Tomorrow Never Knows by Eddie Robson

Last month, I read Eddie Robson's most recent novel, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words; this month, I jumped back to read his debut, Tomorrow Never Knows, from small UK press Snowbooks.

Tomorrow Never Knows by Eddie Robson

Published: 2015
Acquired: July 2024
Read: September 2024

Though I enjoyed Strange New Words a lot, this is in some ways exactly what I wanted out of an original Eddie Robson novel, based on my familiarity with his Doctor Who work. I think Robson thrives when he juxtaposes the everyday with the fantastic, and that's exactly what we have here: it's about a small group of ordinary people living their lives... but on a platform floating in the atmosphere of Jupiter. It's one of those books where there's not one overarching plot, but rather lives of the protagonists weave in and out of each other, intersecting and connecting and having unexpected ramificiations. Robson has good worldbuilding,* good jokes, but above all a good sense of heart; I really liked all of these people and their struggles and wanted to see them succeed. They felt like real people living in the future, living mundane ordinary lives... but in each case, an ordinary life tinged for the better by an encounter with the fantastic.

The ending is, honestly, kind of sudden, but as I sat on it for a couple days, I came to be okay with that. It's not a book about unravelling cosmic mysteries—there are some here, but that's just not what the book is about. What matter is how our encounters with the cosmic change and reshape us. It reminds me of what George Levine says in his excellent Dying to Know: that the requirement for growth and self-knowledge is first self-humiliation, that we must first deny the self in order to expand it. If we understood more what happened at the end, I don't think that would be the case, and the novel wouldn't totally work. Here, all the protagonists see enough of the universe to realize that there is more they need to know of the universe, and thus they all end the novel in a better place than they began it.

* For example, I thought the stuff about the class implications of homosexuality in a world where the rich can afford to genetically tweak their offspring was a very clever, interesting idea.

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson

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.

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.

Hearts of Oak by Eddie Robson

Hearts of Oak by Eddie Robson

I picked up this Tor.com novella (though I think it must be a novel by actual word count) because it was by Eddie Robson, one of my favorite Doctor Who writers, one of those whose senses of tone, character, and world are generally strong enough that I could imagine him succeeding at original science fiction, which is not a thing I believe of most tie-in writers.

Published: 2020
Acquired: December 2021
Read: June 2022

For its first half this is very strong. It has a weird setting: a city where everything is made of wood, ruled by a king with a talking cat, where the imperative is to just build build build. The parallel narratives follow the king and the chief architect, both of whom are beginning to suspect that their world doesn't entirely make sense. (What is... concrete?) The story is told with a dry, factual narrative voice that works well to highlight its absurdities.

About halfway through, though, the novel explains what's going on, and at that point, I was like, "This is just a Doctor Who story!" And indeed, when I flipped to the Acknowledgements page, I found Hearts of Oak was based on something Robson originally pitched to Alan Barnes, former script editor of Big Finish's Doctor Who range. At that point, the story becomes much less interesting; what's really happening is much less striking than what went before, and the disconnected style works against the narrative from then on, too, as to be interesting what comes next, we would need to be invested in the characters as people more.

That said, I like Robson in general and the first half of this novel in particular enough that I would give his original work another chance; I see that this is actually his second novel, so I'll have to seek out his first and see how it is.

Review: Bernice Summerfield: Present Danger edited by Eddie Robson

Reviewing a book tied into some audio dramas reminds me that I actually haven't cross-linked my audio reviews here of late; there have been three. "Flight into Hull!", a Doctor Who: Short Trip read by Camille Corduri, features Jackie Tyler and the "metacrisis" Doctor. The Root of All Rage is the second Star Trek: Prometheus audiobook, presenting the German 50th-anniversay special. And Jeremiah Bourne in Time is a new, original concept from Big Finish about a teenager travelling between contemporary and Edwardian London. (Quoth my editor when I submitted the last review: "'famous magistrate and infamous nudist' is a hell of a character description, I need to listen to these." Indeed he does and so do you.)

Hardcover, 208 pages
Published 2010

Acquired August 2015
Read October 2018

Bernice Summerfield XIV: Present Danger
edited by Eddie Robson

Present Danger fills in the gap between the audio dramas Resurrecting the Past and Escaping the Future. Partially it serves to just move characters into position (in Resurrecting, Benny and Hass are on Earth, but when Escaping opens, Benny is travelling through time to fight the Deindum with a restored time ring, while Hass is a Deindum prisoner on Maximediras), and partially it serves to dramatize the Deindum War more completely, since it's mostly off-stage in Escaping, but of great importance.

So, it's kind of like Life During Wartime, but it doesn't work quite as well. Life During Wartime felt like a novel by many hands, showing the progression of the Bernice Summerfield range's cast of characters during the months (and months?) of Fifth Axis occupation. Present Danger is more spotty-- it often feels like things that ought to have been dramatized are skipped over in favor of things that are less important. Like, there's no story about how Bev manages to take control back of the Braxiatel Collection, which ought to be a key character point, and the refugees crowding the Collection is referenced in Escaping, but that's dramatized here in only a very cursory way. It would have been nice to see this in Present Danger; instead, the most we get for Bev is a story by Niall Boyce, "The Empire Variations," where she witnesses a time travel adventure Benny has by seeing how works of art in the Collection change as history does. It's a neat conceit, but if the book was going to tell just one Bev story, it doesn't seem like this is the one.

This goes for a number of stories. Like, I enjoyed a lot of them, but they often seemed like sidebars to the Deindum War. It's neat to have a sequel to Battlefield in Jim Smith's "Excalibur of Mars," but should working Brigadier Bambera in really have been a priority of this collection? There are a few too many Benny-on-strange-adventures stories that are tenuously incorporated on the basis of Benny scouring time for weapons to use against the Deindum. That said, Jonathan Blum's "The End Times" is a great Benny-and-Peter tale in the way that only Jon Blum can do, and I was unexpectedly delighted by the return of the tax assessor from Venus Mantrap in Mark Clapham's "In the Ledgers of Madness," where a group of reclusive monks keep their books in an ancient, dangerous language so that anyone who tries to audit them will go mad.

The book's best stories are those that deal with the Deindum War and the characters more concretely. "Winging It" by Lance Parkin focuses on Braxiatel figuring out how to fight the Deindum through time, and it's a clever time war story that I really enjoyed. Kate Orman's "Don't Do Something, Just Sit There" of course is a winner, with Benny trying to protect an indigenous population as Earth and the Deindum duke it out. Simon Guerrier gives us some Doggles and Adrian in "Six Impossible Things," a potent combination given their history; there wasn't just the space for this reckoning in the audio dramas, so I'm glad to read it here. (Is Doggles the worst? Yes.)

LM Myles's "The Better Part of Valour," Oli Smith's "Digital Dreams," and editor Eddie Robson's Hass-focused interludes were among the other highlights. But if this collection was meant to make us feel the immensity of Deindum threat in preparation for Escaping the Future, it didn't quite accomplish that as well as it ought to have.

Review: Bernice Summerfield: Secret Histories edited by Mark Clapham

Another review up at Unreality SF: the Fifth First Doctor (I think that's right) returns in The First Doctor Adventures, Volume Two!

Hardcover, 175 pages
Published 2009

Acquired July 2015
Read September 2018

Bernice Summerfield XIII: Secret Histories
edited by Mark Clapham

2009's Bernice Summerfield book is another anthology, with a frame story that fleshes out what Benny was doing between deciding to confront Braxiatel at the end of Secret Origins and being captured by a giant robot in Dead and Buried.  On a dig, Benny discovers a collection of sentient skulls at the site of a war crime, and ends up telling them stories to pass the time. The stories cover a wide range of her life, but there are essentially three or four clusters: a few from her youth, before she had her graduate degree; a couple from the heyday of the Braxiatel Collection, when it was her and Adrian and Jason; a couple from her freelance on-the-run-from-Brax years; and then a number following on from the end of Secret Origins, as Benny and company plan their next move against Braxiatel and in the meantime have some wacky adventures.

I like the diversity on offer here. It's nice to see a young, inexperienced Benny alongside an older, but more carefree Collection-era Benny alongside her present-day status quo. And Mark Clapham's frame story is suitably atmospheric, additionally raising the kind of issues that work well with Benny as a character: dealing with the consequences of history and memory. But though Bernice Summerfield usually thrives in the anthology format (during the Big Finish era, the weaker books have almost always been the novels), Secret Histories isn't among the best of them. It's hard for me to put my finger on it, but I just felt like a lot of the stories here were weirdly plotted, not really coming to climaxes even when they had a solid foundation.

For example, there's a set of stories built around a common incident, where a mysterious machine shunts Benny, Adrian, and Peter back in time: Benny ends up in 1914 England, where she once again encounters Mycroft Holmes and John Watson; Adrian lands in World War I-era France; and Peter ends up in a vaguely Victorian freakshow. Each of the stories is evocatively written, with a great concept. But each one just kind of stops: in Jim Smith's "A Gallery of Pigeons," Mycroft deduces a time-travel mystery but it's more of intellectual interest than dramatic; in Eddie Robson's "The Firing Squad," a pair of alien time travelers (who I think are meant to be pre-existing characters?) tell Adrian what was going on; and in Mark Michalowksi's "The Illuminated Man"... I don't really know what happened at the end. Each story seems quite good until the disappointing endings, though, which is all the more frustrating. Smith is good at the retro-Sherlockiana, Robson does a great job with Adrian's character in an unusual situation, and Michalowski likewise has a good handle on the adolescent Peter.

So it's not like it's a bad book or a waste of time. Benny is a great character, and it's nice to hear from Collection characters like Adrian who have had their roles diminished with season 9's format change, such as in Cody Schell's "You Shouldn't Have," where Adrian and Benny crash-land on a planet where it's the height of masculinity to wear flowers. I also really enjoyed Lance Parkin's "Young Benny" tale, "A Game of Soldiers," a brutal and effective story of Benny reluctantly having to play a role in the Dalek Wars when she's accidentally drafted. And Nick Wallace's "Turn the Light On" is creepy and disorienting.

I did find that the resolution to the frame story followed the same pattern as many of the individual stories, in that it ended disappointingly as well: Benny makes a sort of nonsense technobabble deduction to wrap it all up, which undercuts the emotional potential that had been built up in the until-then effective scenes of her interactions with the skulls. It's not the worst Bernice Summerfield anthology (that's either The Dead Man Diaries or Missing Adventures), but it is underwhelming given the quality this range often provides.

Review: Bernice Summerfield: Missing Adventures edited by Rebecca Levene

Two days in a row of USF reviews! Check out my account of The Avengers: Steed and Mrs Peel: The Comic Strip Adaptations, Volume One.

Hardcover, 246 pages
Published 2007

Acquired June 2013
Read November 2015

Bernice Summerfield XI: Missing Adventures
edited by Rebecca Levene

After Genius Loci and the general quality of Big Finish's Bernice Summerfield anthologies, I really wanted to like Missing Adventures. Unfortunately, I found most of the stories somewhere between frustrating and pedestrian. These stories range across Benny's early life, from her childhood in boarding school up to the day before she met the Doctor in Love and War. I wanted a sense of Benny's development as a person, but I didn't really get that-- in most of these stories, she's just kind of generic goofy action Benny, not the well-rounded character she is when at her best. Unfortunately, given Genius Loci, Ben Aaronovitch's "The Evacuation of Bernice Summerfield Considered as a Short Film by Terry Gillam" is one of the most inexplicable of the lot. Beyond that, I don't really have strong impressions of anything here, except for the last story, Eddie Robson's "Thirty Love," a cute story about Benny's 30th birthday that brings back a lot of characters and concepts from Benny's original introduction in Love and War.

Next Week: One last prequel book before I dive into The New Adventures proper-- the Doctor meets up with the Daleks for the final time in Remembrance of the Daleks!

Review: Doctor Who: Sky Jacks! by Andy Diggle & Eddie Robson, Andy Kuhn, et al.

Comic PDF eBook, 108 pages
Published 2013 (contents: 2012-13)
Acquired May 2014
Read November 2014

Doctor Who, Volume 3: Sky Jacks!

Written by Andy Diggle & Eddie Robson and Len Wein

Art by Andy Kuhn and Matthew Dow Smith
Colors by Charlie Kirchoff and Adrian Salmon
Lettering by Shawn Lee

For the first three chapters, this is classic Doctor Who: the Doctor and Clara (yay!) end up in an infinite sky, where they fall in with the crew of a British bomber from World War II. It's a very cool, sprawling world, and it's very fun-- thanks especially to the art of Andy Kuhn, who eschews dull tie-in realism for a more cartoony style to good effect. His Clara Oswald may not look like Jenna-Louise Coleman, but she does look like Clara. There are a lot of cool visuals and neat ideas here, plus dogfights, and what's more exciting than that?

It all crashes down in chapter four, though, when it's revealed who's behind it all-- tying back in to Andy Diggle's first story in The Hypothetical Gentleman. (The book credits Andy Diggle and Eddie Robson with writing; I'd guess Eddie Robson scripted it from a plot by Diggle, whose presence on the book has been inconsistent at best.) Unfortunately, it's a maniacally evil Matrix, having escaped the destruction of Gallifrey. There's potential here-- the Doctor vs. the dead memories of his race-- but it comes across as an excuse for continuity (there are tie-ins to The Deadly Assassin, The End of Time, and "The Day of the Doctor") and really it could be the Doctor fighting any evil robot spider. I really like Eddie Robson as a writer, but this final chapter does not play to his strengths.

Finally, there's a short tale by Len Wein and Matthew Dow Smith: "In-Fez-Station!" The Doctor, Amy, and Rory fight the Slitheen while wearing fezes at the Fez Music Festival in Fez, Morocco. It's fun.

Next Week: Tony Lee returns (and so does Clara) as the TARDIS visits the Old West in Dead Man's Hand!

Review: Collected Works edited by Nick Wallace

Hardcover, 283 pages
Published 2006
Acquired January 2013
Read November 2013

Bernice Summerfield VIII: Collected Works
edited by Nick Wallace

I've said it before (I think), but in any case, I'll say it again: the best Bernice Summerfield stories are the short-story anthologies. They're works of art, they are, taking shorts by various writers about various characters and managing to blend them into a coherent whole. Collected Works spans the events of the audio dramas in Bernice Summerfield's seventh season, picking up after the events of Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Crystal of Cantus, and ending around the time of The Oracle of Delphi. (See the timeline for more details.)

This book does everything I like about the Bernice anthologies, giving a strong, character-based focused to Benny and the other residents of the Braxiatel Collection, the fallout from The Crystal of Cantus proving a strong hook to hang a lot of stories from. I especially liked the renewed focus on Bev Tarrant (who has really benefited as a character in general from the prose anthologies) and, surprisingly, Parasiel. (Bev especially does well in "The Cost for a Collection" by Ian Mond.) As a result, it's hard to single out any particular favorites; it'd be like claiming chapter 4 was the standout bit of a novel.

That said, there are some strong ones: Wallace's frame story and "Work in Progress" provide a great start, the latter especially haunting in light of what I know is to come in the series' future. Simon A. Forward's "Grey's Anatomy" brings back Mordecan from Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Bone of Contention and  Doctor Who: The Sandman, who I like, and it was an enjoyable story in its own right. Eddie Robson's "The Two-Level Effect" is a fun look at Jason Kane with a cheeky Doctor Who nod, and Hass (the gaseous life-form turned gardener) gets a good turn in "Let There Be Stars" by Mark Michalowski. Dale Smith ties up many of the book's (and, in general, the seventh season's) threads with the chilling "Mother's Ruin." And, of course, I liked Philip Purser-Hallard's recurrent "Perspectives," about a strange group of futuristic historians visiting the collection, a whole lot. No one does this thing quite like Purser-Hallard can-- I like it when my aliens are genuinely alien, and these ones technically aren't even aliens!

Picking out favorites feels like cheating, though. This is another Bernice Summerfield collection with scarcely a weak link, and I continue to love the way the series weaves between media-- each format lends strengths to the others, and Collected Works plugs right into the heart of the seventh season.

Review: Christmas Around the World edited by Xanna Eve Chown

Hardcover, 293 pages
Published 2008
Acquired May 2009
Read  December 2012

Doctor Who: Short Trips #27: Christmas Around the World
edited by Xanna Eve Chown

My memories of this one are vague, now-- but that speaks to something in and of itself; I still remember bits and bobs from Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury and The Ghosts of Christmas. The linking theme here is too specific but too thin, i.e., it locks the stories into a range too limited to consistently yield something interesting. I don't really recall any duffers, but many of them just aren't long enough to even be bad. The memorable strong stories were Gareth Wigmore's "Mirth, and Walking Spirits" (a lost Antarctic expedition celebrates Christmas), Eddie Robson's "Interesting Times" (the third Doctor and Sarah Jane in the Vietnam War), and Andrew Cartmel's "Christmas in Toronto" (surely the only worthwhile thing Cartmel has ever written for Big Finish).

Audio Catchup: Doctor Who: The Jupiter Conjunction

written by Eddie Robson

directed by Ken Bentley

released May 2012

starring

Peter Davison as the Doctor
Janet Fielding as Tegan Jovanka
Mark Strickson as Vislor Turlough
Sarah Sutton as Nyssa

Doctor Who #160: The Jupiter Conjunction

Though I enjoyed Big Finish’s first trilogy that reunited the Fifth Doctor with Nyssa, Tegan, and Turlough (Cobwebs, The Whispering Forest, The Cradle of the Snake), it didn’t push its TARDIS team into must-buy status for me, and thus I gave a miss to the second trilogy — and I’d intended to do so to the third.

But there I was, reading reviews for The Jupiter Conjunction, a release which had been overshadowed in my mind by the fact that Big Finish was bringing back Magnus Greel in a prequel to The Talons of Weng-Chiang in the final instalment of this trilogy. As usual, I had grumbled sight unseen about the return of yet another villain from the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era; I’m still waiting for Kandyman II: Sweeties’ Revenge. Anyway, many of the reviews of The Jupiter Conjunction were saying that it was a nice, solid story, the sort that wouldn’t knock the world over but perhaps was the kind of thing Doctor Who should generally aspire to.

( Read more... )

Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Alternate Timelines

Hardcover, 202 pages
Published 2006
Acquired February 2012
Read May 2012

Professor Bernice Summerfield VII: Something Changed

edited by Simon Guerrier

This Bernice Summerfield anthology has a somewhat odd premise: a man named Doggles brings a "history machine" to the Braxiatel Collection just after the emotionally devastating events of Parallel Lives.  At the end of the first chapter (Simon Guerrier's "Inappropriate Laughter"), the history machine malfunctions, and the devastating consequences are explored in the second chapter (James Swallow's "Siege Mentality"). But at the end of that chapter, everyone dies, and there's another second chapter (Joseph Lidster's "Dead Mice") where we pick up again in a reality where the machine malfunctioned in a different way.  And so the book goes again and again, sometimes picking up immediately after the malfunction, sometimes months or decades later, but always showing a different possibility.

What stops the book from feeling like a collection of pointless alternate-timeline stories is that they all use the premise as a way to create genuine insights into Bernice herself and her supporting cast. I didn't fully understand what was happening in "Dead Mice," but it was a great look into Braxiatel and his levels of manipulation, as is "Family Man" by Ian Mond.  Pete Kemphshall's "Acts of Senseless Devotion," where Bernice is blinded and her son is dying, showed the all-too-plausible depths to which Bernice might sink to save her son.  Jason Kane gets a good showing in Dave Hoskin's "Writing in Green," where he attempts to show Benny the depth of his love with the help of Hass, the Collection's Ice Warrior gardener.  Another dark story was Ian Farrington's "A Murderous Desire," where someone kills Doggles.  Very dark actions from all of our main characters, but seemingly all too plausible.

Of the stories that picked up much later, I most liked Eddie Robson's "Match of the Deity," where Benny and Doggles are reunited eight years later to try to return a religious artifact to an alien planet, with hilarious consequences.  But even though it's set eight years in an alternate future, it still tells us something of both Bernice and Doggles.

Some take odder approaches, but that's okay.  In Ben Aaronovitch's "Walking Backwards for Christmas," the history machine makes Bernice relive her own past, and thus we get a great story of the little-explored period where Bernice was at a military academy and subsequently went AWOL. It's neat to see a very different, but very recognizable Benny. I also liked Dave Stone's "There and Back Again," where Jason uses the constantly shifting timelines to try to help his other selves break free from Braxiatel's conditioning.  Poor guy.

A couple, though, I couldn't see how the worlds they showed were related to the premise at all.  Why is Bernice fighting with a fanatical resistance army in "The God Gene" by Ben Woodhams? No one really ever says. Or why is Bernice fighting for the Fifth Axis in "The Ice Garden" by Jonathan Clements? I have no idea (though it yields the excellent cover image).

Those are just two stories, though, out of an excellent bunch. Once again, Simon Guerrier has knocked it out of the park with a Bernice Summerfield anthology: we have here a collection of deeply character-driven, unique sf stories, which only an open-ended, multi-author series like this could do. A variety of voices and styles, all giving their perspectives on a small group of people, but able to do almost anything like them. Excellent stuff, which once again has me excited for the continuation of the Bernice line.

Dr Who and the Time Signature

Doctor Who: Short Trips #18: Time Signature

edited by Simon Guerrier

Hardcover, 215 pages. Published 2006.  Acquired December 2007.  Read January 2012.

When Time Signature was announced, I almost decided not to get it.  Its back cover doesn't raise a whole lot of interest, sounding like a really generic retread of Repercussions.  But eventually I learned it was nothing like Repercussions at all, and in fact it begins with the story "An Overture Too Early," which originally appeared in The Muses, being one of the better stories in that book.  "An Overture Too Early" sees the third Doctor encounter a companion from his future, a companion who has a snatch of music that can pierce into the time vortex itself.  But the Doctor can't do anything to help poor Isaac, and the Time Lords prevent him from investigating further.

Simon Guerrier wrote that story, and he takes on editing duties here, orchestrating (you see what I did there?) something that's more than an anthology.  Back when I read The Centenarian, I praised it for being (in theory) the best sort of tie-in fiction, the sort that tells a story that could only be told as a tie-in because of the way that it uses the history of the series.  Time Signature is the same, except that it delivers on its promise.  All the stories here stand on their own just fine, but as we move from story to story, we jump backward and forward in the Doctor's history, seeing different pieces of the puzzle slot into place.

It's astonishingly well done.  We move backward to the first Doctor, Susan, Ian, and Barbara discovering a planet literally out of time in Philip Purser-Hallard's "The Ruins of Time," then forward to the sixth Doctor taking a new companion fishing in "Gone Fishing" by Ben Aaronovitch, then back again to the second Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe hanging out at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in Eddie Robson's "The Avant Guardian."  Each story adds a new piece to the unfolding puzzle, until we finally can see the entire story.  Time Signature is more like a novel than a collection in that regard, telling one tale, but out-of-sequence.  Though that's appropriate, as the Doctor encounters it that way too.

Maybe none of the stories here are amazing ("The Avant Guardian" is really, really good, though, but maybe I'm just a sucker for the early BBC), but almost all of them hit very well.  "The Ruins of Time" is atmospheric, and characterizes the first TARDIS crew spot on.  I also really enjoyed Ben Woodhams's "Resonance," where the fifth Doctor meets Isaac not long before he dies; it's kinda depressing in that way so many Season 21 stories were.

The only really weak entry here is Andrew Cartmel's "Certificate of Destruction," which has all the problems any listener of his Lost Stories would expect (i.e., comedy aliens, ineffective Doctor, stupidity), but even it, like all the stories here, is raised by its presence here, acquiring a bit of poignancy.  Time Signature has a clever conceit, but more importantly, it's a collection of strong stories that make an interesting mystery as they unfold.  Or rather, a single story written by ten different authors.

Archival Review: Doctor Who: Short Trips #15: The History of Christmas edited by Simon Guerrier

Hardcover, 192 pages
Published 2005
Acquired July 2006
Read December 2007

Doctor Who: Short Trips #15: The History of Christmas
edited by Simon Guerrier

Inappropriately enough, I got this book for my birthday in July of 2006.  Appropriately enough, I read it just after Christmas 2007.  The second of Big Finish's Christmas-themed Short Trips books, it was enjoyable enough, though towards the end I started to get tired of the Christmas theme coming again and again-- a problem that never afflicted me with Paul Cornell's A Christmas Treasury, despite the fact that that book had more stories!  I feel as though the earlier book had a wider variety of stories, but this book was by no means poor.  My favorite was probably Eddie Robson's "Not in My Back Yard", with Joseph Lidster's "She Won't Be Home" a close contender-- no surprise there, since they're both among my favorite Big Finish writers.