Customer Reviews

Heart of Tardis

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I don't know what this unreadable stuff is all about the the doctors in this book were ok. The only downside to this is that the doctors never meet each other. But there was a certain plot to this and a definite connection to both doctors' situations. You just have to keep an open mind about things, that's all.

Dave Stone has been writing "Doctor Who" books for years, and almost anyone who chooses to buy "Heart of TARDIS" should know what to expect even before they open it. Even so, "Heart" manages to pack in more Stone excess than any novel he has ever written before. That's a bad sign.

The two sets of Doctor/companion pairings bear no relation to the characters (and actors) we remember from TV. The plot makes no sense, being a treatise on quantum physics written in crayon by a guy who just wants to stick big words together. There are references galore to other, better books and TV series -- part of this confusing mess of a novel takes place in the Springfield of "The Simpsons". For humor value only.

There are, in the midst of the morass, some nice jokes: Victoria, a sheltered 19th century girl, hears gangsta rap for the first time. The hammy Fourth Doctor overacts wildly in a room full of dusty furniture. A bookstore's shelves are overflowing with "Star Trek" novels.

But don't take my word for how bad this book is. Here, free of charge, is some sample prose: "as much relation to the truth as a toboggan does to a small tub of weasel cheese", "set to tear reality apart like a rotten walrus", " as the data-stream linkages between two computer networks have to a toaster plugged into a power outlet...", and of course "as similar to that of human recollection as the sound of a tuba is similar to a monkey in a little hat."

The book is unreadable. Please continue to support the "Doctor Who" line by reading the works of other authors.

"Heart of Tardis" tries so very hard to be many different things all at the same time. It's a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode. It's a Simpson's episode. It's a Cheers episode. Why, it's even a Professionals episode. How regrettable is the fact that the one thing it isn't, is a Doctor Who episode!

Like all the other reviewers, I agree that Dave Stone slaps two incarnations of the Doctor in a story that does not match up with the back-cover timeline suggested.

The story picks up with the 4th Doctor and Romana clearly off the search for the Key to Time. It serves no real purpose other than to get the Doctor and Romana I involved in this novel. The pacing of the novel never quite seems to fit the action going on.

Mr. Stone thanks some friends who helped him in fleshing out Patrick Troughton's character. There's our first problem. If Mr. Stone wasn't sure how the character was supposed to act, why choose him? The characterization suffers greatly throughout this novel. Even the 4th incarnation of the Doctor isn't quite right.

A vast majority of the novels in this series manage to at least capture some essence of the Doctor. "Heart of Tardis" does not. It's a very long journey with no real pay-off.

The writing style leaves a lot to be desired as well. I found "Rabid old trout" to be an odd description for the Prime Minister. It just didn't fit the novel.

Even the homage to my second favorite British TV show, "The Professionals", could not save this novel. The possibilities of these two particular incarnations meeting was absolutely squandered. Maybe at the hands of another author within this series, the two can truly meet up again for an adventure of substance.

To quote Crow T. Robot from the aforementioned MST3K: "This is bad. Bad, bad, bad. Bad to the bone, bad. Born under a bad sign bad."

When I say, run.... RUN AWAY from this installment.

This was a book that I picked up because it had a snazy cover and the plot really sounded interesting. I know, I know, don't jusge a book by its cover, and this is NO EXCEPTION.

The characterizations of both Doctors were WAY off and the only redeeming quality was Romana, who was the only well characterized character. (?) The plot was confusing from start to finish and the interruption of "The Key to Time" was a complete waste. Why was there virtually no mention of it? "Shall we continue our search for the key?" was the only mention and it was forced, as if the author needed to explain his choosing to write the book here.

This was a book that should have been read backwards, if read at all. Maybe then we could have understood what on earth was happening.

Packing more charm, wit and ideas than he knows what do with, Dave Stone has written a very confused, frustrating and interesting book, HEART OF TARDIS. I'm not sure what kind of writer Stone really is, as he manages to mix so many styles together, somtimes all on the same page, that any hint of his own creative prose is lost in both the background noise and the foreground action. There are a lot of good ideas in this book, but they are just that, ideas. Fragments of thoughts and clever notions that, had it been applied to a single book with a single Doctor, might actually add up to a good read. But here it is just a confused mess. Neither the Second Doctor nor the Fourth come out well in this book. They never seem to have been written with any real personality or charm, but feel as if they have been constructed out of cardboard and stuck up against the action - which is odd, because on the opposite end, the companions come across almost perfect. Romana (Mary Tamm's incarnation) is allowed the breathing room that the television series lacked, and we are allowed to hear her thoughts and get to know her as not only a companion to the Doctor, but a Time Lord in her own right. Jamie and Victoria as well stand out, Victoria more so, and like Romana, we also get inside her head and get a better understanding of what it is to really travel in time - and how it can actually broaden the mind (while Stone misses so many marks in the book, he does manage from time to time to hit a few nails on the head - and with Victoria he gives the reader a very plausiable internal view that will not disappoint)....

It had been a while since I had read any Who books, so I picked up Heart of TARDIS more for the cover than anything (hey both the 2nd and 4th Doctors in the same book sounded interesting). I didn't recall having read any of Dave Stone's books before, so I was unsure what to expect.

Dave stone (to put it mildly) has an interesting writing style. He seems to try for a Douglas Adams style of humor and likes using big words. It almost works. I was on a very long flight when I read the book so I did it in one sitting. Had I read it over time I'm not sure I could have finished it.

He thanks quite a few people for helping him work on getting Troughton's Doctor right. It has been said (rightly so) that the 2nd Doctor is the toughest one to write. Dave Stone gets pretty close. The only time he falls down is when he puts a long string of technobabble in the Doctor's mouth. It doesn't work. I just can't picture it. His portrayal of Tom Baker's Doctor has similar faults. Suspention of disbelief slips at times because of this.

There are a lot of "in jokes" in Heart of TARDIS. The opening Fitzroy tavern is one of the more obvious ones. "I shudder to think of the state to which Fitzroy tavern might be reduced in another fifty years. Radiophonic actors and pulp-periodical writers, I have no doubt..."

The story is placed between Tomb of the Cybermen and The Abominable Snowmen in the 2nd Doctor's timeframe and The Stones of Blood and The Androids of Tara. The timeframe works pretty well for the 2nd Doctor but is confusing for the 4th Doctor. Why stop the quest for the Key to Time? It doesn't quite work. I suspect it's just an excuse to use Mary Tamm's Romana.

The storyline itself is complex. It weaves the 2nd and 4th Doctor stories together in an interesting fashion; dipping in and out of each situation much like a movie or television show might. It gets confusing at times, but never so much that you can't drop back a few pages and figure it out. I really have to give him credit for this as so many books of late that try to weave a complex storyline end up with a confusing one instead. It's a thin line and Mr. Stone walks it without stumbling too badly.

As I mentioned earlier it seems to be a book that works better in one sitting. After I got into it and past the flaws, the story managed to compensate. Before I knew it I was turning the last few pages. I found myself a bit disappointed that it was all done.

Bottom Line: Characterizations that don't quite work, but it's saved by a successful telling of a complex story.

It takes almost two hundred pages before the HEART OF TARDIS becomes in any way enjoyable, but by that time the reader has to wonder why one even bothered. HEART OF TARDIS is basically a story and its sequel squashed together inside one book for no real good reason. It's bogged down by its own pomposity and collapses under its own weight.

I felt that Dave Stone's characterization of the two Doctors was just slightly off. The second Doctor was somewhat too cartoonish for me, and the fourth just missed the mark of being Tom Baker type insanity and ended up being Dave Stone type insanity (which is a completely different style of madness, believe it or not). On the other hand, Romana was spot-on, and I could exactly picture Mary Tamm's holier-than-thou attitude without it going too far over the top. Victoria is also done quite well, and Stone does an excellent job of viewing the developing situation through the eyes of a 19th Century woman without descending into stereotypes and clichés. His Jamie was perhaps not done so well, but Stone is smart enough to recognize this, and wisely keeps Jamie out of the main action.

For some reason the ending to this story feels extremely rushed which is odd because the first nine-tenths of the book seemed to be happening in slow motion. One is waiting for something to happen for almost the full length of the book and then when something finally does occur, it's over before one has time to react. I got the impression that the author had a really good idea for putting two different Doctors in the same book, but forgot what that was long before he reached the end. The ending doesn't resolve, it just sort of hangs there, and the reader has to wonder what all this careful build-up was for. Far too many things appear to be done completely at random and without any real thought behind them. There is a difference between making something deliberately offbeat and twisted, and just doing random things at arbitrary intervals. Instead of taking these strange elements and perhaps doing something original to them, they are quickly dropped and then replaced with something else so that nothing has time to develop into anything remarkable. The result is a just a jumbled mess of half finished thoughts.

All in all, there are a few parts of the book that work fairly well, but they are very few and very far between.

(On a completely unrelated note, Stone really missed out on a lot of funny material by not taking advantage of the fact that he had a Baltimore native as one of his bad guys. Lines such as, "Tell us what we wanna know, hon, or we'll send you downyoshen", "Hey, Brigadier, you wanna have a Colt '45 at the plant and then goh walk by da harrber?", "We thought you'd died; died or gonna Catonsville" and "Wir gunna have to take over da world tamorroh, mah fellow Baltimorons, 'cause right now we're listenin' to Kirk, Mark and Lopez" were conspicuous by their absence.)

Doctor Who is abroad church, and so every so often a story will come along that is likely to delight some readers and make others pull odd faces. For me, I'm pulling odd faces about 'Heart of TARDIS'.

Dave Stone opts to present us with a double Doctor story featuring the second and fourth incarnations - it is set (or so it tells us) between 'The Tomb of the Cybermen' and 'The Abominable Snowmen' on the one hand, and 'The Stones of Blood' and 'The Androids of Tara' on the other. Or so we are told - there is no real reason why it should be set between those stories. In particular, the fourth Doctor is doing this story halfway through the Key to Time season, although there is very little in the story that would make you think so. I don't comprehend why the quest for the Key is put aside for this story.

To my mind, all the characters are generally not particularly in character, and if we weren't told we were that we were reading about the first incarnation of Romana, you'd never know.

The storyline is perhaps a little overly complex, and we get to see the same things over and over again.

If this rich read is to your taste, you might want to read it several time to understand how it fits together. For me, I don't think a second reading will happen for a while!