Festival of Death (Doctor Who Series)
by Jonathan Morris
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jonathan MorrisEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-09-15
ISBN: 0563538031
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: BBC Pubns
Book Reviews of Festival of Death (Doctor Who Series)
Book Review: The laws of time are really only strongly worded suggestions
Summary: 5 Stars
See what a little extra effort can get you? Every one of these Past Doctor adventures should be like this.
One of my common complaints about the PDA line is that while many are entertaining, that's about as far as it goes, and very rarely do they positively answer the question, "Why does this exist?" Hamstrung by the fact that they can't change anything (or they can only by hitting the reset button at the end) and treading water on the collective energies of our nostalgia, most of them don't strive to be anything more than "just another Doctor Who adventure" and giving us the same experience that we could by watching old television shows, only without really improving the experience (it's a book, you don't have a budget!) and slavishly evoking the era the story is derived from as if that gives the story a pass to just coast.
But maybe I'm being a bit harsh. What do I know? I've only read like forty of these by now.
This one is a little different through, for a few reasons. One is that Morris gets the tenor of the era right to a degree that's scary, to the point where we can imagine him sitting there watching every episode of the Douglas Adams era night after night on repeat and taking so many notes that they fill up his house. He finds a near perfect blend of scary and creepy and funny and absurd but doesn't do it by simply copying the stuff we used to like, he finds new wrinkles and does it with a sense of enthusiasm and style. His touch of humor is light without turning the Doctor into a buffoon or a man who is playing a joke with the audience. His jokes keep his enemies off balance and provide a distraction. Unless he's just being funny, such as the "laws of time" running joke between Romana and the Doctor.
I'm getting ahead of myself. The Doctor and Romana land on a spaceship that has been converted into an amusement park of sorts. The ride? Death. Specifically, the Beautiful Death, an attraction that allows the participant to experience death and the afterlife. People come for miles to enjoy it, until suddenly it goes haywire and turns everyone into rampaging zombies. This could be a situation, but fortunately the Doctor and Romana only have to hear about it because the danger is already past. Some strangers have already come by and saved everyone, as it turns out, even though one of them lost his life in the process. The stranger's name? The Doctor.
What follows is a temporal twisty masterpiece of juggling as several time tracks of Doctor merge and coincide, as the Doctor tries to figure out what he did before, even as he keeps coming across evidence of his actions. The structure alone qualifies this one as a keeper as the messy nonlinear situation isn't just a fancy trick but integral to the story itself and demonstrates something the show tended to ignore: when you can travel anywhere in time and space, sometimes you don't experience stuff in the right order. I'm sure nitpickers can find holes in his logic and Morris must have a flowchart the size of a wall in his house to keep track of where everyone was at certain times, but to my eye it seems to hold up together well.
This gives the story a natural pace and sense of suspense, as they meet characters out of order, get clues as to what they were doing and gradually figure out how to save the day without getting killed, and then not violate the laws of time if they are supposed to get killed. But what matters here is how all the aspects of the story are kept in perfect balance, even when the escalating threats reach the level of ridiculous. Zombies and collapsing hyperspace tunnels and evils beyond the dawn of time and by the time the predatory arachnid monsters show up to start devouring whoever is left, you're just taking it all in stride.
And as I said, its amazing how much of the tone he gets right. The banter between Romana and the Doctor is authentic (a couple in-jokes are sneaked in, including a reference to the short marriage of the actors), the threat is creepy and scary in a way that television probably couldn't have pulled off (the zombies are unsettling, with black ichor giving them that eerie "Waters of Mars" appearance) while the humor remains subtle and gently absurd in a way that Adams would have been proud of, whether it's the hippie talking lizards with a slang that remains goofy and yet somehow a natural part of their speech, or the arachnids, who are almost cute in how they wander around asking for "Eats!" even as they rip people to shreds.
Even a possessed K-9 becomes formidable, which is a sentence I'd never expect to write. I'd become so used to the PDA's not trying all that hard that this one feels like an absolute masterpiece and even if it doesn't push the character or the show in a new direction or rank as a literary classic, it does even better than that, it works as one that I would recommend and marks Morris as an author who I'll eagerly look forward to.
Summary of Festival of Death (Doctor Who Series)
Stuck in the end of a hyperspace tunnel lies a huge, chaotic, space city known as the G-Lock -- the end product of the most terrible intergalactic traffic jam in history. It has now been transformed into a death-themed park, where the major attraction is a death-simulator known as the Beautiful Death. However, the power generated by people enjoying the ride is being diverted to a mysterious destination. A creature called the Repulsion is on the loose, offering resurrection in two hundred year's time to anyone who will surrender to it, allowing it to exist in the real world. Can the Doctor defeat it, and escape from the G-Lock before the interface between hyperspace and real space collapses?Literature & Fiction Books
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