Dominion by Nick Walters
In Brief: The Tardis encounters a wormhole and Sam is thrown into a pocket universe known as The Dominion. Meanwhile Fitz and The Doctor get involved in shady goings-on in late-90s Sweden, which is being over-run by impossible creatures.
I'm still struggling with why I'm reading these books. The 8DA are nowhere near as fun as working through the New Adventures had been, although the strange thing is that it's the quality hasn't varied nearly as much. There were some really awful NAs, and overall possibly more of them than in the later series. However the general setting since we got into the Paul McGann version of The Doctor has been "bland". It's just somewhat sad reading these books since Doctor Who seems held in stasis, nobody in 1999 sure of the right way to go forward. I've been regularly reading the excellent blog The Tardis Eruditorum which has taken on the impressive task of analyzing the overall story of the show as it exists in popular culture. The last few months has been going over highlights of "The Wilderness Years", where the show was off-air from 1990 to 2004. The blog's author has put into words much better than I ever could the feeling towards these books, but basically it comes down to the sense that there were a lot of authors wanting to do their take on Doctor Who, but no one ensuring that there was an overall thrust to the series.
The result is the sense that the overall narrative hasn't been going forward, just standing in place not wanting to change too much.
At least the good decision to bring in an alternative to Sam was taken, as the character of Fitz has given the authors a better anchor for the books. It's similar to how Benny worked better than Ace in the New Adventures.
But to the book itself. It actually wasn't bad, having a good mystery and set of memorable characters. New to the series author Nick Walters makes the smart decision to sideline Sam for most of the book and develop The Doctor and Fitz, so that their relationship has a chance to cement properly. Walters is also good at capturing a good feel for his settings, so that the sparseness of Sweden if nicely contrasted to the wonders of the pocket-universe Dominion.
However the book in being from the late-90s has a *very* noticeable X-Files feel to it with secretive government organisations being the main source of problems facing The Doctor & Co. Even UNIT is not the friendly team it once was, with it all having a slight Torchwood vibe.
Overall the book is a decent if somewhat morose romp, although again one which doesn't seem to in any way really add to the series. I guess I should be happy though that thankfully the quality of the books has greatly increased, considering how awful the beginning of the run was.
