Reviews

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2144332.html[return][return]This New Adventure is an obvious tribute to Iain M. Banks: the People of the title are very similar to the Culture, a post-scarcity interstellar society with intelligent drone robots and spaceships. Banks himself had mixed feelings about the show. In 2008 he wrote that "some of the Doctor Who episodes over the last few years have been amongst the best SF ever to appear on TV or film and may well prove much more influential than anything I've ever written", but by the time of his last interview he had "fallen out of love" with it. Banks fans who are at least vaguely acquainted with Who will enjoy Aaronovitch's adaptation of the Culture to the Whoniverse; for Who fans, who are of course the primary audience, it's one more well-realised alien culture, with a bit more depth to it than is the norm. [return][return]Apart from the audacity of the setting, it's quite a good story. The Doctor and friends (two of his current companions being their time's equivalent of police officers) are asked to investigate the mysterious murder of a drone, and work through the suspects despite various distractions. Roz in particular gets some very good character development time, which she hadn't really had much in her previous five books. I was less happy about the sub-plot involving the Brigadier's descendant Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart and Bernice; the Seventh Doctor as manipulator doesn't always work for me. But it's a small element of an enjoyable whole.

ehlupton's review

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5.0

This was a reread of a book I have read many times. In fact, I have read it so many times that my copy is falling apart, and page 65/66 has departed for a better place. This was my first time rereading this since my early 20s, and I have to say it was both what I remembered and not that.

The bad: Some of the stuff around the African women was a little weird (not really racist but kinda not cool by modern standards). The dialog in the scene where Roz confronts Feli!xi was like an old noir novel. The book fulfills several (bad) NA cliches, including "Chris sleeps with someone," "Benny gets drunk," "The Doctor is accused of manipulating people" (even though I didn't see it). There's also Dep, who decides she wants to have Chris's baby without consulting him about it. Which...what? And I have like half a dozen other petty complaints.

The good: I have rarely met an alien civilization that I quite so wanted to just wrap myself up and live in. And even with my eyes open to the novel's faults, I still feel that way. I like the Dyson sphere, I like the language with its weird pops and clicks, I like the technology, I like God, I like all the sentient machines... I like everything. Oh, and Kadiatu. Of all the characters from the NAs that I have been wanting to see in the new series, Kadiatu is the top of the list. Unfortunately, I think they "adapted" her into River Song, so that will probably not happen...but if the powers that be want to bring the Worldsphere to the screen, I am totally there for that.

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