I consume a lot of tie-in fiction, but experience has taught me that there, to be honest, very few tie-in authors worth following out of the tie-in arena. Even people who are very good tie-in authors often struggle to write compelling original fiction. Their talents may lie in capturing characters and worlds created by others; ask them to write a book about a character not played by an actor, and they just can't do it. So in recent years I have become picky; from the Doctor Who world, it's mostly just Una McCormack, Paul Cornell, and Rob Shearman whose original work I am willing to grab.
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Published: 2022 Acquired: July 2024 Read: August 2024 |
Eddie Robson, though, is one of my favorite writers of Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama, with a keen eye for characterization, weird concept, and atmosphere that you can imagine working outside of the Doctor Who framework just fine. A couple years ago, I picked up his second novel, Hearts of Oak, which I liked to start but then kind of swerved into just being a Doctor Who story without the Doctor. But I liked it and him enough to keep looking for his work, and for my birthday I got from my mother a copy of his most recent novel, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words.
The premise of the book is that aliens have come to Earth in the near future, establishing diplomatic relations. The aliens communicate telepathically, but can only communicate with humans who have undergone special training to become translators. The main character is one of these translators, a woman from the UK assigned to translate for a cultural attaché based in New York City. One of the trade-offs, though, is that the process is pretty mentally intense, and over time induces a feeling in the translator akin to being drunk (hence the title*). During one the times she is drunk, something pretty shocking happens (kind of; it's on the cover blurb but apparently I didn't read that) and so the protagonist has to reconstruct what went on while she was drunk.
I really enjoyed it. Robson indeed applies his keen eye for character and worldbuilding here really well; there are lots of fun little details in the universe he builds up. He constructs a compelling mystery, with the protagonist following a series of clues. At one point, it began to feel a bit forced, but Robson pulls it all together fairly well in the end. It reads quickly and well, and like in his Doctor Who work, there are a lot of good jokes peppered in. I breezed through it, and was telling all kinds of people about what I was enjoying in it.
If I have a criticism, it's that it's a good book and not a great book. The central conceit is very interesting, but the book mostly explores it in an sfnal way; there are ideas of cultural imperalism being invoked here. How can ideas of art and language from outside your society change yours? Is that good or bad? There's a bit of the War of the Worlds conceit going on here: aliens are doing to the West what the West has done with the world. It reminded me a bit of where A Memory Called Empire went. But the novel mostly uses these ideas as part of its mystery, it doesn't really reflect on them or use them to reflect on the world that we all live in. Maybe this isn't the novel that Robson was interested in writing, in which case fair's fair, but I would have loved to see him go there and really knock it out of the park.
* Which is not, as I originally entered into LibraryThing, Drunk on All Your Strange New Worlds. It took me a couple days to realize my mistake.
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