Customer Reviews

The Dying Days (Doctor Who : the New Adventures)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Well I have to give Lance Parkin credit, the man knows his Who. I read this book 2 days after it was released here in the states. I was working a 3rd shift job at the time so every minute I had I was either sleeping or with my Girlfriend. I would take this book to work, read it on the way to work, in the bathroom... even inbetween breaks at work. It was that good.
Parkin had the character of the McGann Doctor down to a science. And it was nice to have something that expanded from the Fox movie so well. And a UNIT story to boot!
A wonderful teaming with Bernice and a beautiful, tearfull ending as the two parted ways, knowing full well even though the Doctor claimed he'd see her again, we knew due to legalities the two of them would never be teamed together again in offical continuity.
It was nice that the Virgin Series ended on such a high note.
I recommend The Dying Days very much and due to its very limited print run and availability buy it at any price under $100.00 if you can afford it. It's a classic in Doctor Who stories right up there next to Lungbarrow which I also highly reccomend.

"The Dying Days" by Lance Parkin was rather a neat segue into the New New Adventures. A Martian invasion of Earth, arranged by a British politician who got in cahoots with the Martians some twenty years ago through a suspected axe murdering astronaut. I know, I know, it all sounds so ridiculously improbable, even for fiction, but that's what Doctor Who is about, overcoming insurmountable odds and finding yourself in the most bizarre situations! That's what makes it Doctor Who in the classic sense. It is a kind of an annoying blur in the vision of your mind's eye, when the Doctor disappears in the middle of the book, but of course he re-appears towards the end, to save the day. I think this was to give Benny a leg up on her own New Adventures, which I have not yet tried, but am looking forward to as Benny is a really neat, interesting, likeable character. This is one of the better New Adventures, and I look forward to New New Adventures in the future!

The Dying Days demonstrates both how good a writer Lance Parkin is, and how sad it is that the Doctor has been snatched from Virgin Publishing's hands. The plot hangs together well enough for novice readers and has enough in-jokes that long=time fans of Doctor Who and the New Adventures will have some good chuckles. All in all, a good book. The return of the ice warriors is welcome, and another glance at UNIT is always good.

After the massive story that was Lungbarrow, the Virgin line still had one more book to go before it folded and the BBC took everything back. On TV the seventh Doctor had already regenerated into Paul McGann and so what we got here was not just the only Virgin book featuring the eighth Doctor, but the only meeting of the eighth Doctor and Bernice Summerfield, who would go on to star in the Doctor-less New Adventures for some time before that line eventually collapsed. As such the book isn't that easy to find and if I hadn't bought a copy when it came out ten years ago and forgotten to read it, I wouldn't have one either. After spending so much time with the McCoy Doctor, it was weird to read a book featuring a totally new incarnation, especially since I've never seen the Fox movie, or read any of the BBC novels (yet), so I really didn't know what to expect. But it was kind of fun, the eighth Doctor is much lighter than his predecessor, not as manipulative, not flamboyant but still exuberant and still remarkably clever. The Doctor meets Bernice, who is unaware that he regenerated, on Earth, just as a group of British astronauts reach Mars and see something that they aren't supposed to see. Cue the incoming Martians, as well as a coup to take over the British government. In the meantime old friends appear, like UNIT and all that entails (the Brigadier, not surprised at the Doctor's appearance, since they met in his future in some unspecified adventure) and much chaos ensues, as the team tries to figure out just what the Ice Warriors' plans are and then how to stop them. As the last New Adventure it's a little disappointing because those books were so engaged in pushing the boundaries of the show's mythology and what kinds of stories you could tell, and yet this is a basic Doctor Who romp, featuring old friends and enemies and a situation we'd seen many times on the show before. Still, it's great fun if you don't look at the context of the line ending, or expect anything super-deep. Parkin has a great handle on every character and manages to shade them with a lot of nuances . . . the Ice Warriors are ruthless but aren't really evil, a scene where the leader imagines taking some Earth art back to Mars to display in a museum was a nice touch. Being that the Doctor had not appeared in print in this incarnation yet (the Virgin book beats the BBC line debut by a few months, although this novel takes place later in the chronology, by all reports) he does a good job at giving us an idea of this new Doctor, sketching out some of his quirks and foibles but overall convincing us that it's the same man, yet different. The novel, although simple, moves quickly and doesn't suffer too much from the Doctor being taken out of action for a good chunk of it. Bernice is fun as always, her interaction with the new Doctor is poignant, as she realizes that the small funny man is gone and isn't coming back (probably the most wrenching scene in the novel is early on, when Bernice enters the TARDIS and sees the seventh Doctor's old umbrella, sitting on top of a cabinet, discarded and covered in dust). But overall it's not a real deep book, it doesn't stretch the boundaries any and maybe it didn't need to. But for a line that did so much to expand what could be done, it would have been nice to see them try one last time to blow our collective minds. Still, it doesn't take away from what they already did and this book makes for quick, light reading, bidding goodbye to the New Adventures that served us so well and a hello to a new Doctor who only existed for maybe two hours on TV but lingered for years in the BBC line of novels. Rare and expensive, but not groundbreaking, so consider that before you shell out a lot of money, unless you're a completist.

Virgin's only 8th Doctor New Adventure, and a sight better than most of the BBC's own 8th Doctor Books, this is a must read for fans of the NA's. The sad thing is it hints at how good a Virgin-produced 8th Doctor line could have been.

This is the final New Adventure by Virgin to feature the character of the Doctor. It is the only one to feature the 8th Doctor (Paul McGann from the TV movie). The only reason this one is not a 10 is that the Doctor while making a valiant effort to save the planet disappears from the novel. The Doctor leaves the reader and is not heard from for quite some time. The use of the Ice Warriors was terrific, they were very menacing in this work. All in all a wonderful adventure.

THE DYING DAYS: eagerly anticipated before its release; desperately searched for as a rarity since then. How does it stand up today? This is the third time that I've read this novel, and to be honest it's lost a little something for me on each reread. Which isn't as bad as it seems, since I thought it was absolutely brilliant the first time.

I've seen this novel hailed as a penetratingly thoughtful meta-textual discussion on Doctor Who, both as it existed on TV, as it continued in the Virgin novels, and then as the book license was snatched away back to the BBC. I'm wondering if I missed something somewhere. Yes, I saw the jokes, but I didn't think of them as anything more than a handful of throwaway jokes. Though as jokes go, these are quite good. Hilarious, in fact. I don't think Parkin gets enough credit for his humor, to be honest. I've laughed much more at some of his witty sentences than from whole pages of some "comedy" Doctor Who writers.

However, one of the jokey things I felt backfired somewhat was Parkin's clever trick of only having three invading Ice Warriors ever seen in any one given scene. Apparently this was a response to a statement made by Philip Segal (producer of the Paul McGann Doctor Who TV-movie) saying that they couldn't have had the plot of the film include an alien invasion because creating hundreds of prosthetic costumes would have been too expensive. Parkin wanted to prove that assertion false by writing an action-packed adventure where, in long-standing Doctor Who tradition, we only see three or four costumed actors at a time. (Apologies to either of the two gentlemen if I'm paraphrasing them inaccurately.) He sort of gets away with it, yet I felt he was placing too much of a limitation on himself, with no clear benefit other than successfully winning an argument. The supposedly huge invasion of Earth just doesn't feel in any way epic. He proved that this sort of thing can be done, but, in a novel, should it?

The characters are a lot of fun, if not terribly deep (partially a reflection of the novel as a whole). The most interesting thing about the story is not the alien invasion (done a thousand times before), but the takeover of the British government by rogue forces working from within. Parkin's well-known shtick of having Ian Richardson "playing" a character in his novels leads to inevitable (and very welcome) comparisons to HOUSE OF CARDS, the mini-series in which Ian Richardson's character backstabs, lies and cheats his way into 10 Downing Street. Here in THE DYING DAYS, a character not totally dissimilar in description to Ian Richardson, backstabs, lies and cheats his way into 10 Downing Street with the help of some invading Ice Warriors. A fun spin to put on both the otherwise tired invasion plot and the political intrigue plot.

The other characters seem a bit shallow in comparison (I wonder how much of Greyhaven's superb characterization was due to me having seen HOUSE OF CARDS, and simply overlaying some of that character onto this one), and there's an unfortunate instance of the clichéd "underling who stays loyal to his higher masters" bit. That said, the Doctor Who regulars themselves are great. Benny has never been better, and Parkin sets a high standard for writing the Eighth Doctor that has rarely been matched. And while Paul Cornell is the novel author who seems the fondest of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Parkin's ability to give the old soldier dignity, great lines and serious gravitas blows many of Cornell's attempts out of the water.

All right, perhaps I've been a bit hard on the book in this review up until now. So at this point I'm going to really turn on the praise. What a fun, rollicking, entertaining romp this is! It's exciting, and filled with thrills and spills. And coming from the pen of Lance Parkin (or keyboard or quill, or whatever it is he uses to write), it maintains his high quality of prose. The actually writing itself is very good. Little thoughts and tidbits are scattered throughout, making the book never dull. The NAs had a reputation of attempting to go a bit deeper than the series went, and since this was the first bona fide "alien invasion of contemporary Earth" story that the series did, Parkin goes in a little more for describing how exactly the population and the world would reaction to a literal invasion of Britain. The results are entertaining, exhilarating and often amusing. Oh, and the pacing is so gripping that I couldn't imagine even someone who disliked the book finding it boring.

Lance Parkin is, of course, also writing the (forthcoming) final EDA, which is oddly appropriate given that he wrote the final Doctor-led New Adventure, which was also the first original Eighth Doctor novel. I'm expecting very different things. While he presumably will be subtly tying up some of the continuing EDA plot-strands, here the only thing he had to do was move Benny from point A to point B, so that she continue as leading lady of the New Adventures. Whether having fewer or greater numbers of restrictions/demands will affect the quality remains to be seen. THE DYING DAYS perhaps lacks the drive of Parkin's previous NA, JUST WAR, but I can forgive, given that it's not trying to be an intensely emotional drama but rather a rompy action-adventure. Like the New Adventures themselves, it may have had a few rough spots, but overall it's a good ride. It's books like THE DYING DAYS that serve to remind me of how much I miss this novel series.

This book was an enjoyable enough read, but it was too much a rehash of 'The War of the Worlds' by HG Wells. Paying tribute is one thing, but not at the expense of originality.