Theatre of War (The New Doctor Who Adventures)

Rating:
Summary: Theatre of War
Review: Gosh, it's busy! Gosh, it's a busy book, but if you read it you'll just have to learn to live with it. Luckily, it does have its rewards.

Justin Richards combines his love for horror-based Dr Who shenanigans with what is an obvious appreciation for both Ancient Greek and Shakespearean theatre. Or else he just did his research on the techniques of great drama just before he wrote this book, and then crammed it all in. As a graduate of a theatre program at a local university, I have half a mind to send a copy of this book to one of my old professors--the one who felt there were no decent playwrights after Shakespeare. Read this intricate tale, and you will learn about what the Greeks called "hamartia", "anagnorisis", and a "skene". Heck, you won't need to read Aristotle's Poetics (or Aristotle's something-or-other--it's been a long time since my first-year theatre exam crams). As for Shakespeare, treat yourself to scenes from Hamlet, with the Doctor and Ace actually interrupting things, once they get stuck inside a mysterious "dream machine", designed to project classical plays onto a stage.

The so-called "dream" machine--really more of a virtual-reality generator, with rather sinister programming--is the maguffin at the heart of this tricky story. It is found amongst ruins of an ancient amphitheatre on the planet Menaxus, where a theatre-loving people once existed, but have since seemingly vanished. Bernice Summerfield starts the story away from the Doctor and Ace, hooked up with an archeological expedition that barely arrives on Menaxus before all manner of horrific things begin happening, including vicious assaults and murders by mysterious armored figures.

A few nitpicks, as the plot progresses:

The novel appears as if Benny the Archeologist will be in the spotlight quite a bit. I mean, here we are among ancient ruins. But once the Doctor and Ace arrive, poor Benny gets shunted off to the side...way, way off to the side. Talk about scene-stealing upstagers. Bernice is stuck doing some boring, if necessary, research, and Ace shines by doing some spectacular heroics involving taking one crucial shot at a hostile spacecraft while left alone on a barren asteroid, with the air leaking out of her spacesuit! And that's just a sample; Ace fights several tough robots that may or may not exist, at least as we know the word, and even has to worry about Hamlet and his apparent penchant for stabbing the wrong people. Ace versus Hamlet...place your bets. And where is the Doctor in all this?--nowhere. Literally, sometimes.

Anything else to complain about? Well, if the book has an inherent weakness, it's that there is a lot of confusing smokescreening to hide what are a few basic revelations. It's all a bit complicated (the friendlier phrase being, I suppose, that it's all incredibly layered), and you have to be paying attention to pick up how it tries to mirror Hamlet in a sort of space-opera, tongue-in-cheek, final-bit-of-revenge kind of way. Plus, the mini-education on Ancient Grecian theatre, the importance of being Aeschylus, and all that. Oh, and I forgot to mention, it all has a lot to do with an intergalactic war going on--the Heletians versus the Rippeareans, with the planet Menaxus caught in the middle.

So you have theatre, and you have war. Hence the title.

Rating:
Summary: Ambitious but falls flat
Review: I grew up watching "Doctor Who" on television and loved the stories that starred Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. I'm very much a traditionalist when it comes to the series and have never been terribly impressed by the printed adventures. Unfortunately, "Theatre of War" did nothing to change my opinion.

Justin Richards tries to write an epic here, setting up a war between two empires: the Heletians, whose culture revolves around live theatre, and the enigmatic Rippereans. At first, only Benny Summerfield gets involved when she joins a Heletian archeological expedition. Eventually, murderous mud statues attack the group, forcing Benny to hit the panic button (literally) to summon the Doctor and Ace. From here, the trio tackle the mystery of the dig and its ties to the impending Ripperean attack on Heletia.

The first problem I had with this book is that Richards kept the Doctor out of the action for almost a third of the book. The Doctor and Ace don't even make an appearance until page 50. For fans of the show, it would be unthinkable for a six-part story to delay the title character's appearance until part 3. Richards' original characters simply aren't very interesting and couldn't hold my attention, making the Doctorless portion of the story difficult to get through.

This leads to my other problem with this novel: wooden characters. The Doctor, Ace, and Benny are serviceable but the supporting cast seem to exist for the purpose of getting killed or saying a few lines to move along the plot. This may describe the majority of the characters who appeared in the TV series but Richards is not writing a TV story. He has written one of the longer New Adventures (300+ pages) but simply used the bulk of the allotted page count on plot rather than characterization.

This is not to say that I found nothing appealing in this book. I quite enjoyed the source documents that Richards inserts before each chapter and the climax of the play within the story really worked for me. Unfortunately, these points are not enough for me to recommend this novel. If you want to read a good book by this author, try "The Burning."

Rating:
Summary: Ambitious but falls flat
Review: I grew up watching "Doctor Who" on television and loved the stories that starred Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. I'm very much a traditionalist when it comes to the series and have never been terribly impressed by the printed adventures. Unfortunately, "Theatre of War" did nothing to change my opinion.

Justin Richards tries to write an epic here, setting up a war between two empires: the Heletians, whose culture revolves around live theatre, and the enigmatic Rippereans. At first, only Benny Summerfield gets involved when she joins a Heletian archeological expedition. Eventually, murderous mud statues attack the group, forcing Benny to hit the panic button (literally) to summon the Doctor and Ace. From here, the trio tackle the mystery of the dig and its ties to the impending Ripperean attack on Heletia.

The first problem I had with this book is that Richards kept the Doctor out of the action for almost a third of the book. The Doctor and Ace don't even make an appearance until page 50. For fans of the show, it would be unthinkable for a six-part story to delay the title character's appearance until part 3. Richards' original characters simply aren't very interesting and couldn't hold my attention, making the Doctorless portion of the story difficult to get through.

This leads to my other problem with this novel: wooden characters. The Doctor, Ace, and Benny are serviceable but the supporting cast seem to exist for the purpose of getting killed or saying a few lines to move along the plot. This may describe the majority of the characters who appeared in the TV series but Richards is not writing a TV story. He has written one of the longer New Adventures (300+ pages) but simply used the bulk of the allotted page count on plot rather than characterization.

This is not to say that I found nothing appealing in this book. I quite enjoyed the source documents that Richards inserts before each chapter and the climax of the play within the story really worked for me. Unfortunately, these points are not enough for me to recommend this novel. If you want to read a good book by this author, try "The Burning."

Rating:
Summary: The Way Things Ought To Be
Review: THEATRE OF WAR was a book that presented me with a dilemma. I wanted to read it slowly, to absorb all of the rich detail that Justin Richards provided me with. But I had a real hard time doing this, because I had an equal and opposite desire to race through the book quickly, so I could see exactly how the plot unfolded.

The outline for this story must have been very detailed indeed. The book is very much driven by its plot, and the twists and turns are all quite welcome. Some of the directions I anticipated, but many of them took me completely by surprise. I love plot twists that are surprising but logical, and THEATRE OF WAR definitely delivers those.

Not only is the plot exciting and captivating, but there are loads of small little things that combine to make this a special book. I loved all of the extracts from made-up references books. I adored the clever play within a play passages with their meta-textual jokes about various Doctor Who stories, existent and missing. And seeing Benny in archeology mode was fantastic and something that had been lacking in previous books. It seems strange to think that it took this long to get a book that made such perfect use of Benny's diary, her background in archeology and her past in general.

The story makes good use of its many characters and settings. The archeological dig was a great place for Benny to develop and yet again she has the ability to drive a story forward all by herself. The secondary characters aren't terribly deep, but they all have a quality of believability. It's only near the end that one or two of them turn stereotypical, and by that point it's a forgivable sin.

There was only one real problem that I had with the plot. While the majority of the hints to the central mystery are carefully hidden, there is a huge clue in the introduction that is so massive that it reveals the way the plot is going to unfold over the next two hundred pages. Now, to be fair to the book, given some of themes that had been running through the story, this was no doubt done on purpose with the hope that the reader wouldn't really pick up on the clue. And even with the mystery somewhat deflated, I was still enthralled watching Benny and the Doctor work their way to the "how" and "why", even if I had already figured out the "what".

THEATRE OF WAR introduces several things that would later play larger roles in the NA universe, Irving Braxiatel and his collection included. However, this also works as a carefully written and enjoyable standalone novel. Its action-adventure status is enhanced by both its close attention to detail and Justin Richards' ability to keep a book filled with surprises. If you want to know why the New Adventures were so popular and why they attracted such a loyal and devoted following, then you merely have to read this book to discover what thousands of other Doctor Who fans were enjoying every month.

(On the subject of the cover. If the DECEIT cover featured giant rocks about to sneeze, then the THEATRE OF WAR cover shows what happens when giant rocks forget to pack their tissues. Eww.)

Rating:
Summary: The Way Things Ought To Be
Review: THEATRE OF WAR was a book that presented me with a dilemma. I wanted to read it slowly, to absorb all of the rich detail that Justin Richards provided me with. But I had a real hard time doing this, because I had an equal and opposite desire to race through the book quickly, so I could see exactly how the plot unfolded.

The outline for this story must have been very detailed indeed. The book is very much driven by its plot, and the twists and turns are all quite welcome. Some of the directions I anticipated, but many of them took me completely by surprise. I love plot twists that are surprising but logical, and THEATRE OF WAR definitely delivers those.

Not only is the plot exciting and captivating, but there are loads of small little things that combine to make this a special book. I loved all of the extracts from made-up references books. I adored the clever play within a play passages with their meta-textual jokes about various Doctor Who stories, existent and missing. And seeing Benny in archeology mode was fantastic and something that had been lacking in previous books. It seems strange to think that it took this long to get a book that made such perfect use of Benny's diary, her background in archeology and her past in general.

The story makes good use of its many characters and settings. The archeological dig was a great place for Benny to develop and yet again she has the ability to drive a story forward all by herself. The secondary characters aren't terribly deep, but they all have a quality of believability. It's only near the end that one or two of them turn stereotypical, and by that point it's a forgivable sin.

There was only one real problem that I had with the plot. While the majority of the hints to the central mystery are carefully hidden, there is a huge clue in the introduction that is so massive that it reveals the way the plot is going to unfold over the next two hundred pages. Now, to be fair to the book, given some of themes that had been running through the story, this was no doubt done on purpose with the hope that the reader wouldn't really pick up on the clue. And even with the mystery somewhat deflated, I was still enthralled watching Benny and the Doctor work their way to the "how" and "why", even if I had already figured out the "what".

THEATRE OF WAR introduces several things that would later play larger roles in the NA universe, Irving Braxiatel and his collection included. However, this also works as a carefully written and enjoyable standalone novel. Its action-adventure status is enhanced by both its close attention to detail and Justin Richards' ability to keep a book filled with surprises. If you want to know why the New Adventures were so popular and why they attracted such a loyal and devoted following, then you merely have to read this book to discover what thousands of other Doctor Who fans were enjoying every month.

(On the subject of the cover. If the DECEIT cover featured giant rocks about to sneeze, then the THEATRE OF WAR cover shows what happens when giant rocks forget to pack their tissues. Eww.)