1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great story mostly, but where's the end?, June 22, 2001
This review is from: Beltempest (Doctor Who Series) (Paperback)
This book consists of two main sections separated by a short interlude. The first part is one hundred and eighty pages long and the second part is fifty-nine pages long. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to notice that the last section is quite a bit shorter than the first, and this is what kills the story dead. The shorter section is just as important to the story (indeed, it's where most of the major developments occur) but things are skipped over at a ludicrous rate. This culminates at the conclusion where we go from the potential destruction of an entire solar system to the resolution of the story inside two pages without any explanation. We aren't told anything about how the regulars escaped certain death, what the eventual fate of the star system and it's billions of inhabitants are, whether the aliens survived and just what on earth happened to Sam.
This was an extremely frustrating conclusion to the story, as I had been greatly enjoying the first two hundred or so pages. There are some fascinating discussions on religion and the power of a leader. Never do these become overbearing or tiresome. In fact, they were by far my favourite parts of the beginning and middle of the book. I grew impatient during the Doctor sections and the long explanations of the Beltempest star life cycles and wanted to get back to the sections I was enjoying. That said, I thought the Doctor got a very good showing in this book. While he's not given a lot to do, he handles his role with a lot of humour and charm. Jim Mortimer manages to give the Doctor the innocence that we've seen in VAMPIRE SCIENCE and SEEING I without falling into the trap of "the Doctor as a congenial idiot".
This book could really have benefited from a stricter editor. The prose was quite literally all over the place; in some places it's utilitarian, in others it tries to be poetical and in others it's incomprehensible. It's as if Mortimer was having major mood swings while writing this and let whatever whim he was experiencing at the moment dictate the tone of the prose he was currently creating. This would not necessarily be a bad thing, except that it leads to a few areas of incoherence where the reader is left unsure of what actually happened. And I'm not speaking about the author being deliberately ambiguous, I'm talking about confusion over how characters got to certain places, why people were trusting the Doctor without question, where some characters had been inserted into the narrative, etc. I don't mind having to piece together things without help from the author, but I am annoyed when people start following the Doctor around when they actually have more of a reason to stay where they are. Characters and character motivation are not something that feature heavily in this book.
The story contains the same faults as the prose. At times it's brilliant and at other times (such as the aforementioned non-ending) it's missing. I can just imagine in the future an editor standing over Mortimer demanding that he finish writing the chapters he's doing before moving on to the next good idea. "No, Jim, this is a great idea and you already have the first seventy-five percent of it finished. All you have to do is to finish writing the ending and it will be brilliant."
To sum it up, this is a very good book that's let down by some very big flaws. It's odd that a story that feels so rushed is actually about thirty or forty pages shorter than the Doctor Who range average. If Mortimer had taken the time to flesh out some of the good ideas that were present here (and bothered to write an ending), I think BELTEMPEST would stand to be one of the all-time best Doctor Who books. As it exists now, it's a bit of an oddity.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
My God, the stars are full of . . . it, May 5, 2009
This review is from: Beltempest (Doctor Who Series) (Paperback)
For some reason, I always associate Jim Mortimore with novels that have a high body count. I really have no reason for this, except that the last Doctor Who book of his I read, the New Adventure "Eternity Weeps", seemed to be extraordinarily violent and also led to the death of a former major character.
He does not disappoint here. Entire starships and populations and generations are wiped out with the stroke of a pen to the point where you start to lose all sense of scale and try to wrap your mind around a million people suddenly dying. It's like Olaf Stapleton was somehow possessing the body of a very irate George Lucas. A George Lucas who cares more about moving the plot the heck forward and not bothering with explaining things as they go.
Those coming here looking for hand holding exposition might be advised to start looking elsewhere, because author Jim Mortimore does not believe in such things. Things happen and we can try to piece together why the heck it's happening but if we don't, hey the story keeps going and it's perfectly okay. And yet, I liked this. Don't ask me why. A lot of folks hate this book and I've come down on some other more well liked Who novels but . . . I enjoyed this. Maybe because it's unpredictable? It certainly is, almost to the point of being incomprehensible in parts but it's never outright bad. You get the sense that the author knows where this is going, even you haven't the slightest idea.
But maybe I like it because Mortimore's got . . . verve? Spunk? I'm not sure what the word is. His prose is among the most distinctive I've seen in the BBC line so far, barring the deliberately ornate style of "The Scarlet Empress" . . . almost every description is off-kilter and strives toward poetry. At some points he starts messing with the page layouts, showing a certain willingness to experiment that's kind of encouraging.
And the story? Oh, right. The story. A sun that was dying suddenly flares back up again thousands of years ago. Now everyone who lives around it are experiencing all kinds of gravitational problems. Enter the intrepid Doctor and Sam, just as all heck breaks loose. There's giant gas aliens and novas and gravity wells and starships and pacifists and refugees and everything starts blowing up and oh my. There's very few quiet moments.
But I like his Doctor, who has a swagger that the other novelists haven't given him as much, an endearing childlike quality that doesn't forget he's a very old man and an alien. Even if he doesn't do a whole lot, he tends to command every scene that he's in. Sam fares a little better than in recent novels, driving a large amount of the action to a disturbing degree, being very proactive and threatening to steamroll everything in her path, not always for the best.
Every other character doesn't make as much of an impression but by the time you want to care about them they're either dead or the plot has shifted to someone else. And does it shift. Most reviewers have pointed out the rather abrupt conclusion to events and just by looking at the size of the two parts that make up the book you can tell things are lopsided. It's like he had so much fun writing about religious death cults and gravity and stars that when someone tapped him on the shoulder to ask for an ending, he just blazed right through. And it does goes quite mental toward the end, if you can explain exactly what happens to Sam and how it resolves, you're better than me. The rest of the end takes the conclusion of "2001" to an oddly practical level if you're an alien species and how much you tolerate the final chapters is more or less a test of how well you can go with it, as it were.
But when it was done, I couldn't find much bad to say about it. It lacks sense in parts, but in a somewhat exciting breakneck fashion and what worked succeeded well enough to erase any negative points. Chances are you like may not like it, but it's safe to say that there aren't many other Who novels in the line that are like it.
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2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The worst I've ever read, May 28, 1999
This review is from: Beltempest (Doctor Who Series) (Paperback)
Do not buy this one. There is no adventure. It is more of a existential journey. The characterizations are way off base. I disliked both the Doctor and Sam. The writer should not do another Doctor Who book. I would give it zero stars if possible. Pure garbage.
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