EDA #11 Dreamstone Moon

Dreamstone Moon by Paul Leonard

In Brief: The Doctor continues to search for Sam. Sam joins a group of protesters trying to stop mining operations for crystals which give their users dreams (both good and bad).

Thankfully Dreamstone Moon was a marked improvement from Legacy of the Daleks, however I'd wonder what something worse could possibly be (that isn't Internet slash-fiction). However the normal problems (so far) with the Eighth Doctor adventures are still present, a poorly realised Doctor and Sam, lack of interesting story and little depth to any of the situations, locations or characters in the book.

I'll try to keep to the positive though. Paul Leonard is thankfully a competent writer, the prose is decent and he's good at keeping events going. Unfortunately his pacing is very off, there's far too little set-up and the final act of the story is horribly stretched-out. It's a shame since the first part of the book is the most interesting as an example of much-missed world-building within the BBC range. I wanted to know more about why people were so reliant on the dreamstones and what they actually did. There was an opportunity here for Leonard to really get some decent character moments across, which is completely missed. Instead the stones themselves are really just an excuse to get to the moon, which begins to undergo some catastrophic changes.

There's a bit of "big business bad" commentary here on the mining/destruction of the moon for the stones, but it's all a little too heavy handed.

As for the continuing story of Sam and the Doctor being separated, I'm not actually sure if I'm seeing the point. In theory this should be allowing her character to finally become more well rounded and mature. Unfortunately she's as irritating and petulant as ever, making judgement calls whenever possible and generally acting like a spoiled brat. The editorial idea to create her character still boggles the mind, except still as it being a reaction to the notion that the companions in the New Adventures had been too complex and multi-faceted. Or something.

But there's no real sense that Sam being on her own (thinking initially that The Doctor had died back at the end of Longest Day) really serves any purpose. By the end of Dreamstone Moon they're *almost* reunited, except for a last minute plot-development where she again finds herself heading off into space with the Doctor continuing to look for her. It feels a bit pointless.

But otherwise not much else to say about Dreamstone Moon. It's at least a competent novel, but one which could and should have been much much better. There were some interesting ideas in it, but none which were given enough depth. Instead much of the book is spent involving characters running around avoiding explosions and cave-ins. It was all very forgettable.

EDA #10 Legacy of the Daleks

Legacy of the Daleks by John Peel

In Brief: Estro is the Esperanto word for Master!

Oh, and f*ck John Peel.

If I were to to a "ranking" scheme for these books, using 1 to 4 stars or some such, Legacy of the Daleks would make me want to go into the negatives. I've read inept. I've read boring. I've read psychic-squirrels.

However this is the first book that's made me want to find the author and punch him in the face.

So why is this one so special?

It's poorly written with bad characterisation and awful plotting. But that's nothing new. The extra spice which really raised my ire was the idiocy and misogyny that's thrown in.

The Doctor ends up searching for a still missing Sam on Earth 30 years after he thwarted the Dalek invasion). For those of you not up on your knowledge of 1964's "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" this is also where he dropped off Susan, his grand-daughter, so that she could get married to freedom-fighter David.

Well 30 years later and all is not well as Susan still looks like a teenager while David has become a portly 50-year-old. That's OK though since Susan still loves him and the reader gets descriptions on how she still likes to dress up sexy in the boudoir to cheer him up.

Ick.

Sorry, but this must be some sort of perverse wish-fulfillment on the author's part. I'd forgotten that authors other than Mark Gatiss tend to be misogynistic but I should have remembered Peel's avid descriptions of bouncy Thal-women and bare-breasted teenage prostitutes in his earlier novels. It's like Doctor Who by some trench-coated pervert in the park holding an issue of Penthouse.

Worse still than Susan's sexual escapades is the character of Donna (no, not *that* one), the only female knight of the realm. However she's not the only women knight due to talent but rather that because she can't have children she had to find some use for herself. Then after a novel filled with her angst and self-loathing she meets a man who loves her regardless and finally feels whole.

ARGHAGHRGHGHGHAG!!!! How the hell did this get published in 1998?!!

Ok, maybe I'll calm down if I just stick to the plot. There's something about a weapon left behind by the Daleks which The Master is trying to get while also causing a war between various post-apocalyptic feudal states of Britain. Mainly because he's bored. And also John Peel wants to needlessly fill in continuity gaps between stories which nobody cared about. At the end of the novel Susan, after seeing David shot dead by The Master, steals his Tardis and leaves him for dead on the desolate planet Tersurus.

Have I mentioned how much I despite authors having to "explain" various gaps in the series? Yes, in the show The Master disappeared for a few seasons and then came back close to death hiding on Gallifrey, but the viewer could fill in the rest with their own imagination. Fans like Peel for some reason can't abide these gaps and demand some form of concrete answers. This is the sort of person who should never be allowed to write for Doctor Who as they kill ingenuity and imagination stone dead.

I really just want to throw my hands in the air and say "this was awful, moving on" Even as an "Eighth Doctor book" Legacy of the Daleks fails, Peel just had him act like the Jon Pertwee version throughout. It's like the author is stuck somewhere in the early-70s but also in the mind-set of a somewhat dim 12-year-old boy.

So, Legacy of the Daleks is a perfect storm of awful. It's not just bad, it's offensive. What's most frustrating is that the opportunity to have The Doctor and Susan meet again after so long is completely squandered, they actually share a scene for something like 2 pages. But John Peel isn't interested in characters or emotional content, rather he wants Doctor Who that's just about villains and monsters. Ugh.