Doctor Who: The Slow Empire By Dave Stone
Enter, with the Doctor, Anji and Fitz, an Empire where the laws of physics are quite preposterous -- nothing can travel faster than the speed of light and time travel is impossible.
A thousand worlds, each believing they are the Centre, each under a malign control of which they themselves are completely unaware.
As the only beings able to travel between the worlds instantaneously, the Doctor and his friends must piece together the Imperial puzzle and decide what should be done. The soldiers of the Ambassadorial Corps are always, somehow, hard on their heels. Their own minds are busily fragmenting under metatemporal stresses. And their only allies are a man who might not be quite what he seems (and says so at great length) and a creature we shall merely call... the Collector. Doctor Who: The Slow Empire

Dave Stone í 7 Read
This is one of the better Doctor Who books. There was plenty going on to keep the interest but enough philosophising to make you think. I haven't read any 8th doctors books before although I enjoyed the film when I was a teenager. I always felt sorry for Paul McGann as he is a good actor. Anyway, Doctor Who has had a great presence in our household, first through my husband and then through my son. I am glad he likes Doctor Who so much. He is an unconventional sort of hero but that's why he's so special. 056353835X http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2190508.html[return][return]a comically pompous narrator but a real evil empire to fight and destroy, lots of stuff for the Doctor and companions Fitz and Anji, and some genuinely novel riffs on traditional sf and Who tropes. 056353835X Eighth Doctor Adventure (EDA) with Fitz and Anji. Enjoyability is purely dependent on whether you like the author's style, as the plot turns out to be quite thin. I quite enjoyed reading it, myself, but there are loose ends and unanswered questions which made it ultimately unsatisfying. Also, there are some EDA arc elements introduced which, although not critical, may bother a reader who wants all the answers right now. 056353835X I'm still not sure what happened.
The story was a good one, but it felt as disjointed as a multi-episode serial from the 70's. The constant narration by Jamon got REALLY annoying. The version I read has a terrible font for him too.
In all the *running down corridors* there wasn't much time for character development, but the story still managed to be amusing.
I'm a bit incredulous about the Doctor's reaction to getting stabbed in the chest. He seemed more hurt in 'Cold Heart' when he was shot with a tiny arrow. And what was with the magical 'fixer-upper' machine in the TARDIS sickbay?
As to what happened . . . there were wraiths and then a creepy emperor guy and then cult people and wraith cult people . . . and somewhere in all that it stopped making sense.
If you love the Doctor, it couldn't hurt you to read it. (As much as getting stabbed in the chest apparently can't hurt the Doctor.) 056353835X This is a fun read. 056353835X
Ugh. Such a try-hard book; so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. There are footnotes, there are sections (in a different font!) from the flowery POV of an alien the TARDIS team encounters, there's a Matrix-like AU section -- all of which can't disguise the fact that the plot is incredibly thin. As Fitz points out, much of this book is spent with the characters just spinning their wheels -- running down corridors, essentially. It's so boring and uninspired, and yet, I think Stone really made an effort.
The Eighth Doctor described as tall: check!
This is also the third time an EDA writer has misused the concept of a Golem.
Dear goys: please stop. 056353835X Yeah, maybe the worst Doctor Who book I've read. A little too impressed with itself to be likable, a little too overwritten to be readable, and due to the Eighth Doctor's (repeated, recurring, infuriating) amnesia, the character isn't quite there. I don't have any connections to Fitz and Anji as companions, and this book didn't really enlighten me on their merits. Jamon was hella annoying. I did not need his comic-sans narration one little bit. Some ideas are cool, but too jumbled in with other ideas haphazardly to be really enjoyed properly. Honestly would've given up and read the wikipedia summary of the conclusion (and I nearly did at the last 20 pages), but this book has been met with such a shoulder shrug by the fandom THAT THERE ISN'T EVEN AN AVAILABLE PLOT SYNOPSIS ON THE WIKI - probably because the plot is a hot mess and no-one wants to try and iron it out into a few paragraphs. 056353835X The Slow Empire suffers from being the Eighth Doctor Adventures directly after The Year of Intelligent Tigers. The Year of Intelligent Tigers was a masterpiece, full of beautiful prose and character work, fully establishing how the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji work as a team and creating conflicts especially in terms of who the Doctor has become and how withdrawn as a person he can be due to continually being disappointed with humanity. The Slow Empire doesn’t do that. The first indication of what kind of book The Slow Empire is going to be is looking at the author, Dave Stone. Dave Stone is an author who I genuinely like. His ideas are excellent and his prose can be utterly fascinating. He has also written books like Burning Heart which is terrible. Heart of TARDIS, his previous Doctor Who effort, wasn’t the worst thing he has written, but it was bogged down in references to The Simpsons of all things. The Slow Empire, on the other hand, is a book whose plot succinctly put by a friend of mine only appears at the very beginning and very end of the novel. This is a book that is about 250 pages of incredibly confusing prose where events happen, but they are narrated by a character who may or may not be the Spanish word for ham without an accent. The plot involves creatures called Vortex Wraiths which inhabit the Time Vortex and there is also this Empire which doesn’t follow the regular rules of reality so Dave Stone can float from scene to scene with tenuous connections yet somehow it works. This might be the most self-reflective Stone has been, with Jamon de la Rocas being an obvious self-insert for the author.
There are also several notes at the back of the novel where Stone places the punchlines to many of his jokes as well as even more worldbuilding, and yes The Slow Empire is a lot of worldbuilding. Stone clearly is enjoying a lot of what he has created and nearly every page is riotous with laughter as the wit of a Dave Stone book is there. But the plot is just not there and that is perhaps the book’s biggest problem. As an experimental book, it’s an interesting idea to try and tell a story without a plot or really even characters, just interesting ideas playing around with time travel and a time without time travel. Heck there is really some interesting bits that could be part of the Divergent Universe arc of the Big Finish Eighth Doctor Monthly Range Adventures which would only come out three years after this book is published. This is also a book where one-third of the text is written in Comic Sans. No, I am not kidding. This professionally published and (hopefully) professionally edited novel written as the 47th in a series, is written and printed using Comic Sans. I think that gives you enough of an idea of what madness Dave Stone has in store.
Overall, The Slow Empire is a book that isn’t going to work for everybody, heck it barely works for me, but it is Dave Stone at his perhaps most esoteric and as the final Doctor Who novel he would write (outside of the Bernice Summerfield novels and audio dramas with Big Finish) it’s definitely one to go out on. 6/10.
056353835X Dave Stone's DW novels are outrageous, preposterous beasts...but this one is by far his most sedate, most contemplative novel, though it still features an undercurrent of the Stone-ish humour we've all come to expect. It's a surprisingly compelling work, as if he's brought a bit more discipline to his ideas, in an effort to make the farcical tragic...and it primarily succeeds. If you go into this thinking this is going to be another wild ride, as with his previous novels Sky Pirates and Burning Heart, you're in for quite a surprise. 056353835X Ugh. Så många dåliga idéer. Introducera en extremt långrandig och svamlig karaktär? Blir tråkigt väldigt snabbt. Låta den karaktären vara berättare i stora delar av boken? Dålig idé. Skriva dom delarna i en EXTREMT IRRITERANDE FONT? Sämsta idén.
På nåt underligt vis gick det ändå väldigt fort för mig att läsa den här boken (kanske för att man seriöst kunde hoppa över en halv sida här och var utan att missa NÅT), och alla huvudkaraktärerna höll ihop i stort sett hela boken vilket irriterande nog aldrig händer annars. Så två stjärnor ändå. 056353835X