Customer Reviews

Unnatural History (Doctor Who Series)

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

 

 

There are a lot of things going on in UNNATURAL HISTORY. The good news is that the great majority are wonderfully intriguing, appealing and well written. The bad news is that because there are so many, they come across at times as being superficial and not fully developed. This is indeed very frustrating although the overall effect isn't enough to take away from the book as a whole.

First of all, we finally get to meet the oft-hinted-at Dark Sam. While the regular (blonde) Sam Jones is a squeaky clean (and at times dead boring) defender of causes, the Dark Sam is an altered version who has had thoughts and experiences that the original would never have dreamed of. Unfortunately, not much of this seems to affect her, and the Dark Sam is soon blindly trusting the Doctor and being innocuous in exactly the same way that she would have normally. She smokes, drinks and has done drugs in the past, but her character isn't significantly different - she still speaks and acts in the same manner. I had to keep reminding myself that this was supposed to be a changed person.

Now I realize that one of the themes of the book is that the past is not as important to the present and the future as the present itself is. I get the impression that Dark Sam was deliberately made inoffensive to re-enforce this philosophy; Dark Sam can have a different and more dangerous, gritty past than Blonde Sam, yet she still is, at her core, the same person. This may indeed be an interesting train of argument (and it definitely works well in the confines of this story) but extending the theme into the Dark Sam subplot didn't seem to work as well. In fact, it took me almost the first hundred pages or so to figure out what they were doing with her. And coincidentally it was around the point at which I realized this that they started bringing some of the darker aspects into the foreground. Although this did begin to distinguish her from the Blonde Sam it didn't seem to quite do enough, though I realize that this was probably the point.

That said, I thought the rest of the story was quite enjoyable. There are some wonderfully written sequences that are a joy to read. The "Wild Hunt" effect when Sam's mind would react to her past being re-written was executed tremendous well. This section highlighted the things that I enjoy the most in Ormanblum books; it's slightly surreal, it's full of wonderful imagery and it's true to the character going through the experience. I thought that there was only a single piece of wasted potential and that was that we only saw the occurrence through Sam's eyes. Since it was a slightly hallucinogenic experience I would have been interested to see Fitz and the Doctor's reaction to going through the same phenomenon and how it compared to Sam's. But this is only a minor quibble and did not detract from my enjoyment of the sequences.

Unlike some of their previous books, there are not very many secondary characters in the story. Instead it focuses on the three regulars (well, two regulars and one altered) and gives more attention over to the plot. The only downside to this is that there seems to be too much going on to fully justify the inclusion of everything

Despite some imperfections this is a story worth reading and is the best book in the Doctor Who range since THE FACE-EATER.

It's Haight-Ashbury all over, with a dark haired alternate Biodata version of Sam Jones who embraces the drug culture and degerates into the poster child for free love! Fitz, attempting as always to "fit in", dons Lennon granny glasses and a yin yang t-shirt. Underneath it all lies a twisted thread of anarchy with PRISONER-esque tones of downing the beaurocracy. The Doctor tells Sam about his trips dropping acid in 1968 and mentions him taking the snake poison in SNAKEDANCE to which she quips "ooh, riding the snake, very Jim Morrison". This one is a GREAT follow up for those who liked VAMPIRE SCIENCE. It'll have you racing to the Castro or searching for what lies in the water under the Golden Gate Bridge. It's Kate and Jon at their Kerouacky best. And Sam finally gets some...

Ah, it's nice to see a pair of adults running the show for once.

While there's been a general uptick in quality to the BBC books up until now, for the most part the books have been merely competent, with a flash of real imagination once in a great while. The stories did seem resigned to basically do what the authors considered "standard" Doctor Who tales, when the standard for Doctor Who is that we should be surprised every time out by what the line is capable of. Yes, those are high standards but it would be nice if someone shot for them. I don't want to feel that things are safe or set, I'd like the impression that things could change at any second, and not always for the best. That the characters live in a constantly shifting universe that is strange and odd and not always on their side.

This isn't a radical redesign or fantastically groundbreaking but it does show the sign that someone is thinking these things through. It picks up on a thread from Lawrence Miles' "Alien Bodies" that hinted that Sam's history had been altered at some point, that the blonde vegetarian righteous Sam we knew had once been a dark haired, sometime drug addict, rather mundane and not real ambitious Sam. Miles' novel sort of left it at that by this book takes that ball and runs as far with it as it can go, with blonde Sam falling into a scar in time very early on and being replaced by the dark haired Sam, who has none of her memories of hanging out with the Doctor and is only really like Sam very far under the surface.

Meanwhile the Doctor has other issues going on, with the TARDIS trapped inside the scar and slowly dying, San Francisco being full of all kinds of weird beings and places, making it even stranger than usual. Weird grey men are running around looking for him, the words biodata keeps cropping up an awful lot, an "unnaturalist" is collecting specimens and a group called Faction Paradox is having a grand ol' time with all that's going on, and seems to be manipulating the Doctor into joining them down the line.

If it sounds like there's too much going on, that's more or less true and the story doesn't give you a really good chance to get into the secondary characters, spending more time with the leads, which in itself isn't a terrible thing. Fortunately Orman and Blum are veterans at doing this and are able to keep a good balance between "Wow!" and the emotional hooks that a story like this requires. They get a lot of mileage out of the shifted dynamics between the team members, with Dark Sam not fitting into a place she's apparently always been. The authors make her a separate character that is exactly like the one we knew, which is no mean feat . . . and while one can quibble that she winds up trusting the Doctor quite easily, it's also good to note that she's the same person, just with different life experiences. Unfortunately, she's also a little more interesting than blonde Sam, even if the dark and edgy aspects of her never really become prominent. She's just a more confused and less capable Sam in parts.

Fitz comes across really well and it's amazing to see how well they've been developing his character. By turns swaggering, hopeless and fumbling, clever and a step behind the Doctor, he's a good portrayal of someone who is starting to realize he's way the heck out of his depth and the one person who acted as a guide is now even less capable than he is. Plus it marks an interesting change between Sam and Fitz that is both odd and organic.

All of this skips along as the authors throw in every literary trick they can get away with, news clips and bizarre page layouts for the Great Hunt sequences, as well as packing the story with as many ideas as they can. Unicorns and beings from higher dimensions and the lurking threat of Faction Paradox, all handled with a sense of wonder and menace. Its uncanny how they manage to make the book so dense.

In the end it's not the plot that matters so much, unfortunately. You know the Doctor is going to win and get the TARDIS back, and you can almost guess at the cost. But for a while there literally anything can happen and the ending opens up to something terrible that's going to happen down the line. Seeing the Doctor caught on the back foot for a good portion of the book and recover is entertaining enough, but knowing he's going to fall hard not too long from now gives the book a momentum and excitement that we don't get too often with these. It's all going somewhere and that's nice.

None of this would work, however, if the authors weren't able to make the ideas and situations emotionally compelling, something the other writers tend to forget in the midst of time travelling madness. Everyone, no matter how absurd, feels real, the imagery gallops, the situations are remarkably tense and while this novel plays off too many other threads to really stand on its own or be a true masterpiece, it's consistently engaging and promises well for what's to come.

Two years after his 7th regeneration, The Doctor is drawn back to where it began, San Francisco. While Fitz remains behind, the Time Lord goes to London to retrieve...Sam?
In the attempt to set events to right, our heroes are kidnapped (several times). Between captures they meet a juggler, a witch, aliens and unicorns. There are also Dr. James Joyce, Faction Paradox, and The Unnaturalist. Joyce and Faction Paradox seem to have a history with The Doctor. I hope to see them in the future. Or the past.
Watch for Orman's trademark pyramid. Each of her Who novels since "The Left-Handed Hummingbird" has featured one. And for those familiar with Benny, keep your eyes open.
"'It's all his fault...All the impossible heroic {stuff}, he does it. So you try to do it. You try to be a hero, and it blows up right in your face, because you're not him. I try to be Frodo, and the best I can manage is- well, Sam.'"

This story was filled with color, personality, and action. This adventure was made vividly real in your mind's eye with excellent writing, an interesting story, and attention to detail. Of the 21 stories I have read featuring the 8th Doctor, this one is my favorite by far!

Halfway through this book, I thought that I was going to give it three stars out of five, instead of the hundred percent the opening merited. Jonathan Blum has recently criticised Christopher Bulis for using stock SF ideas, but then the plot of 'Unnatural History' seemed to resolve around one of these stocks formulas. However, it's how you employ this gravy which matters, how you twist it to create an original slant, and Jon and Kate have succeeded in doing this by creating a thrill-a-minute resolution.

Two years after the millennium, a scar has opened up in space/time in San Francisco. The Doctor did something unethical in a previous visit, and now he has to clear up the pieces. Unfortunately, the scar has attracted all sorts of alien flotsam, including a certain Miss Jones, who is sucked into the scar. In order to stabilise the scar, the Doctor plugs it with the TARDIS. Sam Jones may be gone, but why is she also living in London? Where has this alternate Sam come from and what is she to do with the scar? The Doctor must find out, and release the TARDIS, but there's something nasty in Golden Gate Bay and old enemies appear to stand in his way. They're the sort of people who revel in chaos, but the Doctor's biggest concern is someone with a more rational mind...

A lot of delicious ingredients have gone into this pudding, along with a few juicy one-liner sultanas, but the mixture never gets too rich to be unpalatable. There seems to be a lot more continuity operating in the BBC books nowadays, and there have been subtle hints in previous books about a particular danger of time travel. There are also teasers which make you hungry for more. For instance, Kate and Jon seem to address the vexed question of whether Benny exists in the BBC universe. The extracts from Eldin Sanchez's 'Interesting Times' are also well thought out and provocative. And, much more importantly, 'Unnatural History' is far more entertaining than Kate and Jon's previous San Francisco outing, 'Vampire Science'. Don't gorge yourself all at once.

I used to read the usenet group rec.arts.doctor-who, in which the authors were frequent posters. They came under attack quite often, unfairly, because of the stories they told about Doctor Who. You could always find tremendous arguments about what was "canon" and what "didn't count," what the Doctor would and wouldn't do, and Kate and Jon often came under fire for defending the books. Some people said that the references to the Doctor's history in the books couldn't be official, because he'd never mentioned them in the series, or similar arguments. Their detractors insisted that the Doctor can't have had all these alternate origins and histories, and that the books made up too much new stuff to be official. I stopped reading the newsgroup because there was more personal insult and side-taking than actual discussion going on.

In some of their past books, Kate and Jon have made references in subtle ways to the discussions and arguments that have taken place on the newsgroup. This has usually been in lively and harmless but entertaining ways- unintrusive if you don't catch it, but amusing if you do. But there is a character in this book who is an embodiment of the books' naysayers, and who comes across as a ridiculous caricature of the poeple who have said bad things about them. The metaphor aside, the character, Griffin by name, doesn't stand out as a very good villain for the story anyway. His motives are a little dull, really, and even if the reader doesn't recognize what he represents, it's hard to believe that a person who can reach into several dimensions at once can't wrap his head around the idea that the doctor had a tool up his sleeve, simply because "there's no evidence" that he had it. This, to me, was such an obvious parody of the people who said in the USEnet group that aspects of the Doctor's history mentioned in the books can't be true because "there's no evidence for it" in the TV series. When, in the book, it makes Griffin look stupid, it seems arrogant on the authors' part in their insult against the people who argued with them. As if saying they don't agree because they're not smart enough.

Up to now, I have always liked Kate's books, and her collaborations with Jon have always been good as well. But I didn't like this one, and I'm kind of surprised. But there was a subtext to this story that I found kind of irritating, and a bit haughty. And perhaps because this book is a continuation of a multi-book story arc, it relied much more heavily on the continuity of the series. This was fine. But mixed in with the things that a long-time reader would recognize as a reference to the TV Movie, or to a previous book in the 8th Doctor sereis, there were other things that I got the feeling we were supposed to recognize, but I had no recollection of. The character of Dr. Joyce, for example, I spent much of the book trying to figure out the identity of, but at the end of the book I still don't know who this character really is or what other names we've seen him use in the series's past.

For these reasons, I got the feeling that Kate and Jon were writing to a particular person, and it wasn't me. I'm hoping their next effort will be back on par with the quality I'm used to from them.

Kate Orman is the brilliance behind contemporary Doctor Who. She took characters from our childhood fancies and developed them into people we've laughed and grown with. To read an Orman book is to revisit family. The addition of Jon has developed a literary dynamic beyond compare. Never before has the Eighth Doctor had such a definitive and vivid personification as you will find in this book. Dark Sam tells us more about OUR Sam than we ever knew. Orman and Blum are the most genuine and creative literary minds of our age. Their take on the Faction Paradox and San Francisco will stay with you the way every previous cherished word they've written forever does. These aren't sci fi charicatures. They're family. Orman and Blum represent the BEST 21st Century literature has to offer.

Let's be honest. This was a great book. I mean just a plain great book besides its few dissapointmets. Look at it this way. You've read Sam Jones throughout the series and what happens? You find that she was not characterised well at all in this book. If she was, this would be a five star book.

Ah yes the return of faction paradox. What you've never heard of them. Your not missing much.

Ah, the return of a character who's name changes. What you don't remember him? Tisk, Tisk

What a piece of self-indulgent, pseduo-intellectual tripe.

Have the authors ever even seen Doctor Who? Apperently not!

One of the worst ever. I'd give it a half star.

The only good point is the new character, who promptly gets killed.

I thought this kind of garbage had ended when the BBC took over the series. Guess not.

Take a bunch of old Virgin Books Dr. Who books, rip them up and staple 280 pages together. It be about as enjoyable and as understandable.