⇒ Download Free Anachrophobia Doctor Who Jonathan Morris 9780563538479 Books

Anachrophobia Doctor Who Jonathan Morris 9780563538479 Books

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Anachrophobia Doctor Who Jonathan Morris 9780563538479 Books

The problems posed by a supposed plutocratic empire in the far off future are appropriate to this time period. The three of them face an interesting pair of problems. I won't say what they are, but they are significant.


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Anachrophobia Doctor Who Jonathan Morris 9780563538479 Books Reviews

If you're reading this review, you probably already know author Jonathan Morris from his 4th Doctor story "Festival of Death". You also probably know that he looks to be one of the most brilliant talents churned out by the decade-old "Doctor Who" books series. Here's a guy who can tie together complicated sci-fi concepts, air-tight plotting, and nifty characterizations, all without breaking a sweat. After one chapter of "Anachrophobia" I was looking to petition to allow me to give this book 6 stars.
Then, I hit the rest of the book.
Make no mistake, "Anachrophobia" has a brilliant setup. The early scenery is crisp a planet stuck in time on a winter's night in a leafless forest. The story background is Douglas Adams funny a plutocratic empire wages war against a ragtag team of loan defaulters. And there's real horror, as characters are killed not by bullets, but by accelerated (or decelerated) bursts of time itself.
What bogs the book down is the lack of that something Extra. Maybe I was waiting too long for the book to tie back into the arc-changing events of "The Adventuress of Henrietta Street" a few books back. After the clock villains arrive... they simply lumber around for 150 pages, and become less menacing with each attack. It takes forever for the action to get out of the tiny underground bunker and back into the forest (or elsewhere). A character arrives on page 100 who's so obviously a decoy that I found myself skipping ahead (unsuccessfully) to the final pages in search of the name of the character he simply had to be.
When the climax finally arrives, the book returns to brilliance. The sequence in which the Doctor is offered a chance to reshape his own past is of high TV-quality (I'd love to see this filmed). However, the Big Revelation is saved for literally the final three pages, and I'm afraid I was left scratching my head more than I was picking myself up off the floor. Raising more questions than you answer is a good thing... but this one basically negates the entire book and, while it's not a cheat, I thought it could have been revealed 20 pages earlier.
In the final analysis, "Anachrophobia" continues the vast upward trend of the 8th Doctor books since the recent story arc began. Editor Justin Richards gets massive credit for his ability to link each of the books together, through well-placed references to the past 2 or 3 adventures. The events of "Adventuress" have paid off immediate dividends, unlike earlier EDA arcs which never quite managed to create cliffhanger tension from book to book. Add this to Morris's crisp writing and brilliant ideas (the Doctor's quote on pg 136 is possibly the funniest thing he's ever said) and you still have one of the best EDAs yet produced.
As one of the few authors to write a Past Doctor Adventure that wasn't borderline cringe inducing, and in fact was quite entertaining, I was curious whether this time out he would prove that the earliest success was a fluke or if in fact he was an author that was worth paying attention to on the covers.

Truth is, that first time out definitely wasn't a fluke. He still has some polishing to do but he gives the impression the flaws in his writing can be corrected over time and with more experience, as opposed to aspects that you just grit your teeth over and resign yourself to accepting them every time you crack open one of their novels. We all know the type. We call them "stylistic quirks" when we're being polite.

Here Morris tackles the Eighth Doctor and his merry crew, dumping them in a situation where two sides are using Time itself as a tool in a four century long war, blanketing alternating areas with accelerated or decelerated time, either aging people to dust or freezing them where they stand forever (or worse, forcing them to watch as really slow bullets crawl toward them, unable to get out of the way). The first thing he does is get the utter strangeness of this right, down to the details, as the Doctor, Anji and Fitz wind up in an Isolation Station, where clocks surround every wall as the people inside keep track of making sure that Time runs at the proper rate in every section. Meanwhile, a scientist inside is doing his best to send a probe back in time in the hopes of changing it and winning the war. The only problem is the people going back are returning all messed up. At which point all heck starts to break loose.

Morris is one of those writers who tosses out ideas casually in the course of the story and the whole setup brings a nice level of strangeness to the affair that seems distinctly "Doctor Who", doing what the Doctor does best, entering a situation already smothering in its claustrophobic stasis and proceeding to mess it up entirely. It's not long before he starts messing around with things and pretending to be an expert that the people coming back through time start to have clocks for faces and wander around the base doing scary things. Ooh.

Amazingly, this whole scenario comes ridiculously close to the TV series' special "Waters of Mars", where the Doctor gets trapped on a base menaced by transformed human beings. Many of the mental images are present (including an eerily similar scene where the people, half-transformed, stare at the others from the other side of the glass in the quarantined sector) as well as the general feel of doom that pervades the scenario. I'm not suggesting Davies ripped this off by any stretch of the imagination, but it just goes to show that no matter how original you think your "base under siege" idea is, it's still a base under siege.

Which is what starts to hamstring the book eventually. The initial appearances of the clockface people are genuinely creepy and weird in a way that the book hasn't been in a while. But once they start to hang around for a while we're just treated to endless scenes of everyone running away from the entities (and is it me or does the layout of the base make little sense at times?) as the book vamps for time until the Doctor reaches all the way back to WWI for an out of the box solution that is astonishingly brutal. Once again the dreaded BBC page count template takes hold as the author tries to find variations on things to do until the plot needs to shift to its next setting.

It recovers somewhat but when they leave the base that feverish intensity, diminishing as it was, is gone entirely. By the time we're treated to a whole city of clockface people and the reasons behind the war, a lot of the frightening power of it has been drained. Even the threat of being turned into a clock person isn't utilized to its fullest extent (it involves wanting to change a past regret), once we have the initial crew, it just milks the image as much as it can. Don't get me wrong, it's effective, but the author's talent suggests he could have done more with it.

Still, good moments abound. The Doctor's solution is clever in the same way that a master beating you at chess is clever . . . you don't totally understand how its done but you admire the intelligence that went into it. The scene where one woman realizes she's been infected and just starts to quietly cry gets to a basic touching humanness that the series rarely achieves, at least not so understated. Fitz and Anji for once get an author who understands what teamwork means, as they not only get plenty of face-time but manage to be useful, as opposed to putzing around until the Doctor tells them what to do. Both of them have opportunities to shine and fumble, far more than they normally do, and as someone who is a huge fan of this team, it's nice to see an author use them as characters instead of being along for the ride.

The book gets some mileage out of a new addition that some people felt was obviously a ringer (I didn't quite feel that way but I didn't predict who it would be) and the climax leads to a sequence that more or less undoes the last two hundred or so pages, which can leave a bad taste in the mouth for some. If you're reading this novel as a standalone, the last handful of pages is going to tick you off royally because it more or less says "everything we told you so far is wrong but we're not going to tell you how its wrong". However, it also leaves you with an intriguing cliffhanger, something the series hasn't been able to do for a while, and if you're in for the haul it could be promise to see how the next author picks up the baton.

Still, you can't assume that every person is reading these in sequence and having a finale that so readily and eagerly undermines the effectiveness of everything that came before is curious, to say the least. Yet, there is so much here that is well thought out and does work that it shows Morris as an author to watch. Part of the reason his last book succeeded was his ability to navigate the time-twisty plot, left to subsist on his own ideas and more conventional plotting, he stumbles slightly but with enough skill that if the BBC had any sense, they'd leave the door open for an invitation back anytime.
The problems posed by a supposed plutocratic empire in the far off future are appropriate to this time period. The three of them face an interesting pair of problems. I won't say what they are, but they are significant.