Sundry

So, a confluence of deadlines left me pretty much focused on the paying side of the writing equation last week, but that has actually cleared some space for this week. So, yeah strange schedules. What am I thinking about?

There's not much on TV to hold my interest. Since I abandoned the pay cable stations once the free trial ran out, I can't watch some of the more ballyhooed shows, or even Dexter (which, to be honest, I haven't watched all that closely since the second season). Breaking Bad is done for the season. The Walking Dead is sitting on my DVR, waiting for me to get the energy to get into it again. Even the presence of Michael Emerson couldn't get me to watch more than 15 minutes of the incredibly dire Person of Interest. Everything else that's new holds almost no interest, even genre-benders like Grimm and American Horror Story.

There's a fatigue factor going on here, with so many networks and so much original programming, but from a genre standpoint (which is what attracts me to most shows, be they part of the fantastic family or in the thriller/mystery vein) much of it is pretty ordinary to bad. As someone who's followed these styles literally for my entire life (that would be 42 years), I know that there are uncharted depths that haven't even been remotely touched, but instead we get magic computers, bare twists on familiar fairy stories and third-rate "steampunk" recasts of classic stories. In other words, it looks like a long winter of Fringe watching ahead of me.

How am I filling my free time? There is that massive shelf of unread books that is slowly shrinking. I had a great time in the last week with Mark Hodder Burton & Swinburne novels, which give us a fresh twist on the whole 19th-century revisionist thing by being absolutely, barking mad.

Without going into all of the details, history has been completely fucked up in the middle of the 19th-century by a time traveler who 1) causes Queen Victoria to be assassinated, 2) sparks a genetic and technological revolution a century early and 3) completely alters the political landscape of the world. Into this madhouse steps Sir Francis Richard Burton (now the star of two different science-fiction series, as he was the main man in Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series) and young libertine poet, Algeron Swinburne. The unlikely pair face off against the otherworldly Spring-Heeled Jack, werewolves (yes, in London), gentleman zombies and massive automatons during the first two volumes, with a third promised for early next year.

Amid all the madness, action and gore (don't get too attached to some of the secondary characters here) is a real sense of the time and place, including the social inequities that often get shoved to the background in these stories. Oh, and the only airships present? Controlled by the (from the British perspective at least) evil Prussians. Our heroes travel by giant mutant swans.

Hey, maybe I should play some of these games. Since I am achingly slow at playing video games, I tend to be a few seasons behind on new releases. As it turns out, the one I've spent the most time with as of late is Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012, a Magic: The Gathering game that allows me to get all the turning-cards-90-degrees action that I want without having to open endless booster packs or visiting game stores looking for opponents.

In this video game version, you are given a series of preconstructed decks to battle either computer or human (via online) opponents. The mechanics work pretty well, though the interface sometimes is clunky enough to make it difficult to pull off fun combat tricks. As you win matches, you unlock additional cards for the deck, which you can then use to hone into something more fitting to your play style, or at least remove some of the weaker cards.

Sure, it would be more fun to build decks from scratch, but for the price ($10 for the main game, $5 for the expansion) you get quite a bit. I wish I had as much fun with Magic Online, the full digital version of the game, but I've had serious connectivity issues almost every time I've tried to play, making the experience frustrating. Considering I'm paying full price for these digital cards and that the online game has been around for years, I would hope that it would be smoother. (To be fair to Wizards of the Coast, they were quick to answer my complaints and resolved the situation to my satisfaction.)

On the non-digital gaming front, I picked up a copy of Games Workshop's latest stand-alone box game, Dreadfleet, and have been working through the rules. It seems to be a solid representation of naval combat (well, with a decided fantasy tinge of course), but it was the gorgeous models inside that drew me into the box. There are plenty of opportunities for painting, and even a middling one like myself should be able to get good results. I'll post some pictures once I have more of the fleet completed.

Tim Powers 'The Bible Repairman and Other Stories'

The nice thing about completing a (essentially) 4,500-page novel is that it opens the floodgates for the other, shorter books waiting on my shelves. (Heck, even Patrick Rothfuss' second novel looks trim compared to George R.R. Martin.) This will continue on for a while, as I build up the stamina for my next epic series: Steven Erikson's 10-book Malazan Book of the Fallen series. (To be followed, sometime next year to coincide with the eventual end of the series, a complete reading of The Wheel of Time.)

The first of the shorter books I picked up was short indeed. Tim Powers' new short-story collection runs a trim 170 pages, featuring half a dozen stories from the past few years. Mind you, since it's been six years since Powers' last novel, I'll take whatever visits to his imagination I can get.

And we get quite a set of them here. Unlike his expansive novels (including On Stranger Tides, which was sort-of used as the basis for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film), these are tight little golden nuggets. In short form, Powers has the same inventive drive and desire to mix the everyday with the fantastic into a world where magic is an everyday experience for those willing to look. Death and ghosts play important roles throughout here, from the title story to a haunted-book story ("A Soul in a Bottle") to one that plays with the idea of automatic writing from the beyond ("Parallel Lines").

The collection ends with a somewhat return to the world of Byron and Shelly from The Stress of Her Regard, using the real Edward John Trelawny as a way to delve into the one story here that is closer in scope to Powers' longer works. The novella puts a lot on the table, from Greek-Turk battles in the 1820s to an attempt to engage the giants from the Bible, the Nephilim, into this war. At the center is Trelawny, a maddening complex character who has built his life upon so many lies that he has begun to believe them. (Also true of the real-life character, whose "autobiography" was considered to be true for generations before finally being debunked.)

Powers' next novel, about the Rossetti family (Trelewny was involved here as well) and vampires, is due out in March. A bit of time with his short stories, or rereading the earlier novels might not be a bad way to pass the time.

Doctors, dragons and mad scientists

So, the ole work schedule (you know, the writing that pays the bills) has kept me pretty busy as of late, so here are just a few thoughts while I take a quick breather before diving back in full force.

The Doctor Who finale was entertaining, thrilling and pretty emotional -- but I wonder if the real impact will come when I sit down and watch the entire season back to back. Steven Moffat builds complex narratives in whatever he does, be it a single half-hour of Coupling or across a complete series, and I think pieces of the puzzle may have been obscured over the 13 episodes and long summer break. This recap won't happen until the DVDs come out, however. For whatever reason, BBC America isn't in HD, and while the broadcast episodes are certainly tolerable, I miss the sharpness.

One thing I can say for certain is that Matt Smith came into his own this season. I already considered him to be the best pure actor of all the Doctors, but this year the character caught up with talents. The madcap, childish energy is still there, but tempered with enough moments of deep emotions (love, sorrow, pain) that help to remind us that this man child is incredibly ancient.

Fringe should be taking the Doctor Who slot in my obsessions for the coming months. The show has reached the "if I sum up where we are, it's going to sound insane" level, with not just multiple universes, but wonky time lines and characters not-quite erased from history. Still, I usually come to any show, movie or theatrical performance with an eye on the actors, and there are two terrific ones at the core of the show.

John Noble is now playing the third version of Walter Bishop -- one whose madness hasn't been tempered by the time spent with his (now missing) son. There are still the fun quirks that define the character, but there's also such a sense of loss. The same comes in Anna Torv's Olivia, who has lost the years of growth at the side of Peter. The show as a whole hit a new high in the season's second episode ("One Night in October") and promises plenty of twists along the way in what is likely its last season.

And I finally finished up George R.R. Martin's massive Dance with Dragons last night, after re-reading the entire series over the past couple of months. I felt the same way here as I have in the last couple of volumes. There are great characters on great journeys throughout, but too much time is spent in privy and war councils as the characters talk about the politics binding them all together. I know the "game of thrones" is vital to the series, but it's hard to pay attention when I know other characters are learning how to be faceless assassins, how to "fly" or, of course, have trio of dragons at the ready.

It's not a unique problem. The issue that these massive fantasy series often have is that the cast of characters becomes so vast, with so many plots going on, that the main focus gets lost. I'd really love to get back to what brought us to the dance in the first place: the Stark family, trying to survive, and maybe find their way back home. Maybe that will start to happen next time.

Down the Mysterly River,' by Bill Willingham

This was an intriguing and sometimes entertaining read that eventually left rather disappointed. Willingham set the bar pretty high with his excellent Fables series of comic books/graphic novels, where the inhabitants of various fairy and folk tales carve out a life for themselves in New York City. That deft imagination comes through at times in this adventure, where a bright and inquisitive Boy Scout joins up with a talking badger, cat and bear in a strange land as they try to work out where exactly they are and why folks with blue glowing swords are trying to kill them.

It's pretty clear early on that we're working with meta-fiction here and that these are characters drawn from various creations. This really isn't a spoiler, as this is pretty clear from the first few chapters, even though the narrative denies going down that path, even though it is pretty screaming obvious (our young lad, Max, thinks of his past adventures with italicized titles, for heaven's sake).

That's certainly not a bad foundation, but Willingham stubbornly clings to this first-level exploration, never bringing any of the various sides beyond the basics. This is certainly true of the bad guys (and gals), who mainly wander through the story as bogeymen without much in the way of clear or nuanced definition. It's especially bad at the end, when Willingham's analogue in the story lays every thing out on the table (most of which I had guessed) and then gets some knocks against, I don't know, bad copy editors? Fan fiction writers? that probably would have fit in better in an essay about the creative muse than in a young-adult adventure.

What's left -- and what makes Down the Mysterly River a fun read -- are the well-drawn characters who spend plenty of time bickering as they journey across the mystical land. Max is clever, resourceful and a great ad for the Boy Scouts (he doesn't once try to set the forest on fire, which puts him ahead some of The Scouts from my troop). His friends, Banderbrock the badger, the bear Walden and mad Tom cat McTavish, show equal amounts of resourcefulness, though none of them are free of the flaws their creators may have built in to them at the beginning.

I so desperately wanted to like Down the Mysterly River more than I did. The adventure is fun and clearly drawn, and the main characters show plenty of life, but our author didn't push this, or his main idea, hard enough to make it more than a frustrating diversion.

Doctor Who: whoooo!

Being an absolute Doctor Who fanboy means that I greet any official (and plenty of semi and non) addition with sheer joy, so I was pretty high on the hog Saturday evening when I sat down to watch the continuation of the Matt Smith's second season, "Let's Kill Hitler."

The title ended up being one of many red herrings in Stephen Mofffat's script. After newly introduced Amy/Rory "best friend" Mels makes that declaration (with a gun to the Doctor's head no less) they do just about everything but kill Hitler. Instead, the Nazi leader ends up locked in a cupboard by Rory a few minutes in, never to be seen again.

That's not the real plot. Instead, Mels is shot and then does the golden-sparkly regeneration thing - and turns into River Song. Or at least, into Alex Kingston. It seem whatever programming that was done to her between the time we last saw baby Melody and now kicks in, and River has it in for the Doctor.

And she succeeds. The Doctor is poisoned, given 30 minutes to find a solution and save his own life.

Oh yeah.

Like most of the modern run of Doctor Who, it's a sprint to the finish from here, as Amy and Rory chase River across Berlin and the Doctor desperately searches for a solution. Oh, and there are mini time-traveling agents of justice inhabiting a human-sized robot thing that are after River as well.

The script twists and turns in the way Moffat excels at, though I don't think we'll feel the final resolution of all of this until the season finale. There are lots of nice touches along the way, like polite-but-murderous robot antibodies in the otherwise absolutely daft robot thingy full of little people.

Matt Smith continues to do remarkable work as the Doctor (who, despite the efforts of his companions, learns the date of his death here). He's still a wild soul, but we're seeing more and more of the weight of 900-plus years of life, love and heartbreak in his performance. It's becoming clear that Smith may be the best pure actor to take on the role. Whether or not he becomes one of the best interpretations of the character (which has a lot of other factors built in beyond talent) is yet to be seen.

And next week we get a creepy looking Mark Gatiss script, who hopefully can make a return to form following last season's disappointing "Victory of the Daleks."

Sometimes, it's the little things the break the deal

Like writing your book in second person, such as Charles Stross has done with his latest book, Rule 34. Stross is an author who runs hot and cold with me, so it may be more than just the unusual choice in narrative voice.

Rule 34 follows up on Halting Space, and looks to explore the same near-future head space (current computer technology and online culture) through the eyes of, well, as it's in second person, my eyes taking on whoever the character is in that chapter. I understand where Stross is coming from here, as virtual worlds are supposed to put me in the digital shoes of another person.

But I've always hated second person narratives (and there are reasons why it's used rarely). At the end of the day, I am not the one in the story, and if I were, who is to say I would make the same decisions that the "you" in the narrative would? Instead of making the fictional world richer, it just creates an additional barrier for the oft-busy reader to fight through while absorbing the book.

And while I managed to make it through the first book, Rule 34 left me completely cold after only a few pages. I looked at the shelves heavy with unread books and decided to send the Stross back to the library unfinished.

Is this fair? Probably not, but I've only got so much time to read and forcing myself to read a book with only marginal interest to me isn't high on my priorities. That also has to do with the author. I've enjoyed some of Stross' books considerably (the Lovecraft/IT Laundry books come to mind), but others just haven't tripped any of my triggers. That's all part of the mysterious thing called "personal taste," which may or may not be completed tied to anything rational (see my love of Brian Lumley) but drive anyone's interactions with books, movies and every other kind of art.

'The Fly-By-Nights,' Brian Lumley

In a kind of literary whiplash, I went from directly from Ted Chiang's highly regarded The Lifecycle of Software Objects (both a Hugo and Nebula nominee) into Brian Lumley's latest creation. Literally, from the sublime to the ridiculous, as Lumley revisits one of his favorite topics, vampires, for a post-apocalyptic adventure tale full of manly men, shrieking women and guns that jam at inopportune moments.

Through a 40-plus year-long career, Lumley has demonstrated that he is not great literary stylist. His writing is clunky (though the exclamation! points seem to have taken a needed rest), his characters have all the dimensions of a back-of-the-issue story from Weird Tales, circa 1935 and nuance doesn't go much beyond "this guy is good, this guy is evil, deal with it."

Oh, but I eat up every one of his books, quickly turning pages to get see what happens. For all his stylistic limitations (even after all these years, Lumley still writes like the military policeman he was when he started) this man can tell a story.

Here, we follow a clan of humans who have scratched and clawed to survive in a post-nuclear wasteland. The bombs fell a century and a half before, leaving small enclaves to fight for life. And they don't just have radiation to deal with either, there are mutated creatures in the wastelands, the Fly-By-Nights, who love nothing more than to make a meal out of the unwary.

The humans security is lost when their water supply is contaminated, so they follow up on half-heard rumors and head north in hope of finding more of their kind. The story focuses on young Garth and his rival, the evil Ned (we know he's evil from the outset, as he argues with the plans of the clan's leader, Big Jon), who is a big bully. They are fighting for the hand of Layla, a coming-of-age woman who, to her good senses, wants nothing to do with Ned.

The conflict grows as they slowly journey north, but it seems to have been solved when Ned gets taken away during a Fly-By-Night attack. Oh, but it is only halfway through the book, and things rarely stay dead for long in Lumley's world.

This is a breezy, old-style narrative, where odd turns of phrase are easily ignored through the sheer weight of the narrative. Lumley has always showcased a vast imagination that enjoys following thoughts to intriguing, and sometimes rather grisly, conclusions. The Fly-By-Nights are a natural extension of the vampires from the Necroscope books, full hatred and hunger - a perfect antidote to the wimpy sparkly vampires that dominate current popular culture.

The end of Miracle Day

Hi Torchwood, we go way back. You know, that episode of Doctor Who where Queen Victoria started you, and then the whole Cyberman/Dalek invasion bit and even those odd seasons on BBC whatever, with Welsh cannibals, space whales and the occasional good episode. Then there was Children of Earth and I was like, "wow, maybe there's something good here."

And then there's Miracle Day, which remained mediocre for the first few episodes, until number 5, when you killed off the only interesting character of the newcomers.

And that's why I'm killing you off as well. No more Miracle Day for you. The central mystery has some intrigue, but the characters around it (apart from the longtimers Jack, Gwen and Rhys) have been so, so awful, but in creation and acting, that it has become nearly impossible to watch. The politics are so blatant as to be laughable, and the attention to detail is absent. (For example, a screen card read "Washington D.C. City Hall" on this episode. It took literally five seconds to find out the actual name of the building, the John A. Wilson building. Details always make a story more believable, especially on a fantasy/SF show like this.)

So, bye bye oddly restrained Capt. Jack and plucky Gwen. I'll read up when the series is over to find out who the bad guys really are, and wait for Aug. 27 when the Doctor is back in business with a showrunner that seems to have an idea about how to craft a show.

Friday morning thoughts

I'm off Fringing all weekend (read my reports in City Pages' Dressing Room blog), but I have time for a few notes.

Happy Birthday, Rifftrax!

Mike Nelson's post Mystery Science Theater 3000 creation has evolved and grown mightily over the past half decade. The business has grown far beyond crafting downloadable podcasts for cinematic travesties (and classics - see their Casablanca riff for that) to doing live shows and unleashing hundreds of short subjects, including epics like The Calendar: How to Use It and the absolutely horrifying At Your Fingertips: Grasses.

To celebrate, the Riffers have crafted a five minute best-of reel.

Wither Torchwood?

OK, I know I'll keep watching it, but Miracle Day is looking more and more like those sloppy, dull episodes from seasons 1 and 2 that made the program such a slog before Children of the Earth. We're deep into conspiracy by numbers, with tone-deaf comments on American politics, the absolutely puzzling edification of a convicted child murderer as a mainstream hero and some, to be nice, uneven acting from the new cast members. Maybe this week will pick up speed. Please?

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs

Ransom Riggs' debut novel is, like plenty of debut novels, a mixed bag. While he gets full marks for a unique approach (many of the characters and situations are inspired by found photographs that often detail bizarre, unlikely and impossible things), the novel relies too much on "the seemingly unremarkable boy who has Amazing Powers" trope to be fully successful.

The aforementioned boy, Jacob, has dealt the traumatic loss of his somewhat mysterious grandfather. Grandpa filled Jacob's head with impossible stories from his time at a children's home in Wales in the years after he escaped from the Nazis and his volunteering to fight against his foe. At Miss Peregrine's home there were folks with remarkable powers, from being invisible to being able to start fires with their minds.

After his grandfather's death, Jacob spirals in a deep depression, the back of his mind tickled by thought that maybe all of those stories were true. To finally settle it, Jacob and his somewhat dazed father head to a small Welsh island. There, the youth finally finds the fabled home, hidden from all to see in a time loop on one particular day during World War II. The children haven't aged physically, but have lived through the last 70 years, all under the watchful eye of their mistress.

The plot, and Jacob's own abilities, grow out of this. There's a decadent group that loves to feast on the essence of those with special talents (though any old human or animal will do in a pinch) that has forced our heroes into these hidden loops. It's pretty clear that one of these is on the island in modern times, will it find its way behind the scenes and into the succulent flesh of our heroes?

The photographs, such as a girl levitating a few inches off the ground, are all presented as found, and provide the sense of eeriness that drives the first half of the book. Once we get into the time-looped home, things move away from that into more familiar, "child hero saving us all" territory. Jacob is a good, complex and rather unlikable protagonist, but a lot of the others seem to come from either 1) quirky Welsh or 2) X-Men reject central casting. Riggs is a talented writer and I'm sure I'll at least give the inevitable sequel (this volume ends on a bit of a cliffhanger) a read, but I think it could have been so much more than what we get here.

Mortality Bridge, By Steven R. Boyett

Steven R. Boyett (Ariel, The Architects of Sleep, Elegy Beach) took his time in writing Mortality Bridge, a thrilling mix of rock 'n' roll, B-movie chases, Dante and the Orpheus story. A long time, in fact, as he started work on the novel in the middle 1980s and finally saw it in print earlier this summer (in a limited edition from the fine folks at Subterranean Press).

The book follows Niko, a world-famous rock guitarist who, as happens from time to time, made a deal with the devil, trading his soul for success. Niko didn't read the fine print, discovering too late that the contract extended to those he loved as well. After his longtime lover dies, Niko makes a mad dash into the depths of Hell in a desperate attempt to bring her back.

The scenes in Hell could have been drawn from any number of death-metal album jackets, with rivers of blood and massive, bewinged demons, but Boyett's vision of a mad Disneyland sticks with the reader, as does Niko's intense drive to finally do something right in his life, even if that is only shepherding his wife's soul from the underworld to heaven.

In recounting the book's long gestation process on John Scalzi's Whatever blog, Boyett writes of crafting dozens of complete drafts of the book over a two and a half decade span. The issue wasn't writing something publishable - an author of Boyett's skill certainly had that the first time out - but of coming up with a book that completely satisfied him.

This brings to mind the brohahahaha over George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons, which took several years longer than anyone (especially Martin) expected. Fans got hot under the collar, wondering how hard could it be to write a quarter-million-word extension of a complex sequence of books to the satisfaction of the most important person in the equation, the author.

That's right. We, as readers, are an important part of the equation, but it's the author's duty to produce work that satisfies themselves above all else. Boyett (or Martin, or Neil Gaiman with the later issues of Sandman or Alan Moore at the tail end of Miracleman) could have published this book back in the late 1980s. It would have probably found an audience, but readers would also probably note that something was missing. The book, no matter how well written, would have felt incomplete.

It doesn't feel incomplete now.

Nick Mamatas 'Sensation'

Nick Mamtas' latest is a Kurt-Vonnegut-like thrill ride through 21st-century life, with sentient wasps and spiders, a political and social movement not only without leaders but without any central philosophy; and, at the center, a couple's troubled relationship.

Those characters are Julia and Raymond. She leaves him after being bitten by a mutant wasp, which drives her away and, seemingly by accident, to start a movement fighting the oppression of everyday life.

It gets deliciously weird from there. The parasitic wasps use a species of spiders as the incubators for their young, causing them to change their behavior and spin a nest for the young that are also eating them from the insides. This has caused a long-standing cold war between the two species, who have guided human history behind the scenes in their endless battle. This has led to a secondary level of reality where the human (and human looking) agents wage their battles.

Mamatas pokes plenty of fun at the elements of everyday life here, but there's something haunting and beautiful about Raymond's quest to reconnect with his wife and the reality that comes when it does eventually happen.

Mamatas' verisimilitude with the current state of social media helps to drive the book, as the characters naturally interact in their "virtual" environments, spreading the Julia-inspired non-gospel across the world. How well that will play in a decade's time is still to be seen, but as a comment on the now, it's a brilliant, brazen work.

Torchwood: Miracle Day, episodes 1-3

Just a few thoughts now that I'm caught up with the latest, super sexy installment of the Doctor Who spinoff.

The story is finally starting to move a bit, even if it does rely on the "evil drug company" motif. It's not that I object (or disagree), it's just that shadowy, evil big businesses are the second most popular bad guy these days (right after shadowy, evil big government, also present here).

I don't believe the Bill Pullman as "evil killer who turns evangelist" one bit, in part because there's a real fundamental misunderstanding of current American law here. Sex offenders can be kept in prison long after their sentences are up, including a child-killer like the character.

The new characters are still struggling to find their roles, but have some potential in a science-fiction "24" kind of way.

On the upside, John Barrowman and Eve Miles still have great chemistry together (Capt. Jack and Gwen have always been the engines of the show, even more so now that the rest of the originals have been offed) and there are some wonderful, seat-of-their-pants action set pieces that keep it all moving. And they do science! I'm not sure if any of it really makes any sense or not, but it's not just a matter of magic hand waving over the super computer (OK, there is some of that too).

Best of all, Jack is still his old omnisexual self and definitely gay, as his hook up in the third episode proved.

The Hidden Goddess, M.K. Hobson

Newcomer M.K. Hobson continues the story she started in The Native Star here with strong results. Her new novel moves deeper into the unique layers of magic of her reimagined 19th-century America, with plots, counter-plots and even a blood-soaked goddess to keep the action interesting. What really makes the book, however, is the attention paid to our protagonist, Emily, who navigates the equally alien worlds of high-end magic and cultured society.

In the first book, Emily had been forced from her California home when a bit of a highly powerful artifact embedded itself in her hand. Joining her was the wonderfully named Dreadnought Stanton, an exile with (of course) a dark, mysterious past. As it often happens in stories like these, the two fell in love, managed to defeat the bad guys and found themselves in even deeper, hotter water.

The U.S. government has made a deal with the aforementioned blood-soaked goddess, giving her the power to manifest and eventually, destroy the world. Emily and Stanton need to uncover the truth, which lies in both of their pasts. For Emily, that means learning about her birth family and the missing first five years of her life, and for Stanton, it means going back to his own blood-soaked early years.

The magical world is wonderfully developed, ranging from credomancers (who rely on their reputation at large to work their spells) to ones who specialize in violent, blood magic to factions that would like to eliminate any touch of magic in the world.

The plot may drag at points (it depends on how much you like political intrigue and romantic entanglements) but Emily is such an honest, living and breathing character that it becomes easy to be swept up in the action. Best of all, the story comes to a satisfying end here, which doesn't preclude additional volumes, it just means you won't be left hanging while the author moves the plot threads forward in the next book.

Big Finish Doctor Who: Robophobia

While a sequel to the classic Robots of Death sounds like a good day, the actual execution in Nicholas Briggs' new Big Finish audio is severely lacking. Mainly because the mystery here is no mystery.

If you remember the original, a sandminer was terrorized by a ship full of robots that had been reprogrammed to kill. It also introduced the idea of "robophobia," an unconditional fear of their mechanical helpers. That gets expanded somewhat here. This time, the isolated location is a large space freighter ferrying more than 100,000 robots. Crew members start to die and it looks like the robots are to blame.

The Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) is on the case in that mysterious, "I know what's happening but I'm not going to tell the characters any of what I know, ha ha" way. There's no companion here, but the handful of characters - especially medtech Liv (Nicola Walker) - serve that role. Part of the problem is that they are so dim. That might have been an interesting approach to the story, but I don't think it's intentional. Instead, their inability to see the solution staring them in the face for most of the story is there to make sure the story stretches out over four episodes.

The key problem is that Briggs' script doesn't take any twists at all. Suspicion falls onto one character early one and never wavers at all. Even that character's dark secret is incredibly easy to guess.

On the upside, the performances are good throughout the cast and it's nice to hear McCoy bouncing off different actors (not that I don't love the regular companions) for once.