| THE CRYSTAL BUCEPHALUS by Craig Hinton |
| Story ? Synopsis: In the 11th millennium, a restaurant allows people to dine in authentic period eateries. But in one such, a murder is committed, and the freshly-arrived Doctor, Tegan and Turlough are framed for it. Tegan runs off, finding an ally in Diva, the mistress of the victim. They are pursued by a mysterious Suit. Turlough is the victim of a kidnapping dressed up to look like murder, and finds himself a fellow captive of Prelector Sven Tornqvist of the Lazarus Intent. They are captives of Professor Ladygay Matisse, former associates of Professor Alexhendri Lassiter, who runs the Crystal Bucephalus restaurant, allowing patrons to dine at the restaurants of history. The Doctor is disappointed in Lassiter's achievements, and even more when he finds he provided the original funding, and is therefore the owner. He finds the dead man, Max Arrestis, wasn't dead - but a clone of him was. The real Arrestis is inside the Suit, and expecting Matisse to bring him to safety and then kybosh the Bucephalus. Plans go awry. The Doctor tries to help find Matisse's base, but is subjected to intense mental attack. He later tries to recover the TARDIS, and gets dumped on the planet of Pella Satyrnis instead. Turlough and Diva find themselves back at the place they left the TARDIS, and when Kamelion finally lets them in, they set course for the Bucephalus. Tegan teams up with Sven to explore Matisse's base, to try and find evidence of what she's up to. Arrestis nearly causes temporal embolism, but Matisse is able to rescue him in time. The Doctor spends 5 years building a restaurant up until it qualifies for inclusion in the Crystal Bucephalus, but he ends up in Matisse's base, the Exemplar by mistake. Tegan and Sven learn that Arrestis' secret labs include genetic programmes, and she sets off for the Bucephalus, unwittingly setting her base into overload. Turlough and Diva become hostages when Arrestis takes control of Kamelion. Matisse enters the TARDIS, which sets off into the Vortex, where it stalls. The Doctor gets Tegan and Sven away from the Exemplar - into the TARDIS. He himself winds up on the Bucephalus. Arrestis wants Lassiter to stablise a time path, and Diva, really Lassiter's old partner, Hellenica Monroe, is aghast that Lassiter had discovered time travel and hidden it, contrary to the aims of the Lazarus Intent. Lassiter explains that Arrestis is Lazarus, and he did bring him back from death. Monroe becomes Arrestis' devoted accomplice. Arrestis wants Lassiter's knowledge, and an escape, but the time chaos prevents an easy way out. Monroe sends him off, supposedly to a safe base. As Tegan and Sven struggle to survive as the TARDIS begins to be destroyed, Matisse becomes greedy for knowledge and dies when the library reconfigures itself. The Doctor gets Kamelion to destroy the Bucephalus statue, releasing pent-up energy to knock the TARDIS to safety, and he then sends the resulting explosion back in time so it can't cause any damage. Lassiter and Monroe patch up their differences, and Sven prepares to relaunch the Intent. The Doctor, Turlough, Tegan and Kamelion depart in the battered TARDIS. Arrestis finds himself back at his point of death, from which Lassiter had rescued him. This time, he dies. |
| Review:- Where to begin, then? To its credit, the book is packed with ideas. Bursting from every chapter, the basic idea of the time zone restaurant leads onto the future society, and from there to a hearty attack on organised religion, and a bit of extraneous soapy guff in the meantime. At one point, Tegan comments to Turlough that it sounds like they're in a soap opera, and for much of the time, they are. Alex Lassiter is a profound temporal scientist, whose ex was also a brilliant temporal scientist, who forsook him for religion, and his second love was also a brilliant temporal scientist, and was using him for her own twisted ends, and keeping their son a secret from him. His brother runs the restaurant, and acts all uppity 99% of the time. Arrestis employs Matisse, and uses/is used by Monroe. This all dances on the edge of credibility. Amidst this comes the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough, who get little to do except talk to the guest characters and move the plot along. Though Tegan has her little triumph in mid-1980's London (and a guest appearance from a certain future companion), Turlough gets to bring the TARDIS from its position in France, and the Doctor spends years in the wilderness building up a restaurant, these are isolated moments in a frenetic book that has little time for events beyond the lead characters. Setting the book in the far future allows for a little humourous name-dropping with all manner of species present and correct, none of whom now want the Doctor killed for a change. Despite the plethora of alien life, it's a story of individuals (even with Arrestis' loathing for reptilian life, which comes across as adding another hatred to his crimes for the sake of effect). Then there is the science. Oh boy, it would fill a whole page just to list every last piece of tech thinking on display here, although to be fair, it's written with enough confidence and gusto to be forgiven and accepted. By the time Kamelion has turned into a giant to smash the big statue, the relentless silliness may have either drummed the reader into submission, or rendered the reader a bubble of hate. Kamelion's appearance has provided some humour, over the suggestion that the doomed robot had some kind of curse on it. Whilst this might have seemed funny to some when this author was alive, it's clearly less so since his untimely death at the end of 2006. Despite the good intentions, the soap opera elements betray a lack of human interest, the farce elements are cack-handed and humourless, and the plot is pretty negligible and horribly padded. Not to mention the rather cynical kicking of Christianity - for all the blether of the Intent doing more good than harm, there's no mistaking the prejudice intended to be taken. A forgettable thriller, if that isn't a contradiction in terms. |
| Disclaimer: I have a copy of the book. |