Death and Diplomacy (The New Doctor Who Series)

Rating:
Summary: What???
Review: Okay, I have become a Dave Stone fan, espcially of his Doctor Who books, but this also means I've become aware of his more irritating qualities. That includes his tendency to include very, very strange aliens, scene changes right in the middle of the action, and a lot of DouglasAdams-isms. D&D is probably the worst offender in the Virgin Doctor Who range (with Sky Pirates! in a dead heat), and is further hampered by having to include the improbable romance between Jason and Benny.

On the plus side, the Doctor is (there's no other word for it) awesome! He's almost supernatural in this book, and I loved every minute he was on the page. Which wasn't enough.

Rating:
Summary: What???
Review: Okay, I have become a Dave Stone fan, espcially of his Doctor Who books, but this also means I've become aware of his more irritating qualities. That includes his tendency to include very, very strange aliens, scene changes right in the middle of the action, and a lot of DouglasAdams-isms. D&D is probably the worst offender in the Virgin Doctor Who range (with Sky Pirates! in a dead heat), and is further hampered by having to include the improbable romance between Jason and Benny.

On the plus side, the Doctor is (there's no other word for it) awesome! He's almost supernatural in this book, and I loved every minute he was on the page. Which wasn't enough.

Rating:
Summary: Death and Diplomacy
Review: Repeated drubbings--sorry, that's a rather negative start--say instead: repeated exposure to Dave Stone's sense of humour, as force-pumped into the Who Universe, does reveal that his bag of tricks is limited. He loves titles for creatures like "Chief Executer of Panicking Humans Running Up Corridors By Munching Them With Big UnFlossed Teeth" (that's one of mine, so technically I'm paraphrasing). He loves aliens who do boneheaded things, or aliens that make pithy pronouncements or monosyllabic threats, just before they suffer the equivalent of their pants falling down (usually somehow courtesy of the Doctor). He loves fuzzy, cute aliens that suddenly excel at dismemberment. And ultimately, the overall effect is that of armaggedon erupting from fleecy superficiality. It's like someone blowing a bigger and bigger pink bubble-gum bubble, that inflates compellingly before it can explode and surprise everyone by destroying the cosmos.

So, with that in mind, never never try to take one of Stone's novels seriously (the ones I've met anyway). Or, to go for the pejorative, a book like Death and Diplomacy lacks any real meaning.

But...there is a lot of charming whimsy sandwiched between the covers.

The filler: Roz and Chris, mysteriously separated from the Doctor, have to pass themselves off as soldiers serving the Czhani Empire, merely to stay alive. It's basically like this: dress up in combat fatigues and go where the troops go, or else expect to get shot. This puts them in the thick of the interstellar military action featured in the novel, as three Empires prepare to go to war, but really, their dilemma does not add much to the overall plot.

The subplot (really the plot): More than filler, thankfully, is what happens to Benny, also cut off from the Doctor under strange circumstances. Once she tries to get back to him (figuring out the worst possible spot to be in, regarding the pervading political tension and heading there), she meets rogue spacefarer in leather Jason Kane, and promptly falls in love. The rest is history...as rollercoasterly depicted in follow-up novels. So, for the record, this is where all the fighting and sex start between Benny and her fella.

The plot (really the subplot) (meaning that you only hang out with the Doctor at odd spots in this entry): The Doctor is forced, by the Hollow Gods, to be Arbiter, at an edifice in space called the Summit, between the three clashing Empires alluded to earlier. This is where Stone attempts some level of depth; the Doctor uses unorthodox methods to promote friendly communications between the Empires' various ambassadors--methods like group-encounter sessions and encouraging warm feelings between formerly hate-crazed species, plus asking overlooked questions like "Why can't we all just get along?" (I'm paraphrasing again)--so that the sworn enemies will just sort of mellow and not kill anyone. It seems to work--meaning, I suppose, that this part of the book is a comment on how ridiculously, politically, complicated war is, when we should really just "stop all that nonsense, just stop it". The Doctor is, as usual, right.

Dave Stone remains The Royal Exalted Who Adventure Churner-Outer Who Tickles The Funnybone But Ultimately Lacks Substance Unless You Really Stretch Things And Can Pretend Like The Book Has Some Kind Of Meaning, and Isn't Just Silly.

Rating:
Summary: Nonsense and Non-sensibility
Review: Why am I writing this review? Why am I bothering? Nothing in DEATH AND DIPLOMACY inspired me to sit in front of a keyboard and type out my thoughts. The only excuse I have for putting fingertip to key is that I've done this for the first forty-eight New Adventures, and I might as well keep going for this one. It's a struggle though. Almost as much of a struggle as reading the book was. The book is just so pointless, really. I mean, would the world be that much worse off if this book had never seen the light of day? Did an author really wake up in the middle of the night screaming, "Yes! This is a story that absolutely MUST BE TOLD!"

One can see from the beginning that this is not exactly going to be a tightly plotted and intricately detailed story. The regulars are so clumsily separated, one wonders if this is supposed to be some hilarious meta-textual joke; if it is, it fails. In any case, Benny, Roz and Chris fall out of the TARDIS and become embroiled in subplots of their own. The Roz and Chris story is so clichéd and unoriginal that it scary bears discussing; let's just say that it puts the "bog" in "bog-standard" and we'll not speak of it again.

The Doctor's story actually appears to be relatively interesting for a while. Not because it's an engaging or witty narrative, but because there is a hint of some fascinating world-building going on. The Doctor finds himself in a portion of the galaxy inhabited by three different war-like space-faring races. The three are perfectly balanced as far as position and weaponry is concerned. So naturally, the Doctor shows up just as they are being ordered by their mysterious Hollow Gods to engage in a peace summit.

Unfortunately, this subplot eventually devolves into bland people walking quickly through corridors while Discussing Important Things. There are a few surprises to be had here, but by the time they're sprung I had gone beyond the point of caring. At one point, a character who belongs to one of those three races realizes that after spending time with his enemies he has begun thinking of them as people rather than faceless monsters. I wish I could have said the same thing. For the most part, all of the characters are as flat as the page they're printed on. The story takes the lazy road of telling us that these are three-dimensional characters without showing us anything to back up its own statements.

Now, the real meat of the book is contained in the passages involving Benny and her soon-to-be fiancé. I actually kind of enjoyed these sections, though they certainly feel superficial. Jason comes across as a standard pulp character, not too much depth apart from that which is applied with all the subtlety of a thrown brick. He's a relatively fun character, though I'm not sure he exactly works as a romantic foil for Benny.

Overall, well, this is a very mixed bag, ultimately with more negatives to its name than I would like. Sure, I laughed at a handful of the jokes, but I rolled my eyes at others. And that, is pretty much my summing up of this novel. It's slightly clever in one or two places, but never gets anywhere near to being as funny or as smart as it thinks it is.

The book opens with a rather defensive note from the author where he haughtily suggests (more or less) that there's a lot more going on in his books than people realize and that, damnit, people ought to appreciate it. My own comment to future authors out there is that this is a terrible way to start a novel. A novel should stand or fall on its own merits, so if you're going to blind us all with your brilliance, make sure you write a better book than DEATH AND DIPLOMACY.

Rating:
Summary: Nonsense and Non-sensibility
Review: Why am I writing this review? Why am I bothering? Nothing in DEATH AND DIPLOMACY inspired me to sit in front of a keyboard and type out my thoughts. The only excuse I have for putting fingertip to key is that I've done this for the first forty-eight New Adventures, and I might as well keep going for this one. It's a struggle though. Almost as much of a struggle as reading the book was. The book is just so pointless, really. I mean, would the world be that much worse off if this book had never seen the light of day? Did an author really wake up in the middle of the night screaming, "Yes! This is a story that absolutely MUST BE TOLD!"

One can see from the beginning that this is not exactly going to be a tightly plotted and intricately detailed story. The regulars are so clumsily separated, one wonders if this is supposed to be some hilarious meta-textual joke; if it is, it fails. In any case, Benny, Roz and Chris fall out of the TARDIS and become embroiled in subplots of their own. The Roz and Chris story is so clichéd and unoriginal that it scary bears discussing; let's just say that it puts the "bog" in "bog-standard" and we'll not speak of it again.

The Doctor's story actually appears to be relatively interesting for a while. Not because it's an engaging or witty narrative, but because there is a hint of some fascinating world-building going on. The Doctor finds himself in a portion of the galaxy inhabited by three different war-like space-faring races. The three are perfectly balanced as far as position and weaponry is concerned. So naturally, the Doctor shows up just as they are being ordered by their mysterious Hollow Gods to engage in a peace summit.

Unfortunately, this subplot eventually devolves into bland people walking quickly through corridors while Discussing Important Things. There are a few surprises to be had here, but by the time they're sprung I had gone beyond the point of caring. At one point, a character who belongs to one of those three races realizes that after spending time with his enemies he has begun thinking of them as people rather than faceless monsters. I wish I could have said the same thing. For the most part, all of the characters are as flat as the page they're printed on. The story takes the lazy road of telling us that these are three-dimensional characters without showing us anything to back up its own statements.

Now, the real meat of the book is contained in the passages involving Benny and her soon-to-be fiancé. I actually kind of enjoyed these sections, though they certainly feel superficial. Jason comes across as a standard pulp character, not too much depth apart from that which is applied with all the subtlety of a thrown brick. He's a relatively fun character, though I'm not sure he exactly works as a romantic foil for Benny.

Overall, well, this is a very mixed bag, ultimately with more negatives to its name than I would like. Sure, I laughed at a handful of the jokes, but I rolled my eyes at others. And that, is pretty much my summing up of this novel. It's slightly clever in one or two places, but never gets anywhere near to being as funny or as smart as it thinks it is.

The book opens with a rather defensive note from the author where he haughtily suggests (more or less) that there's a lot more going on in his books than people realize and that, damnit, people ought to appreciate it. My own comment to future authors out there is that this is a terrible way to start a novel. A novel should stand or fall on its own merits, so if you're going to blind us all with your brilliance, make sure you write a better book than DEATH AND DIPLOMACY.