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I have this long-standing dream of someday being able to sit in on a pitch session for a Doctor Who novel. I will be sorely disappointed if there aren't serious looking people in snappy suits sprawled all over the room, drinking cheap beer and dropping acid and yelling at each other about how they need more tiny aliens and sentient tigers, damnit!
Seriously, it is the only way I can explain away the plots of 9/10ths of the DW books published in the last twenty years. They are crack personified. They are a literary drug trip. They are the Doctor and Amy Pond riding a robotic rampaging mammoth through the New York Museum of Natural History. THEY ARE REALLY SERIOUSLY ADDICTING.
Take, for example, the book I'm reading now from the Eighth Doctor Adventures. Stylistically it is actually pretty neat - the whole thing is written as a pseudo-historical narrative, like someone found a bunch of first-hand source texts and decided to write their dissertation on one of the Doctor's adventures. It's interesting to compare the conclusions the fictitious author draws about the Doctor and the events around him, based on his interpretation of the source texts, and the conclusions a reader can draw, based on knowing who and what the Doctor actually is. I'm not sure that kind of conceit would be to everyone's tastes, but I'm really enjoying it.
But the plot. Oh my god the plot. It is amazing.
Honestly I never in my weirdest dreams thought I would read a book where a desperately ill Eight goes undercover in 18th Century London as an inventor slash elemental spirit, so that he can help a coven of high-class Tantric prostitutes use ritualistic magic to stop the invasion of the world by evil, blood-thirsty apes summoned by the actions of European occultists and secret societies. In order to do this, he almost gets married to a thirteen-year-old girl in a ceremony intended to formally bind him as Earth's protector.
HE STEALS THE MASTER'S BEARD. I AM NOT MAKING ANY OF THIS UP.
Oh Doctor Who. What are you on, and where can I get some?
Seriously, it is the only way I can explain away the plots of 9/10ths of the DW books published in the last twenty years. They are crack personified. They are a literary drug trip. They are the Doctor and Amy Pond riding a robotic rampaging mammoth through the New York Museum of Natural History. THEY ARE REALLY SERIOUSLY ADDICTING.
Take, for example, the book I'm reading now from the Eighth Doctor Adventures. Stylistically it is actually pretty neat - the whole thing is written as a pseudo-historical narrative, like someone found a bunch of first-hand source texts and decided to write their dissertation on one of the Doctor's adventures. It's interesting to compare the conclusions the fictitious author draws about the Doctor and the events around him, based on his interpretation of the source texts, and the conclusions a reader can draw, based on knowing who and what the Doctor actually is. I'm not sure that kind of conceit would be to everyone's tastes, but I'm really enjoying it.
But the plot. Oh my god the plot. It is amazing.
Honestly I never in my weirdest dreams thought I would read a book where a desperately ill Eight goes undercover in 18th Century London as an inventor slash elemental spirit, so that he can help a coven of high-class Tantric prostitutes use ritualistic magic to stop the invasion of the world by evil, blood-thirsty apes summoned by the actions of European occultists and secret societies. In order to do this, he almost gets married to a thirteen-year-old girl in a ceremony intended to formally bind him as Earth's protector.
HE STEALS THE MASTER'S BEARD. I AM NOT MAKING ANY OF THIS UP.
Oh Doctor Who. What are you on, and where can I get some?