Well, according to Down, all transmats are a form of suicide. You go in, your molecules are recorded, you're slaughtered and a perfect copy of you is created wherever-you're-going. I don't know how seriously to take this, it would mean that Harry and Sarah got killed in The Ark in Space, The Sontaran Experiment AND Revenge of the Cybermen. Not to mention the Doctor.

Fitz's little dreamscape which echoes (ha!) the early days of Pink Floyd is probably the highlight of this curiously flat book from Dave Stone. While his books meander on their own way none could ever be called dull until this one.

Have you READ Oblivion? Or was it written after Slow Empire?

Wonder if Stone ever read Thomas Disch's "Echo Round His Bones", another novel that discusses the odd side effects of matter transportation.

Dave Stone in I, Who 3: 'This book contains an utterly disastrous typo, which completely wrecks the thematic sense of it, and which I missed until after it was printed..."On Thakrash" should have of course read "No Thackrash" - which would have literally made three points about the plot clearer to the reader' - it WOULD?

'Stone also claims that when the Doctor acts like his past personas...he had different actors in mind for the roles..."I managed to get eight Doctors wrong instead of just the one"' - why would anyone DO that?

Has the occasional good line ('Faint heart never won fair lady, gentleman or hermaphroditic bicuspid of your personal choice') but basically it's rather dreary, just as I remembered (and, bizarrely, NOT as I immortalised in my review).

'You have no doubt heard the stories of this magnificent, illustrious and quite obdurately enigmatic personage' – how? It's a SLOW empire. And one the Doctor's never been to before or since this adventure.

'Slowly, over a hundred years, he drew the skeins of memory about himself, knitted them together into something halfway complete, rediscovered something of who, and what, he once was' – since WHEN!

'The effulgent light burned the flesh from the bones and charred those bones to dust' – so how come the victim is STILL WHIMPERING?

'I just wish I could remember if it was ever actually mine' – since when does the Doctor bemoan his amnesia, let alone over something as petty as an umbrella?

'The recent unpleasantness, in the way of such things, had been very unpleasant indeed' – hmm, I don't remember anything particularly bad happening to Anji in Year of Intelligent Tigers? Admittedly this could be because I don't remember Anji even being IN Year of Intelligent Tigers.

The Doctor 'seemed to be relapsing into the paramnesia that had at one time plagued him to the point of complete debilitation' – that was a century before Anji met him! Sure, Fitz COULD have told her all about it but can ANYONE picture him admitting that yeah, he'd dumped his best friend alone on an alien world for a century whilst said friend was a gibbering lunatic?

The Doctor casually admits it could take YEARS for the TARDIS to reach its next destination? And Fitz and Anji seem unbothered?

The TARDIS swimming pool was 'in a continuingly shifting position and with ever-changing decor. It was as if it were uniquely vital to the scheme of things and the TARDIS were forever trying to find the perfect version of it' - interesting theory, slightly ruined by the fact the Doctor jetisoned the TARDIS swimming pool and Sexy didn't bother to replace it (Paradise Towers).

'The musty reek of a million kinds of ancient cloth degrading over time’ – Sexy allows the clothes in her wardrobe to just ROT AWAY?

The Doctor gave 'a look of sudden and genuine terror, as though some part of him saw something deep and dark and fundamental that no human eyes should ever see' - he hasn't got HUMAN eyes you cretin!

Oh. Right. Eight. He HAS, hasn't he. The novels usually have the good taste to ignore that nonsense, just like the audios and (give or take a bit of Hell Bent teasing) New Who.

'Oh, if they start monkeying with the primary systems, here in the vortex, that might trigger an interstitial singularity that could •••• the entire universe into oblivion like bathwater down a plughole' – honestly, a bunch of monsters pressing a few buttons on the TARDIS will destroy the universe? It's a miracle it's still here.

So (unlike everyone else in the Whoniverse, even the Companions) Jamon can TELL that the sounds Anji is making aren't the sounds he can hear and understand?

'He told me once how he could sort of change' – the Doctor mentioned regeneration ONCE to Fitz? Who didn't ask for any details? And takes one look at Jamon of all sexist show-offs and starts wildly suspecting that HE'S a regenerated Doctor?

'There were any number of types [of tunnel], in his experience, ranging from the gentle dankness of th sewer to the spare whiteness of a nuclear command bunker' – hmm. Either the Doc's memory is a LOT better than every other EDA gives us reason to suspect, or the Doctor's been a LOT busier since Escape Velocity than, well, every other EDA gives us reason to suspect. Ditto for there being 'seven thousand, four hundred and thirty-two things that might be simply and instantly lethal' at the top of the stairs and quite a few other things that I carefully noted down but just can't be bothered to type up.

'Now I hope you don’t think I brought those creatures to your world intentionally...' – but you DID, Doctor. You wanted to land the TARDIS in a hurry and you didn't give a single thought to what the monsters would do to an inhabited world once you'd unleashed them on it. Nor did you look overly upset at the sight of all the dead bodies afterwards.

'I must admit, I sometimes wish I hadn't lost the knack of knowing everything at a glance' – the Doctor had such a knack? The Doctor REMEMBERS having such a knack?

The Doctor can modify the iterations of the immediate probability space since when?

'It seemed reasonable to assume that the old girl had done something to protect herself from the interlopers. Some form of blanket particle emission that accelerated physical ageing, perhaps' – come off it! Like Sexy's ever done anything of the sort, before or since!

So the Doctor's irresistible urge to purloin a penny whistle makes him sense that he had 'past lives'?!

To be continued...

'The effulgent light burned the flesh from the bones and charred those bones to dust' – so how come the victim is STILL WHIMPERING?

Maybe it didn't do that to ALL of him-her.

interesting theory, slightly ruined by the fact the Doctor jetisoned the TARDIS swimming pool and Sexy didn't bother to replace it (Paradise Towers).

She must have done so at SOME point.

'The musty reek of a million kinds of ancient cloth degrading over time’ – Sexy allows the clothes in her wardrobe to just ROT AWAY?

She is too busy finding the perfect spot for the swimming pool to bother

'The effulgent light burned the flesh from the bones and charred those bones to dust' – so how come the victim is STILL WHIMPERING?

Maybe it didn't do that to ALL of him-her.

How many of your bones can be reduced to dust without it killing you?

interesting theory, slightly ruined by the fact the Doctor jetisoned the TARDIS swimming pool and Sexy didn't bother to replace it (Paradise Towers).

She must have done so at SOME point.

True...maybe she just refused to replace it while Mel Bush was around, just to annoy her. Or, indeed, to get her killed, given what happened when Mel decided she needed a nice swim in Paradise Towers. (This of course contradicts that bit in the Quantum Archangel PDA when the TARDIS's rich fruity voice tells a departing Mel that she'll be missed but hey, let's just all just ignore EVERYTHING in Quantum Archangel, OK?)

How many of your bones can be reduced to dust without it killing you?

Well, if you only destroyed the lower half of their body, they would end up dying of course but they might linger long enough to whimper for a minute or two.

Bloody HELL.

'I have to say that was a particularly vicious and cruel thing to do' - when has the Doctor EVER spoken like THAT to a Companion? And how could Anji possibly be stupid enough to think he meant Jamon slapping her rather than her dismantling Jamon's worldview? Also, she could have been a bit more tactful about it but doesn't THE DOCTOR always go round dismantling people's worldviews himself? Also, Anji's brutal deductions ('You really should consider the possibility that what you've really been doing in your so-called travels is committing a particularly gruesome form of suicide, while somewhere else, something else is cobbled together and loaded up with a collection of false, dead memories') are probably true (do we ever discover? I've already forgotten) in which case she's SAVING (THIS) JAMON'S LIFE by telling him not to do it again.

'Quite how [the Doctor] had managed to go for so long, without it so much as occurring to him to wonder about the physical fact of having two or more of certain things, where other people had only one, was probably best left unpondered' - how the hell did Fitz know the Doctor had never thought about such things? Don't recall him bothering to ask much about THAT CENTURY the Doctor had spent alone after Fitz dumped him as a gibbering madman and scarpered.

'Emphatic lettering, in some indecipherable local language' - OK, this was written before New Who firmly established that Sexy translated writing, but still...

Our Heroes didn't bother to ask SOONER about the cost of their supper?

'Fitz related the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The tale wasn't particularly well told in itself' - it wasn't? Why the hell NOT! Fitz is an accomplished story-teller (i.e. pathological liar).

'I contrived to drive Mistress Anji into such a rage that she poured forth such vile insinuations that it was all my manly strength could do, at the time, not to meet those outpourings with immediate defenestration' - well, that and the fact the TARDIS doesn't have windows, presumably...

'During the comparatively recent years of his mental recovery, the Doctor would occasionally lapse into a state [in which] he was simply unable to distinguish between the fact and fiction of a moving image. During these times he'd had to be forcibly restrained from watching a popular British soap opera, say, for fear that he would instantly be about slitting his wrists at the sheer futility and misery of life...And certain incidents concerning the relative position of the trousers and underpants are best, on the whole, glossed completely over' - most amusing but somewhat implausible. When exactly did these incidents take place? WHO was restraining the Doc?

Why does the Collector talk just like Sgloomi Po?

There's a TARDIS kitchen? With automated systems that can produce steaks and avocado salads and suchlike? Whatever happened to the white-Mars-bar food machine? (I suppose this is a nit I should really be picking with Five Doctors rather than Slow Empire...)

The TARDIS has a 'big red button labelled DO NOT PUSH! which if it's pushed will make the entire TARDIS disappear instantly up its own pocket singularity'? And the amnesiac Doctor knows this HOW, exactly?

'While not sharing their perversion, Fitz counted several notorious inverts in his acquaintance, and was often vocal in his support of them' - how sweet. Fitz in a virtual-reality world is a passionate advocate of gay rights. Don't remember him being anything of the sort anywhere else?

And shouldn't such virtual realities - like parallel universes - be used sparingly and actually be INTERESTING when they occur? Because those WAKE UP instructions are starting to feel disturbingly appropriate.

Wouldn't they all be stinking after all that time trapped in VR?

'It was very fortunate for one person at least that the TARDIS was here - or at least two people thought so, for it was only the fact that said one person had the sole means of entering the TARDIS that prevented said two from braining him with the nearest handy plank' - they could always have brained him and taken the key...And isn't Eight manic a lot of the time anyway - what's so much more annoying about him HERE?

Our Heroes are talking a lot considering that the landscape of ash hurts their lungs when they just BREATHE. (I'm used to Who characters chatting away about how they're choking on Vesuvius ash and suchlike when they're in Big Finish audios, but there's a REASON for that that doesn't really apply to BOOKS.)

'You've been...prodding us out of the TARDIS and making sure we have an appropriately exciting adventure, with rescues and explosions and running through corridors' - as this book sadly proves, it takes more than rescues and explosions and running through corridors to make for an appropriately exciting adventure.

So WHAT'S new in the Vortex, exactly? Do we ever find out?

'It was a terrible thought to think oneself without the spark of the Divine, a quietly horrifying thought' - WHY, exactly? I've never had any problem with it, and it's not like Jamon was ever particularly religious - in fact, wasn't there a line about religion being sparse throughout the Empire, like butter spread over too much bread?

So the (Eighth, amnesiac!) Doctor is capable of inventing a teleport that can also reintegrate lost souls?

'There comes - or should come - a time in the writing of any fiction when the characters take on a life of their own and say things the writer himself would not ordinarily say. At some point the Doctor, for example, will make some moral pronouncement, some connection between the elements of life as it is and how it should be lived, that would never occur in a million years to one who, quite frankly, spends most of his time wrangling the beer vouchers and thinking up things to say to the people he fancies.' - ah bless! Why can't more of this book be footnotes and less actual NOVEL?

The TARDIS has a 'big red button labelled DO NOT PUSH! which if it's pushed will make the entire TARDIS disappear instantly up its own pocket singularity'?

I like big red buttons as much as the next guy, but of what use could this one possibly be? And isn't it just a disaster waiting to happen, ESPECIALLY if you label it "DO NOT PUSH"?

Well, QUITE. For starters, the Doctor mentioned the button because he'd just found the crazy Collector creature he let into the TARDIS playing with it, and for another thing, as we learnt in Christmas Invasion, no self-respecting Doctor can HELP but push a big red button that must never, ever be pressed...

'The recent unpleasantness, in the way of such things, had been very unpleasant indeed' – hmm, I don't remember anything particularly bad happening to Anji in Year of Intelligent Tigers? Admittedly this could be because I don't remember Anji even being IN Year of Intelligent Tigers.

OK, it turns out she started a war...or something...

The Doctor 'seemed to be relapsing into the paramnesia that had at one time plagued him to the point of complete debilitation' – that was a century before Anji met him! Sure, Fitz COULD have told her all about it but can ANYONE picture him admitting that yeah, he'd dumped his best friend alone on an alien world for a century whilst said friend was a gibbering lunatic?

Plus, Fitz is ALSO suffering from amnesia for some reason the EDAs never bothered to explain...

The TARDIS swimming pool was 'in a continuingly shifting position and with ever-changing decor. It was as if it were uniquely vital to the scheme of things and the TARDIS were forever trying to find the perfect version of it' - interesting theory, slightly ruined by the fact the Doctor jetisoned the TARDIS swimming pool and Sexy didn't bother to replace it (Paradise Towers).

I take it all back, obviously the book foresaw the swimming pool's vital role in saving River Song's life...

'The musty reek of a million kinds of ancient cloth degrading over time’ – Sexy allows the clothes in her wardrobe to just ROT AWAY?

Well, THAT'S nonsense or Bill would have stopped being low-key in love with her REALLY FAST.

The Doctor gave 'a look of sudden and genuine terror, as though some part of him saw something deep and dark and fundamental that no human eyes should ever see' - he hasn't got HUMAN eyes you cretin!

Though admittedly he can swap between human and Time Lord senses (Christmas on a Rational Planet).