I'm struggling with Dostoyevsky's The Gambler, which I drew in the school Book Group World Cup.
As an alternative to that, I've returned to George R. R. Martin's Wild Card anthologies from the 80s. This last year, I've also read a wheen o' Star Trek books, including the Alan Dean Foster Logs of the animated series. Next Gen and DS9 stories simply can't compare, however, to James Blish's novelisations of OST: among the first books I ever read.
I would like to post about that Star Trek in prose and in comics, especially Gold Key, Marvel and DC ; also, I have been thinking about further 2000 AD Dan Dare posts. I don't think that 'll happen for a while, however - not,at least, until I can afford a cheaper copy of the second collected hardback. In the meantime, I'll probably blog about the Grant Morrison serial from the 90s.
Today, I'm reviewing the latest Big Finish audios I've listened to while walking to work (or on the two Saturday trips I made in May to Aberdeen).
Ravenous is the first release in the new box set series starring the Eight Doctor. It picks up threads from the sprawling Doom Coalition quadrilogy and comprises four adventures by John Dorney and Matt Fitton.
Their Finest Hour was a prime example of Big Finish at its politically naïve, Brexit-loving worst. The intention was to honour the contribution of Polish pilots in WWII but the cartoon portrayal of Jan and Wilhelm ( I don't know any Polish kids with Dutch or Germanic names like those) and the caricature heroism of Churchill was glib and almost insulting. 0/5 Talmars
How To make a Killing in Time Travel is an unfunny black comedy about time travel experiments and murder on a space station. The phoney scientist wasn't as engaging as BF seemingly thought. Inconsequential. 2/5
The final two episodes form something of a continued story and are somewhat less facile. World of Damnation is set on a prison planetoid and reunites The Doctor and Liv with Helen Sinclair and the Eleven, the Time Lord criminal with warring multiple personalities. Both were lost at the climax of the Coalition's plot in Stop the Clock last March.
The prison world Rykerzon has fallen under the malign influence of a new, humanoid version of the Kandyman from The Happiness Patrol:
Sweet Salvation sees the Kandyman and the Eleven ( who has a personality which sounds very much like Sylvester McCoy) taking over a planet with the aid of telepathic spiders. They don't seem to be the Eight-Legs from Pertwee's swansong, unfortunately. Does (somewhat dull) language scholar Helen have terrifying new powers, obtained from her encounter with the Sonomancer? Will she go all Dark Phoenix/Willow Rosenberg in the next box set? Hopefully, yes. 8/10
My main criticism of this two-parter is that there are a confusing number of criminals who sound alike and at least two seem redundant. But the dour Liv is less downbeat this time and while I don't care for this Tardis team much, I want to know who the Ravenous actually are. 10/20
Men of War is read by the always-energetic Peter Purves, playing Steven Taylor in a story set in the middle of the epic Daleks' Master Plan. It's an audiobook rather than a play and takes place at the Battle of the Somme. Justin Richards introduces a longer story arc here but I couldn't tell you how this plodding trenches tale of living mud is resolved. Unmemorable. 1/5
Black and white DW - the Hartnell and Troughton Years- has been extremely popular in the last fortnight on the live streaming platform Twitch. It's refreshing to see tweets about the reactions of young people to the classic show, as opposed to the dreary negativity of middle-aged nostalgists barracking Steven Moffat, even when he stopped being show runner six months ago.
In light of their antipathy for Moffat, Whovians never seem to have an issue with Jonathan Morris re-writing the same plot in different media something like nine times by my reckoning. The latest incarnation of this timey-wimey story was Vortex Ice:
This is a very hard-to-follow claustrophobic story set in a mine in Mexico, where Sixie and Flip encounter a squid alien suspended in the eponymous medium. As ever with Morris, it hinges on multiple time-lines but the impulse I had to see a diagram to stay with the narrative was supremely irritating. 1/5
The second story on this split disc, Cortex Fire is a sci-fi thriller which involves a significant amount of world-building. Here, a super-computer with a genocidal drive intends to use a network of skycar roadways as a conduit to cleanse the "human infestation". This was a compact and well-told dystopian story although it reminds me of Nocturne by Dan Abnett from about a decade ago. 3/5
Aquitaine was a more enjoyable and refreshing adventure, if quite similar to Moffat's World Enough And Time on tv last year ( but with Triffids rather than Cybermen).
A charming robot butler is apparently the sole survivor of the eponymous spaceship, orbiting a black hole in a timey-wimey story of human/plant hybridisation. The only negative for me was that Nyssa become INFECTED AGAIN; a trope that is becoming banal if not ludicrous. This is an unassuming meat-and-potatoes disc in many ways but it's a diverting listen. 4/5
Coming in the near future, hopefully: summer sword & sorcery with Gardener Fox's Kothar; Killraven and Barsoomian pastiche; and in August, Hammer Horror on dvd.
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