NA #49 Death and Diplomacy

Death and Diplomacy by Dave Stone

In Brief: While The Doctor acts as mediator for a trio of warring factions (and the three-eyed cat creatures who are secretly controlling them) Benny gets engaged. Roz and Chris wander around a bit.

While its entertaining, overall Death and Diplomacy ends up being rather unsatisfying. No part of the book is bad, and in fact much of it is very inventive, but the whole thing just never comes together as it should. It felt like 3 different novellas tenuously linked together without a proper resolution. However, I suspect Stone realised this problem when The Doctor even comments that the resolution was a bit of an anti-climax.

I could comment that this may reflect my feelings towards the latest series on TV, but I've harped on enough concerning my issues with "Series 6".

After the Tardis crew is plucked from the ship and end up in various parts of a distant cluster of stars the plot-strands settle down to being:

1. The Doctor must handle the intrigue of mediation between 3 warring races who all worship mysterious beings known as The Hollow Gods.
2. Bernice finds herself stuck on a rather dilapidated space-ship with Doctor Who's answer to Han Solo, Mr. Jason Kane. Boinking ensues.
3. Chris and Roz wander around and get into various fights and gun-battles.

Then at the end they all meet up and go home. And stuff blows up.

The biggest problem I had with the novel is that there's really not a lot that goes on beyond meandering and a few coincidences too big to really accept. While more tempered than Stone's earlier Sky Pirates! he's still not really gotten the grasp of plotting and pacing. In their place we find Stone's very Douglas Adams-like sense of humour, which while not bad does tend to give the book a *very* 1990s post-modern sentiment. This was definitely a product of the "Scream"/"Buffy"/"Farscape" years of not-so-subtly winking at the audience. While not disastrous by any means it does lend the book a somewhat dated feel compared to the rest of the series and left me not quite caring what was going on.

Another problem was that the character of Jason just doesn't really work for me. He's shallow, manipulative and immature and only the fact that Benny seems to really *really* like having sex with him explains her agreeing to get married at the end of the book. Girl, you can do better.

But I'm making it sound like I found Death and Diplomacy to be a bad book, which I didn't. I think it's just that it's a novel I didn't feel fulfilled its potential. Dave Stone *can* write, he just needed to move away from the too-jokey style which was distracting. So while still a good book with some great ideas I can't help but feel this is the New Adventures equivalent to The Horns of Nimon, a fun time but overall lacking.