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2.58 AVERAGE
2.58 AVERAGE
I rate David A. McIntee's Doctor Who New Adventures and his 1st Doctor novel The Eleventh Tiger quite highly, so I am especially disappointed by Bullet Time. What McIntee does best, normally, is throw the Doctor into a specific genre, and in The Eleventh Tiger, he showed he knew how do to kun fu. So a novel with a Matrixy title, set in Hong Kong as it's about to revert to Chinese leadership is gonna be a big HK action spectacular, right? An early stunt makes us think so, and there's a big sequence near the end, but no, that's now what this is. Rather, it plays as a sequel to McIntee's own First Frontier, though rights issues makes him cagey about saying so point-blank. But Gray aliens, UFOs and such don't really mix well with Triads and Hong Kong crime thriller tropes. In fact, the novel is a big mess that features too many characters that I'm not sure pay off (like the two detectives). Why does it even have to take place in Hong Kong?! Throw in the CIA and UNIT and a UNIT sub-group and you've hardly got room for the real star, the 7th Doc--no wait, it's actually Sarah Jane Smith's adventure and she doesn't know if she can trust the dark NA Doctor. Let's just say that it's also not my preference for Sarah, of all companions, to have a sex scene, even such a brief one, and if this is the ill-motivated note she goes out on, let's just say I found the puzzling ending maddening. Might just be the first McIntee novel I've disliked, so I'm not complaining about the episode "School Reunion" throwing its canonicity into question.
Do you want a Doctor Who novel that hardly features the Doctor, is angsty and squalid for no reason, casually kills the most important companion in the show's history and all hinges upon an extremely cliched story?
Then this is the Doctor Who book for you. McIntee may be the worst of the repeat Doctor Who novelists. He seems actively hostile to the show, to science fiction and to the idea that these books should be entertaining.
I liked his book about The Master, for some reason, but the others I've read of his are terrible.
Then this is the Doctor Who book for you. McIntee may be the worst of the repeat Doctor Who novelists. He seems actively hostile to the show, to science fiction and to the idea that these books should be entertaining.
I liked his book about The Master, for some reason, but the others I've read of his are terrible.
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2765570.html
The final Seventh doctor novel in terms of continuity, actually it is much more about Sarah Jane Smith in Hong Kong just before the 1997 handover, getting sucked into what at first appears to be a criminal conspiracy but turns out to be the work of aliens - well, one alien in particular... I felt that Hong Kong itself was well conveyed, and the plot had enough twists involving characters I was interested in to make up for the fact that it's relatively light on the Doctor. I'm also not in general a big fan of the Seventh=Doctor-as-cosmic-manipulator, but it worked OK here. However, certain events at the end don't sit so well in overall Who continuity.
The final Seventh doctor novel in terms of continuity, actually it is much more about Sarah Jane Smith in Hong Kong just before the 1997 handover, getting sucked into what at first appears to be a criminal conspiracy but turns out to be the work of aliens - well, one alien in particular... I felt that Hong Kong itself was well conveyed, and the plot had enough twists involving characters I was interested in to make up for the fact that it's relatively light on the Doctor. I'm also not in general a big fan of the Seventh=Doctor-as-cosmic-manipulator, but it worked OK here. However, certain events at the end don't sit so well in overall Who continuity.
i had to read twice to understand the story but once i did, it was a clever piece of work. everything combines in the end to give light to the whole story. a good read.
I wish I could give it less than one star. The only book I could not get through besides Wicked....