Doctor Who: The Tomorrow Windows

Rating:
Summary: Don't Panic...
Review: While the book's closing acknowledgements proclaim a dedication to the late Douglas Adams, it also mentions that this is not meant to be a pastiche of his work. Indeed THE TOMORROW WINDOWS does not feel like a rehash or a rip-off of Adams, but it certainly feels informed (or at least influenced) by his fiction. There's a worldview present in Adams' writings that Jonathan Morris captures quite well. I wasn't sure I was going to like the book, but somewhere near the middle it won me over.

It actually took me a while to get a handle on this book, because it kept confounding my expectations. There are a lot of different locations/settings that focus is placed upon and then quickly removed. So I initially didn't pay much attention to the introduction of the main group of secondary characters because at the relatively late stage in which they appeared, I was expecting them to be introduced and then leave within twenty pages. I'm not mentioning this as a criticism, I merely wish to describe how loose and fast the book plays with its locations and casts of characters. It's actually a nice effect. It gives the book a quick pace and makes it feel very different from the EDAs that came before it.

As for the jokes, well, humor is very hard to do and extremely difficult to maintain over the course of nearly three hundred pages. I thought a lot of the witticisms near the beginning didn't quite hit their mark (although the stuff with "God" addressing various cultures was hilarious). Yet somewhere near the middle, the book had finally made enough of an impression into my slow brain that I was able to appreciate the jokes. Maybe it just takes a little while to get into this book's style. I suspect that if I read it a second time, my appreciation would begin earlier in the page count.

Like the Douglas Adams books that, perhaps, inspired parts of this story, one gets the impression that there's actually more here than meets the eye. Take the whole "there's someone else inside my mind!" subplot. This has been told a million billion times before, but Morris manages to tell it in a slightly new way, giving it exactly the sort of creepy, unsettling feeling that sort of story element should invoke. The political satires are done well do. They're certainly broad and obvious (not necessarily a bad thing), but work because they're so blasted funny.

What I really ended up liking about the book was how rich it was. There are lots of mad ideas all over the place that you can't quite imagine the author getting away with in an overly serious tome. But they're very welcome here.

I initially thought through the opening passages that I'd be coming down hard on this one. I figured I'd be slamming it as an unfunny mess, relying on in-jokes to other series for its attempts at humor. But it kept working and working until it finally wore me down and won me over. I'm glad it did and I think I'll be revisiting it at some point.