Great book- well, coming from two of my favorite authors, it'd have to be. Did the one ‘living in San Francisco with his wife.’ remind anyone of Joyce from UH? (Actually it would be vice versa if you read the books in anything like the correct order.)
And the nexus is a psychic leyline. Thingy. Whatsit. Something.
Actually, I didn't think of Joyce - I was too busy shuddering with horror at the thought of the Doctor *gulp* MARRYING Grace and settling down with her.
The Nexus was a psychic leyline (as Ed said), which lay throughout the universe and affect people to become psionics. The leylines themselves are the last remains of the irrational, cacophonious universe inhabited by the Carnival Queen and her ilk, the universe that disapated as the Time Lords laid down the masculine laws of rationality.
On another note, was the Doctor who killed the Empress an alternative Doc? I thought the Doctor throughout was the Doctor proper and that the only alternative Doctors were the ones who appeared fleetingly and/or were said to be alternate.
Yes, I'm sure it was the 'real' Doctor who killed the Empress. It's good to know that he too believes in euthanasia. (Though I suppose the Kamelion incident had already made that clear. Which is, incidentally, at odds with his attitude in The English Way of Death.)
Well, I paid a fortune for it, thought I might as well give it a reread...enjoyable, but with a distinctly disjointed, not-entirely-satisfactory feel to it. Plus too much continuity, and an absolute obsession with that boring old SLEEPY book.
Would a heart-attack be so serious...for the Doctor? Tennant seems able to get round with only one beating (as of course did Hartnell and Troughton...)
I don't remember any of this neo-feudalism stuff from Original Sin - and I reread that recently.
Ha! So in the thirtieth century they need some serious equipment to keep that Dwarf Star Alloy up. Anti-gravity columns and failsafe clamps and suchlike. Yet somehow American cretins in the 1960s have mastered zero-balanced Dwarf Star Alloy...
'I've met myself dozens of times...' - DOZENS?!! Where the hell were the BBC cameras??
The Empress thinks the Doctor has got nothing to LOSE by killing her? What about HIS LIFE? They seemed quite keen on the death penalty when they caught him standing over her corpse.
Sorry, have I missed something or are the Doctor, heroic Ogrons, etc helping rebels murder Empire ships?
If no aliens ever attack Earth (cos...well...it's the other way round these days) why is Unitatus allowed its own private army?
So when Earth nearly fell in '75, the corruption in the Adjudicators was revealed. Roz n'Chris COULD have stayed, then! Instead of fleeing for their lives in the TARDIS in the cowardly and incorrect belief that no one would believe them about their bosses' corruption!
Also, those are some SERIOUS family connections Roz COULD have called upon for help...
'Back then there were no other intelligent races. None that mattered, anyway, as far as we were concerned. Just the Time Lords, and our enemies. The residual horrors of the universe before this one, and the Great Vampires' - so much for the Fledgling Empires who fought the Racnoss, eh?
'Roz had tried a few of those HeadStops after Martle had died. After she'd killed Martle. She'd tried a lot of things in those heavy days before she'd found Doc Dantalion and his memory-cutting knife. Anything to replace the worn, jumping and stuttering sim of the moment she'd thrown that vibroknife...' - say WHAT! Roz didn't DELIBERATELY get her OWN memory wiped! Martle's evil partner did it to her cos it was less suspicious than killing her! MAJOR mistake!
So in an alternative history, Jack White killed Roz. OK...who the hell's Jack White? This whole book relies WAY too much on you remembering ALL the past NAs.
No cancer-free cigarettes even in the thirtieth century? Blimey.
•••• but the whole thing feels unbearably poignant thanks to Decalog 4: Re: Generations. It's not often that an uncanonical bunch of short stories have any effect but extreme boredom, but...things do NOT go well for the Empire or the Forresters.
Bookwyrm:
'The priests are also soldiers...The Empress says things like You must have known, my love, making her sound a lot like River Song...There's also a derm-patch drug called "Bliss"...whist the Doctor and friends [go] into a deep pit on a bizarre asteroid...returning lost balloons to small children, which is similar to the second Night and the Doctor...there's also a brief segment where the plot relies on time running at different speeds for different participants' - dammit I KNEW there was a lot of good stuff in So Vile, and I knew New Who mined the novels to within an inch of their lives, but sadly this still doesn't stop So Vile adding up to considerably less than the sum of its parts.
A version of the Doc 'became Huitzilin'?!
Oh,and also, 'It's wi-fi, described here in 1997 almost exactly as it turned out. And wi-fi was invented in 1998. holy cow.'
No cancer-free cigarettes even in the thirtieth century? Blimey.
Not what it says in Dry Pilgrimage - set in the late-twenty-sixth-century: 'These days cigarettes contained no harmful substances whatsoever.'