This is pretty good. The People and their Dyson Sphere is so similar to Iain M Banks that Aaronovitch has probably just nicked the idea. Good characterisation, especially the Doctor- a great scene, where after entertaining some local people, with card tricks and spoon playing, he reflects that maybe this incarnation is more suited to that than the dark plots he has created around himself.

The humour is just about right for Doctor Who as well, quite like Iain M Banks again, which isn't a bad thing.

I agree that The Also People is great - especially the Treaty when it mentions the Doctor. But I really don't see any resemblance with Iain M Banks, or at least with that half of Consider Phaebus that I read before I gave up in sheer boredom.

Don't slag off Iain Banks!!! Evil! You are evil!

Well anyway... If you've only read Consider Phlebas, which I think is good, but not his best, then don't judge him until you've read some others. Excession was the book that I was most reminded of by the Also People. There are certain similaritys between the People and the Culture- sentient ships with crew only to keep the ships happy. Drones. The sphere could be likened to orbitals.

Anyway, don't give up on Banks until you've read either Excession or Player of Games. Oh yeah and he used a character named 'The Doctor' in his most recent book 'Inversions'. She was a woman though.

Well, I've just been on RADW, and noticed a subject about the Also People. 3 or 4 messages mentioned the extreme similarity to Iain Banks. So there.

Well, I bow to your and RADW's superior knowledge of Iain M Banks. God forbid that I should be mistaken for an expert on him.

The only thing I didn't like about the Also People was when God suddenly announced that all the Ships were going to go to war with the Time Lords in a minute, and the Doctor goes and talks to them, and they decide not to go to war after all. We don't even get to see the conversation! It was almost as weak as that scene in Vengeance on Varos where Sil's people are about to invade...oh no they're not.

Emily- If you still don't believe me, check the foreword, where Aaronovitch says something about plagarism. IIRC something like 'good writers borrow, bad writers copy, but NA authors just steal.'

'While talent borrows and genius steals, New Adventure writers get it off the back of a lorry, no questions asked.'

OK, you can rest your case...

I really enjoyed this, and for a simple reason--it was just very pleasurable to read a Who novel that didn't spend 90% of the time torturing the regular characters. Even the single death was that of a machine intelligence, so it was hard to get too upset about that. And the Doctor finally gets to show Benny that it's not so easy making life or death decisions.

Chris' storyline seemed tacked on just to give him something to do, while Roz (for a change) actually acquired a personality.

Back to Ed and Emily's 2 year old conversation, I have to admit that I don't exactly hold Who novellists up to the highest standards. Since these are designed to be knock-offs of a TV show, I'm not disappointed when the Nobel prize for literature awards are announced, and they've left Lawrence off again.

Well, Roz gets hideously betrayed by her lover, Chris suffers the worst crime ever committed on the Worldsphere (admittedly I can think of worse crimes than sperm-stealing, myself) and loses his girlfriend (admittedly he's the one doing the dumping - and I don't know why he, not to mention the other Companions, didn't abandon the Doctor and stay there - I would have, like a shot), Benny gets betrayed by the Doctor (OK, so this happens all the time, though mercifully not as often as it did with Ace) and has to face murdering a woman; and the Doctor is dammed near responsible for starting a universe-destroying Time Lord/People war, not to mention IS responsible for blowing a sentient being's brains out. This may not count as torture, but there's plenty of angst going round.

And I don't care what you say, Dead Romance SHOULD have got the Nobel prize for literature. Or a Booker at least.

This book is the most enjoyable of the entire NA range. Only two deaths is probably the lowest body count of any story (since 'The Edge of Destruction' at least). There's lots of jokes strewn throughout but they arise from the situation and aren't shoe-horned in as some other authors are prone to do. I keep hearing 'What A Wonderful World' when reading this book :-)

I've noticed that my books now have a tendancy to crack at the spine and fall apart. The better the book the more pieces. This one broke into six pieces, 'Shakedown' into two and 'Just War' is in three and I'm still reading it. All my Paul Leonard books are still resolutely in one piece.

I've had the same problem with my Virgin books, too. I ended up re-glueing the spines on "Man in the Velvet Mask" and "Downtime." You have to hold these books as though they were made of crystal...

All the same...DOWNTIME...how embarrassing for you.

There are actually several TV stories in which no one dies including 'The Savages' and 'Fury from the Deep'. But I think I've had this argument before...

I have to admit I've been unable to finish "Downtime", it's so awful. And considering I did finish the Barry Letts' MAs, that's saying something.

Nobody dies in " The Edge of Destruction" or "The Mind Robber", either.

Loads of characters were wiped out at the end of Mind Robber (and, similarly, in Celestial Toymaker). I realise they weren't technically alive, what with being fictional and all that, but they were originally human (I think - I'm a bit hazy on the details, probably because they make no sense) and I don't see why the process couldn't be reversed in some way. At least, until the Doctor came along and just put them all out of their misery.

I thought the only live person was the Master of Fiction. I've also heard a theory that the entire story was an hallucination of the Doctor, so that makes it doubly hard to tell who died and who didn't.

It's The Celestial Toymaker where the 'toys' were originally human. The Mind Robber characters are simply fictional. Obviously Emily hasn't watched this as often as she could...

Heck, I haven't seen it at least 8 to 10 years, so I'm surprised I remember as much as I do. When's it coming out on DVD?????

No idea, but there aren't THAT many Troughton stories to release - thanks, BBC - so I doubt we'll have to wait too many years. Those of us who actually WANT to watch this thing again, that is. (I DO like it, I just drastically overwatched it a decade ago cos it was one of a pitiful handful of Whos the BBC repeated after my parents had finally acquired a video recorder.)

Didn't the Doctor abruptly stop typing up an escape for himself when he realised it would turn him into fiction? That implies (to ME) that such a fate may have befallen other people from time to time.

I doubt The Mind Robber can be just a hallucination of the Doctor's, given that the Land of Fiction appeared again in Conundrum and Head Games. (And its Master popped up in Happy Endings.)

DWM: 'Consider...The Also People, only let down by a skimpy, intrusive plot spoiling the fun of revelling in the novel's setting. Is it so outrageous to suggest that this plot could have been excised completely? [Jonny] Morris believes so, and that "a Doctor Who without adventure would be like a Sherlock Holmes story without any detecting, or a James Bond story without any spying...ignoring the Docotr Who format is a rather superficial way of pretending to be original.'

Reports of the plot RUINING Also People have been greatly exaggerated, but yeah, it WOULD have been fun to excise it and I really think the Whoniverse could support ONE story with no 'adventure'. It's coped with weirder things, in its time.

Bookwyrm:

'And that was when Bernice looked up and saw that the world curved over their heads"...However we later learn that the radius of the sphere is 150 million kilometres...the sphere's curvature would be nearly 25,000 times less than the curvature of the planet Earth and, to the naked eye, Earth looks pretty flat.' - Oh.

'We learn that the People could "take out the Daleks without raising a sweat". Given what we know now, it might have been nice for them to lend a hand in the Time War. Bastards.' - Yeah. This.

But then God IS playing the long game vis-a-vis the cultural development of the universe...or something...according to Down, anyway...and let's face it, the Time War doesn't really seem to have done any long-term damage to the universe, bar the Nestene's protein planets (gits), the Gelth (also gits) and Gallifrey (triple gits, and also ones hell-bent on getting themselves killed, one way or another...).

'And that was when Bernice looked up and saw that the world curved over their heads"...However we later learn that the radius of the sphere is 150 million kilometres...the sphere's curvature would be nearly 25,000 times less than the curvature of the planet Earth and, to the naked eye, Earth looks pretty flat.' - Oh.

But if you're INSIDE the sphere, you will see it curve over your head, be it a hundred or a billion kilometers in radius.

Ah, so the novel got it right?

*Shakes head sadly* You'd think you could trust PAID nitpickers, but...