A review by julis
Doctor Who: Beltempest by Jim Mortimore
2.0
I don’t understand how the person who wrote Natural History of Fear could also write this.
It took me 3 tries and an entire year to get through it, because I kept waiting for the plot, for actual secondary characters (instead of 1 dimensional archetypes), for literally anything but a series of distantly connected scenes.
Part of it, definitely, is that what worked so well in NHF, the stark and often absent setting descriptors, doesn’t work in a novel. But also? There’s not so much a plot as sequence of events where 8 and Sam bounce around like ping pong balls. I don’t care about any of the characters, including Eight and Sam, which is an accomplishment. Despite finishing it yesterday, I couldn’t even tell you how the plot was resolved, except it had to do with nanobots. Yay.
Onward and upward?
It took me 3 tries and an entire year to get through it, because I kept waiting for the plot, for actual secondary characters (instead of 1 dimensional archetypes), for literally anything but a series of distantly connected scenes.
Part of it, definitely, is that what worked so well in NHF, the stark and often absent setting descriptors, doesn’t work in a novel. But also? There’s not so much a plot as sequence of events where 8 and Sam bounce around like ping pong balls. I don’t care about any of the characters, including Eight and Sam, which is an accomplishment. Despite finishing it yesterday, I couldn’t even tell you how the plot was resolved, except it had to do with nanobots. Yay.
Onward and upward?