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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Odious. Unbearable. Unmanageable., October 28, 2001
This review is from: Heart of TARDIS (Doctor Who Series) (Paperback)
Dave Stone has been writing "Doctor Who" books for years, and almost anyone who chooses to buy "Heart of TARDIS" should know what to expect even before they open it. Even so, "Heart" manages to pack in more Stone excess than any novel he has ever written before. That's a bad sign. The two sets of Doctor/companion pairings bear no relation to the characters (and actors) we remember from TV. The plot makes no sense, being a treatise on quantum physics written in crayon by a guy who just wants to stick big words together. There are references galore to other, better books and TV series -- part of this confusing mess of a novel takes place in the Springfield of "The Simpsons". For humor value only. There are, in the midst of the morass, some nice jokes: Victoria, a sheltered 19th century girl, hears gangsta rap for the first time. The hammy Fourth Doctor overacts wildly in a room full of dusty furniture. A bookstore's shelves are overflowing with "Star Trek" novels. But don't take my word for how bad this book is. Here, free of charge, is some sample prose: "as much relation to the truth as a toboggan does to a small tub of weasel cheese", "set to tear reality apart like a rotten walrus", " as the data-stream linkages between two computer networks have to a toaster plugged into a power outlet...", and of course "as similar to that of human recollection as the sound of a tuba is similar to a monkey in a little hat." The book is unreadable. Please continue to support the "Doctor Who" line by reading the works of other authors.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Ouch! This one hurt!, July 25, 2001
This review is from: Heart of TARDIS (Doctor Who Series) (Paperback)
"Heart of Tardis" tries so very hard to be many different things all at the same time. It's a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode. It's a Simpson's episode. It's a Cheers episode. Why, it's even a Professionals episode. How regrettable is the fact that the one thing it isn't, is a Doctor Who episode! Like all the other reviewers, I agree that Dave Stone slaps two incarnations of the Doctor in a story that does not match up with the back-cover timeline suggested. The story picks up with the 4th Doctor and Romana clearly off the search for the Key to Time. It serves no real purpose other than to get the Doctor and Romana I involved in this novel. The pacing of the novel never quite seems to fit the action going on. Mr. Stone thanks some friends who helped him in fleshing out Patrick Troughton's character. There's our first problem. If Mr. Stone wasn't sure how the character was supposed to act, why choose him? The characterization suffers greatly throughout this novel. Even the 4th incarnation of the Doctor isn't quite right. A vast majority of the novels in this series manage to at least capture some essence of the Doctor. "Heart of Tardis" does not. It's a very long journey with no real pay-off. The writing style leaves a lot to be desired as well. I found "Rabid old trout" to be an odd description for the Prime Minister. It just didn't fit the novel. Even the homage to my second favorite British TV show, "The Professionals", could not save this novel. The possibilities of these two particular incarnations meeting was absolutely squandered. Maybe at the hands of another author within this series, the two can truly meet up again for an adventure of substance. To quote Crow T. Robot from the aforementioned MST3K: "This is bad. Bad, bad, bad. Bad to the bone, bad. Born under a bad sign bad." When I say, run.... RUN AWAY from this installment.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Confused..., April 23, 2001
This review is from: Heart of TARDIS (Doctor Who Series) (Paperback)
It takes almost two hundred pages before the HEART OF TARDIS becomes in any way enjoyable, but by that time the reader has to wonder why one even bothered. HEART OF TARDIS is basically a story and its sequel squashed together inside one book for no real good reason. It's bogged down by its own pomposity and collapses under its own weight. I felt that Dave Stone's characterization of the two Doctors was just slightly off. The second Doctor was somewhat too cartoonish for me, and the fourth just missed the mark of being Tom Baker type insanity and ended up being Dave Stone type insanity (which is a completely different style of madness, believe it or not). On the other hand, Romana was spot-on, and I could exactly picture Mary Tamm's holier-than-thou attitude without it going too far over the top. Victoria is also done quite well, and Stone does an excellent job of viewing the developing situation through the eyes of a 19th Century woman without descending into stereotypes and clichés. His Jamie was perhaps not done so well, but Stone is smart enough to recognize this, and wisely keeps Jamie out of the main action. For some reason the ending to this story feels extremely rushed which is odd because the first nine-tenths of the book seemed to be happening in slow motion. One is waiting for something to happen for almost the full length of the book and then when something finally does occur, it's over before one has time to react. I got the impression that the author had a really good idea for putting two different Doctors in the same book, but forgot what that was long before he reached the end. The ending doesn't resolve, it just sort of hangs there, and the reader has to wonder what all this careful build-up was for. Far too many things appear to be done completely at random and without any real thought behind them. There is a difference between making something deliberately offbeat and twisted, and just doing random things at arbitrary intervals. Instead of taking these strange elements and perhaps doing something original to them, they are quickly dropped and then replaced with something else so that nothing has time to develop into anything remarkable. The result is a just a jumbled mess of half finished thoughts. All in all, there are a few parts of the book that work fairly well, but they are very few and very far between. (On a completely unrelated note, Stone really missed out on a lot of funny material by not taking advantage of the fact that he had a Baltimore native as one of his bad guys. Lines such as, "Tell us what we wanna know, hon, or we'll send you downyoshen", "Hey, Brigadier, you wanna have a Colt '45 at the plant and then goh walk by da harrber?", "We thought you'd died; died or gonna Catonsville" and "Wir gunna have to take over da world tamorroh, mah fellow Baltimorons, 'cause right now we're listenin' to Kirk, Mark and Lopez" were conspicuous by their absence.)
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