Customer Reviews

Quantum Archangel (Doctor Who)

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

 

 

If you like your "Doctor Who" novel to be heavy on style points, "Quantum Archangel" may be just the book for you. It's a sequel to a 30 year-old TV serial ("The Time Monster"), and a followup to author Craig Hinton's previous book "Millennial Rites". It builds on some of the themes of the worst-regarded DW book in recent years, "Divided Loyalties". There's a boatload of returning friends and enemies and more references to past DW stories (real and apocryphal) then you could find in a series episode guide.

Predictably, some parts of "Archangel" are more fun to read than others. When Hinton sticks to his "Time Monster" sequel -- reusing not only characters from the 1972 story, but also entire scenes -- I found myself smiling along. The Master's appearance is well thought-out and at times really fun to read.

However, as one wag put it, "Craig has a degree in physics, and isn't afraid to use it!". So here we get the most expansive treatise ever on how the DW "universe" is organized. We learn about eleven dimensions and the Six-fold realm and the Lux Aeterna. There are Eternals and Chronovores (two characters switch from one to the other almost at random) and Six Guardians. There's a "Mad Mind of Bophemeral" (I've always wanted one of those). We see just how the Key to Time was created (remember the Key to Time?). For good measure a "Millennium War" is recreated -- in just a few pages! Keep the caffeine away from the typewriter, Craig!

Of course, cartoon astrophysics may even appeal to you. In "Quantum Archangel" there's literally something for everyone, if you know which page to read.

Craig Hinton returns to the Doctor Who range with this book which, while I liked generally, got a bit overly cosmic for me. Essentially, following a particularly unpleasant finish to an adventure (never written, just referred to in this book), Mel decides to leave the Doctor and asks to be dropped off on Earth. The Doctor complies, but both are drawn into events arising from the TV serial 'The Time Monster' (which was not very good!).

The book is weighed down with Doctor Who continuity and a seemingly desperate desire to straighten out the cosmology of the series. It also features several references to non-Who (Star Trek, comics, etc.) matters. I'm sure I missed several of the references.

However, Mr. Hinton wears one influence very plainly on his sleeve - Garth Ennis' great comic series 'Preacher'. It is plain from the beginning how much Mr. Hinton enjoys this comic (which I'd recommend to most, although some with strong Christian beliefs may find some of it difficult). Unfortunately, Mr. Ennis did it a whole lot better (twice!), and I don't it works for me in this book.

That said, my main problem is that (in my opinion) Doctor Who works much better on a smaller scale than this. I enjoyed Mr. Hinton's last novel ('Millennial Rites') much more than this, even though it was more cosmic than the usual Doctor Who fare, probably because it didn't go as far as this one. Do write again, Mr. Hinton, but on a smaller scale!

I suspect this one is really for the die-hard Doctor Who reader, with the very high number of continuity references making it either semi-intelligible or possibly boring to casual readers.

This was the first BBC Dr. Who novel that I read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The sixth doctor has always been my favorite and I felt that Mr. Hinton captured the characters of the Doctor and Mel. The character of the Master was complete and believable and it was enjoyable seeing his actual thought processes. It was a "real page turner," I could not put it down at night and had to pick it up in the morning. On the down side, I did have hard time wading through all the techno-babble. All in all an excellent read.

I agree with the other reviewer. I found it interesting someone would feel "The Time Monster" needed a sequel. This novel had the same feeling as the other Doctor Who novel "Divided Loyalties". A supposed sequel to the Celestial Toymaker. Was it really necessary?

"The Quantum Archangel" is probably not a book for the casual reader/fan of the Doctor Who line. This one is for true loyalists of the series. There are references that will go over the casual fan's head.

On the plus side, The Master is used quite well throughout most of the novel. I was always partial to Anthony Ainley's portrayal in the series and found that his character comes across smoothly in many of his scenes. One can just hear that sonorous laugh of his.

I very much enjoyed the parallel universes the Quantum Archangel created for the novel's characters. Imagine getting your own personal universe where everything you ever wanted had come true! And then, along come the Chronovores to eat away at it! The end result being your dreams crashing in around you in the most horrific way possible.

I probably would have liked this one a whole lot more had Craig Hinton kept up the parallel time-line aspect of the story. I wasn't disappointed in the novel, but neither was I totally satisfied.

Again, casual readers may wish to pass. Come back to this one once you're more comfortable with the Whoniverse. Fans of the Sixth incarnation . . . well . . . you read it and see what you think.

More Master, less Kronos. That was my take on it.

Something tells me I'm not the target audience for this book.

Don't get me wrong, I love "Doctor Who", it's why I've been spending the past three years reading every Eighth Doctor and Past Doctor Adventure even though they came out like ten years ago and we're three Doctors past them. But I'm not the kind of fan that likes when they refer back to past adventures, or do explicit sequels to old stories. To me, "Doctor Who" should be about doing something new each time out and if they never referred to an old adventure again, I'd be extremely happy. Unless it's the Daleks. The Daleks can come back.

The author gives himself an easy and a hard task here. The hard task is to write a sequel to an established adventure that took place during the Third Doctor's tenure. That story was "The Time Monster" and that's where the easy task comes in. According to most sources, "The Time Monster" is really rather terrible and thus coming up with something that improves upon it shouldn't be that difficult, as it's not all that well regarded a story, to put it mildly (and yes, I have it on DVD so one day I'll see it for myself).

In that task, he . . . doesn't exactly succeed.

The plot on its face is rather simple. The Chronovore Kronos, who the Master tried to control back in the day, decides to come back and try to kill the Master, who has to come up with a plan to keep that from happening. In doing so he manages to return to the scene of the original crime, the TOMTIT device, and manipulate everyone into doing his will. It might be that no one will be around to stop him except that Mel gets mad at the Doctor due to plot contrivance (right before the book starts, they had an adventure where the Doctor's actions end up with an entire planet basically getting wiped out) and stumbles into the Master's scheme, which is ensnaring an old classmate of hers. At which point things get cosmic.

It's not that I have anything against cosmic. I've read "Starmaker" and a bunch of early Stephen Baxter novels, so I'm used to stories involving beings of untold comprehension and a scope spanning billions of years. It's just that the cosmic overwhelms just about everything here to the point where the plot loses you and just stops becoming compelling at all. Pages upon pages are devoted to telling us about events in the Six Fold Dimensions and with the higher Old Gods and a lot of other places and being that Involve Capital Letters and frankly a lot of it sounds kind of ridiculous. When you're reading about a love affair between two higher gods and realize that it reads a lot like Garth Ennis' "Preacher" comic, you start to wonder what all this has to do with Doctor Who. Hinton's sense of scale is all over the place and while he admits in the afterword that he was just trying to have campy fun, there's nothing really fun in this. It's ridiculous but not ridiculous enough to be anything silly since the narrative seems to be taking all this very seriously, even when you're throwing around terms like The Great Attractor and the Mad God Computer of Whatever. More paragraphs are spent explaining concepts that we've never heard about before but are required so that the next plot twist maintains something resembling logic and we're told about wars at the beginning of the universe that everyone has forgotten about (except, conveniently, the Doctor) and the Guardians show up and her friend turns into the Quantum Archangel and makes out with the Mad Computer being powered by a black hole and it starts to sound like two kids trading off chapters and seeking to one-up each other. And why each chapter is named after an eighties pop song is beyond me, but at this point it's more an observation than a complaint.

I don't needs my cosmic to be po-faced serious, but it needs to be grounded to some extent or it just becomes a lot of babble about stuff that I can't bring myself to care about. Instead of sitting there in slack-jawed wonder as forces from beyond imagination are duking it out with all of existence at stake, I'm wondering why one of the gods is called "Elektra". In the midst of all this, all the characters can do is stand around and watch, or stand around and talk amongst themselves until the plot requires them to take some action again. Even though the universe is at stake, it never really feels that way. Even though the Master is dying, it never feels imminent. The prose explains way too much and leaves nothing to the imagination. Too much time is spent in parallel earths that never amount to anything other to show possible futures and create artificial tension even though none of it means anything. The Cyberman Doctor is sort of creepy, however, so I will give him that.

There's just nothing to latch onto here, no matter how hard I try. Half of it doesn't deal with anything I remotely care about and the other half feels like the author trying to recreate his favorite Doctor Who moments. Oh, look, a Time Ram! And the story goes out of its way to remind us that the only time in history any one survived a Time Ram, it was the Doctor and the Master again. But all the references remind is how this is a pastiche of something that wasn't that good to begin with. Copies are hard enough when the source material is immaculate, using a flawed tableau is just asking for trouble.

And that's what we have. Nothing here is necessarily bad, it just feels amateurish and fannish, the kind of thing written for people who only want to read about stuff that references the things they like, so they can feel superior that they caught the references, or validated that they read the "right" books. As I said, there's an audience for that type of thing, but I'm not it.

But you know what galls the most? Remember the big stake that started the novel, the Doctor screwing up and killing most of a planet so that Mel wants to leave him? The reset button gets hit, Mel gives him an "Everyone makes mistakes" and the Doctor looks briefly sad, and that's all we get. Which is the problem with the novel in a nutshell, it's so concerned with looking back with a silly grin, that it can't even dare to go forward.

I really enjoyed Hinton's previous Who books, but this one was just a bit too much. While it was said before the book was published that Justin Richards had encouraged him to use as much as possible, I went into fanwank overload while reading this book.

The continuity references come fast and furious, swamping the reader. I enjoy continuity references as long as their done lightly, a sauce to add flavour to the book. In Quantum Archangel, you can taste nothing but the sauce.

It was also too cosmic for my tastes. Hinton tries really hard to ground the narrative and make it personal, but he doesn't succeed enough. The technobabble starts to invade, and the book is lost. The ideas and concepts are too big and overwhelm the characters.

I also don't like the Sixth Doctor. Too many times, he is a generic Doctor with Sixth Doctor mannerisms grafted on. Too many times, the Doctor repeats his words in an annoyed manner.

To say something good, Mel was well characterized and I enjoyed the Master's part in all of this.

I can't wait for Craig's next book. Hopefully it will be more down to earth.