Tediously awful book. It took me a week to get through the last half primarily due to not caring about the huge number of characters that appeared for a few pages and then vanished. I know it was meant to tie in with the method of storytelling used in fairy tales but it just didn't work contrasted against the magical realism of other books. Did anyone else get the impression it was two separate proposals which were mashed into a single book?
No, but I'll bear that in mind when I reread. Which I will one day, what with it being a thorougly enjoyable book.
'Stopping to investigate would waste energy and even risk their own ship' Christina thinks...two seconds before thinking that 'at worst it would cost them time and air'. Will it risk the bloody ship or not?
'What if we only thought we were reading English?' asks the Doctor. Surely this is an issue he should have dealt with CENTURIES ago.
How can three chains of command work on one ship?
This must be the only book not to put alien races in capitals, just like humans.
Oh great. Dogs having sex with people BEFORE Mad Dogs and Englishmen.
Love the casual mention of 'Christmas or Yom Kippur or Zero-Rad Day'.
'•••• him. •••• his whimsicality and his brown leather walking boots that never seemed to get unpolished, and his hail-fellow-well-met bonhomie. I'll see you done down, Doctor, he thought. Maybe I'll even hurt myself to do it. You walk among us, but you aren't one of us. You aren't slaving for your living, you aren't beholden to a boss. You don't desire what we desire, or need what we need. You're less real than that bloody gnome, and you'll never know how much you're hated for it.' Wow. Alex is, it goes without saying, insane, but still...
Fitz is told that the last person to leave the hut will get eaten and his reaction is to wake up the other two instead of quietly scarpering? He's my hero.
'A hole cut cleanly, almost politely, through his leg' - so why is it his stomach that's wounded in the rest of the book?
Why doesn't Anji just go to the loo in the TARDIS?
Even Christina thought of getting Inex to get 'em into the tower before it occurred to the Doctor. Also pretty thick of him not to think of Christina nicking the boxes when she scarpered. (SO not fair when she gets turned into a CAT.)
A million realities have been seeded by the white hole??
Bit reckless of Anji to make a bargain with the love-sick ogre after the way her LAST bargain turned out.
Ah bless, the Doctor's caught the bouquet!
Good fun, though sadly short on nits, what with being MAGIC or whatever.
Ah bless, the Doctor's caught the bouquet!
Astonishing that neither this nor the wedding ring on Adventuress's cover gave the game away...a married Doctor was JUST SO UNTHINKABLE in those days...
sadly short on nits, what with being MAGIC or whatever.
Adventuress of Henrietta Street: 'Two of his most recent adventures had taken place in "two most remarkable worlds... one called Ceresalpha, where the children were as ghosts, and another where faerie-tales came true"...it could be argued that the Doctor had travelled to both of these peculiar realms, subconsciously or otherwise, in order to get himself into the right frame of mind for the ritual he was to perform at Henrietta Street' - nice try, I'll attempt to accept this as the reason for the fairy-tale nonsense, alas this excuse doesn't extend to The Crooked World...