Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Hamster Book Club - Vanderdekens Children by Christopher Bulis (featuring Luke Sims-Jenkins, Jon Arnold & Andrew Batty)

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Hamster Book Club - Vanderdekens Children by Christopher Bulis (featuring Luke Sims-Jenkins, Jon Arnold & Andrew Batty) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:00
  The things poured out of the doorways in a nightmarish tide.
• 0:04
  For a moment they were mere phantoms lurking in the veil of
• 0:07
  shadow they wrapped around themselves, their forms
• 0:10
  torturing the eye and imagination with improbable
• 0:12
  silhouettes and grotesque half scene skeletons trapped within
• 0:16
  them. But as they flowed across the
• 0:18
  floor towards them, they grew and became more tangible.
• 0:22
  Twists of myths condensed into many jointed arms, tentacles and
• 0:26
  claws. Virulent colour suddenly erupted
• 0:29
  out of the shadowy grey obscurity and seared itself into
• 0:33
  the mind. Hot blood red, bile yellow,
• 0:37
  decay green, and the hues flowed into the things and took on
• 0:41
  shapes like water soaking for a sponge, illuminating them in all
• 0:45
  their terrible magnificence. Sam wanted to turn her eyes
• 0:49
  away, but she couldn't, because no two were alike in size or
• 0:53
  shape or help the form they had for more than a few seconds at a
• 0:56
  time, and their faces and eyes run.
• 1:01
  She heard the doctor shout, breaking the spell of
• 1:03
  disbelieving horror that had held them in it's for all.
• 1:06
  But before they could react that things burst with the interface
• 1:08
  and fell upon them. Only then came the sound, the
• 1:15
  cow shrieks, roars, rasping hisses and hootie whales that
• 1:18
  should not have issued for any living creature.
• 1:21
  Both parties opened fire, bolts and beams of flyer from the
• 1:25
  nose, from the MD and West into the horde, lighting them up from
• 1:29
  within as though they were made of melted wax.
• 1:32
  If the sound the things have made before were terrible, the
• 1:35
  chorus of rage and fury that issued forth now was ghastly
• 1:38
  beyond description. But not one creature fell.
• 1:43
  The edges of the hole blasted through a scaled body flowed
• 1:46
  together and knitted seamlessly. A limb severed by incandescent
• 1:52
  cutting beam reformed. An emojian marine was snatched
• 1:58
  up into the air by a huge clawed hand belonging to a hulking
• 2:02
  thing with a bear's body supported by a cluster of
• 2:05
  spiders legs. As he struggled, another claw
• 2:08
  slashed across him, tearing his soup's ribbons and ripping over
• 2:11
  his flesh. Simmons was steward by a
• 2:14
  tentacle tipped with a metre long spike extending from a
• 2:18
  pulsating mass of bloating flesh that flocked and wriggled across
• 2:22
  the floor. A black winged creature with a
• 2:24
  slobbering needle fanged frog now dived at Bendix, Dessal and
• 2:28
  Rexton, even though their fire was burning holes for its Levery
• 2:32
  intake room. Lieutenant Tain had fallen to
• 2:34
  his knees as his two attendants joined in the fire.
• 2:38
  Sam caught him under the arms and hauled him to his feet.
• 2:41
  An oxypoid arm coiled itself around Lysette Winter's waist
• 2:45
  and dragged her into the clutches of a ball of writhing
• 2:48
  black tentacles. Del Rey was on the ground,
• 2:51
  weaponless and clutching his arm, shouting Lysette's name,
• 2:54
  but the thing carrying her vanished into the dreadful
• 2:57
  kaleidoscope of slashing limbs and stabbing fire.
• 3:01
  Then the shrill of the Doctor's Sonic screwdriver rose above the
• 3:05
  bedlam. Arm outstretched, he swung it
• 3:07
  back and forth. The image from an old horror
• 3:10
  film of a priest holding back the Devil's creatures with a
• 3:12
  cross flitted through Sam's mind.
• 3:15
  The creature's plastic forms shivered like rippling water,
• 3:18
  and Sam saw waves of light and darkness radiating through them.
• 3:22
  For the briefest moment, the things edged backwards, not
• 3:26
  harmed, but perhaps uncertain what the strange sound was in
• 3:30
  that momentary aristite. She saw Rexton snap something up
• 3:33
  from the floor to the shuttle. Now.
• 3:36
  The doctor yelled. They ran for their lives through
• 3:39
  the mouth of the long, straight corridor and LED back to the
• 3:41
  shuttle way. And at their heels came a
• 3:44
  gibbering, baying nightmare. Host Sam ran as desperately as
• 3:48
  she ever had in her life. She knew she could look only to
• 3:51
  the front, and nothing could make her move any faster.
• 3:54
  Nevertheless, she could not resist A compulsion to snatch a
• 3:57
  glass behind them. But what she did see made her
• 4:00
  run faster. Behind them, the things actually
• 4:03
  filled the corridor from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, a
• 4:07
  boiling mash of translucent putrid flesh, hair and scales
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  rolling over and squeezing their way between their fellows in a
• 4:15
  blind frenzy of pursuit. Some were growing extra arms to
• 4:19
  haul themselves along the ladder, like hand rails with
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  hooks and talons, while others ran upside down along the
• 4:25
  ceiling, clinging on with plate light suckers.
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  Bony, many jointed arms sporting uncannily human hands, spine,
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  tentacles, tightness and sectile limbs lashed out from the
• 4:37
  seething mass, limbs that stretched impossibly like rubber
• 4:42
  in an attempt to catch them in their embrace.
• 4:45
  And then they were at the junction.
• 4:47
  The inner airlock doors, sensing their presence, began to open.
• 4:50
  They only just made it. As Dessel plunged through the
• 4:53
  last, he jerked flat on his face and began to sliver backwards,
• 4:57
  struggling and kicking. A thick, distant tentacles
• 5:00
  coiled around his leg. Sam Amanda's grabbed his
• 5:03
  outstretched arms and heaved while Rexton and Bendix fired
• 5:07
  point blank into the wall of mottled, slightly translucent
• 5:11
  flesh that filled the aperture. A beak set into the underside of
• 5:15
  the thing snapped back at them, but the beast would not release
• 5:19
  its grip. Slowly Dessa was being pulled
• 5:21
  back towards it. The doctor had the control panel
• 5:24
  beside the door and was working frantically on the circuitry
• 5:27
  within. Suddenly the door began to
• 5:29
  close. The iris and segments contracted
• 5:32
  about the fire thick tentacle a motor wide in protest as it met
• 5:36
  resistance then. With a spray.
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  Of blood yellow slime. The tentacle fell to the floor
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  as the door closed completely. Desil fell forward, trembling as
• 5:47
  though from cold. In shock, Sam and Mendes tore
• 5:50
  the limb 3 from around his leg, the suckers coming loose with
• 5:54
  loud pops, and kicked it aside in disgust and horror.
• 5:57
  The cleanly severed end flopped and twitched grotesquely for a
• 6:00
  moment, then lay still. Dole thubs reverberated against
• 6:05
  the other side of the door, and Sam could hear the muffled cries
• 6:08
  when things rise. In the chorus of frustrated
• 6:11
  rage, the Doctor adjusted his Sonic screwdriver and played it
• 6:15
  over the control panel, which sparked and puffed smoke.
• 6:19
  They won't get that open in a hurry, he said.
• 6:28
  Hello everyone, and welcome to the Hamster Book Club, a book
• 6:32
  club podcast. My name is Luke Sims Jenkins,
• 6:35
  your host today on the Hamster Book Club, and with me on this
• 6:39
  episode is Mr. John Arnold, Mr. Andrew Batty, and Mr. Joe Ford.
• 6:44
  Hello, gentlemen. Hello.
• 6:47
  I love you, Christopher Beulis. Oh, hello.
• 6:52
  So the law of our book club, apparently, for me at least, is
• 6:57
  I read a book I love and then following that I read stank
• 7:02
  Nuggets. And just to put with the cherry
• 7:06
  on top, I also get to host Hamster Book club.
• 7:13
  It's like Joe's like I've got the knife, the Buellers knife
• 7:16
  here. I'm just going to.
• 7:17
  Fucking dig it in a. Put it in a Luke's Spot side
• 7:20
  right there and just twist it. Put a bit of lemon on it and
• 7:23
  some salt too. So I.
• 7:25
  Was like, you know what he's. Done his own podcast now you
• 7:29
  know he's, he's getting all of my guests on.
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  You know, he's becoming really popular.
• 7:34
  How can I make him suffer? Right.
• 7:37
  Read this Christopher Mueller's book and then host the episode.
• 7:40
  No, not at all. Well, no.
• 7:42
  Can I just say right before we can go into the book, can I just
• 7:45
  say that I do think there might be a small element of bias going
• 7:52
  into reading this book because I think we all expected this to be
• 7:57
  shit because it's Beulis. We all expected it to be really
• 8:01
  mid. And I think we all went in with
• 8:03
  that mindset, especially you, Luke.
• 8:06
  And and I wonder if perhaps next time we approach a Christopher
• 8:10
  Beulis novel, we start going with us with an open mind as to
• 8:14
  what he might he might give us. Because I, for one, came out
• 8:18
  surprisingly impressed. So.
• 8:21
  It is really meant. Not good Mr. Joe, just I said it
• 8:25
  in my top 10's and I'll say it again right here.
• 8:28
  I will not do Twilight of the Gods unless it's the Benny one.
• 8:31
  I won't. Twilight of the Gods, I was at
• 8:34
  the the. Buelless decides to do a sequel
• 8:39
  to the freaking Web Planet. Oh gold, I'm sure I'll find
• 8:43
  some. Loser will do it.
• 8:45
  Cover is gorgeous, then Beuless apart from the 1 he drew
• 8:49
  himself. Beuless gets somebody good
• 8:50
  covers. I'll give that to him.
• 8:52
  This is a gorgeous cover. I mean I've I've spent much.
• 8:55
  To the last two weeks, just staring at it.
• 8:58
  Yeah, well, I wonder what the mystery of this this cover is.
• 9:03
  I mean. It just looks like an enormous
• 9:05
  It's like the asshole, doesn't it?
• 9:06
  I was going to say it's not the first time you've said you've
• 9:08
  spent looking at an enormous red gaping hallway.
• 9:12
  Who are? You talking to?
• 9:15
  We've got like 3 minutes in and we're already there.
• 9:19
  Yeah. Really.
• 9:20
  It's not really that rude looking, isn't it?
• 9:22
  But the little TARDIS look in the hole is gorgeous.
• 9:25
  Poor. Tardis.
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  It's like throwing a sausage down a hallway.
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  It's being eaten whole by the derelict.
• 9:33
  How many times can we say the word whole at the start of this
• 9:36
  episode? Many, many times.
• 9:41
  You say Christopher Beulis is an A hole.
• 9:43
  All right, I'm going. No, no, no, I won't.
• 9:46
  I won't say that, but I will say Christopher Bullshit, am I
• 9:49
  right? I shouldn't have said that
• 9:53
  before we started recording. That would have landed a lot
• 9:55
  better. You know, Luke, he's going
• 9:57
  through really tough times at the moment.
• 9:58
  Christopher Beulus, he's been going around listening to
• 10:00
  podcasts about his books just to try and up his mood a little
• 10:04
  bit. You know you came back.
• 10:05
  Well, I know at least. You continue tonight.
• 10:07
  I know at least one podcast that will probably love everything
• 10:10
  he's ever written, and you guys all know the name of it and I'm
• 10:13
  not going to say it out loud. Anyways, because I fucking love
• 10:17
  everything. There is not.
• 10:20
  There is not a critical opinion on that podcast at all.
• 10:23
  Oh, sorry, sorry. That's all.
• 10:26
  Right. So we've got innuendo, bitching.
• 10:32
  We're already in the mood. We didn't name the.
• 10:35
  Client thing all. Right, we didn't name it.
• 10:37
  It could be any one of them. The Doctor Who Hole podcast
• 10:45
  sausage in all way. All right, So you're welcome.
• 10:49
  Oh, sausage sandwich. Sausage sandwiches, seeds.
• 10:52
  Yeah. Stones of Blood podcast for you.
• 10:54
  Go away. Yeah, that's great.
• 10:57
  Sausage sandwich podcast. It's usually this indulgent this
• 11:00
  early, are we? Yeah, but.
• 11:03
  There's not that much to get indulgent about, is there?
• 11:05
  The Super bootless. Book Oh, we will get there all
• 11:08
  right, I think. Joe, you're over commentating a
• 11:13
  little bit. Maybe just a dissertation?
• 11:15
  I mean, I've got, I've got a dissertation, all right, So for
• 11:19
  my argument I've got knows. I will balance you out.
• 11:22
  I'm under compensating. So it'll it'll it'll work out in
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  the in the end. But I have a question for all of
• 11:29
  you and I'll start with you, John, what is your favorite?
• 11:34
  Yes, you have to pick 1. Christopher Bueller's novel.
• 11:38
  What? What's the least worst is what
• 11:40
  you're looking at here, right? I did ask that, that's what I
• 11:43
  said. Yeah, I would say off the top of
• 11:48
  my head, it was easy to think of the ones that I really didn't
• 11:51
  enjoy. But I will go with the really
• 11:54
  obvious one. I'll go with The Sorcerer's
• 11:57
  Apprentice because I think Hartnell is one of those dogs
• 12:01
  who is very, very difficult to fuck up in prose.
• 12:05
  He really suits the medium and it's kind of a more traditional
• 12:11
  fancy story than we're maybe used to these days, you know,
• 12:13
  post Game of Thrones, etcetera. But it's that kind of kids
• 12:18
  storybook fancy. And Hartnell really fits into
• 12:22
  it. And the image of him as a wizard
• 12:23
  is absolutely irresistible. And I think it was the first
• 12:27
  time when actually I kind of enjoyed that booze bug for the
• 12:31
  first time. Whereas yeah, something like a
• 12:34
  chat of mine I have never been able to reread.
• 12:38
  So yeah, I will go with the Sorcerer's Apprentice among a
• 12:42
  heap of mid. Don't be sad, John, because one
• 12:46
  out of 400 ain't bad. What about you, Andrew?
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  This is the first Christopher I've ever read.
• 13:00
  I'd never read any of his other doctors.
• 13:02
  You lucky, lucky. Bastard.
• 13:06
  Well, I wouldn't give stuff I'd read 1 Christopher.
• 13:10
  Yeah, I think I just never like because he just has a reputation
• 13:14
  for just sitting in the middle, really just none of the like if
• 13:20
  with all the books to choose from, I've never been pulling a
• 13:24
  Christopher Bullis off the off the shelf, is it?
• 13:27
  Bullis or beulis? I don't know, I've always
• 13:30
  thought bullish but maybe it's. I think it's, I think it's
• 13:33
  Beulis. OK, well, I apologise.
• 13:36
  Just call it crispy. Crispy B So yeah, never read a
• 13:41
  Chrissy B before. So I probably went in with like
• 13:44
  the least. I mean, I went in with the
• 13:46
  expectation that it wasn't going to, like, blow my socks off, but
• 13:49
  also not really an expectation of what makes a Christopher
• 13:53
  Beulis good or bad. So yeah, I think just just my
• 14:00
  previous experience was just like everyone being like, yeah,
• 14:02
  it's all right. Can I ask you?
• 14:05
  Yourself, you read. And blown.
• 14:07
  You. Really read 1 Christopher
• 14:09
  Beulis, right? And obviously you've only read 1
• 14:12
  Stephen Marley, because they put they only wrote one.
• 14:16
  Where would you rank those two authors?
• 14:18
  In, let's say ascending order. Luke, have you got any Hitman
• 14:23
  numbers? He's putting me on the spot here
• 14:26
  and pulling out parts of our group chat where I said that I
• 14:29
  preferred Vanderdecken's children to Managra.
• 14:32
  But our episode of Managra. You will note that that is
• 14:37
  ranking pretty lowly for me. So that's necessarily a
• 14:40
  recommendation for Vanderdecker's children.
• 14:43
  But I think I did enjoy reading this book more than Managra.
• 14:45
  Oh. I just know you say it in the.
• 14:47
  Apartment. Thank you.
• 14:50
  You're a bitch. Yeah, I think I've got a fast
• 14:54
  episodes out this thing. All right, Joe, Hello, your
• 15:00
  favorite Christopher Buellis. City at Wells End by Country
• 15:04
  Mart, another Hartnell 1 beautifully characterized.
• 15:07
  We are a really great plot planet on the brink of disaster.
• 15:12
  These great, big fabulous space age rocket ships and another
• 15:15
  great cover. He got there, didn't they?
• 15:16
  He just get good covers. Did he do Tempest that, you
• 15:19
  know, the one with the bullet train on the cover?
• 15:21
  Great covers. Oh, Palace in the red sun, that
• 15:26
  beautiful cars and the lovely sun.
• 15:28
  Anyway, sorry. Yeah.
• 15:30
  Really, really great. Full of surprises, full of
• 15:32
  twists and turns and a real pace to the second-half of the book
• 15:37
  as everything you've learnt in the first half of the book is
• 15:40
  sort of overturned and turned out to be not what it seems
• 15:44
  Really, really good, like It's Beauties is never going to write
• 15:49
  a classic. It's just never going to happen.
• 15:51
  But he can write a good book, and that's a very good book.
• 15:54
  So we should have read one of those.
• 15:56
  Oh, I'm pleased we read this. Oh, by the way, I guess it's
• 16:01
  Andrew. Favorite book by Christopher
• 16:04
  Bulis is the Dirtykins Children. So just to put that on the
• 16:08
  record, it's also your least. Favorite book Say that as well,
• 16:12
  Van Deckens. I think it's Van Deck van
• 16:15
  Deckens children. It's, it's, it's the Dutch,
• 16:18
  isn't it? So.
• 16:19
  Yeah, when you look it up, it's three separate words like the
• 16:22
  actual, it's Van Decken like of the.
• 16:26
  OK. Oh, that they tried to sort of
• 16:28
  sci-fi out by making it one. Yes, OK.
• 16:32
  That's that's very futuristic. I mean, again, surely some
• 16:36
  people must have gone into this with that title, with the fear
• 16:39
  of God in them that this was going to be full of children,
• 16:42
  right? I was.
• 16:45
  Very pleased when I got to the end of the book and I think
• 16:48
  there was only a couple of mentions of the children.
• 16:50
  Absolutely. A little shit survived too.
• 16:53
  Now we know what your expectations were tempered.
• 16:56
  Clearly Mark does not want to hear our book club episodes
• 16:59
  today because the door is mysteriously just shut.
• 17:04
  It's like. No.
• 17:05
  Future of yourself. Yeah.
• 17:07
  Oh, really? Oh, so you let it go?
• 17:11
  Before I give you my serious answer, I will just jokingly say
• 17:15
  that Christopher Bulis single handedly made sure that every
• 17:19
  doctor, include and beneath had at least one shit book.
• 17:24
  So now that I've got that. You see this, this is this is
• 17:27
  the mindset he's gone into reading this book with.
• 17:30
  But it didn't have, I said. Did it?
• 17:33
  Having said that, it was just a dumb joke.
• 17:35
  Relax. My favorite other two harder
• 17:38
  ones sources Apprentice and City at Wells end.
• 17:41
  I think they're really good, so I wouldn't go as far as to say
• 17:45
  they're 10 out of 10s or anything like that, but they
• 17:48
  were pretty solid 7 from what I remember.
• 17:51
  I enjoyed reading both of them. So, you know, I made the dumb
• 17:55
  joke. But the exception, I guess is is
• 17:57
  harder, yeah. I was just last book.
• 17:59
  Christopher Beulis. I was going to ask Luke, I want
• 18:02
  to scale up one to 10. How excited are you about
• 18:05
  Cameron? Christopher Beulis twice on the
• 18:08
  Marin Chester. Yeah, yeah.
• 18:14
  What are you? Doing.
• 18:17
  What are you doing? Coming coming a lot sooner to
• 18:20
  the Mario Chess club is warmonger too.
• 18:24
  Now I look I already I already know I can just reliably say
• 18:28
  hey, Joe want to Buellers, and because he's already written the
• 18:34
  songs of and serenaded him, I could probably probably swing
• 18:38
  that. So yeah, now yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm
• 18:43
  completely impotent at the the idea so.
• 18:48
  What's his 5th Doctor book? Ultimate treasure.
• 18:52
  Treasure. Imperial Moon, OH.
• 18:55
  That wasn't too bad actually as well.
• 18:57
  Steampunk future Imperial Moon. Imperial Moon.
• 19:00
  Cover as well. Yeah, I'd have a good cover
• 19:03
  here. Yeah.
• 19:04
  What was his? Last book, At what point did
• 19:07
  they go look? We just can't.
• 19:08
  Use this man anymore, Sorry. When the new series came in.
• 19:13
  Palace of the Red Sun was that that's.
• 19:16
  Right. Yeah, I think you're right.
• 19:19
  Yeah, so everyone got a phone call randomly because that's the
• 19:23
  story out here about a lot of. So how did you come to do a new
• 19:26
  series adventure? Well, I got a call and I I was
• 19:30
  asked if I wanted to do 1. So I assume everyone got the
• 19:34
  call, including Colin Brake for some reason.
• 19:37
  But Beulus didn't get a call. Ouch.
• 19:42
  Maybe he didn't like the new series and he said no, I don't
• 19:45
  know. We don't know.
• 19:46
  Simon Messenham didn't like it. He still said yes, didn't he?
• 19:50
  Of course it's it's a, it's a payday, I guess, but.
• 19:54
  It would have been good for those quick reads, wouldn't he
• 19:57
  be less? It's so simple.
• 19:58
  His pros. It would have been perfect for
• 20:00
  one of those. I think given given what we've
• 20:04
  got here, I'm not sure he would have been able to capture the
• 20:11
  new doctors and companions dialogue.
• 20:15
  So. Are you telling me that Van
• 20:17
  Durdecken's Children really isn't the same length as War and
• 20:21
  Peace? It.
• 20:23
  Might have felt like it, but. All right.
• 20:28
  Well, I got a question for everyone before we jump right
• 20:32
  right into Van Durdiken's children, except for Andrew,
• 20:36
  because it's his first time. I want to know what did you guys
• 20:41
  think of it the first time and what did you think of it this
• 20:44
  time? Did you like it more this time?
• 20:46
  Less the same, Joe. I didn't remember a thing about
• 20:50
  it if I'm honest and I have read it before.
• 20:54
  I think, I mean, I started my reviews on doco reviews with
• 21:00
  Revolution Man. So I'm wondering if I did read
• 21:03
  this before because there are things in this I would remember,
• 21:06
  right? We will, three of us on this
• 21:08
  call will say this is a very mid book, but there are things that
• 21:12
  will stick in your mind about it.
• 21:15
  So I didn't really have any great expectation.
• 21:20
  What surprised me about it? This time was I got 100 pages of
• 21:25
  everything I expected from Christopher Beulis, which was,
• 21:30
  you know, dreadful non entity characters are very functional,
• 21:34
  Dr. companion team and fairly intriguing set up.
• 21:38
  And then I had 180 pages of it wasn't I'm not going to sit here
• 21:42
  and say it was a classic, but it was intriguing.
• 21:46
  There were moments of suspense and I was surprised at least
• 21:50
  three times by this book, with various twists and turns.
• 21:54
  And I liked. The ending as well.
• 21:56
  So I was pleasantly surprised by this book.
• 22:02
  What about? What about you, John?
• 22:05
  It was it was that I had a vague impression that it was kind of
• 22:10
  at least the book that I'd most enjoyed reading of his.
• 22:15
  So I came back to with a kind of an open ish mind.
• 22:19
  It's kind of maybe slightly a jar mind.
• 22:21
  I would put it rather than open completely.
• 22:24
  And I kind of thought that it's this, this is definitely his
• 22:29
  most ambitious book, I think with the ideas and what he's
• 22:32
  trying to do. But I don't quite think he's got
• 22:37
  the skill to pull off what he's trying to do here.
• 22:39
  Not with the plot and not with the prose, and definitely, for
• 22:44
  God's sake, not with the characters.
• 22:46
  But. Oh God.
• 22:50
  But we'll come to that. So I I kind of want the enjoying
• 22:56
  it side of mid but not too far on that side.
• 23:01
  Also, I do hear the word enjoy there, John.
• 23:04
  Just yeah, yeah, there's there's it's not entirely irredeemable.
• 23:09
  I didn't feel like wasting my life like I did with some, like
• 23:12
  Shadow Minds. While other gods the ultimate
• 23:16
  treasure. Maybe you can put that on the
• 23:17
  cover? Not entirely irredeemable there.
• 23:21
  You go. You can have that for free.
• 23:24
  Chrissy Boyd all. Right.
• 23:29
  So as a first time reader of the book, Andrew, how'd you how'd
• 23:32
  you find it? It was fine, it was readable.
• 23:38
  I think the biggest flaw in it is the characterisation, but I
• 23:42
  mean the plotting is fairly good.
• 23:45
  It's as Joe was saying, like it's intriguing it like it did
• 23:49
  keep me reading and intrigued as to what was going on.
• 23:52
  And there's unexpected parts of it.
• 23:55
  I think it's one of those things like it is, it is very Mered and
• 23:58
  it's like, I could have been reading something better.
• 24:02
  Did I? Did I?
• 24:03
  Do I need this book in my life? Do I need to have read this?
• 24:06
  Is this a stellar example of Doctor Who fiction?
• 24:09
  No. So I think if you're like a
• 24:11
  completist and you like reading everything, sure, go for it.
• 24:15
  But it's not like I could have been reading a better Doctor Who
• 24:20
  book. I could have been reading a
• 24:21
  better book in general. Zagra, for instance.
• 24:27
  Sacrifices you make for. This book club with your time.
• 24:30
  Thank you. So much so, yeah.
• 24:32
  I mean, I like, I like Doctor Who.
• 24:34
  So like, it was it, it was a fine Doctor Who story.
• 24:37
  It's like, I guess sort of the nightmare of Eden of if it
• 24:41
  wasn't there nobody would care, but fine while you're reading
• 24:45
  it. Wow, I alright put that on the
• 24:49
  back cover as well. Yeah, it wasn't there.
• 24:52
  Nobody would care. The.
• 24:54
  Quotes are coming in, Luke. Come on, I'm sure you've got a
• 24:57
  quote for us. I feel like stank out because I
• 25:01
  thought this was fucking stank Nuggets and a fucking a flat
• 25:06
  roller coaster. It's like a roller coaster that
• 25:09
  doesn't go up and down. It starts on the ground like
• 25:13
  low, like in the basement, and it doesn't get out of the eye.
• 25:19
  Look, I got I got 120 pages in this book and I was like, I need
• 25:23
  to read something else. Fuck, I was like, all right, I
• 25:26
  got something else coming up. I'll, I'll, I'll dip into that
• 25:30
  and see just to just to read something else.
• 25:34
  And in one sitting I read like 90 pages.
• 25:37
  I almost read the same amount of pages in one day.
• 25:40
  That took me almost a week for this book.
• 25:44
  And then if I'm at page 230 or 40 and I'm still putting you
• 25:52
  down for a couple of days F like I was just like like remember
• 26:01
  the, I think a message you guys the other day I had 20 pages
• 26:04
  left. I didn't.
• 26:05
  I had 50. Serves you right.
• 26:12
  I mean, you said you read quite slowly sometimes, don't you?
• 26:15
  So I think you should thank Vander Dekker's children for
• 26:17
  allowing you to get through 90 pages of another book at such.
• 26:21
  I read. I read books I don't like
• 26:23
  slowly. I read books that I think are
• 26:25
  awesome at freaking lightning speed.
• 26:29
  It's like, I would say just a just an easy comparison because
• 26:35
  it's the last book we did. Time 0 is a roller coaster and
• 26:40
  it has action, excitement, amazing twists you don't see
• 26:44
  coming that some I remembered somebody didn't.
• 26:47
  So it was great for a reread. And then anytime I had a bit of
• 26:52
  a breather, I was I was like, oh, all right, cool.
• 26:57
  But I'm still excited to be like, all right, the next one's
• 27:00
  going to be just around the corner, isn't it?
• 27:02
  Because the chapters are really nice and short too.
• 27:05
  This book I read at the same pace the entire time from start
• 27:12
  to finish, so. I.
• 27:13
  Would say this book is as competently structured as Time
• 27:16
  00. My God, what are you on?
• 27:20
  I want some. Literally sets up its premise.
• 27:23
  It sets up its premise. It explores its premise, it then
• 27:27
  hits you with a load of twists and turns, and then it answers
• 27:30
  what the premise is all about. That is a perfectly reasonably
• 27:33
  structured book. There is one thing, Mr. Joe, I
• 27:37
  wish you hadn't have said because I couldn't Unsee it.
• 27:41
  And then my brain went and made a list.
• 27:44
  Now you're like, wow, this is like a really mid Next
• 27:47
  Generation episode. So my brain went my brain went,
• 27:51
  well, why couldn't Christopher Bulus do one of the following?
• 27:56
  Why not do redemption with a draconian?
• 27:59
  Why can't he do cause and effect but have Niles be in it instead
• 28:02
  of Frasier, Measure of a man with Chameleon, Darmok with
• 28:08
  Ogroms, Iborg with a Cyberman the NTH degree.
• 28:12
  But instead of Berkeley, what happens is that some kind of
• 28:16
  it's one of the companions and they become smarter than the
• 28:18
  doctor. Well, how about a Trans Matt
• 28:20
  accident where the 8th Doctor turns into a previous
• 28:24
  incarnation and now we can see how that companion fits.
• 28:28
  Would get along with a different version of the Doctor the Chase,
• 28:32
  the TNG version, but Doctor Who, all of them would have been
• 28:37
  better. Can you say I'm trying to write
• 28:39
  this all sound much more? Boring than the Deckins
• 28:42
  children, Luke, I'm afraid I'm so.
• 28:44
  Sorry. Plus, I think you've forgotten
• 28:46
  that David A McKinsey has already written all of those for
• 28:48
  Virgin. I don't know TNG well enough to
• 28:55
  get any of those reference. Well, basically any TNG episode
• 28:59
  that starts with two races fighting over an alien derelict
• 29:04
  and a politician going, you know, we must get there first
• 29:06
  and get in there. And then they go in and there's
• 29:08
  lots of smoke and atmosphere and terrible things start happening.
• 29:11
  I mean basically this is your standard episode of TNG I.
• 29:15
  Don't know, I thought my trans met 1 was pretty good.
• 29:19
  I don't know, I think I'd rather read a view list of all honest.
• 29:24
  8th Doctor goes in, Davo comes out.
• 29:27
  Let's see how Davo and Fitz hang out.
• 29:29
  Like, yeah, let's go. I want to read that that.
• 29:31
  Picture it's a big finish. They have that in a heartbeat.
• 29:34
  They've. Got fit, so yeah, do it.
• 29:39
  Which Doctor is Fitz going to be crushing on this week?
• 29:45
  Colin. You know what, I reckon he would
• 29:50
  smoke cigars with Pertwee. Yeah.
• 29:53
  Oh yeah, absolutely smoke cigars with Pertwee and I yeah, no,
• 29:57
  that that would. And then watch absolutely
• 30:00
  gobsmacked as Pertwee did karate and like 10 bad guys at once.
• 30:05
  So he was. In the fucking 60s, right?
• 30:07
  He'd Nick. Collins coat straight away and
• 30:09
  go my God look at these threads. Amazing.
• 30:12
  Like successfully derailed us into talking about fits.
• 30:16
  Oh. Well done.
• 30:17
  He. He yeah, he'd be in the
• 30:19
  left-handed home, but doing psychedelics with self, wouldn't
• 30:21
  he? So it's the best thing about
• 30:23
  this book is a month after it comes out, The Scarlet Empress
• 30:27
  is released. So that's.
• 30:29
  Literally in my notes as well. What was before this?
• 30:33
  Was like. Thank fuck the placebo of our.
• 30:36
  Brother. I think I might prefer, yeah.
• 30:41
  I haven't read that for a while either, so I don't know.
• 30:44
  But I will say this is the first time I've read the in fact, the
• 30:50
  only times I've read Sam, because I usually just go back
• 30:55
  and read from the Burning on Woods and cherry pick something
• 30:57
  from there. The all the Sam books we've been
• 31:00
  reading for the book club are the only times that I've
• 31:03
  resampled Sam Jones. So it was, it was kind of
• 31:08
  interesting, I guess, to go back to an era where the Doctor
• 31:10
  actually remembered stuff and knew what he was doing and all
• 31:14
  that kind of kind of thing. I'll, I'll talk more about what
• 31:18
  my feelings of it later on, But well, let's get into the meat of
• 31:23
  the book. All right, So I this dovetails
• 31:29
  and this is the first question I have and this is the one I want
• 31:32
  to ask everyone. The 8th Doctor and Sam, what do
• 31:36
  we think of Are they? Address.
• 31:39
  No. It could.
• 31:43
  Let's just say Case of Addressoni isn't the only
• 31:46
  classic Doctor Who story that would play out in exactly the
• 31:49
  same way if the Doctor and the Companion didn't arrive.
• 31:53
  Yeah, well, no, I disagree with that.
• 31:57
  They're a rogue element. They speed things along.
• 31:59
  The natural conclusion might have been the same, but because
• 32:02
  they're there, they they kind of interrupt the stalemate and they
• 32:05
  make things kind of come to the head.
• 32:08
  Yeah, they're the catalyst. So they might not be the heroes
• 32:11
  of the story, but they're the reason because everyone hates
• 32:14
  them or thinks they're spying for somebody else and thinks
• 32:17
  they are something they're not and all that kind of stuff.
• 32:21
  So I don't know. I'm not, you know, I, I, I, I
• 32:25
  think eventually you're right that everything would have come
• 32:29
  to a head pretty much the way it did.
• 32:32
  But the Doctor and Perry being there just made it go from like
• 32:35
  this is going to all end in about 5 years to like, no it's
• 32:38
  going to end today. No, I just want to talk cage
• 32:41
  angels now. But Andrew, this is your first
• 32:44
  time reading this book. What did what you you can?
• 32:49
  What did you think of the characterisation of the 8th
• 32:51
  Doctor and Sam? Non existent like this is the
• 32:58
  worst characterisation of Doctor Who and companion in the 8th
• 33:04
  Doctor books that I've read. I think like the the Doctor is
• 33:07
  just not the 8th Doctor. He's he's just sort of generic
• 33:13
  Doctor talking in just sort of pompous dialogue that just
• 33:18
  doesn't feel like the 8th Doctor at all and doesn't really do
• 33:23
  very much either. Just sort of follows around
• 33:27
  other characters, gets a bit worried about things and then
• 33:31
  presses the magic TARDIS button at the at the end, but doesn't
• 33:34
  do a whole lot. And Sam, she's again, just so
• 33:39
  generic. I mean, one thing that I will
• 33:40
  give Christopher Beulis is that he does follow clearly the
• 33:44
  editor's notes about what's been going on with Sam in the last
• 33:47
  few books. So she's fairly competent.
• 33:52
  She's not like a teenage girl, Sam, she does do stuff.
• 33:55
  She's brave. There's there's references to
• 33:59
  her getting over her crushed on the Doctor.
• 34:01
  So like he's he's following, like he, he's he's read the
• 34:05
  notes that he's given and he's delivering on those, but not
• 34:09
  actually really giving her any personality in the process.
• 34:13
  She's just sort of plucky girl who does some plucky stuff.
• 34:17
  And it's weird that I don't know, he's like he, he just
• 34:22
  seems invested in the characters that aren't the Doctor and Sam,
• 34:25
  But also those characters are very, very bland and generic.
• 34:29
  And like there's a whole plot about like the photographer who
• 34:33
  gets left on the ship when the Doctor when the rest of the
• 34:36
  party goes back to the other ship.
• 34:38
  And it's like, it just feels like that should be the
• 34:39
  companion of doing sort of adventurous stuff.
• 34:43
  And you split the Doctor and Sam, like, you know, just the
• 34:45
  the classic Doctor Who plot, but he doesn't do that, which just
• 34:50
  seems like a bit of an odd decision.
• 34:52
  I mean, there is a plot point as to why the photographer has to
• 34:54
  be there, but maybe you could have left Sam with her and just
• 34:59
  given Sam more to do. Then you've got the the main
• 35:01
  characters in two different locations.
• 35:03
  But yeah, bland, bland, bland. And like, if you're reading
• 35:07
  these books for the 8th Doctor like it is the series with his
• 35:11
  name on, he would be very disappointed by this book.
• 35:14
  And it this could be a past Doctor adventure.
• 35:16
  It doesn't. It doesn't need to be in the 8th
• 35:18
  Doctor line. And he doesn't do anything with
• 35:21
  the 8th Doctor that couldn't be done with another Doctor.
• 35:24
  So yeah, just really, yeah, disappointing when it comes to
• 35:28
  the characterisation. All right, what I'm going to,
• 35:34
  I'm going to piggyback on that in a minute.
• 35:36
  What about, what about you, Joe, You, you're very positive on
• 35:39
  this book, I think like what did what did you think?
• 35:43
  Now I know you like some of the other stuff that happens in it
• 35:45
  that the actual 8th Doctor and Sam themselves.
• 35:49
  No, I think Andrew's right. I it's so weird because next
• 35:53
  month you get the first Paul Myles book and that sort of
• 35:57
  minimal plot, all character and great character work and
• 36:01
  probably the best character work we've had of the 8th doctor and
• 36:04
  Sam today. And this is all plot and no
• 36:08
  character, you know, and they serve their functioning story.
• 36:11
  Like Sam isn't annoying in this. So that's a a huge bonus because
• 36:16
  in those early, she could be really fucking irritating.
• 36:20
  And the Doctor was too. He was far too adept at being in
• 36:25
  a Star Trek episode that I would imagine the Doctor would ever be
• 36:29
  like, it's just that, you know, sort of eccentric weirdo.
• 36:32
  And yet politically, you know, he's so polite with everybody.
• 36:35
  And I'm just like, this isn't a doctor.
• 36:37
  He should be literally irritated everybody, you know.
• 36:42
  Yeah. So really it was their scenes
• 36:45
  where I was just like, yeah, the doctor and Sam.
• 36:48
  OK, now can we get back to our Leicester and Rhonda, please?
• 36:51
  Come on, let's. Go Why'd you shaking his head?
• 36:55
  My favorite files. So yeah, so in that respect, I
• 37:02
  absolutely agree. I think it bland is a good word
• 37:05
  for it. Just faceless.
• 37:06
  There was nothing to them. When was the face eater?
• 37:09
  Has that been? Yeah.
• 37:10
  Have they had their personalities stripped from
• 37:12
  them? No, I think fit is in that one.
• 37:14
  I'm not. I don't think it's happened.
• 37:15
  Yet is. Boy, if you're doing this in
• 37:17
  order, you've got a Simon messing them to look forward to
• 37:19
  coming up as well. Wowzers.
• 37:21
  You got 2. 142, so yeah. Like Sam's always in danger in
• 37:26
  this. Well, did you know it?
• 37:27
  She's always in danger, but she never really thinks about sort
• 37:30
  of the emotional consequences of it.
• 37:32
  She's just sort of reacting from one dangerous situation to
• 37:35
  another. And I think they were quite well
• 37:38
  executed scenes. But yeah, Chris, like, yeah, you
• 37:41
  can, you can give your characters personality, you
• 37:45
  know, as well as a function in the story.
• 37:49
  He can Rhonda, and what's his name less.
• 37:52
  Oh, we'll come to. We'll, we'll come.
• 37:54
  To that we'll. Come to that.
• 37:56
  Oh boy. What about?
• 37:58
  What about you, John? I've probably given it away, but
• 38:01
  yes, he acts so much like Hart Le Leon these.
• 38:08
  He hooks his his thumbs into his Sprock car.
• 38:11
  We're like, just tell us what you're doing there.
• 38:14
  It's it's obvious. It is not great.
• 38:17
  The doctor should be driving the plot.
• 38:19
  He's not. He's observing it like heart
• 38:21
  mothers. I mean, I'm prepared to bet we,
• 38:24
  you know, we've mentioned Star Trek in this Christopher Booze's
• 38:27
  bookshop is basically classic SF.
• 38:29
  It's it's all that kind of big, big ideas, the Golden Age SF,
• 38:36
  you know, Clark Asimov, the Rhondda Brew with Ryan stuff to
• 38:41
  Heinlein. Yeah, totally.
• 38:43
  Because that's what this book is, just that big hard fag book.
• 38:47
  And it's about that idea rather than the characters.
• 38:49
  So to that extent, I don't think he's trying to do much with the
• 38:53
  characters. But equally, I've read his other
• 38:55
  books and this is not unusual. And this, I think, is why
• 38:59
  Hartnell suits it, because Hartnell is kind of a more
• 39:01
  passive Dr., he tells. Us a good colleague as well.
• 39:05
  Palace had a red sun. He rides a good they're the
• 39:07
  doctors are just yeah. Totally.
• 39:12
  So yeah, I thought Sam, I was hopeful early on.
• 39:15
  She got she was kind of a bit of a sarky me because then he had
• 39:18
  her talk about Victorian Iron Work, Gothic and like, what
• 39:22
  teenager fucking sounds like that, for God's sake.
• 39:28
  I don't mean this as an insult because you guys know I'm not a
• 39:31
  huge fan of the era, but I think this would work have worked
• 39:36
  better as a third doctor in Joe book, because this is the kind
• 39:43
  of future history kind of stuff that they would.
• 39:46
  I mean, you just call it Van Durdiken in space and done
• 39:50
  right, because I could see him being all right, a mixed.
• 39:58
  Asshole in space, isn't it? That's right, but I could see
• 40:02
  him being. Of.
• 40:02
  Deaf being a mix, mix of polite and all this kind of stuff.
• 40:08
  And I, and maybe I and I could see him wanting to be involved
• 40:13
  in two groups of people who are fighting each other, you know,
• 40:18
  or on the brink of war like the Draconians and.
• 40:20
  He does in Frontier, in space, doesn't he?
• 40:23
  He's that sort of polite doctor that goes into a room and goes,
• 40:27
  oh, Your Majesty, you know. That's not pomp again.
• 40:31
  Yeah, that's sort of slightly pompous mediator.
• 40:34
  Yeah, well, he's a moderator in this book.
• 40:37
  So I yeah, I was, I was, I had that thinking of, well, could
• 40:44
  have been any doctor and companion, but I had to watch 3
• 40:49
  different podcasts, Frontier and Space, Escape Capture, Escape
• 40:55
  Catcher, Make it stop. But lots of great ideas in that.
• 41:00
  And just the characterization of of the Doctor and Joe in that
• 41:06
  transplanted to here where they don't really get put in a cell
• 41:09
  once. I think it really would have
• 41:11
  worked. You could have had him to some
• 41:13
  and Namoidian at one point, you know, that's fine.
• 41:19
  You know, he loves his gadgets, so he would have got a kick out
• 41:21
  of making normalizers for people and all this kind of stuff.
• 41:24
  So yeah, I want to piggyback on what Andrew said when he was
• 41:30
  like, he got the note of this is what's happening.
• 41:33
  He got the notes because yeah, I don't think this guy has read or
• 41:40
  an EDA. Whereas when I read the
• 41:43
  following book, The Scarlet Empress, I get the feeling that
• 41:48
  Paul Mars has read all of the books.
• 41:51
  And now Paul Mars has read every book in existence.
• 41:54
  Have you not seen his Shoot shoot channel at his house?
• 41:57
  Oh my God, He's got another video about what I've read this
• 42:00
  week and I'm like another one. How do you have the so many?
• 42:04
  Yeah, I know. Right as well.
• 42:06
  And he's writing books. What do you get?
• 42:08
  You must read a lot faster than I do, that's for sure.
• 42:12
  But yeah, so part of me was like, did he pitch this as an
• 42:18
  ace doctor book or was could it have worked?
• 42:21
  Because you don't need to read when you write for the PDAs,
• 42:24
  which granted, and the MAS, which is what the bulk of his
• 42:28
  output is, you don't need to have read anything else.
• 42:34
  And all you need is, oh, my story set after this TV story
• 42:39
  done. You know, that's all you need
• 42:42
  need to do and things like that. There's there's very vague
• 42:47
  references. Like he did get a a note from
• 42:50
  from Steve going, hey, Sam's not a teenager anymore.
• 42:53
  She's like 2223, so and and she doesn't have a crush on the
• 42:58
  doctor. All right.
• 42:59
  So don't put that in there. Yeah.
• 43:02
  This should be one of the longest portions of a hamster
• 43:07
  book club with with the four of us talking about the
• 43:10
  characterization of the Doctor and the companions.
• 43:13
  It was one of the longest parts of our discussion of Time 0, and
• 43:19
  I think we're done now. I mean, I will say that at the
• 43:24
  end of chapter where Sam Jones gets turned into a child, I was
• 43:28
  like, did we go through those three years for nothing?
• 43:30
  Are we? Stuck with Sam Jones, the kiddie
• 43:33
  wing now is she van der Decken's children?
• 43:36
  That's exactly what I was thinking when that happened.
• 43:38
  I was like oh shit, is this gonna be like space babies and
• 43:42
  children? If I'm lengthy, she gets turned
• 43:45
  back in the space of a chapter. Yeah, it's like straight.
• 43:48
  Away I was like, what was the the point of that?
• 43:50
  And then I don't think anyone else gets turned into a child
• 43:52
  after that, do they? No, and it doesn't really have
• 43:55
  any impact on the plot at any point ever again.
• 44:00
  I mean, he could have just. We would have been wonderful if
• 44:01
  he'd gone right quick to the TARDIS.
• 44:03
  I'm going to take you to the Zebedee Academy.
• 44:05
  Like John and Jillian. Get rid of Sam Jones quick.
• 44:10
  Isn't there only one other time where that kind of device comes
• 44:13
  into effect? And it's right at the end of the
• 44:15
  book with Rexton because he ends up being a tired of himself.
• 44:20
  Yeah, he's trying to set that. I guess it was setting up that.
• 44:23
  Turns out he's like Dave Lister. He doesn't have a parent have
• 44:26
  parents. He's just, he just exists or
• 44:30
  something. And he rubber us.
• 44:32
  Yeah, I mean that. Wasn't important but but the you
• 44:35
  know the diagram on page one of the keypad, which made me feel
• 44:40
  very stupid neat too it's. Hilarious.
• 44:46
  Thinking it's like sitting at the exelons or something.
• 44:49
  And Gary, well, what does that all mean?
• 44:51
  I mean, did you get it, John? No, I just went when I was like
• 44:56
  a real nipper. There was something called being
• 44:59
  Interplanetary Spy which were game.
• 45:01
  I remember those. And they were basic and this was
• 45:04
  the sort of shit they pull in that.
• 45:06
  And then I looked and I went. Was anybody trying to find the
• 45:10
  symbol that didn't relate? I still think it doesn't make
• 45:14
  sense what it does. It still doesn't make sense.
• 45:16
  Because there are multiple symbols that can fix.
• 45:18
  That because he's like, oh, each each one has like a rotated
• 45:22
  letter of unlock, but there's multiple letter letters rotated
• 45:26
  on each line. I felt very stupid.
• 45:29
  I'd, I'd, I was literally watching like an episode of the
• 45:31
  1% like that, that quiz show where it's all puzzles like this
• 45:36
  and I was like, I can't, I just don't get it.
• 45:38
  I'm too stupid for this. I like my.
• 45:43
  Laughing is. Ass off.
• 45:45
  Or I didn't that. Which I shouldn't.
• 45:46
  Make your audience feel stupid on page one.
• 45:49
  Should you? Not really.
• 45:50
  Yeah, we're not unconfit, Stephen.
• 45:53
  What's Stephen Moffat? You know, in the back of like
• 45:55
  kids, like puzzle adventures. They'd be like the answers at
• 45:58
  the back, like the version of this diagram where it circles
• 46:02
  the correct letters 'cause I'm still not sure which one.
• 46:04
  Did you go looking at the back there?
• 46:06
  Then where is it? Tell me.
• 46:09
  I mean, what I will say one thing about that keypad is like
• 46:12
  one of the things I really love about the New Adventures is they
• 46:15
  do, they pull off, not this shit, not this stupid shit that
• 46:18
  he's got here, but they do sort of drawings and things like
• 46:22
  that, maps and things. And the 8th Doctor books don't
• 46:25
  do this very often. I think there's a map in You're
• 46:27
  into Intelligent Tigers. There's a couple of times we do
• 46:31
  it and obviously Lance's song lists that he does and things
• 46:34
  like that, so I just appreciate it visually.
• 46:37
  It was something a bit different in the book, but yeah.
• 46:40
  God I felt thick as shit when he told me what it.
• 46:42
  Was all about. The.
• 46:45
  Number is also quite helpful just in terms of like the
• 46:48
  description from the book I'm not sure if I would have got
• 46:52
  that this is what it's meant to look like so it was quite
• 46:55
  helpful to just like flick back to this and be like OK so like
• 46:58
  the other ship goes through the middle of this ship and it like
• 47:02
  spying the stuff on the outside like I did a lot of like other
• 47:05
  cases they're they're there when there were.
• 47:10
  That yeah, that fabulous sequence.
• 47:12
  Yes, I said fabulous. You know, take it that fabulous
• 47:16
  sequence where the man who goes, I'm just so close to retirement
• 47:20
  in Chapter 3 and you're like, OK, so he's dead.
• 47:24
  And he's, he's described as being on one of the spikes.
• 47:26
  And of course, you just have to look at the cover there and you
• 47:28
  can see exactly where he is. It's very helpful.
• 47:31
  You're right, I did love that that chapter though that.
• 47:34
  Chapter was was. Probably picking up to see if
• 47:35
  the dude was on the freaking cover.
• 47:37
  I'm like wait, wait, did I miss something?
• 47:39
  No, he's all right. Cool.
• 47:41
  That's. Just.
• 47:42
  Very alien, wasn't it? It was like man in spaceship
• 47:46
  explores weird shit. Something bad happens to him.
• 47:50
  I mean, it's me. Potato is Doctor Who, isn't it?
• 47:52
  But. I don't know, is it?
• 47:54
  Is this post about the rise in the film?
• 47:56
  Because that's why that's still very evident.
• 47:58
  Didn't it? Yeah.
• 48:01
  You know, eerie black hole. The Disney film, but with Yeah.
• 48:04
  But with Christmas boozes probes.
• 48:08
  Hang on a minute, no, I'm not having this.
• 48:10
  It was I am heavy beat, gradually picking up in tempo,
• 48:15
  telling and sleeping forces that were slowly stirring.
• 48:19
  Go on. He can't turn a phrase.
• 48:21
  He can, but we can't remember the first half of that.
• 48:24
  That chapter is him describing in painstaking detail like each
• 48:28
  fucking switch that the pilot is turning on the space.
• 48:32
  Like you are really writing up to that 280 page.
• 48:37
  Andrew, it's heart. Star Trek page.
• 48:39
  There's a half a fucking page on the TARDIS materializing.
• 48:42
  You don't mean it. It's what all these Star Trek
• 48:45
  books are like a fucking techno Babble on spaceship from.
• 48:48
  Who cares? I know, I know.
• 48:51
  I've wasted my life on those bloody Star Trek books earlier.
• 48:55
  God bless you, John, that. Should be perfect for you to
• 48:58
  hide. David.
• 48:59
  Too. Come on, this shit, it was shit.
• 49:02
  Peter David. He's no Peter David.
• 49:03
  That's what I'm saying. You could say that John Peel is
• 49:06
  the only writer in existence to write both a shit Doctor Who
• 49:10
  book and a shit Star Trek book. So there.
• 49:12
  You. Go.
• 49:16
  Yeah, Look, you brought up the prose, right?
• 49:18
  And you've been very mean about poor Mr. Beulis.
• 49:21
  I mean, I want to read something out because I thought that that
• 49:24
  action sequence, a page 100, yeah, where I I lost count of.
• 49:29
  There's so many characters in the book with stupid space
• 49:32
  names. I'm like, who are these people?
• 49:34
  Why there's so many people? In this but.
• 49:35
  I just gave up and won't be the flow I've gotta be honest.
• 49:38
  But he both, he obviously just thought well.
• 49:41
  Yes, I've written too many people.
• 49:42
  Right, fine, I'm gonna murder half the cast now in a single
• 49:45
  chapter and. Boy, does he, with this hideous
• 49:49
  sort of What are we allowed to say these days, Eldritch?
• 49:52
  Is that what we're supposed to say instead of Lovecraftian?
• 49:55
  And then the gates of hell seem to open.
• 49:58
  Oh boy. Boiling mass of translucent
• 50:00
  putrid flesh, Hair and scales rolling over and squeezing their
• 50:04
  way between their fellows in a blind frenzy.
• 50:08
  In the morning is he? Some were growing extra arms to
• 50:11
  hold themselves along the ladder, like hand rails with
• 50:13
  hooks and talons, while others ran upside along the ceiling,
• 50:17
  clinging on with plate light suckers, Bony mini jointed arms
• 50:22
  sporting uncannily human hands, spine tentacles and oh, I don't
• 50:26
  even want to say that insectile limbs lashed out from the
• 50:30
  seething mass. I mean, it was just a great
• 50:33
  sequence and loads of people were murdered.
• 50:35
  And I'm like, OK, this has stopped being Star Trek for a
• 50:38
  second because Star Trek doesn't do that.
• 50:42
  You don't take all those people over there and then murder half
• 50:44
  the cast in in one fell swoop. What do you do if you've given
• 50:49
  red shoes? I think, I think Beulis knows
• 50:54
  his Rep and I think he he, I don't think he's deliberately
• 50:57
  written a mid 100 pages to start the book, but he's sort of done
• 51:01
  his usual shtick and then he just comes in with a sequence of
• 51:05
  mass slaughter. I thought that sequence was
• 51:07
  great. I mean, I, I, I tore through
• 51:09
  that bit going this is not what I expect from Christopher
• 51:12
  Beulis, that mass murder described in such intricate
• 51:16
  detail. Yeah, I feel like those things
• 51:19
  work better when you give a shit about any of the characters, so.
• 51:23
  I was just happy that I didn't have to think about how many
• 51:26
  people they were. In the bouquet.
• 51:31
  I was hoping because when I see, saw, see the every time I look
• 51:35
  at this cover, I think of just think of any cover you might
• 51:38
  have seen of Rendezvous with Rama or or something or
• 51:41
  something like that, where it's about them encountering A
• 51:45
  gigantic cylindrical ship and exploring its mysteries.
• 51:52
  So I was hoping for a book where the doctor and I don't know
• 51:58
  whoever the fucks with him at the time, half from Sam, You
• 52:01
  know, like whoever they meet along the way.
• 52:03
  Board this ship and unlock its awesome mysteries.
• 52:08
  Well, they do. I mean, there's some not
• 52:13
  awesome, but you know, some. But yeah, I also feel the same
• 52:18
  way as John and Andrew. By the time we get to something
• 52:22
  action-packed happening, I've already been kind of like, OK,
• 52:28
  well, yeah, something's happening and then it slows back
• 52:32
  down again. I don't know, like I'm going to
• 52:36
  use it for the same example. They're in the same range so I'm
• 52:39
  allowed and I'm hosting too, so I'm doing it time 0.
• 52:47
  It had action set pieces, but I didn't just care about the
• 52:50
  Doctor, Fitz and Angie. I don't maybe remember all the
• 52:54
  other characters names now, but the the the American General.
• 52:58
  What an evil piece of garbage. You know the other scientists,
• 53:02
  you've got the guy who turns out to be a black hole.
• 53:06
  You know, you've got the guy who's gone with Fitz on the
• 53:10
  expedition and and things like that.
• 53:13
  There were characters in that book who were literally on like
• 53:15
  2 pages who you care about. And when that brutal violence
• 53:20
  happens, when they get shot in the head or whatever, it's like,
• 53:23
  oh, it's shocking because like they were a well drawn character
• 53:26
  and now they're gone. Whereas with this, it's like
• 53:29
  you're with these characters for what, like 200 pages?
• 53:31
  And it's like when they die, it's like, oh, it was that
• 53:34
  person. You just, I just got to check
• 53:36
  back. If you get pages to work out if
• 53:38
  it's this space name person or that space name person, it's
• 53:40
  just. I.
• 53:42
  Do agree with that and they are, yes, but man oh man, those tests
• 53:46
  were just so cool I didn't care. At one point, a man gets an
• 53:50
  enormous spike. Thrust through his chest.
• 53:53
  You know, and the steam of his blood starts smoking into.
• 53:58
  Space it's just so cool I was like I don't care this is great
• 54:02
  this is fucking I wrote it to you fucking chaos murder blood
• 54:06
  massacre. It was great.
• 54:09
  I. Think the next time we do
• 54:12
  beulahs because I know you're going to make us do another one.
• 54:15
  I want to read your audio book of it because you, Joe, you
• 54:22
  because you, I reckon, could interject like a bit of oomph
• 54:28
  and a bit of passion into something that I I've read and
• 54:32
  thought, like, you ever seen the Ferris Bueller's Day Off and,
• 54:34
  you know, the teacher that just says Bueller?
• 54:37
  Bueller. Yeah, for me this.
• 54:40
  Building was kind of. That's it.
• 54:43
  It felt kind of monotone and I'm I'm, I'm legit happy that that
• 54:49
  you got derived a lot of pleasure from this.
• 54:52
  I I I really AM. It's a bit where an enormous
• 54:55
  tentacle comes squeezing out of an iris and the doctor pushes
• 55:00
  the button and it signs off the tentacle it goes flying off
• 55:03
  into. I mean, I just love this shit.
• 55:06
  It's great what you were reading.
• 55:09
  It's great fun. It's pulpy, it's ridiculous,
• 55:12
  it's got no characters. But it was exciting for me.
• 55:18
  I can remember 2 characters and I can remember Del Rey and
• 55:24
  Lysart numbers. I liked the idea of Lysart as
• 55:27
  well. Who was again?
• 55:29
  She was the photographer lady. Oh thank you man.
• 55:32
  I can remember this book. God damn it.
• 55:35
  How do you like it more? I remember and I remember all
• 55:38
  these characterizations. There's a corner of your brain
• 55:41
  that is forever beulis. Now you don't.
• 55:43
  Need to waste any part of your memory, you know, remembering
• 55:46
  Christopher Beulis characters? I'll know that by now.
• 55:49
  But Oh my God, I swear to Christ, I was like, why are we
• 55:53
  going back to Lester and Rhonda? Why?
• 55:57
  Oh yes, let's talk about this. Lester is, I'm just saying, he's
• 56:05
  a whipped gentleman to his wife makes all the decisions.
• 56:12
  He just goes along with what she wants.
• 56:15
  He's the definition of whipped, right?
• 56:17
  Like he just is. And he meets this other lady, I
• 56:22
  don't remember her name. Ingrid yes.
• 56:25
  Ingrid. Oh, all right, Ingrid and.
• 56:30
  It's You're obviously not that fond of Osgood, are you, Luke?
• 56:35
  Find a cringe that she's wearing like 4 different doctors pieces
• 56:39
  of clothing at the same time. Hideous.
• 56:41
  Oh Mike, that's some fan shit and that makes me cringe, sorry.
• 56:48
  I like the idea of the character though.
• 56:49
  But no, no, I don't want to say a Doctor Who fan in in Doctor
• 56:55
  Who. Mind you, I did like that scene
• 56:56
  in the last series of Doctor Who Lux that had that.
• 57:00
  I'll shut up. So you like that scene?
• 57:03
  Oh God bless you. I thought it was, I thought it
• 57:06
  was fun and maybe the bit that made me go that's that's a bit
• 57:12
  suss. Was all three people agreeing
• 57:14
  that Blink was the best episode? Because I'll just ask the three
• 57:19
  of you now what's the best episode of Doctor Who?
• 57:21
  And I'm going to get 3 different answers to mine and you're all
• 57:25
  wrong. It's Inferno.
• 57:27
  Actually, it's kinder or Snake dance.
• 57:28
  But yeah, so you know, no one's going to agree, right?
• 57:32
  So I could see you guys shaking your heads right now.
• 57:35
  Anyway, let's. Camera obscure.
• 57:47
  So Lester is this whipped gentleman.
• 57:51
  His wife is like Miss Bouquet from keeping up appearances,
• 57:57
  right? You know, all she cares is bad
• 58:00
  is her image and stuff. She can't do anything wrong.
• 58:03
  Every it's everybody else's fault.
• 58:05
  All that kind of stuff and and all that.
• 58:09
  I'm like, why are we going back to them when they keep going
• 58:12
  back to the kid? I understand why because there's
• 58:15
  that scene where where he's with these like ghost parents and
• 58:19
  stuff. I'm like, all right, I
• 58:21
  understand that. Cool.
• 58:25
  But then Lester and Ingrid start chatting and it's harmless
• 58:28
  flirting and just harmless, you know, two people engaging with
• 58:33
  each other. Could my could it have led
• 58:35
  somewhere? Yes.
• 58:36
  Did it? No.
• 58:38
  So that's why I say it's just oh, harmless flirting and things
• 58:41
  like that. Well, stuff.
• 58:44
  The problem, I guess arises when it's not Ingrid, but she but
• 58:51
  the, what's her name? Rhonda Plecht sees a ghost woman
• 58:56
  with Leicester a few times and it's like, who's that woman
• 58:59
  you're with? Who's that woman with?
• 59:01
  It's her as a ghost. We find out and.
• 59:09
  She's like Star Trek as well, isn't?
• 59:11
  It Yeah, I'm going to Ingrid about this.
• 59:13
  Ingrid's just like, fuck you, you old bag, and leave your
• 59:17
  husband alone. Oh.
• 59:18
  Yeah, great. I kind of like that.
• 59:22
  I was like, finally someone's telling this annoying character
• 59:25
  what for and then she Ingrid gets stabbed to death and dies.
• 59:31
  In a really forced and terrible manner, it's.
• 59:35
  What the? He cannot write that.
• 59:38
  It's the big seed in that in that little pass to the book,
• 59:41
  and it's terrible. Lester finds out what Rhonda did
• 59:45
  from from Rhonda herself, and Lester beats the shit out of
• 59:49
  her. I'd like I'm that no hyperbole.
• 59:54
  Like teeth are flying, like he beat it to a pulp and then he's
• 1:00:00
  got the shame of that. Hops into an escape pod.
• 1:00:04
  Which gets shot down by the the the Moidians.
• 1:00:08
  Which makes me think of The Phantom Menace all the time.
• 1:00:11
  They're both names medians. Nemoidians.
• 1:00:14
  When are notes? It was so fucking annoying
• 1:00:17
  having to keep spelling out those names.
• 1:00:19
  It's planet A and planet B. Yeah.
• 1:00:21
  So you think that? Think of.
• 1:00:24
  That equally as. Effective.
• 1:00:25
  You think that might be the catalyst for people to start
• 1:00:28
  shooting at one another and stuff like that?
• 1:00:30
  It's not. And that's that's why that's
• 1:00:36
  like the silence. There's nothing, there's nothing
• 1:00:39
  more to do with those, those characters.
• 1:00:42
  They're like Rhonda's beaten up. I don't think she dies.
• 1:00:47
  Dies, you know, see or hear from her again.
• 1:00:50
  Good. Lester's gone.
• 1:00:54
  OK, Well I didn't like what he did to his his wife, but I'm
• 1:00:59
  glad he's gone and Ingrid's gone.
• 1:01:02
  I liked her, but she was annoying me because she was
• 1:01:05
  involved with the other two. Fine, but what did it lead to?
• 1:01:10
  What are you? See, I think I can see where it
• 1:01:15
  why it's in there. I think that scene with the
• 1:01:19
  domestic violence, it did make me think that Steve Cole was
• 1:01:22
  having one of those months where they got shovel brew up your ass
• 1:01:26
  but get you through the office as well.
• 1:01:28
  So we didn't have time to do a really proper depends on editing
• 1:01:31
  job list. Otherwise you might have got
• 1:01:34
  that tongue going as you need to do.
• 1:01:36
  But it's there to kind of reflect the bigger theme of it
• 1:01:39
  because ultimately the novels about cycles of abuse and how
• 1:01:43
  they go round and round of perpetrate themselves.
• 1:01:46
  And that's what that sequence of the way it ends.
• 1:01:49
  It's just this little kind of loop within a book of loops, so
• 1:01:53
  I know what it's doing. I know it's really.
• 1:01:56
  Isn't it? They're going to go round and
• 1:01:58
  around and around doing this again and again and again.
• 1:02:01
  It's horrible. That domestic in a scene with
• 1:02:04
  basically a carry on thing, it's I can see what he's going for,
• 1:02:09
  but this is where I don't think he's quite got the skill to pull
• 1:02:12
  off what he's trying to do you need.
• 1:02:15
  An editor to join Sims. And you got it.
• 1:02:17
  Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, I, I don't think that you
• 1:02:19
  can, I don't think you should play around with those themes.
• 1:02:25
  And the domestic violence of it is just really horrible.
• 1:02:28
  And it comes, I don't know, it's they, they are carry on
• 1:02:33
  caricatures. Like she's just a walking,
• 1:02:35
  shouting bosom. He's this little like weakling
• 1:02:39
  of a man. And Ingrid is like a buxom
• 1:02:42
  block. It's like they're just so paper
• 1:02:44
  thin and it's based in like gross 70s stereotypes of what
• 1:02:51
  women are. And then, like, the plot just
• 1:02:54
  sort of contorts this stuff like that.
• 1:02:56
  Rhonda's stabbing of Ingrid is so unconvincing.
• 1:02:59
  It's stupid. And it's just there to
• 1:03:02
  legitimate him beating the shit out of her.
• 1:03:05
  It's there to make that kind of OK.
• 1:03:08
  And it's just horrible. And it's like this, this is real
• 1:03:13
  stuff that happens to real people.
• 1:03:14
  And it's like, yes, I'm sure that there are wives who break
• 1:03:18
  their husband and. Absolutely there are.
• 1:03:21
  Yes, obviously. But like, I don't know, the
• 1:03:26
  whole thing just made me feel really uncomfortable.
• 1:03:28
  But like, not in like, oh, he's challenging my expectations.
• 1:03:31
  I should feel uncomfortable. It just, it's an inept way of
• 1:03:34
  dealing with these themes and he's not a writer who's equipped
• 1:03:38
  to deal with it. Doctor Who probably isn't the
• 1:03:41
  right medium for that. And it's just like a really sort
• 1:03:45
  of vapid engagement in those themes in order to just sort of
• 1:03:51
  show a woman being beaten up. And I hated it.
• 1:03:56
  I'm I'm coming out of this from completely the opposite.
• 1:03:58
  I know you are just shouldn't this your I I.
• 1:04:00
  Didn't hate it. No, no, I'm not being
• 1:04:02
  contrarian. I Those were my favorite bits of
• 1:04:04
  the entire book. And I loved it for the same
• 1:04:06
  reason I loved the stabbing of Oscar in The Two Doctors in that
• 1:04:10
  it is fucking ridiculous. Operatically ridiculous.
• 1:04:14
  Yeah. And sort of oddly moving at the
• 1:04:17
  same time and completely sick. And I do like being challenged
• 1:04:20
  like that. You're right.
• 1:04:21
  It is icky. It's unpleasant, it's
• 1:04:24
  unconvincing. I don't know, it just made me
• 1:04:27
  feel lots of weird feelings all of the same.
• 1:04:29
  It is a merger because it's. It's so ridiculous, but that's
• 1:04:34
  also, it's also horrible. It's really horrible.
• 1:04:37
  What happens. The bit where he grabs her hair
• 1:04:39
  in the room and that. And you're right.
• 1:04:41
  Should Doctor Who be playing around with those things?
• 1:04:44
  Well, no, but we've had that conversation before and we were
• 1:04:46
  absolutely fine with, you know, poor house murder in the
• 1:04:50
  adventurous of the Henry industry and Joe Grant puking
• 1:04:52
  maggots in rag. So I'm guessing at this point
• 1:04:56
  everything's on the table. Yeah, and you're right, Beulis
• 1:05:00
  is not equipped to. Deal with this.
• 1:05:02
  Maturely and to even write it properly, convincingly.
• 1:05:06
  But did it repulse me? And did it sorry, did it make me
• 1:05:10
  laugh a bit? Yeah, it did.
• 1:05:12
  And I thought that again, is him playing against the expectations
• 1:05:18
  of what you get in a Beulah's book, which is just safe.
• 1:05:21
  I don't think you expect domestic violence, you know,
• 1:05:25
  affairs and just anything, anything going anywhere near
• 1:05:28
  that in a Beulah's book. So every time I kept going back
• 1:05:30
  there, I liked how, you know, it starts off and he meets a woman
• 1:05:34
  and I've been that person in the relationship that's met somebody
• 1:05:38
  else. And I think the line is he felt
• 1:05:41
  happier than he had done in years.
• 1:05:43
  And I've absolutely felt that feeling.
• 1:05:44
  So I think there was the odd moment where he managed to write
• 1:05:47
  this up. Not often, you're right.
• 1:05:50
  Sequence where she killed. So it's so.
• 1:05:52
  Badly done. That could literally be two side
• 1:05:56
  characters from A Next Generation episode and it would
• 1:05:58
  be executed as ineptly as he does it here.
• 1:06:04
  Sequence in the quarters was just horrible, you know, and I
• 1:06:08
  don't mind feeling horrible sometimes when I'm reading a
• 1:06:11
  Doctor Who book. I did think that then him going
• 1:06:14
  off in the shuttle, that would lead to the the spark that would
• 1:06:19
  ignite the war. And it should have been that
• 1:06:21
  issue. It's like, it's like if he'd
• 1:06:22
  have gone there, it would have been what they're trying to do
• 1:06:25
  in like Pyramid at the end of the world, that small event that
• 1:06:29
  lights the fire really, really well and it doesn't connect the
• 1:06:32
  dots there, which is odd because plotting wise this is quite well
• 1:06:36
  done. So I'm not sure what went wrong
• 1:06:38
  there. Maybe what Carl was just so
• 1:06:40
  bored at this point, he'd stop reading and said, yeah, print
• 1:06:42
  it. But no, I, I just an alternative
• 1:06:46
  reading on those scenes is yes. I don't even argue with anything
• 1:06:50
  you guys are saying. It isn't particularly well
• 1:06:52
  handled, but I was engaged with the ickiness of it and maybe
• 1:06:59
  that's reflects badly on me, but I did really like those scenes.
• 1:07:03
  I think the reason I'm OK with, I was going to say whores,
• 1:07:08
  prostitutes and, and and things like that in a Lawrence Miles
• 1:07:12
  book is because I kind of trust him to make it work, you know,
• 1:07:18
  to create a story. In which death doesn't he?
• 1:07:22
  Yeah. I mean, it's literally like an
• 1:07:25
  episode of Keeping Up Appearances where it ends with,
• 1:07:29
  you know, Richard murdering. I mean, it just makes you laugh
• 1:07:34
  to think about. You can.
• 1:07:36
  You can kind of read it as that critique of the sitcom, that
• 1:07:40
  sitcom. I don't think that's no, But the
• 1:07:45
  trouble is he's such a basic bitch, I can't give him the
• 1:07:48
  credit. To do that.
• 1:07:50
  But like, within within the book, yeah, I've been surprised
• 1:07:53
  by that action sequence, that sort of murder sequence.
• 1:07:56
  I've been surprised by the domestic violence.
• 1:07:58
  I don't expect to be surprised by Christopher Pulis.
• 1:08:01
  So it's what what you're saying, like what John was just saying
• 1:08:04
  about it being a critique. I mean, that's kind of what like
• 1:08:06
  the Crooked World is doing, like when it has Squeak biting the
• 1:08:10
  head of the hamster. And like, you could do something
• 1:08:12
  like that with playing with your expectations of these sitcom
• 1:08:15
  stereotypes and then something shocking happens.
• 1:08:17
  And like, that would be a great book, like an, an actual one
• 1:08:20
  where it's doing that and it's examining what's going on with
• 1:08:23
  those. And yeah, that sounds great, but
• 1:08:26
  that's not what's happening. No, it's just I want to, I want
• 1:08:30
  to write an unhappy husband and wife and I'm gonna write like I
• 1:08:35
  feel like he feels like this is great characterisation, but it's
• 1:08:38
  literally pulled from the pages of a of a carry on script.
• 1:08:42
  It does make you question whether he's met a person,
• 1:08:44
  doesn't he? He reminds me of dialogue.
• 1:08:50
  You know, I question whether he's ever spoken before.
• 1:08:53
  He reminds me of Garth Marenghi, who claims that he's written
• 1:08:58
  more books than he's read. Yes.
• 1:09:01
  Oh, beautif. Yeah.
• 1:09:04
  So he's written more Doctor Who books than he's read, I think.
• 1:09:08
  Yeah, he knows writers who use subtext, and they're all
• 1:09:11
  cowards. Cowards.
• 1:09:12
  Did anyone listen to the episode, the interview that he
• 1:09:14
  did on that other podcast? We'll see.
• 1:09:17
  I'll just imagine it's the most passionless talking bloke you
• 1:09:20
  know. Hello.
• 1:09:21
  I wrote some Doctor Who books once they had the Doctor.
• 1:09:24
  Wasn't he assigned that? No.
• 1:09:25
  Oh. Really.
• 1:09:27
  Same God charming. Yeah, Charming.
• 1:09:30
  Well, why didn't he put any of that in his books?
• 1:09:32
  For us, like, like, like adorable, you know, like,
• 1:09:36
  because he's an older, older, gentle.
• 1:09:37
  Like he seems he seemed her own. Yeah.
• 1:09:40
  But for the for the most blood, like the plotting is OK, like
• 1:09:44
  it's quite good. Like it's, it's not awful like
• 1:09:47
  the structure of the story, like apart from the ending, which
• 1:09:51
  we'll get into, I'm sure, but like the actual mystery of the
• 1:09:55
  spaceship and like the way that the warring factions are vying
• 1:09:59
  over it. Like it's a it's a standard
• 1:10:01
  Doctor Who plot. And I feel like there's lots of
• 1:10:04
  books which do it better. Like fear itself is relatively
• 1:10:08
  similar to this and 10 little aliens, which we've done as
• 1:10:11
  well, have the same sort of bones of the story.
• 1:10:14
  And I feel like this sort of plot beats of it are like they
• 1:10:19
  make sense. It's just the getting us there
• 1:10:23
  and the character stuff around it that's not as strong as most
• 1:10:27
  of the other authors who I think were writing for this range.
• 1:10:29
  I even think the way. Oh, sorry, John.
• 1:10:32
  No, no, no. It just made me appreciate kind
• 1:10:35
  of Justin Richard's more because this is what Justin Richard
• 1:10:37
  does, but Justin Richard does it with a a much higher level of
• 1:10:40
  skill. I would say the characterisation
• 1:10:43
  of. Yeah, like, I'm not going to sit
• 1:10:46
  here and say this is great prose.
• 1:10:47
  Jesus Christ. It's so functional for the most
• 1:10:49
  part. I think every now and again he
• 1:10:51
  writes about Go or he gets a good image in, you know, and I'm
• 1:10:54
  like, OK, that's great. More of that, please.
• 1:10:57
  Like that big tentacle, you know, being chopped enough.
• 1:11:01
  But I did like the way, certainly in the last few
• 1:11:04
  chapters, and he did it a lot where he does tiny, like two or
• 1:11:09
  three paragraphs cutting from bit to bit to bit to bit to bit.
• 1:11:11
  So he is building it up. He's giving it some momentum,
• 1:11:14
  you know. If he just needs the force.
• 1:11:16
  In the writing as well, because he certainly knows how to
• 1:11:19
  structure a chapter. And in the first half of the
• 1:11:21
  book. Yeah.
• 1:11:23
  It's blissfully short chapters as well.
• 1:11:25
  I do. I do like a book with short
• 1:11:27
  chapters. Yeah, same.
• 1:11:29
  I read Terminus recently. Did I like it?
• 1:11:31
  Yes. Hey, Stephen Gallagher, put a
• 1:11:34
  fucking chapter in there. There's no chapters.
• 1:11:38
  It's just old pages. I'm like, I need to put a
• 1:11:41
  bookmark in here. I'm going to sleep now.
• 1:11:44
  Yeah, put some chapters in there and don't make them too long.
• 1:11:47
  So I think Justin learned that over time.
• 1:11:50
  If you read some of his first novels, he's got long chapters.
• 1:11:54
  And I know Time 0 is different because he's structured as his
• 1:11:57
  countdown, but as he goes along, I think he tightens his book
• 1:12:00
  books up. That's the other thing I want to
• 1:12:02
  bring up. For someone who's written as
• 1:12:07
  many books as he has, why didn't Christopher Beulus improve?
• 1:12:15
  Because I read the end of war. It's a pretty good debut.
• 1:12:19
  I read Time 0 and I'm like, holy shit is I can say that that's
• 1:12:23
  the same author, but Time 0 is such a better book.
• 1:12:29
  It's faster paced, the characters are more punchy.
• 1:12:33
  I can remember more more things in it.
• 1:12:36
  It's it's just like it feels like there's a lot more more
• 1:12:39
  kind of going on as a confidence and of like, you know what, I've
• 1:12:43
  got this by the time he writes time.
• 1:12:47
  Zero Theatre of War is a superb debut.
• 1:12:50
  I'm not saying it's a bad. It's easily as good as Time 0.
• 1:12:54
  It's a great plot. Theatre of war.
• 1:12:56
  So clever. It's got brackets.
• 1:12:59
  Hell, in it he just jumps from the page.
• 1:13:01
  It's. Got that boring bit on the
• 1:13:02
  spaceship in the middle though. I don't remember that bit.
• 1:13:05
  It's like 300, there's like 200 pages, like 100 pages in the
• 1:13:09
  middle where the plot just stops and it's really, really boring
• 1:13:13
  until they get to the end bit. I would say that as someone who
• 1:13:15
  likes that book and what really likes The Sands of Time Time as
• 1:13:20
  well, but I like Justin's kind of latter period, The Burning
• 1:13:25
  Time, Zero it. Develops.
• 1:13:26
  Yeah. And do.
• 1:13:28
  Like October, corkers get better sometime new.
• 1:13:30
  I think they sort of have a base level of their own competence.
• 1:13:34
  Yeah, talking about does it because Revelation is sundar
• 1:13:38
  complete mess and but until we get to human nature and maybe
• 1:13:41
  Cheryl Avalon, you can see he's massively improved as a writer.
• 1:13:45
  Then he wrote Chauka. I mean, come on.
• 1:13:48
  I I wrote the book on Chauka, so I'm, I'm I.
• 1:13:51
  Wrote no better than all of us. What happened there?
• 1:13:54
  What about Martin Day, the missing adventure of the
• 1:13:57
  Menagerie? Is terrible.
• 1:14:00
  Exactly. There you go.
• 1:14:01
  Michael Mills will tell you that his new series adventure is the
• 1:14:04
  worst thing he's ever read under the Doctor Who logo, but there's
• 1:14:07
  an argument to be made that everybody's up and down.
• 1:14:10
  But what about his his EDA towards the end of the run?
• 1:14:13
  Sleep. Of reason.
• 1:14:14
  Michael Mills is doing a book club on that next.
• 1:14:16
  Week and he hates it. I absolutely adored it.
• 1:14:20
  Me too, me too. Looks like you're going to have
• 1:14:22
  to do another episode on that one, Mr. Joe.
• 1:14:25
  And I think I know three other people who are willing to.
• 1:14:28
  Read Jesus you want to talk about disturbing That opens with
• 1:14:31
  someone splitting their wrists, for God's sakes.
• 1:14:34
  I I hated that one first time round and didn't finish it, so
• 1:14:37
  maybe we should do a. Oh.
• 1:14:39
  Yeah, the amazing thing about that book, Book Joe, is when
• 1:14:42
  when I read The Sleep of Reason, I like I liked Bunker soldiers.
• 1:14:49
  I like the two books he wrote with Keith Topping, but I didn't
• 1:14:55
  necessarily give give him the same kind of trust with
• 1:14:58
  difficult themes and ideas as I say or would it Kate Orman or or
• 1:15:03
  Lauren smiles or something like that.
• 1:15:06
  And yet he managed to do something.
• 1:15:09
  He managed to pull it all together in the sleep of Reason.
• 1:15:12
  And I'm, I'm a believer, I thought, all right, if the
• 1:15:16
  series had continued, I want more Martin Day books.
• 1:15:19
  Absolutely. But we've already said in this
• 1:15:22
  episode, sort of cherry picking our favorite beauticist.
• 1:15:25
  Someone said one right from the start.
• 1:15:26
  Sorcerer's Apprentice. Someone said one right in the
• 1:15:28
  middle city at World's End. We said Imperial Moon was pretty
• 1:15:32
  good for its imagery, so maybe he didn't, or maybe he's had
• 1:15:36
  good days and bad days. He's got a base level of
• 1:15:39
  average, right? I think we all agree on that.
• 1:15:42
  But he can raise his head above the parapet when he wants to.
• 1:15:46
  Yeah, I mean. You know the other thing, The
• 1:15:49
  low. Floor low ceiling writer to me,
• 1:15:53
  Yeah. We.
• 1:15:55
  Yeah, little bit in the middle, that's where he is.
• 1:15:57
  You know that thing in the back of the seat where he says that?
• 1:16:00
  Peter Devil Evans says. This is the baseline.
• 1:16:04
  He's. Got a?
• 1:16:05
  Fucking this is lips. Revenge.
• 1:16:07
  But what I mean is at the end of that book, he's got a afterward
• 1:16:10
  where he goes, look on the end of the books.
• 1:16:12
  Here's your baseline. You can do better than this.
• 1:16:15
  You're probably going to get published.
• 1:16:16
  Please do better than this is what he should I.
• 1:16:18
  Think the actual baseline over time between Virgin and the BBC
• 1:16:24
  books is Christopher Buellis. You know, if you if you're worse
• 1:16:29
  than him, you're. Out.
• 1:16:32
  If you're better than him, you're getting published again.
• 1:16:35
  Maybe that's the question you should ask everybody who's worse
• 1:16:38
  than Christopher Beulis. I mean, we've sort of said
• 1:16:43
  messing and camping at times. I mean, we, we talked about him
• 1:16:47
  as a, a sort of safe pair of hands didn't we have?
• 1:16:50
  Like that's why he got so many books published.
• 1:16:53
  But when you look at how weak he is around the character stuff, I
• 1:16:57
  mean, I think of like Big Finish now and how like there's a lot
• 1:17:00
  of very prolific authors who write for that range.
• 1:17:04
  But when you think about like their safe pairs of hands, it's
• 1:17:07
  like Jonathan Morris and Simon Gary and Eddie Robson and people
• 1:17:10
  where you're like, I see that name, like I know that it's
• 1:17:12
  going to be good. And like the base, their base
• 1:17:16
  level of sort of like business as usual is like good.
• 1:17:20
  Whereas with these books, it's this where yes, he's not, he's
• 1:17:25
  not. As well.
• 1:17:27
  The plot is all right, but the characterisation is advocating
• 1:17:30
  inept. And it's like it feels if you're
• 1:17:34
  making this series of books where you're expecting people to
• 1:17:37
  buy them each month, and you're putting an author like this out
• 1:17:41
  who just has a very big flaw in what they're writing, like
• 1:17:45
  that's just not really good enough.
• 1:17:48
  I didn't object to reading this though, so on the strength of
• 1:17:52
  this book, if this came out in sequence and I'd read it at the
• 1:17:56
  time, I wouldn't have objected to it.
• 1:17:58
  So if if we put up with a book like this every now and again,
• 1:18:03
  so more work. I think you touched on this in
• 1:18:06
  in the group chapter. It was This is the kind of
• 1:18:10
  writer you need who will deliver you a barely publishable or
• 1:18:16
  publishable book on schedule and with minimal editing.
• 1:18:20
  It's. Chippers.
• 1:18:21
  It's. Chippers and RTD, well, we don't
• 1:18:24
  need to script it and it'll be competent.
• 1:18:26
  Yeah, but not. Spectacular.
• 1:18:28
  If you've got that heavy workload, you need this guy.
• 1:18:31
  Just find there, put it out, go. Yeah, I just wish they'd found
• 1:18:34
  someone better. Yeah, me too.
• 1:18:38
  I know you could say stuff about maybe sometimes with Gary
• 1:18:43
  Russell or David Mckinty, but I don't think Christopher Beulas
• 1:18:46
  wrote anything as good as the scales of a Justice Gary,
• 1:18:49
  specially Sanctuary. He's a far worse writer of
• 1:18:53
  Doctor Who books than Christopher Beulas.
• 1:18:56
  I think Beulas has a competence to his writing, to his prose,
• 1:19:02
  that Gary Russell lacks. I haven't read a Gary Russell in
• 1:19:06
  a long time. Oh, coming soon to the hamster
• 1:19:09
  book. I mean, let's do it.
• 1:19:11
  Oh, divided loyalty. Instruments of Darkness starring
• 1:19:14
  Ethan Smythe and Andrew Batty. I watched that.
• 1:19:22
  All right, before, before we move past the kids, I I messaged
• 1:19:30
  you guys. I'm 20 pages from the end.
• 1:19:35
  It was 50. I haven't even seen the word
• 1:19:39
  vendetta that you can yet. What the fuck is going on?
• 1:19:44
  So I'm going to say I'll put you in the middle Joe for this,
• 1:19:49
  because I think you balance the rest of us out.
• 1:19:52
  Maybe I'll start with John, because you read it first ages
• 1:19:55
  ago and then we were like you fuck that when we're reading
• 1:19:58
  time Zero first, get out of here, even though you'd already
• 1:20:00
  read Vertikins children, sorry. You were right, don't worry.
• 1:20:05
  Yeah. What did you think of?
• 1:20:13
  What do you think of what this ship is the like what and the
• 1:20:19
  ending of Vin Derdikins children?
• 1:20:23
  I, I kind of liked the idea of it because he's only, he's only
• 1:20:28
  giving you that thematic link right at the end.
• 1:20:34
  It's, it's a nice idea to do that.
• 1:20:36
  As I said, the eruberous thing, the the bootstrap paradox, it,
• 1:20:40
  it, it creates itself and these people are trapped in this loop
• 1:20:44
  of hatred and anger. So it, it's kind of thematically
• 1:20:49
  and it did, as I said, it made sense of the Rhonda plot line.
• 1:20:53
  So I, I kind of do appreciate that ending where he does kind
• 1:20:57
  of bring all that, all those strands together.
• 1:21:01
  But I think, you know, the, the reference he wanted the Van der
• 1:21:05
  Deakin reference, a get right is 3 words only giving it that at
• 1:21:12
  the end when you needed to go, OK, I can look this up.
• 1:21:15
  That what, what is this? I, I kind of feel you need to
• 1:21:20
  drop a few more hits earlier on because it didn't really make
• 1:21:24
  sense of the monsters to me either.
• 1:21:27
  It's got, Oh yeah, they've been out of their human form so long,
• 1:21:29
  they're just losing all their faults.
• 1:21:31
  Really. Where the fuck does that come
• 1:21:32
  from? Even in this kind of loop, you
• 1:21:35
  need something to make sense and it's just kind of it, it's a
• 1:21:39
  hand wave line that he gives to it.
• 1:21:41
  I think of they've been here this long that, you know,
• 1:21:44
  they've lost their minds, they've lost their form,
• 1:21:46
  etcetera. So I'd love what he's trying to
• 1:21:50
  do with it, but I again, I think either needs another edit to
• 1:21:56
  tighten that kind of bit up to make it most.
• 1:21:59
  I think just in when he was editing it would have absolutely
• 1:22:03
  tightened the logic on this and made something actually really
• 1:22:05
  good out of this as an editor. He would have made that point
• 1:22:09
  between Rhonda and Lester and the war, wouldn't they?
• 1:22:13
  He would. Have joined, yeah.
• 1:22:16
  And he'd have gone as well. Rhonda.
• 1:22:18
  That though that murder scene, that domestic, right?
• 1:22:21
  Rewrite that so it makes sense. Rewrite that aloud a bit so it's
• 1:22:25
  not as absolutely brutal and graphic because it's not a place
• 1:22:30
  this range goes in this book. You can fit it in in me.
• 1:22:34
  Brad's getting those pages in from Paul Mars.
• 1:22:36
  He's going, oh, Oh yeah, just print Blue list.
• 1:22:39
  I want to read. This, this is what I was
• 1:22:41
  thinking. Put Paul Mars on social media.
• 1:22:46
  He put up a letter from Russell T Davis about having read The
• 1:22:48
  Scarlet Empress and went Oh yeah, thank fuck, because it's
• 1:22:51
  all those just like bland books about planets and generic races.
• 1:22:56
  It kills emit. You know you've killed the
• 1:22:58
  boring bits in them. You've read Belton.
• 1:23:00
  Best haven't. You God, Yeah, sadly. 230 pages.
• 1:23:09
  And, and you know what? It feels like 400 and fucking 50
• 1:23:12
  at least. Yeah, Mortimer man.
• 1:23:14
  What? What happened?
• 1:23:16
  Yeah, but yeah, love the ideas, but the execution, just this guy
• 1:23:22
  just is not quite the guy who has the skill to do with.
• 1:23:26
  But that's Doctor Who to AT though, isn't it?
• 1:23:29
  It's like I don't think any of us have the talent OR I don't
• 1:23:33
  mean talent in a derogatory. We don't have the resources or
• 1:23:37
  anything to quite pull this off. Fuck it, let's get we're going
• 1:23:42
  to do it anyway I can. I can respect.
• 1:23:44
  That yeah, I can appreciate that book on that level.
• 1:23:47
  Absolutely. It is his most ambitious book, I
• 1:23:50
  think. What about you, Andrew?
• 1:23:53
  The ending. Yeah, I I liked thematically
• 1:24:00
  where the ending one in when in terms of like these sparring
• 1:24:05
  factions who can't see eye to eye and are just going around in
• 1:24:09
  circles and that's generating this whole situation like that
• 1:24:12
  kind of makes sense. But the actual the ship coming
• 1:24:16
  out of nowhere just doesn't make any fucking sense and it's
• 1:24:20
  really frustrating. So the the book, so this
• 1:24:23
  mysterious spaceship, there's a portal between different
• 1:24:26
  hyperspace junctions has been found by some aliens and it's
• 1:24:32
  the same ship at two different points in time.
• 1:24:34
  Like, fine, that, that's, that's all fine.
• 1:24:36
  But it then it, it doesn't explain where the ship came
• 1:24:40
  from. And then the explanation that
• 1:24:42
  comes at the end is that because they're caught in this time
• 1:24:44
  loop, it's been generated by the desires of the two different
• 1:24:48
  warring factions and created itself out of nothing because
• 1:24:51
  they wished so hard for this thing that would help them win
• 1:24:54
  the war. Magic.
• 1:24:56
  It's magic and it like there's no starting point.
• 1:24:58
  It just doesn't make sense. Like they weren't in the,
• 1:25:02
  they're in the fight because of the thing, but if the thing
• 1:25:05
  didn't exist until they were in the fight, where did it come
• 1:25:07
  from? It just doesn't make sense.
• 1:25:10
  And it's really frustrating because yeah, the themes make
• 1:25:14
  sense, but the actual sort of final drawing together in a, in
• 1:25:20
  a plot doesn't make sense. And it's a, it's literally on
• 1:25:24
  like a page 179 of 279 of 280 where the doctors like, Oh yes,
• 1:25:30
  there's a magic ship that they wished for.
• 1:25:32
  And so it's very disappointing. And then I feel like the Vander
• 1:25:36
  deck and stuff again on the on the last page where the doctors
• 1:25:40
  like, oh, Vander deck and he was the Flying Dutchman and they are
• 1:25:44
  the Flying Dutchman drifting through space.
• 1:25:46
  And it's like, OK, that's really pretentious.
• 1:25:50
  And you've made like, again, it's like a Star Trek title,
• 1:25:52
  isn't it? And it's, yeah, I like it.
• 1:25:57
  It's just annoying. Yeah.
• 1:26:00
  So I felt I made it annoyed by the ending.
• 1:26:03
  I know I've been negative, but I think that the time loopiness of
• 1:26:07
  it is kind of cool. And the fact that the doctor
• 1:26:10
  saved some people and then they get to kind of begin again.
• 1:26:13
  Yeah, that is. That's cool.
• 1:26:18
  I wanted the fucking ship mystery to be cool and it sucked
• 1:26:24
  big time. I fucking hated it.
• 1:26:27
  I. Hate yourself on this.
• 1:26:30
  I thought it was fucking Mega Stanks and I was like, you
• 1:26:35
  always see you for real. I fucking.
• 1:26:40
  But you know, it's as if to me, it's just like, you know how
• 1:26:45
  sometimes you'll get a Big Finish extra, right?
• 1:26:48
  And it'll be the producer David Richardson would is the guy
• 1:26:53
  who's like, hey, I want a Doctor Who story that combines like
• 1:26:56
  this with this, or here's the gist or an idea for a Doctor Who
• 1:27:01
  story. Go right of it.
• 1:27:05
  Maybe Buell has sort of done that because I reckon like if
• 1:27:08
  you gave this same kind of story to a better writer, it might
• 1:27:14
  have actually banged and maybe that rider could have been like,
• 1:27:18
  no, we're not doing magic space cylinder and we're not doing
• 1:27:20
  that. I've got this idea instead how
• 1:27:22
  we do that, you know. I think that would work a lot
• 1:27:27
  better. If you asked him for a horse
• 1:27:29
  riding a man, he would give you a man riding a horse.
• 1:27:35
  That's so disappointing. I.
• 1:27:37
  Do need to tell? You, Luke, Unfortunately
• 1:27:39
  somebody was doing a book club the other day and was going on
• 1:27:41
  about horses loads and he went, Oh my God, he goes.
• 1:27:44
  You probably never had anyone go banging on about horses this
• 1:27:47
  much on a book club. All right.
• 1:27:48
  Well, you'd be surprised as sort of perverts I know, actually.
• 1:27:55
  It was you I was referring to. Oh my God, the best running joke
• 1:28:03
  in 1000 episodes. Oh my goodness.
• 1:28:08
  Yeah, like these ghost scenes can turn into anything.
• 1:28:12
  None of them weren't. Yeah, it was a horse riding, man
• 1:28:15
  riding. Yeah, we get it.
• 1:28:17
  So Joe, what? What?
• 1:28:21
  You don't seem to mind so much. I know you're not going to say
• 1:28:24
  it's like a 10 out of 10 or anything, but.
• 1:28:27
  Jesus Christ, I don't have many. Critical faculties, But I'm more
• 1:28:30
  than that. I didn't really.
• 1:28:33
  I liked the last four or five chapters.
• 1:28:36
  I thought it came to a really climactic end.
• 1:28:38
  The war goes off and you get great fabulous bits like this.
• 1:28:42
  Whether it had been a Nymozion or what they called a Mindian
• 1:28:46
  ship was now impossible to tell. The blazing massive wreckage
• 1:28:50
  across the path of the derelict broke up into a dozen lesser
• 1:28:55
  fragments. The silent Avatar struck the
• 1:28:58
  central tower when ships were crashing into the derelict.
• 1:29:02
  Bendix felt his suit shred and disintegrate around him.
• 1:29:06
  Fireballs blasted him into space.
• 1:29:08
  Rexton kicking and screaming down the well of the central
• 1:29:12
  shaft. I mean, I just love all this
• 1:29:14
  bullshit, you know? It's so exciting.
• 1:29:16
  It's all out war, it's ships colliding, it's character being
• 1:29:20
  killed, and and it's the Doctor desperately trying to improvise
• 1:29:24
  throughout all of this as well. I really liked all of that.
• 1:29:26
  In the climax where Sam goes, he's going, no, we can't
• 1:29:29
  interfere as a perpetual loop. And then Sam goes, no, you're
• 1:29:32
  thinking about it. I can tell it goes, actually,
• 1:29:34
  yeah, I am. That's true.
• 1:29:35
  Let's see what we can do and all of that.
• 1:29:37
  If that was on the screen, man, we were cutting between action
• 1:29:40
  and the Doctor and Sam, you'd love it.
• 1:29:42
  You just love it. I think it's just how it's
• 1:29:45
  written mostly. But I did think because he was
• 1:29:48
  doing these sort of short scenes, it was building up great
• 1:29:52
  pace. And she's right, a fucking
• 1:29:54
  stupid explanation for the ship. I mean, for God's sakes, Bing,
• 1:29:59
  it just came into existence because.
• 1:30:01
  He, Russell T Davies, was reading this and thought that's
• 1:30:03
  a great idea for a companion's back story.
• 1:30:06
  Do you imagine he read this, you know, before starting RTD 2, you
• 1:30:09
  know, oh, this is wonderful stuff.
• 1:30:11
  You know, we'll do this. But the idea of the perpetual
• 1:30:15
  loop of greed, you know, of firing that shot causing a war
• 1:30:20
  where sort of nobody wins and everybody winds up being haunted
• 1:30:24
  by themselves in a perpetual loop, sort of showing the mad
• 1:30:27
  futility of actually going to war.
• 1:30:30
  I like that idea a lot. And I think that's a really
• 1:30:34
  satisfying ending to a sci-fi mystery.
• 1:30:36
  So the sci-fi mystery prevents is shitty dumb. 60s hippie
• 1:30:41
  bullshit but. Because even like.
• 1:30:43
  Star Trek. Beautifully drawn on the cover,
• 1:30:46
  The Derelict turns out to be a massive stupid Mcguffin, but it
• 1:30:51
  does also turn out to be the catalyst to what is actually a
• 1:30:54
  really great twist that shows that, unfortunately, Paul,
• 1:30:58
  Lester and Rhonda are going to be beating and killing for the
• 1:31:02
  rest of their lives. Horrible.
• 1:31:05
  Yeah, the apes, doesn't it, when they turn up at the devastated
• 1:31:08
  planet of like, Oh no, hyperspace gateway to web to our
• 1:31:12
  planet all along. My no, I'm at the same age.
• 1:31:16
  Andrew, you know, but. The Simpsons get amused to it.
• 1:31:21
  You're right, conceptually I thought, yeah, it it is very
• 1:31:24
  satisfying and a lot of Doctor Who.
• 1:31:26
  But it was kind of ending really pony ways, right, Paul Mars
• 1:31:30
  didn't even bother to write an ending at the end of The Blue
• 1:31:32
  Angel. For God's sake, settle.
• 1:31:34
  We'll get there. It is, I mean Briggs wrote, an
• 1:31:39
  end into the Dalek generation we all wish we could do.
• 1:31:42
  That one was Jelly, Jelly blobs, wasn't it?
• 1:31:44
  And a great big toy or something.
• 1:31:46
  Jeez. Yeah, you remember.
• 1:31:48
  Actually, yeah, I bought that. I've read that now.
• 1:31:51
  It's obviously now. You're reconsidering Christopher
• 1:31:54
  Beulis, aren't you? Yeah, I am actually.
• 1:31:56
  Yeah, I thought. You might.
• 1:32:00
  It is above the worst Doctor Who book ever written.
• 1:32:02
  I'll I'll say this, if it was if this Van Dekker's Children was
• 1:32:06
  an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, it would be a good
• 1:32:11
  to great episode of TNG with great shocks and surprises and
• 1:32:14
  action. But it would also be one of
• 1:32:17
  those sort of blandly directed ones where they forget to move
• 1:32:20
  the camera all the time because it would be executed very
• 1:32:24
  moderately with. With the main characters acting
• 1:32:27
  as the plot needs and. But we've read far worse than
• 1:32:31
  this. Far, far.
• 1:32:33
  Worse than this, Troy would say something dumb, like, I feel
• 1:32:36
  like these ghosts are angry. Yeah, they just like, shredded
• 1:32:40
  some people on the the thing. Yeah, they're they're angry.
• 1:32:42
  Of course they are, in my typical Troy fashion.
• 1:32:45
  Invite you gentlemen to reread The Doctor Trap and then
• 1:32:48
  consider Decker's children again.
• 1:32:51
  Yeah, Peter David's vendetta booking, his next generation
• 1:32:55
  booking. This if you've read that Joe's
• 1:32:57
  don't know. Nah.
• 1:32:58
  I haven't read Star Trek books. No.
• 1:33:01
  I've wasted a lot of my life, you know, but not that much.
• 1:33:04
  Peter David's ones are worth. That's it.
• 1:33:07
  I would say if you if you want something that's set not far out
• 1:33:12
  of from the motion picture Ex Machina is by Christopher
• 1:33:16
  Bennett is a really good Star Trek book.
• 1:33:19
  It won't change your life, but yeah, it's it's fucking good.
• 1:33:24
  It's really good Ex Machina the. Second, somebody says anything
• 1:33:27
  like I'm recuplicating the phase modulators, I will be out of the
• 1:33:31
  book. Unfortunately, I know that's
• 1:33:32
  going to happen on Page 1. Surprised you're a Star Trek fan
• 1:33:36
  of the TV show then. Coupling everything Jeffrey's
• 1:33:39
  tubing. This and fucking subspace
• 1:33:42
  anomaly. Why Andrew's so happy, I
• 1:33:44
  couldn't say. He doesn't have any of this in
• 1:33:45
  his life. Yeah, Joe, Joe's faking his love
• 1:33:49
  of Star Trek for that podcast. Well, I've got to hang out with
• 1:33:51
  Nathan somehow. He is.
• 1:33:53
  He hasn't even come up with a time damn thing.
• 1:33:56
  Yeah, no. Shocking.
• 1:33:58
  People still listen. All right, so the last question
• 1:34:03
  I have for all of you gentlemen, it was posed by Joe and I
• 1:34:07
  thought it was a fucking great question.
• 1:34:11
  And that is what are some books that might be considered by
• 1:34:17
  other readers, slash fandom in general, I guess, that are mid
• 1:34:22
  that you like. I thought it was.
• 1:34:24
  I thought it was fantastic. I won't be a prick about it.
• 1:34:28
  John, do you want to go first? But because my immediate
• 1:34:33
  thoughts on this were the mid ranges tended to be the past
• 1:34:36
  Doctor and EDA, but it's because so I dodged those.
• 1:34:39
  So I've gone for stuff from new adventures from the EDA's.
• 1:34:43
  So I'll go in chronological order because I didn't put them
• 1:34:45
  in an order. I will go first with the
• 1:34:47
  Dimension Riders, because you can at least tell from the prose
• 1:34:52
  and the characterization that this is a guy who can write,
• 1:34:56
  that this is a guy who can he's going to have a decent careers
• 1:34:59
  wrote. There's one moment which I
• 1:35:01
  remember craking and picking out in his review with DWM.
• 1:35:05
  One of these futuristic soldiers is running around Oxford stops
• 1:35:08
  and looks in a bookshop window, and it's just a lovely little
• 1:35:12
  bit of writing that you wish more of the the books had done
• 1:35:16
  more the little character bits that make a book sing.
• 1:35:19
  So I think this book, it's not yo God, it's not a conundrum,
• 1:35:25
  it's not a human nature. That's just this nice, really
• 1:35:29
  well written book among that's not all the grim dark of the
• 1:35:34
  early days. It's someone who's serious about
• 1:35:37
  the writing, who's not just writing it because they go
• 1:35:39
  Doctor Who should be like this. It's a really solid, well
• 1:35:42
  crafted Doctors of Adventure with a fucking banging.
• 1:35:45
  Cover as well. Oh dude, that's one of the best
• 1:35:49
  covers there is. Oh my goodness, Joe, what about
• 1:35:54
  you? I'm making this up on the fly,
• 1:35:57
  but I would like to put forward Shakedown by Terence Dicks,
• 1:36:02
  which is it's me doing every single time because it's just a
• 1:36:06
  trad Doctor Who book. And we're sort of slipping in
• 1:36:09
  the the Dreamwatch video in two chapters in the middle and it is
• 1:36:14
  desperately sort of improvising something around it.
• 1:36:17
  Fuck, he's having so much fun writing it.
• 1:36:19
  He's got the mega city and Garshak, the intelligent Ogron,
• 1:36:23
  you know, and Chris and Ros on on the run from the serial
• 1:36:27
  killer Bernice on the crystal planet, you know, and the the
• 1:36:31
  doctor chucked in a prison. And it's all your sort of base
• 1:36:34
  level Terran sticks cliches, but you.
• 1:36:36
  Can just tell he loved. Right in it, and we done Warm
• 1:36:40
  Uncle recently. And that's all of Terence's
• 1:36:43
  worst instincts in one book. Shakedown is all of his best
• 1:36:46
  instincts in one book. And he's never going to write a
• 1:36:49
  new adventure that's going to be one of the best of the best
• 1:36:52
  because he's Terence, right? He does meet him potatoes Doctor
• 1:36:55
  Who, but it's a great ride. That Ogron turns up in Beneath
• 1:37:00
  novel as well, I think mean streets.
• 1:37:01
  That's right. I've done already.
• 1:37:03
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was fun as well.
• 1:37:08
  That was Terrence doing film noir.
• 1:37:10
  That was very fun. He's.
• 1:37:11
  Having he's having, it's like blood harvest.
• 1:37:13
  That's his, kind of. Passion.
• 1:37:15
  Oh yeah, the crime stuff. What about you, Andrew?
• 1:37:20
  Yeah, I was just trying to think of like books that I've read
• 1:37:24
  that just, I thought were all right, which is sort of the
• 1:37:28
  definition of mid. So the first one I've gone for
• 1:37:32
  is the Silent Stars Go By, which is a 11th Doctor book, which was
• 1:37:40
  part of that reprint that they did for the 50th anniversary,
• 1:37:47
  which had a very pretty cover, was part of that set.
• 1:37:49
  I had the whole set. I think I decided, oh, I want to
• 1:37:51
  read an 11th Doctor book one day.
• 1:37:53
  Pulled that one off the shelf and it's a run around with some
• 1:37:57
  Ice Warriors and it was fine and I couldn't tell you a single
• 1:38:02
  thing about the plot. Thinking this is all right and I
• 1:38:05
  read in it. Read it in about two days.
• 1:38:07
  It was a hardback, wasn't it? Originally?
• 1:38:09
  I think it was. It was at the same time.
• 1:38:11
  That yeah, yeah. Coming of Terrafiles and harvest
• 1:38:16
  of oh we we love ice and harvest of time.
• 1:38:19
  Yeah, I think it was meant to be one of those like ones for
• 1:38:21
  grown-ups, like to distinguish it from the new series
• 1:38:24
  Adventures, but didn't really feel different in any way, apart
• 1:38:28
  from maybe being a little bit longer.
• 1:38:30
  But it was OK. Well, the first one I chose was
• 1:38:36
  APDA Science Fiction by Chris Boucher.
• 1:38:42
  I don't hate last. I don't.
• 1:38:43
  I haven't read Match of the Day, but I've read the other three.
• 1:38:50
  Last Man Running's fine course, Mark is better than that, and
• 1:38:56
  science fiction is better than the other two.
• 1:38:58
  No one really talks about it, so I guess everyone thinks it's
• 1:39:01
  either really bad or kind of mid or something like that.
• 1:39:05
  It's mostly a character piece. This is this is a decent story
• 1:39:09
  there too, but it it's the writer of Leela creating like a
• 1:39:15
  fear or something that scares the piss out of her, which is
• 1:39:18
  really cool. That's really solid
• 1:39:22
  characterization for the 4th Doctor as well.
• 1:39:25
  Everything I would say is there's too many uses of the
• 1:39:29
  word bitch. And that's, that's it.
• 1:39:35
  I couldn't praise or criticize it any more than that because
• 1:39:39
  it's been a while since I've read it, but I remember not
• 1:39:42
  expecting, I expected the same level I got from the first two.
• 1:39:47
  You know, a decent solid Chris Batcher, Doctor Who, Tom and
• 1:39:53
  Leigh, the book instead, I thought it was pretty good.
• 1:39:56
  So yeah, science fiction for me. John, what's your second choice?
• 1:40:01
  I'm going to go to the A's. I'm going to go with Simon
• 1:40:05
  Messinger and I'm not going to go for the Infinity Race, don't
• 1:40:08
  worry. I'm going with the Face Eater
• 1:40:11
  because I think it's I think Simon Messinger had seen 7 and
• 1:40:16
  he wanted a little bit of that. So it's this really nicely done,
• 1:40:20
  warish kind of Doctor Who science fiction thriller with a
• 1:40:26
  really horrific central concept at the start, which he really
• 1:40:32
  absolutely makes the most of and comes up with a a good
• 1:40:37
  explanation. And like Chris brutally is in
• 1:40:39
  this one, it's not magic. So I and it's one of those kind
• 1:40:44
  of ones. I think it's just before it is
• 1:40:46
  just before Fitz comes along looking at because I think the
• 1:40:49
  tank is the next booking series. So this one yeah, it's it's kind
• 1:40:54
  of had this potential be it's really generic space colony
• 1:40:57
  stuff, but he's gone. Then the noir elements makes it
• 1:41:02
  a really kind of, I wouldn't say memorable, but this engaging,
• 1:41:07
  the kind of dark and disturbing colony.
• 1:41:10
  It's maybe what, you know, the the NHS were trying to do with
• 1:41:12
  the grim dark. But it's kind of nice short and
• 1:41:15
  it's got no impact. But I really enjoyed that one
• 1:41:20
  and you know, I said he can be terrible, but this one I think
• 1:41:24
  is him really nicely edited and down and short and and a nice
• 1:41:31
  solid got. The one where the man sort of
• 1:41:35
  pressing his face up against. That's the one.
• 1:41:38
  All that, yeah. Just a great couple.
• 1:41:40
  Wrap filter. Yes.
• 1:41:44
  Looks like Rover from the prisoners, like pressing against
• 1:41:46
  his face or something. Yeah, yeah, yes, Joe, what's
• 1:41:50
  your second choice? Hope by Mark Clapham.
• 1:41:54
  Which I think of that book. I love that book as well, but I
• 1:41:56
  think it's considered to be sort of fairly average in the run.
• 1:42:03
  But I think it's a great planet that Mark Clapham creates.
• 1:42:07
  I mean, in no way depicted on that weird gay disco cover.
• 1:42:10
  I don't know what is going on with those men standing in.
• 1:42:13
  That like the gay disco. Weird are in it.
• 1:42:17
  I don't think it happens at any point in the book.
• 1:42:19
  What's going on there? With a brilliant villain in
• 1:42:22
  Silver. Silver, yeah.
• 1:42:24
  And a wonderful exploration of Angie.
• 1:42:27
  And you know how we love Angie around these parts.
• 1:42:30
  Yeah. So like, I don't think it's any
• 1:42:32
  great shakes with the books around there.
• 1:42:33
  You know, you've got City of the Dead, adventurous, Henrietta St.
• 1:42:37
  and Acrophobia, like big, big hitters.
• 1:42:40
  But it is a really great character examination of Angie.
• 1:42:44
  And it actually takes her from the Angie who lost Dave to the
• 1:42:49
  Angie who's on board for a little while.
• 1:42:53
  I mean, that's the base standard of the books at that time.
• 1:42:55
  And if that's your base standard of mine.
• 1:42:58
  Yes, Oh my goodness, Andrew, what's your, what's your second
• 1:43:03
  choice? Yeah, my other two are ones
• 1:43:06
  which I read when I was young, so sort of like just because
• 1:43:12
  they were important to me, I guess, like have just stuck with
• 1:43:14
  me as the first one is of that ilk is The Murder Game by Steve
• 1:43:21
  Lyons, which I feel like we all love Steve Lyons.
• 1:43:24
  But I think maybe that's like the one that's at the bottom of
• 1:43:26
  people's lists when it comes to his books because most of the
• 1:43:30
  other ones are quite ambitious or have like a big central idea.
• 1:43:34
  But this is just sort of a straight Doctor Who story of
• 1:43:38
  people on a space station being killed and big stomping aliens
• 1:43:44
  coming and taking over the the ship.
• 1:43:46
  So it's like a very sort of standard Doctor Who themes, but
• 1:43:50
  I just loved it when I was a kid and I loved like the
• 1:43:53
  characterisation is really good and the selations, the sort of
• 1:43:58
  shark monsters in it are a really good Doctor Who monster
• 1:44:01
  and have quite a unique back story.
• 1:44:06
  And it's one that I've kind of gone back to as like, Doctor Who
• 1:44:08
  comfort reading when I need something because I just know
• 1:44:11
  that I'll always really enjoy that one.
• 1:44:15
  So yeah, like the bottom of most people's list when it comes to
• 1:44:17
  Steve Lyons, but fairly near the top when it comes to me.
• 1:44:21
  And also it's got Venom Polly in it and I love them.
• 1:44:26
  I think that looks great and you've got the 2nd Doctor
• 1:44:29
  playing dress ups and that as well now.
• 1:44:31
  I think it's a great time. My second one is an EDA.
• 1:44:36
  It's reminds me of like a like a band that comes out with this
• 1:44:41
  amazing first album. I'm looking at that you The
• 1:44:45
  Stone Roses. And then their second album
• 1:44:47
  comes out and everyone's kind of hyped for it and it's not very
• 1:44:52
  well received, even though I still think that album's pretty
• 1:44:55
  good. The second coming, that was the
• 1:44:57
  first one, but I don't hate it. But Steve Emerson had a really
• 1:45:03
  good book with Casualties of War.
• 1:45:07
  He's got another book coming out.
• 1:45:08
  What's it going to be? And I feel like dark progeny.
• 1:45:11
  Everyone's just like, Oh yeah, fine, moving on, OK.
• 1:45:16
  Or they just didn't like it. This.
• 1:45:19
  Why not? This shouldn't surprise any of
• 1:45:22
  you at this point, but I'm a fan of the Saywood era of Doctor Who
• 1:45:27
  do a podcast that covers that covers pretty much the first
• 1:45:31
  half of it all the time. I'm not shocked about the news,
• 1:45:36
  I'm just shocked about. That you're a fan of that era?
• 1:45:41
  Well, you know, 2/3 of my podcast is say, Wardian, so
• 1:45:48
  there's no escaping it. And I like the bakery as well.
• 1:45:51
  So yeah, what can you do? This feels like a book straight
• 1:45:57
  out of the kind of kind of that would have been it's it's
• 1:46:04
  channeling that's kind of say with vibe you've got a.
• 1:46:07
  Big city. Sized mining thing, mining this
• 1:46:11
  planet. The planet has some some dark
• 1:46:13
  secrets on it. The mining company is greedy and
• 1:46:16
  evil and there's like all this kind of stuff, but what I think
• 1:46:21
  makes up for what might be like a cliched, say, Wardian kind of
• 1:46:27
  plot. It's just the really good
• 1:46:29
  characterization of the Doctor and, and Fitz and and and Angie.
• 1:46:35
  I think they're really good in it and I know it.
• 1:46:39
  It was a book I wasn't expecting too much of, I guess, from what
• 1:46:45
  I heard. But when I read it, it was right
• 1:46:48
  up my alley. And when I reread it a year or
• 1:46:51
  two ago, I enjoyed it even more. So yes, that progeny is my my
• 1:46:57
  #2, I said. You guys are all quite like
• 1:47:00
  fucked up progeny. Dark progeny.
• 1:47:05
  Yeah, I haven't read it so long I can't remember.
• 1:47:07
  I've been quite moved about the woman again, the woman who loses
• 1:47:11
  her child. There was some quite moving
• 1:47:13
  passages, isn't it? No, it's I think it was good
• 1:47:18
  enough to warrant a third book by Steve Emerson, but we never
• 1:47:21
  got one and he never got. Called the Crooked World, Luke,
• 1:47:24
  make your choice. Crooked World.
• 1:47:26
  Sorry. Sorry.
• 1:47:27
  Steve Emerson. There's only room for one Steve
• 1:47:29
  here, and he's a fucking lie. And get out of here all right.
• 1:47:40
  How many pro bases does Luke have going?
• 1:47:45
  He's a lover, not a fighter man. He loves fighting as well.
• 1:47:49
  He's got a wrestling podcast. Yes, lover and a fighter.
• 1:47:54
  He's got it all covered. That's.
• 1:47:56
  Right, cover all the bases. We got the thing about centaurs
• 1:48:01
  as well, I mean. Lots going on over in that
• 1:48:03
  corner. What's your third pick, John?
• 1:48:08
  I have gone again to the EDA's and slightly for him but this is
• 1:48:13
  host interference because I've gone with Frontier World by
• 1:48:17
  Peter Ancholidis. I know Casal is not a great
• 1:48:21
  favorite but this is kind of Doctor Who as corporate
• 1:48:26
  infiltration. I completely forgotten until Ian
• 1:48:29
  Martin asked me to do it for his podcast.
• 1:48:31
  But I've forgotten how much fun it is watching Fit and
• 1:48:36
  Compassion as basically these comically terrible infiltrated
• 1:48:40
  to a corporation. It's comedy for 140 pages.
• 1:48:45
  There's a terrible bit in the middle where it devolves into a
• 1:48:48
  kind of a hike across territory. But it's got this nice kind of
• 1:48:53
  eco plot, and Fit and Compassion just have this brilliant
• 1:48:57
  relationship in it. You know, I think Fitz is great
• 1:49:01
  as this. Yeah.
• 1:49:02
  Is this great incompetent guy who's always slightly out of his
• 1:49:05
  depth. And Compassion is almost this
• 1:49:08
  Angie figure in this, you know, the the one who's just basically
• 1:49:12
  look at him and going, oh, for fuck's sake.
• 1:49:17
  And you know, and they caught you with the alias Frank and
• 1:49:19
  Nancy Sinatra. That's so fit.
• 1:49:21
  It's perfect. It's so beautifully
• 1:49:24
  characterized. Fitz and compassion and I just
• 1:49:27
  forgotten all those elements, you know, and I said it is a
• 1:49:31
  book. I'll go, yeah, maybe you didn't
• 1:49:32
  need that section of it all. You're trying to get you to the
• 1:49:34
  work out there, but it but the bits that are really good and it
• 1:49:38
  really sink. So it's kind of it, it reaches
• 1:49:41
  mid by being both great and a bit dull in the middle.
• 1:49:45
  So it's a nice mix. So for me.
• 1:49:48
  Best use of an axe ever in a Doctor Who book.
• 1:49:51
  Isn't it? Oh God yes.
• 1:49:52
  It's so fucking brutal. In fact, it just goes to show
• 1:49:57
  how quickly if this is mid, you know, in the sand period, the
• 1:50:03
  fact that Frontier Wells is sort of considered mid in the Fitz
• 1:50:06
  compassion period, it shows you how quickly things are on the
• 1:50:10
  rise, isn't it from there? Yeah.
• 1:50:13
  Oh, wow. Joe, what?
• 1:50:14
  What's your second choice? Oh, I wanted to choose a new
• 1:50:17
  series adventure because everybody thinks they're mid and
• 1:50:20
  I'm the more I explore them, the the more I'm finding to enjoy.
• 1:50:24
  And one that I think sort of skipped by and I just don't
• 1:50:27
  understand why they didn't do more of this sort of thing.
• 1:50:31
  Tying it in directly with the TV series is the story of Martha by
• 1:50:35
  Dan Abner. It's such a great idea.
• 1:50:37
  Let's tell that story of her travelling the Earth.
• 1:50:41
  We'll have a running storyline going through it, and then we'll
• 1:50:44
  tell individual stories of her and the Doctor told by different
• 1:50:49
  authors of the stories she's telling to people as she's
• 1:50:53
  travelling the Earth. Really clever premise.
• 1:50:55
  You've got a short story by Rob Shearman in there.
• 1:50:57
  That's always a sign of quality. There's a couple in there that
• 1:51:01
  are less good. But the running story written by
• 1:51:04
  Dan Abner, it's surprisingly brutal.
• 1:51:06
  What time is. I mean, there's the bit where
• 1:51:08
  Japan literally is on fire at the end of a chapter.
• 1:51:13
  It's really horrific. So yeah, I just don't hear
• 1:51:17
  anyone talking about it at all. So the story of Martha, please,
• 1:51:20
  Because yeah, we should cover that at some point.
• 1:51:25
  I love me a bit of Martha. Also give me that one with with
• 1:51:30
  Yaz and the gang away from the Doctor for a year or two in
• 1:51:36
  flux. I will read the shit out of that
• 1:51:38
  please and thank you. Give me that.
• 1:51:40
  I think that's the next charity anthology after the 8th Doctor
• 1:51:43
  one. Oh no, just do another eighth of
• 1:51:46
  the one. Why not both?
• 1:51:54
  The year, the year I finally finished off the EDA's and I'm
• 1:51:57
  like, oh, there's no more new ones to read.
• 1:52:01
  Fucking boom party. Like it's 1998.
• 1:52:03
  Hell yeah. Coming soon to our hamster.
• 1:52:07
  Book. Oh my God, yes.
• 1:52:09
  I can't wait. What's your third choice,
• 1:52:11
  Andrew? Yeah, my third choice is also
• 1:52:16
  like a one that I read as a kid, but it's actually like the first
• 1:52:20
  long form Doctor Who book that I read.
• 1:52:23
  So it's the first one that wasn't like a target that was
• 1:52:26
  like Apda or Ana or whatever. And that is Dancing the Code by
• 1:52:31
  Paul Leppard. I did think of that one, yeah.
• 1:52:34
  Yeah, which again, it's just one that people don't really talk
• 1:52:37
  about, but it's a third Dr. unit, one sort of set in a
• 1:52:42
  made-up African country where weird alien straight is
• 1:52:47
  happening and again has a beautiful cover.
• 1:52:51
  And I feel like with that one it was, I must have been about 10
• 1:52:55
  or 11 I think when I read it. So like just getting through a
• 1:52:58
  sort of grown up book was just felt like such an achievement.
• 1:53:02
  I've never gone back to it, but I just do.
• 1:53:05
  I remember all the images of that, these sort of like termite
• 1:53:08
  mounds in the desert that they were exploring.
• 1:53:11
  And it's really brutal as well. There's this sort of like
• 1:53:14
  Bernice, like journalist figure who's sort of like a substitute
• 1:53:18
  companion in the book who just like, really brutal stuff that
• 1:53:22
  happens to her at the end. So yeah, like, despite not
• 1:53:26
  having read it for 30 years. Yeah.
• 1:53:30
  Like a one that stuck in my head because it was the first one.
• 1:53:34
  And yeah, but you don't really hear anyone talking about it.
• 1:53:38
  Just one of those sort of like mid missing adventures, mid in
• 1:53:41
  the range and broadly well received.
• 1:53:45
  But yeah, not not a standout. Oh yes, I didn't think he was
• 1:53:52
  sorry. * Moisturizers. He's only read 1 Bueller's book,
• 1:54:02
  that's why. It adds lever to your face as
• 1:54:07
  you read more and more. I think he's got a seam of
• 1:54:10
  spectrox as well, you know. I think you might be right.
• 1:54:19
  I chose another EDA and I chose the book directly before Dark
• 1:54:26
  Progeny, and it's the only book that has Doctor Who in it by
• 1:54:31
  Dave Stone that I actually like. I've read Heart of Tata, so I
• 1:54:37
  don't know but that one, but I don't like any of Dave Stone's
• 1:54:42
  books with that. A Doctor Who books centric.
• 1:54:45
  He's been nice ones. I keep saying it.
• 1:54:47
  I really like his Benny books. I don't know why, that's just
• 1:54:52
  how I feel, but I love the slow empire.
• 1:54:53
  I don't all right love that's the strong word.
• 1:54:56
  I I really enjoyed the slow empire.
• 1:55:00
  I like the concept of it too. It's like a vein avenge kind of
• 1:55:03
  novel like not in terms of tone, but some of the ideas like a a
• 1:55:09
  fire upon the deep or a deepness in the sky where travel there's
• 1:55:15
  you can't do time or faster than light travel in this section of
• 1:55:19
  space. And so you can only travel
• 1:55:21
  between the planets through the use of these like these
• 1:55:25
  transduction chambers and stuff. And but to travel through those
• 1:55:30
  takes a long amount of time. So it's it's an interesting
• 1:55:36
  concept that he plays around with it in a satisfying way.
• 1:55:39
  And unlike other Dave Stone books, it's fucking short that
• 1:55:44
  232 pages or something like that.
• 1:55:47
  So it's for Dave Stone, it's in and out.
• 1:55:51
  I do feel like if you want to get a book that has this vibe
• 1:55:56
  and is an absolute like better and better book in every way,
• 1:56:02
  The Tomorrow Windows is that book for you.
• 1:56:04
  Don't worry about the Slow Empire, just and it looks like
• 1:56:06
  the cover of this book looks like someone's taking a piss on
• 1:56:09
  Paul Mcgann's face. Why have they turned planets
• 1:56:12
  into sperms? Yeah, that that too.
• 1:56:16
  Yeah, that's. Deliberate, right?
• 1:56:19
  But that's still like, that's like the transduction thingies
• 1:56:22
  between the planets. So yeah.
• 1:56:24
  Sperms for me Luke. Black shape man.
• 1:56:28
  What were you on? So maybe.
• 1:56:30
  So maybe what was missing in this Doctor Who book that Dave
• 1:56:34
  Stone's other Doctor Who books didn't have was, I don't know,
• 1:56:39
  how about this cool ass motherfucker from the 60s named
• 1:56:41
  Fitzcryner? Like, yeah.
• 1:56:43
  So there you go. I enjoyed it.
• 1:56:45
  It's. Yeah.
• 1:56:46
  Can we add that one to the list? Because I can remember that
• 1:56:50
  being the biggest slog of any Doctor Who book I've ever read,
• 1:56:53
  and I'm thinking maybe I might reconsider it.
• 1:56:57
  Yeah, I can see. I went into the book expecting
• 1:57:02
  to absolutely not finish it, and I finished it and I enjoyed it.
• 1:57:10
  So that's, I'm taking that as a win.
• 1:57:13
  That's what you want from a Doctor Who book, isn't it?
• 1:57:15
  To read it and enjoy it. And it's sort of Jago like
• 1:57:17
  character, first person who has all these sort of long Dave
• 1:57:21
  Stone words. Hello.
• 1:57:24
  Greet you. Yeah.
• 1:57:25
  Andrew yeah, Jesus is like fucking hell.
• 1:57:27
  I just agree. Today.
• 1:57:31
  I. Would be.
• 1:57:33
  My pirate is twice the length, but I see.
• 1:57:36
  So I'm kind of glad that none of you guys have been like, hey,
• 1:57:39
  how about we read Sky Pirates? Because I've never been able to
• 1:57:42
  finish that that. Another book club.
• 1:57:44
  They want to do it. They want to do that book.
• 1:57:47
  Oh God. Do it, Andrew, Do it with him.
• 1:57:50
  I do remember in the Slow Empire though, and he's a total bitch,
• 1:57:53
  so you get a lot of pleasure out there.
• 1:57:55
  Something for everyone. Oh wow, that was that was good.
• 1:58:02
  I was you told me 10 minutes before we started that.
• 1:58:06
  Hey, Luke, can you host this? Sure, I'll host the fuck out of
• 1:58:10
  it. And I'm having and I had some
• 1:58:12
  wines too. So I don't think I anything and
• 1:58:18
  I didn't think as we started this.
• 1:58:19
  Am I going to fuck the name of this podcast up?
• 1:58:21
  No, I did not. I got it.
• 1:58:23
  I got it right the first time. I keep forgetting Luke, it's the
• 1:58:26
  daytime for you. I thought it was the.
• 1:58:28
  No, it's the nighttime, I kept thinking.
• 1:58:31
  Then. Oh my God.
• 1:58:32
  He's turned, we've turned him into a Daydream car.
• 1:58:34
  But no, it's nighttime, isn't it?
• 1:58:39
  It's one of the few times Christopher Boulis.
• 1:58:41
  Turned him into a Daydream. Car.
• 1:58:43
  Well, at least all of you can go to bed tonight.
• 1:58:45
  And I'm actually 15 like we don't have.
• 1:58:48
  To think about Christopher Boulis again for a long time.
• 1:58:52
  Oh, I'm sure he'll bring him to our attention.
• 1:58:54
  And as someone on this podcast was really kind to remind me, he
• 1:59:01
  wrote two Daivo books, so I will be talking about him in the
• 1:59:05
  future on on the Mar Chess Club. That is absolutely unavoidable.
• 1:59:10
  But after a book club episode, what everyone wants wants to
• 1:59:15
  know is what? The hell.
• 1:59:18
  Are we doing next? You know what I think after
• 1:59:22
  Bulis, after this long summer, we need a holiday.
• 1:59:26
  I'm going to drag you 8 EDA hoes off to a Dyson spear to talk
• 1:59:31
  some interesting people and talk to God.
• 1:59:34
  It's the also people. By Benny Ranovich.
• 1:59:39
  Yes, fabulous. I mean I've not read it for
• 1:59:43
  years but bloody loved it when I read it before this year and.
• 1:59:49
  I want to read it again. You know the laws.
• 1:59:54
  Luke 1, Sherman 1. Great one.
• 1:59:58
  That's the that's the law. Oh my God, what's after that
• 2:00:02
  book? What if?
• 2:00:03
  What if I don't want to think about?
• 2:00:04
  That Cole having been bold, senseless by it.
• 2:00:08
  Oh. Christ.
• 2:00:09
  It's all right. I have a number of a good hit.
• 2:00:11
  Man. Oh, OK.
• 2:00:14
  You're letting me know I've got three people.
• 2:00:16
  For the list after this beaulist book.
• 2:00:19
  Yeah, no. Problem.
• 2:00:20
  I don't know, saying that von Durdiken's children is better
• 2:00:25
  than menagra. I think Andrew owes me an it's a
• 2:00:29
  long quai God damn it. He'll never do it.
• 2:00:35
  He'll never. Do it.
• 2:00:43
  So I really thought you were gonna be more on the this is a
• 2:00:46
  10 out of 10, but. Not no.
• 2:00:48
  Oh my God. Yes.
• 2:00:51
  Just because I don't have much of A reputation, Andrew, but
• 2:00:54
  enough to not say that.