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Rating: 
Summary: Must Read
Review: Exciting and fascinating, this book never fails to entertain! The Doctor is at his best, Fitz is great, Trix is well rounded out as a character. The Council of Eight is chilling to the bone, with their plans and schemes. The Schroedinger Cells are an interesting concept. I would like to see the Swiss Cheese Palace some day. Nice resolution in the end.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: Fantastic tie up of lots of loose ends from the last year or so of books in the 8th Dr. Series. A must read for all fans of the BBC books!
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: Fantastic tie up of lots of loose ends from the last year or so of books in the 8th Dr. Series. A must read for all fans of the BBC books!
Rating: 
Summary: Just stop
Review: I'm actually shocked by how much I disliked SOMETIME NEVER... There are some decent set pieces. Some boring set pieces. Things unfold because the author decides that what needs to happen. There's some corridor-running. Worse, there's some technobabble-laden corridor-running. But overall, the whole exercise just lacks oomph. Not only is it a poor resolution to a, frankly, terrible story-arc, it's not even a decent book in its own right.
First of all, can I state how tired I am of the whole "a butterfly's flight changing the course of a hurricane" thing? Yes, I liked Ray Bradbury's "A Sound Of Thunder", but I am absolutely sick to death of encountering and revisiting these references in time travel fiction over and over again. Maybe this is a sign that I need to vary the fiction I read. But, look, this sort of stuff was clever the first million times I saw it; can't we just grab hold of some other idea to beat to death?
Getting to the book's specifics, this is a story where The Universe and/or History Itself is threatened. Again. Yes, in resolving a story-arc in which each uninteresting story concerned threats to Everything, we are presented with a story in which there is an enormous threat. To Everything. You can only go to that well so many times, and I think this aspect of the story-arc overstayed its welcome at about, oh, the third or fourth time out. Yet there we go again. A universe populated by utterly uninteresting characters is again faced with absolute, total, and certain destruction. There's something wrong in a book where I, the reader, find myself cheering on the collapse of everything only because I wanted to see something (anything!) interesting happen.
The resolution to the story-arc is vaguely logical, but totally uninteresting. The back of the book tells us of the Council of Eight. And now that I've read about them, I'm disheartened to report that they are exactly as boring and stereotypical as their initial description would suggest. They're mysterious. They have a mysterious plan. They live in a mysterious fortress which is mysteriously cut off from the rest of the universe. There's very little that's original here and, thus, all attempts at forging a creepy or fearful atmosphere fail. And what original material exists is utterly lacking in soul. The plot unfolds dryly, with no passion or imagination.
For a book about predictability, predetermination and events unfolding logically, SOMETIME NEVER... strangely feels random as hell. And worse than that, it feels awfully contrived. Villains delay attacks long enough for the Doctor to explain the plot to the dumb humans. Exposition is given by having two characters explain things to each other that each is already aware of. This is not what you expect from an author whose résumé is as long as Justin Richards' is. Richards has written much better than this before. Richards has written much better than this in situations where he's slapping something together at the last minute to fill the book schedule. What's the excuse here when the book was presumably planned out literally years ago?
Oh, and that weird reference at the end utterly baffled me. It wasn't until I started wandering around the Internet that I found out it was a tie-in to SCREAM OF THE SHALKA. Um, couldn't we have had a reference to something that was actually good? What is the bloody point referencing a dull story in the middle of another dull story? Boredom raised to the power of banal. Oh, and what was up with that bizarre AN UNEARTHLY CHILD thing? I mean... What?! Why?!
If not for the fact that the Internet has informed me that future stories in this book series are more standalone (and indeed will eventually be replaced by Ninth Doctor Adventures), I think I would be giving up now. It's depressing to think that this is the book that the series had been leading up to. This whole arc has been a series of failures at both the individual book level (save for some worthy exceptions such as the brilliant EMOTIONAL CHEMISTRY) and of the overall meta-story. Thank God it's over. And let's hope that the powers that be have learned from their mistakes. Here's to the future.
Rating:
Summary: Best 8th Doctor Adventure in a while...
Review: Sometime Never... The 8th Doctor, Fitz and Trix get entangled in the secret plot of a secret society bent on controlling time. Sabbath's role in the Doctor's life is finally explained, and his story arc is concluded. With some mystery still floating in the Doctor's life in the end, this epic tale kept me reading late into the night. Recent Doctor Who novels, especially the Eighth Doctor's adventures, have been somewhat depressing lately. "Hope" and "Reckless Engineering" are two of these. But, like "Timeless", this book has elements of depression that don't weigh down the story. The use of time travel in "Sometime Never..." is provacative and interesting, and the book comes to a terrific conclusion, with the Doctor's cunning mind tricking the enemy yet again. I can only hope that the Eighth Doctor novels to come are as good as this one.
Rating:
Summary: Best 8th Doctor Adventure in a while...
Review: Sometime Never... The 8th Doctor, Fitz and Trix get entangled in the secret plot of a secret society bent on controlling time. Sabbath's role in the Doctor's life is finally explained, and his story arc is concluded. With some mystery still floating in the Doctor's life in the end, this epic tale kept me reading late into the night. Recent Doctor Who novels, especially the Eighth Doctor's adventures, have been somewhat depressing lately. "Hope" and "Reckless Engineering" are two of these. But, like "Timeless", this book has elements of depression that don't weigh down the story. The use of time travel in "Sometime Never..." is provacative and interesting, and the book comes to a terrific conclusion, with the Doctor's cunning mind tricking the enemy yet again. I can only hope that the Eighth Doctor novels to come are as good as this one.
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