With Fitz gone to his certain death and Anji back at work in the City, the Doctor is once more alone. But he has a lot to keep him occupied. At the Naryshkin Institute in Siberia, scientists are busily at work in a haunted castle. Over a century earlier, creatures from a prehistory that never happened attack a geological expedition. Pages from the lost expedition's journal are put on display at the British Museum, and a US spy plane suffers a mysterious fate. Deep under the snowy landscape of Siberia the key to it all remains trapped in the ice. Only the Doctor can see that these events are all related. But he isn't the only person involved. Why is Colonel Hartford so interested in the Institute? Who is the mysterious millionaire who is after the journal? How is the Grand Duchess, descendent of the last Tsar, involved? Soon the Doctor is caught up in a plot that reaches back to the creation of the Universe. And beyond... ...to Time Zero.
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More About the Author
Justin Richards has written dozens of novels as well as non-fiction books. He has also written audio scripts, a television and stage play, edited anthologies of short stories, been a technical writer, and founded and edited a media journal.
Justin is the author of The Death Collector, The Chaos Code, The Parliament of Blood and The Invisible Detective series. He is also Creative Consultant to the BBC's best-selling range of Doctor Who books.
His novel 'The Skeleton Clock' is available as a Kindle eBook.
He lives in Warwick with his wife and two children, and a lovely view of the castle.
Justin is the author of The Death Collector, The Chaos Code, The Parliament of Blood and The Invisible Detective series. He is also Creative Consultant to the BBC's best-selling range of Doctor Who books.
His novel 'The Skeleton Clock' is available as a Kindle eBook.
He lives in Warwick with his wife and two children, and a lovely view of the castle.
Customer Reviews
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Who on Ice,
By David Roy (Vancouver, BC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Time Zero (Doctor Who) (Paperback)
Justin Richards is the editor of the Doctor Who line of books, so it's only fitting that he get the occasional "big" book rather then just doing fill-ins when an author misses a deadline. He can always be relied upon to give us an interesting story, often compelling and never boring. Time Zero is one of the big ones, though not as big as everybody thought it would be. It doesn't really end the Doctor-Sabbath war of ideas concerning how the timestream will ultimately work, instead blowing everything up and forcing the Doctor to try and pick up the pieces over the next few books. Time Zero keeps moving at a steady pace, gripping the reader, but then it hits a patch of ice. Still a very good book, though.After the events of Camera Obscura, Fitz has decided to join an expedition to frozen Siberia in the 1890s and Anji just wants to go home. The Doctor is alone again, but things are already set in motion to link him with his companions yet again. Fitz's expedition was attacked by dinosaurs from a history that never happened, and the Doctor has Fitz's journal to prove it. The journal also indicates that Fitz never returned. Anji's back working the financial markets, but gets co-opted into joining an American expedition to Siberia that has unknown purposes, though it involves the Naryshkin Institute. The Institute ostensibly is trying to create a black hole, but why? And what do the Americans want with it? Are all these events linked? The Doctor seems to think so. He's the only one who does, and his arrival on the scene could be the catalyst that destroys the world, or at least the past. Repercussions could stretch back to the beginning of the universe. Or even farther. Richards manages to tie all of these events together expertly, leaving each plot line to move on to the next one just when it's getting good. The suspense was killing me at a few points, when Fitz was endangered by the dinosaurs or it looked like Anji might get killed. This had the classic feeling of a "companion leaving" story, and I wouldn't have put it past Richards to kill one of the companions in their final book, so the sense of danger was palpable. Only the Doctor seemed safe, as it's obviously his series. Richards also keeps the reader guessing on how everything ties together, with only Siberia visibly linking everything at first. It's definitely a high-concept book, with alternate realities, time experiments, black holes, and an examination of the universe and how it functions. But Richards also grounds this in some believable characters and modern-day action, including two Special Forces units. The characters are what make the book great. The Doctor, Anji, and Fitz are simply wonderful, with the Doctor being at his frenetic best. He's on top of things, he's a force of nature at times, almost child-like at others, but always the moral center that everything revolves around. He's calm when everything around him is hysterical and he's intelligent as well. Gone are the days when he would do something truly stupid and naïve, the "congenital idiot" that some fans labeled him. Anji and Fitz are just as good, each leading their own scenes, taking charge (figuratively, if not literally) and displaying the attributes that we've always loved about them. While this is the Doctor's book, they aren't sidelined like they are in Camera Obscura. They are an integral part of the plot. While Anji doesn't get to actually do a whole lot, she gives us a viewpoint into Hartford's team and what they're doing, and she shows quick flashes of brilliance even as she's horrified by what Hartford is doing. Most of the other characters are quite good as well, though I thought Hartford was a little too over the top in his ruthlessness and I didn't quite buy his transformation at the end. It does give a new look at his previous actions, but I don't think it actually worked. Hartford and his group are chilling and work wonderfully, but Fitz's expedition members are given just enough characterization to make them mildly interesting, but the bits before the expedition reaches the castle dragged a bit because I just didn't care that much about them. Things picked up once the dinosaurs got involved, though. So the book is moving along very nicely, I'm contemplating taking a longer lunch at work because I want to finish this fascinating novel. The Institute is rigged to explode and there's a countdown and everything. Then Richards steps on a technobabble landmine, all of a sudden trying to explain all the concepts that he's been examining. Revelations of who's who and who's been pretending to be who come fast and furious, and the book comes to a screeching halt. I put the book down and went back to work, eager to finish it but not driven to like I had been. The tension burst out of the book like a balloon. Don't get me wrong, Richards quickly recovers from it and the climax is just as exciting and thought-provoking as the rest of the book, but there's a brick wall right in the middle there that just brought everything rudely to a halt. It's the only real problem in an otherwise wonderful book. Don't let that stop you, though. Time Zero is yet another hit in the Eighth Doctor line of books David Roy
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Right on target,
By Shane Welch "Serge Ortega" (Canberra City, ACT Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Time Zero (Doctor Who) (Paperback)
Hat-trick!!! 3 out of 3, right on target! Suns Of Caresh, Camera Obscura and Time Zero. 2 months ago I was despairing how far (and for how long) the Doctor Who books had fallen, culminating in Combat Rock and the literally dozens of poor to average books preceeding that. Now these 3 come along all at once. Time Zero is extremely well written, and portrays a good sense of mystery throughout. The plot held my interest, keeping me wanting to come back for more. This book has the usual 8th Doctor Adventure page count but its smaller font meant even more story for my money than usual. The book has a nice use of Quantum theory and 'parallel worlds'. It places just enough of a spin on the common 'parallel universe' idea used a few times already in the Doctor Who series, to make this novel new and interesting. I have to admit that I'm getting a bit tired of Sabbath doing a 'Master' in each book (who is he disguised as this week?). Its not a very original way to handle the character. If we're going to have a Master-clone, why not just use the real thing? One of the best books in years! Hopefully the start of a Doctor Who Renaissance, especially since Time Zero is obviously the start of an 'arc plot'.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
I have read this book,
This review is from: Time Zero (Doctor Who) (Paperback)
Well, I started reading this book, see. And then I got really interested, and kept on reading. And then I discovered suddenly that I was trying to understand quantum mechanics, at which my pleasure sort of ended.The characters are developed very well, and I guess it is well-written, and the dialogues are believable and at times memorable, but unfortunately the plot gets lost as we poor readers need to appreciate the subtleties of event horizons, multiverses, parallel universes, black holes, time travel, photons, singularities, gravity eddies, and the speed of light, just so we can follow a debate between two men who don't agree on the finer points. This would not be a problem, of course, if understanding the finer points weren't necessary to follow what the Doctor is doing, or whether some people are dead or aren't. If the author had tried less, ah, hard, to try to explain everything he knew about the science behind science fiction, the book would definitely have been more enjoyable. In this book, the author's sense of humour works and complements the Doctor's personality well.
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