spacephilosopher's review
challenging
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
3.75
unnaturalhistory's review
adventurous
challenging
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
isayhourwrong's review
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.25
Marc why
nwhyte's review against another edition
3.0
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1381420.html
It's actually rather fascinating, just after watching The End of Time, to experience a completely different reinterpretation of the Time Lords and Gallifrey, the combination of Cartmel Masterplan and Marc Platt's imagination which culminates in Lungbarrow (which is itself mentioned here as a concept for the first time). Like a lot of Platt's writing it is eerie and confusing, early Gallifreyans and peculiar deserted cities, but with some fascinating insights and ideas, and some decent character development for Ace who has to carry most of the plot with the Doctor being in cold storage for much of the book. I do wish I'd been picking these up when they first came out in 1992.
It's actually rather fascinating, just after watching The End of Time, to experience a completely different reinterpretation of the Time Lords and Gallifrey, the combination of Cartmel Masterplan and Marc Platt's imagination which culminates in Lungbarrow (which is itself mentioned here as a concept for the first time). Like a lot of Platt's writing it is eerie and confusing, early Gallifreyans and peculiar deserted cities, but with some fascinating insights and ideas, and some decent character development for Ace who has to carry most of the plot with the Doctor being in cold storage for much of the book. I do wish I'd been picking these up when they first came out in 1992.
count_zero's review against another edition
3.0
Virgin Books’ Doctor Who: New Adventures series was, back in the day, meant to provide fans of Doctor Who the thing they wanted after the show was put on indefinite hiatus after the serial Survival. Time’s Crucible is the 6th book in the series, part of a pair of thematically linked stories under the heading of “Cat’s Cradle”.
The story involves the TARDIS basically having a temporal collision with an early prototype Time Ship from Gallifrey from just before the rise of Rassilon. This gets into material that doctors from Tom Baker on had explored directly, but which Sylvester McCoy’s doctor had only explored obliquely – the history of the Time Lords.
Conceptually, telling the story as a novel lets you do some stuff that would be really hard to do in live-action television. The mixed up TARDIS interior is described with a weird surrealistic and claustrophobic interior that you could do with comics or animation (as was demonstrated by the anime Id:Invaded), but would be very difficult to do with a TV budget for the time (even modern Doctor Who might stumble a bit with that).
Additionally, the book puts Ace at the forefront in some interesting ways – she’s always been an active character in Doctor Who stories, but here for 3/4th of the book she’s the driving force of the resolution of the plot.
The book’s not without some real problems though. The elements of the plot with time folding in on itself and alternative versions of characters from different places in their timelines running into each other works very awkwardly in prose. By the end of the book I’ve completely lost track of some of these characters timelines. This, on the other hand, is something that a visual presentation would work strongly with – through showing the same character in different physical states to indicate where they are in their life and their timeline (or timelines).
Additionally, the opening portions of this book are something of a slog – when the book gets going, it really gets going. It’s just that it takes almost a quarter of the book to get there.
(This book review originally appeared on my blog)
The story involves the TARDIS basically having a temporal collision with an early prototype Time Ship from Gallifrey from just before the rise of Rassilon. This gets into material that doctors from Tom Baker on had explored directly, but which Sylvester McCoy’s doctor had only explored obliquely – the history of the Time Lords.
Conceptually, telling the story as a novel lets you do some stuff that would be really hard to do in live-action television. The mixed up TARDIS interior is described with a weird surrealistic and claustrophobic interior that you could do with comics or animation (as was demonstrated by the anime Id:Invaded), but would be very difficult to do with a TV budget for the time (even modern Doctor Who might stumble a bit with that).
Additionally, the book puts Ace at the forefront in some interesting ways – she’s always been an active character in Doctor Who stories, but here for 3/4th of the book she’s the driving force of the resolution of the plot.
The book’s not without some real problems though. The elements of the plot with time folding in on itself and alternative versions of characters from different places in their timelines running into each other works very awkwardly in prose. By the end of the book I’ve completely lost track of some of these characters timelines. This, on the other hand, is something that a visual presentation would work strongly with – through showing the same character in different physical states to indicate where they are in their life and their timeline (or timelines).
Additionally, the opening portions of this book are something of a slog – when the book gets going, it really gets going. It’s just that it takes almost a quarter of the book to get there.
(This book review originally appeared on my blog)
fullfledgedegg's review
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
2.5
arutha2321's review
4.0
Very, very confusing at times, but superbly written, and fascinating to read a bit about Pre-Rassilon Gallifrey.
Probably my favourite from the NDA range so far.
Probably my favourite from the NDA range so far.
whovian2711's review
2.0
Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible is an incredibly ambitious and creative novel that is unfortunately let down by a sense of self-indulgence and a severe lack of editing.
On the positive side, the imagery underpinning the story's setting is genuinely spellbinding. Marc Platt manages to conjure the sense of atmosphere with detailed descriptions that somehow never get boring, no matter how frequently they're invoked. Weirdly, if this whole book was just Platt describing a grey alien city slowly crumbling into dust, I think I'd have enjoyed it a lot more. Several of the novel's key concepts are also fantastic, such as a city in which different phases of time exist simultaneously.
Unfortunately, I have several issues with this novel. A couple of minor irritations were the number of underdeveloped side characters (whose names I could never remember) and the fact that Ace's character felt slightly under-baked compared to the amazing development she received in the previous novel (Timewyrm: Revelation), despite the fact that she's the most prominent character in this.
I was both bored and frustrated by the frequent self-indulgent forays into Gallifreyan history, which, although containing a few cool concepts, mostly felt like glorified fanfiction. I understand the appeal of filling in some of the blanks in the show's lore, but Platt goes way too far with his demythologising approach. In particular, the first time we meet Rassilon, the legendary figure of Gallifreyan history, he's sitting at a desk. No other image could have so powerfully turned the mysterious into the mundane.
The book's fatal flaw, which makes it the most momentum-killing novel I think I've ever read, is its pacing. Platt has an extraordinary talent for stringing the reader along with tantalising cliffhangers that imply that something is actually about to happen, only to have one's willpower gradually eroded away by the story's joyless monotony yet again. This is not helped by the fact that the Doctor is absent from a huge portion of the story, leaving Ace simply to wander around looking for him for about 200 pages, a good half of which could (and should!) have been cut, or at least generously trimmed.
Although Marc Platt has a very creative mind and is capable of conjuring some fantastic imagery, this novel is far too drawn out to support its ideas in an enjoyable way. The entire experience feels a lot like the majority of the story itself; wandering through an endless grey city from which the Future has been stolen, leaving only Now.
On the positive side, the imagery underpinning the story's setting is genuinely spellbinding. Marc Platt manages to conjure the sense of atmosphere with detailed descriptions that somehow never get boring, no matter how frequently they're invoked. Weirdly, if this whole book was just Platt describing a grey alien city slowly crumbling into dust, I think I'd have enjoyed it a lot more. Several of the novel's key concepts are also fantastic, such as a city in which different phases of time exist simultaneously.
Unfortunately, I have several issues with this novel. A couple of minor irritations were the number of underdeveloped side characters (whose names I could never remember) and the fact that Ace's character felt slightly under-baked compared to the amazing development she received in the previous novel (Timewyrm: Revelation), despite the fact that she's the most prominent character in this.
I was both bored and frustrated by the frequent self-indulgent forays into Gallifreyan history, which, although containing a few cool concepts, mostly felt like glorified fanfiction. I understand the appeal of filling in some of the blanks in the show's lore, but Platt goes way too far with his demythologising approach. In particular, the first time we meet Rassilon, the legendary figure of Gallifreyan history, he's sitting at a desk. No other image could have so powerfully turned the mysterious into the mundane.
The book's fatal flaw, which makes it the most momentum-killing novel I think I've ever read, is its pacing. Platt has an extraordinary talent for stringing the reader along with tantalising cliffhangers that imply that something is actually about to happen, only to have one's willpower gradually eroded away by the story's joyless monotony yet again. This is not helped by the fact that the Doctor is absent from a huge portion of the story, leaving Ace simply to wander around looking for him for about 200 pages, a good half of which could (and should!) have been cut, or at least generously trimmed.
Although Marc Platt has a very creative mind and is capable of conjuring some fantastic imagery, this novel is far too drawn out to support its ideas in an enjoyable way. The entire experience feels a lot like the majority of the story itself; wandering through an endless grey city from which the Future has been stolen, leaving only Now.
nukirisame's review
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
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