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.