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zmull's review
4.0
Father Time is an Eighth Doctor adventure set during a period when the Doctor is living on Earth with no memory of his past and no access to the TARDIS. The other books in the arc must have dealt with the Doctor gaining knowledge of his alien background and longevity, because by the time we meet him in this story he's basically the Doctor we all know, memory or not, but without the specifics (Time-Lord, TARDIS, etc...). Given the premise of the novel -The Doctor becomes a father to an unusual ("unearthy"?) child- I was expecting something a bit slower plotwise, than what I got. This isn't a character piece. That said, it's a heck of a good story. Father Time plays out over the course of the 1980s, giving everything a depth of time not seen in many Doctor Who stories. And it takes advantage of the unlimited budget of novels for some impressive set pieces (the tower block and the roses, to cite the obvious example). This one's got a little bit of everything.
nwhyte's review
4.0
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2092950.html[return][return]Years before Georgia Moffett sprang from David Tennant's thigh (or wherever), the Eighth Doctor had an adopted daughter: Miranda Dawkins, lost scion of a imperial family from the far future, growing up in the vividly recalled 1980s (reminiscences of Thatcherism rather appropriate for the moment), the target of youthful desire from her classmates and assassination attempts from her political enemies, and trying to get to grips with both. It's not completely clear to me that Miranda is actually a Gallifreyan; though she has two hearts and a lower body temperature, she ages at the normal rate for a human child / teenager, and her future Empire doesn't sound very Timelordish to me. Parkin's portrayal of the Doctor (still amnesiac as he has been for the last few books) as a loving but very absent-minded single parent is very compelling, and the final section in which the Doctor and his human companion Debbie steal a space shuttle to rescue Miranda is suitably bonkers.[return][return]I am not yet a convert to the Faction Paradox concept, but if this book is part of it then I am a few steps closer now.
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