| EMPIRE OF DEATH by David Bishop |
| Story ? Synopsis: The TARDIS detects a time disturbance, and is promptly visited by Adric. The Doctor and a shocked Nyssa decide they must investigate further, landing in the mausoleum to Queen Victoria's late husband. She has joined a seance to communicate with Albert, and been advised of a way to join him. There is a channel near a waterfall along the river Clyde. Members of the Army are sent to guard the channel. The seance is organised by Baroness Von Luckner and James Lees, a young man cursed with the ability to contact the dead. Von Luckner is soon exposed as a fraud, but Lees is all to real. The Doctor is given 1 day to assess Lees. He uses equipment from the TARDIS to try and regress James back to the point when he originally made his trip to the Other Side, but something goes wrong. A force leaves James' body, but returns because otherwise James will die. In the morning, James disappears. The Doctor assumes he is headed back to the crossing point. The force was high in artron energy. He and Nyssa head up to Scotland by coach. At the site, the army officer in charge appears to die of fright. A diving suit is delivered, and another officer heads down to look for the connection to the Other Side. To stop the disaster of the channel opening, the Doctor uses the TARDIS, but at great cost. The diving officer is hauled up after several hours, somehow alive, but with white hair. He later dies. The Doctor arrives, and tries to stop any further examination of the channel. The best he manages is to accompany the General he arrived with. He suspects it isn't the Other Side, and signals to be raised to the surface. Soon, word arrives that his credentials were faked. He and Nyssa are ordered to be clapped in chains. The Doctor suspects Lees has already arrived, and is causing the deaths of the soldiers. A plan is made to drain the river, so that the Queen herself can cross to the Other Side. The Doctor speaks out against it. The General takes a diving bell down, with a dozen soldiers, and Nyssa, but they don't bring her back. In fact, he is a duplicate, as all are the soldiers. The Other Side of the rift was a stable place until James Lees originally went through. Now they want to destroy Earth. The real General helps rescue Nyssa and James Lees, who is still on the Other Side. The Doctor persuades the Queen that the channel is dangerous, and he uses the TARDIS to provide a healing for it. The river is drained, but then restored, preventing further access attempts. |
| Review:- A journey into other realms... but on Earth - and a chance to hobnob with royalty. This, like some of Bishop's previous books has a languid pace, and does actually make you feel that he's tried to write a book, rather than recreate the feel of the TV series through cliffhangers and lots of chapters. However, the story isn't that good. The basic idea is that there is another place next to Earth, and by accident someone from here went there. Anyone going there thinks they've seen the afterlife, and are soon dead after coming back. Queen Victoria gets to hear about the upside of this, without considering the downside, and sends troops to investigate. At which point the Doctor and Nyssa arrive, with their own issues. And the book begins to lurch into trouble. The themes explored here have been looked at before, so this comes across as a book for people who haven't read earlier books. Whilst that nobly meets the standalone remit beloved in recent years, it makes previous works seem worthless, and that's not good. The idea that Queen Victoria went into prolonged public mourning for her dead husband is not new - it was most recently addressed in the film Mrs Brown. Here, instead of a heartwarming story of friendship, we get a rather grim treatise on spiritualism. The problem with using this as the gist of the story, is that it's not proven either way, and the Doctor, as a rationalist (more often than not) is going to end up pooh-poohing it. Which he does. That the Other Side turns out to merely be another realm, rather than the specific afterlife associated with many religious beliefs, is too tedious a resolution to that level of seriousness. Then we have the fact that Victoria last turned up in PDA Imperial Moon, with the same incarnation of the Doctor. Or the notion of Nyssa's latent psychic skills, which have already cropped up in other PDAs and Big Finish plays. If it was an exciting and dramatic facet to a story, that wouldn't matter, but it was clutching at straws in the first place. To get to here, with the Doctor diagnosing Nyssa with post-traumatic stress disorder is distasteful and shabby tokenism. Another gimmick that mars this book is the use of real-time, and having each chapter cover the events of a day, as the whole meat of the story covers 7 days in February 1863. This draws attention to the idea that Scotland is a long way away, and means the Doctor and Nyssa take a long time to reach the centre of the action, but this comes across as padding, especially when the events happening with the army at the channel are so simple and samey. Essentially, this story could have been told in a lot less pages. By the time we get to doppelgangers, and blatant time-checks such as blowing up a dam, the remaining patience of the reader is lost. Some of the characters are credible, but their actions don't draw sympathy. Vollmer is probably the best of these. On the whole, what I had heard before reading this book was not good, but I read it anyway. Don't make the same mistake. |
| Disclaimer: I own a copy. |