This is my favorite NA. Gabriel and (••••, forgotten), have to be some of the scariest DW enemies ever. Very interesting concepts.
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Or something.
(Edje uses a bit of his RADW sig.)

Gabriel and Tanith annoyed me with their cheesy, corny dialogue.
I managed to get a grip on most of the things in this book but I don't understand why G and T died at the end, the Grey Man said something about their being wrong about the Cathedral or something?
The Mandlebrot Set were cool though, and I liked the stuff about the Grey Man's origins (though, if he observed the *first* race evolve, then where did his race come from?)
By the way, who are the character out of Sapphire and Steel in this book? I haven't seen this show but I read this morning that they were in this book.

I think Gabriel and Tanith were the S&S characters, only evil versions of them.

After re-reading it I found it better than I originally remembered. It seemed to have less pain and suffering although my memory may be cheating. Or perhaps the level of them have been greater in subsequent novels so it now looks tamer in comparison.

A very cliched and rushed ending spoiled it as the re-appearance of the grey man came across as a deus ex machina. I know he was one literally but it still seemed a cop-out. I'll give Daniel marks for working in 'The Parrot Sketch' and not giving any characters VD.

I dunno about the violence, Jane (or whatever her name is) getting her eyes gouged out was a bit unnecessary. Usually when that happens in a Who book (Just War, Eternity Weeps) the victim gets to keep ONE eye. And I don't care if Jane isn't, strictly speaking, 'real' - that's pure snobbery.

What about Homer in the novelisation of The Myth Makers? He lost both his eyes.

God, I'd forgotten about that! It was WEIRD. I mean, this is a children's book, and a comedy to boot. Having the cheery, flippant narrator have BOTH his eyes put out - one at a time, for maximum horror - was...um...very original.

GREAT first line. And prologue. The discussion on darkness reminded me of COARP's opening paragraph.

Why is Ace lying around with a splitting headache for TWO HOURS before getting some aspirin?

'Not the usual, probably untrue, spiel about dimensional transcendentalism or forced perspectives' - how DARE you accuse the Doctor of being a liar! (Alright, I'm the first to complain when Tom starts waving those stupid boxes around, or Hartnell talking about big buildings on television, but that's not the POINT.)

'He tapped her nose with his finger. Patronizing. He didn't try it when he was real. Scared of losing the finger.' - Nonsense, it's not PATRONISING! Eleven does it to River and he wouldn't dare patronise HER.

Oh my god, we're SEEING a TARDIS bedroom. I'd forgotten that such things EXIST. New Who doesn't just avoid SHOWING 'em, they aren't allowed to be mentioned in the BOOKS either.

'The Doctor's face was a fluid mix of features that never seemed the same twice, a face of infinite facets balancing dark wisdom and authority with childish wonder. It was the face he had been born to wear' - nope. Eccy's was the face he'd been born to wear.

'Ace had long ago formulated the theory that he had twenty or thirty identical sets of clothing in his wardrobe' - well, Ten appearing in that blue suit in Waters of Mars certainly backs THAT up.

'It was a massive room' - it hasn't had the telemovie make-over yet! The console room should be pretty small.

'I like cats' - yay! Good for McCoy! No pathetic Tennant-style PRETENDING that he doesn't love 'em really...

The Doctor and Ace SERIOUSLY THINK Benny would be so stupid she'd not only completely forget to meet them in ten minutes as arranged, she might actually climb thousands of flights of Castrovalva-like stairs for no readily apparent reason?

Honestly, why don't they just have mobile phones like any SENSIBLE Companions?

'There was no point in giving herself, and the Doctor and Ace, away to any sane people' - er...the POINT would be to GET AWAY FROM THE KNIFE-WIELDING MANIAC. Plus there's no need to mention you've got friends wandering around the house.

'Time to round up his accomplices. Ace first, since he had a vague idea of where she might be. Try to find Benny with a minimum amount of fuss.' - sorry, WHAT! Benny has DISAPPEARED. You and Ace concocted a plan to search for her that involved you starting at the bottom of the house and working your way up and Ace going to the top of the house and working her way down. Yet you're going to abandon it ALREADY and search for Benny WITH Ace, thus halving the search-rate?

'If her one and only serious love affair had worked out' - ha! If that's a reference to bloke-who-betrayed-her-and-her-tortoises, what about Daniel, who she was in love with in Sword of Forever and haunted by ever since...

So whether Benny lives or dies 'All depends on how much blood she lost in the first place.' Er...Doctor? You do know there are these things called HOSPITALS that do these things called BLOOD TRANSFUSIONS, right?

Ace STOLE the TARDIS key from the Doctor?! Actually I'm outraged that the git didn't just GIVE her one.

'Nothing was left but a few fragments of metal' - sorry, not a nit, just trying to work out who/what the Grey Man IS. And why a force so fundamental to the universe doesn't bother showing his face again, except in Happy Endings.

'Something unholy, something fatal, something soul-crushingly good.' - Wow. GREAT description of the Seventh Doctor. Perhaps a leetle more impressive than the McCoy we saw on-screen, but never mind.

Tanith's hair 'hung about her shoulders'. Well not in the cover photo it didn't. Though frankly that's the LEAST of my problems with said cover. It's second only to Parasite's in sheer godawfulness.

'thirteen shafts of cold obsidian hollow and rotting that is my soul my soul my soul' - shouldn't it be 507 shafts...? And what's this nonsense about it being hollow and rotting?

'I am faust come from a race of fausts who sold our souls for thirteen long lives' - interesting. Though I'd hardly say kicking the Pythia out was selling your soul.

'come friendly bombs and drop on gallifrey i hated that world i hated it all...' - hey! He LOVED running across those red fields with the Little-Master...Besides it's Come friendly bombs and FALL on Gallifrey...sorry...Slough.

'my companions you gave me my life and sometimes you gave me yours too i loved you all i never want you to leave because it is like death for me' - that's almost...New Who-ish.

'i am not a Time Lord i reject the title' - who does he think he's fooling?

'A cosy, stifling sensation that reminded him of a childhood when he was smothered by the lethargy of Gallifrey' - alright, so it turns out *scowls* that the Doctor DID have a childhood, but at this point shouldn't the NAs have been sticking to their 'Looms' story?

To be continued...

Er...Doctor? You do know there are these things called HOSPITALS that do these things called BLOOD TRANSFUSIONS, right?

He isn't a medical Doctor, most of the time. He might not now how long it takes to die of blood loss.

Ace STOLE the TARDIS key from the Doctor?! Actually I'm outraged that the git didn't just GIVE her one.

As if Ace could steal anything from Seven he didn't want stolen. That was obviously just his way of giving her the key, and a sense of accomplishment into the bargain. Later Doctors were more straight forwards, but that's no surprise.

shouldn't it be 507 shafts...?

That must have been changed during the Time War, which hadn't happened yet.

And what's this nonsense about it being hollow and rotting?

A subtle indication that the Doctor can lie, even in his thoughts.

"Honestly, why don't they just have mobile phones like any SENSIBLE Companions?"

Do you know what size mobile phones were in 1994? They wouldn't have been able to get them through the TARDIS doors.

He isn't a medical Doctor most of the time. He might not now how long it takes to die of blood loss.

All the more reason to rush Benny to a hospital where they know such things.

As if Ace could steal anything from Seven he didn't want stolen. That was obviously just his way of giving her the key, and a sense of accomplishment into the bargain.

Ah, but whatever sense of accomplishment you get from STEALING from the universe's Ultimate Thief surely can't match that joyous moment he VOLUNTARILY ENTRUSTS you with this Sacred Object - did you SEE the look on Rose and Martha's faces? (OK, not Donna's so much...)

A subtle indication that the Doctor can lie, even in his thoughts.

I could live with THAT. I'm genuinely worried that he DOES think his soul is hollow and rotting, though.

Do you know what size mobile phones were in 1994? They wouldn't have been able to get them through the TARDIS doors.

Well, THAT'S why they should have nipped forward to the twenty-first century and purchased some nice slimline iphones and blackberries and, um, whatever we HAVE these days.

Why is Ace lying around with a splitting headache for TWO HOURS before getting some aspirin?

I guess you're not a chronic headache sufferer. Some headaches and migraines zap my energy to such an extent that I simply cannot get up to walk across the room and get the aspirin.

I guess you're not a chronic headache sufferer. Some headaches and migraines zap my energy to such an extent that I simply cannot get up to walk across the room and get the aspirin.

Yes, I'm totally a chronic headache sufferer, but they've never been THAT bad. Anyway, isn't Ace combat-trained - she should be able to move while in agony.

OK, stopping Ace doing what she was THREATENING to do to Page with that gun is one thing, but why didn't Benny let her at least relieve the unconscious psycho of her weapon?

This definitely scores uncomfortably high on the eyeball front. Even the Doctor gets his ripped to bloody shreds (luckily it's imaginary. Or something).

'She'd never felt like this before. Not when Julian died. Not when Mike died. Not when Sorin died. Not when Jan died. So what did Benny have that they didn't?' OK, a) which one was Julian, again? and b) I simply don't believe this. Ace and Benny never struck me as particularly close (they rather got on each other's nerves in the TARDIS and they sure as hell never met up after Lungbarrow) and OK, I realise the NAs have retconned Jan from the Lurve Of Ace's Life to some dirty gypsy she was thrilled to see die nobly two seconds after they got engaged. But STILL. 'No one I loved's been killed before'???

'It would be her, alone with the gun, facing an unarmed enemy. The advantage was hers; she held all the aces' - sorry, which bit of 'Gabriel and Tanith can control her every move and come back from the dead and rip apart the universe and stuff' has SLIPPED ACE'S MIND?

'The smallest actions irrevocably altering futures of a hundred worlds on which you had no right to be. Millions of potential, real futures dislocated. You - every other time traveller - guilty of genocide to an unimaginable degree.' - I DON'T like this vision of time travel.

'Theta Sigma was a secret he kept well guarded. It was not his name but it identified him uniquely among the Time Lords. It should not have been spoken outside the Academy of Gallifrey' - well why's he telling people in Happiness Patrol then!

'I have no affection for the Time Lords of Gallifrey, nor any mayfly-race that claims for itself the status of gods. But if flung into a chaotic situation, they are more than capable of stabilizing matters' - the HELL they are!

'I'm thinking of returning home. It's time I settled down, high time. You wouldn't like Gallifrey' - WHAT! Where did THAT insane idea come from? And is it ever mentioned again?

'Fifteen thousand million years ago the cosmos formed during Event One' - is that accurate? 'When the first cells spawned in the first oceans on the first world, I was there, with my people, watching' - er...HOW?

'[My people's] influence stretched through the cosmos, down to the universal structure itself...They had taken it and were making it rigid, imposing their own philosophies, their absolutes. They had taken the people of the first world to war. They had destroyed the oldest civilization for their own fathomless motives' - who ARE these people! Why have we never encountered them before or since! And CoaRP says it was the Time Lords who made the universal structure rigid.

'I was immediately placed on trial by my colleagues for my "blasphemy". They cast me out. I fell, and as I fell, I burned.' - what is he, Lucifer?

'They reminded Benny of the brooding statues of Easter Island, of the Karet'ah Tika on Plaemus Tau...of a hundred different places she had visited or read about. It was a big galactic mystery, it suggested a common cultural inheritance across Earth's sector of the galaxy' - well, guess THAT mystery is solved. Eleven was BUSY GETTING WORSHIPPED during his 200-year Farewell Tour...

People 'purr' three times in less than one page. It's irritating in such an otherwise well-written book.

Ace 'sensed little danger...What remained of [Page] was so grotesque it was entertaining' - which bit of an armed homicidal maniac is so amusing, exactly? It's a shame cos you can usually hear Ace's voice clearly in this book, unlike most of the NAs.

'Better yet, none of the Mandelbrot Set remained. Benny had been afraid that some might have hidden while the others destroyed themselves' - which bit of A MANDELBROT IS ESSENTIAL TO THE DOCTOR'S PLAN TO DEFEAT GABRIEL AND TANITH does Benny just not get?

'Oh ••••. Yeah. We never thought of that. ••••.' - OK, and I'm still not clear what THAT is. Gabriel and Tanith were defeated HOW, exactly?

'"Are you going after Ace?" "Yes," he said wearily. "She'll kill Tanith. If I tried to stop her, I'd fail, so I won't try."' - so by 'Yes' you mean 'No', then.

Good book. Would probably have been a great book, with a decent editor to cut it down.

I DON'T like this vision of time travel.

Fortunately, we know it's not true. The Doctor told Martha that in 'The Shakespeare Code'. As best we can tell, fixed points can't be rewritten without making the universe go seriously weird, and Earth's history is littered with fixed points.

But if flung into a chaotic situation, they are more than capable of stabilizing matters' - the HELL they are!

You can't get much more stable than Gallifrey without being dead. Competent Time Lords ought to be great at stabilising things - the problem is find one who is competent, and sane.

who ARE these people! Why have we never encountered them before or since! And CoaRP says it was the Time Lords who made the universal structure rigid.

Well, they could be the same people who imprisoned the Beast: they were around at the right time.

This can be reconciled with CoaRP if the Grey Man's people are the Time Lords, seen from the other side of the mirror. Neither realises they're twins, separated at birth

"well, guess THAT mystery is solved. Eleven was BUSY GETTING WORSHIPPED during his 200-year Farewell Tour..."

That's a horribly cruel thing to say about the Easter Island heads*.

(* Which are actually called Mo'ai, as the author apparently didn't know.)

I DON'T like this vision of time travel.

Fortunately, we know it's not true. The Doctor told Martha that in 'The Shakespeare Code'. As best we can tell, fixed points can't be rewritten without making the universe go seriously weird, and Earth's history is littered with fixed points.

You know, I was halfway through typing 'I DON'T like this vision of time travel, but thank the gods New Who has told us it's LIES, ALL LIES' when I had second thoughts.

In Shakespeare Code the Doctor didn't deny that stepping on a butterfly could change history - he specifically told Martha not to step on any butterflies.

And several of Earth's so-called Fixed Points seem less fixed in the Wedding-of-River-Song sense than just major historical turning-points that the Doctor can (and does, in Waters of Mars) alter.

After all, on those happy occasions when time's in flux (Hungry Earth/Cold Blood) you CAN change things - and DON'T tell me a Silurian/Human shared Earth wouldn't have had MAJOR repercussions for the rest of time, including so-called Fixed Points...

You can't get much more stable than Gallifrey without being dead.

True, but that would just mean that when exposed to the REAL universe most of 'em would promptly have a nervous breakdown - or possibly stare at the Clangers/Teletubbies with a beatific smile on their faces till they fell over and regenerated through lack of food.

Competent Time Lords ought to be great at stabilising things - the problem is find one who is competent, and sane.

Yeah, and the Grey Man really should have noticed that THERE BLOODY AREN'T ANY. Even the Doctor's nuts. (I'd nominate Romana, only she became The War Queen and Mistress of the Nine Gallifreys so isn't exactly the poster-girl for sanity.)

Well, they could be the same people who imprisoned the Beast: they were around at the right time.

Yeah, except that apparently the Legion of Light heroically imprisoned the Beast, whereas the Grey People were total gits (who at least had the decency not to give themselves names like that).

This can be reconciled with CoaRP if the Grey Man's people are the Time Lords, seen from the other side of the mirror. Neither realises they're twins, separated at birth

I don't see how they CAN be. The Time Lords definitely evolved on Gallifrey, in this universe. They may have been the first (well, not according to Falls the Shadow they aren't) but they didn't predate the universe.

"well, guess THAT mystery is solved. Eleven was BUSY GETTING WORSHIPPED during his 200-year Farewell Tour..."

That's a horribly cruel thing to say about the Easter Island heads*.

Hey! It wasn't me who said it, it was River Song!

Daniel's DWM interview:

'The major changes happened at [Virgin's] insistence....These changes included cutting a hundred pages (although it's still the longest New Aventure so far) and removing a lot of the violence and gore - although you wouldn't believe it!' - you're right. I don't.

'There are reasons why the book is so gruesome: I think part of it was to exorcise the demon of reading a very disturbing issue of DC's Sandman comic' - some people SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED TO READ COMICS.

'They wanted me to completely rewrite the ending and I'm happy about that. The second draft works better than the original, it ties up the loose ends' - Jeez, what was the ORIGINAL ending like if THAT inexplicable blink-and-you-miss-it ending was an IMPROVEMENT?

'Ace had long ago formulated the theory that he had twenty or thirty identical sets of clothing in his wardrobe' - well, Ten appearing in that blue suit in Waters of Mars certainly backs THAT up.

Not to mention Old Sixie's hideous revelation in The Crimes of Thomas Brewster that 'I have another dozen identical coats back in the TARDIS.'

'thirteen shafts of cold obsidian hollow and rotting that is my soul my soul my soul' - shouldn't it be 507 shafts...?

OK, as you were, turns out Eleven was lying a bit about those 507 regenerations, dammit...

a childhood when he was smothered by the lethargy of Gallifrey

Oh come ON! In between the Untempered Schism, the orphanage, the Academy, the seven grandmothers (Granny Two was a Zygon agent, you know!), his crush on the Master, raising hell with his Deca-gang chums, climbing mountains to commune with daisy-loving hermits, getting his Doctorate, getting expelled, stealing the moon and the president's wife...when the •••• did little-Thete have TIME to get SMOTHERED BY LETHARGY?

'The smallest actions irrevocably altering futures of a hundred worlds on which you had no right to be. Millions of potential, real futures dislocated. You - every other time traveller - guilty of genocide to an unimaginable degree.' - I DON'T like this vision of time travel.

Well, at least it - oddly - omitted to mention the ENVIRONMENTAL damage ('Time travel is damage. It's like a tear in the fabric of reality. That is the scar tissue of my journey through the universe. My path through time and space from Gallifrey to Trenzalore').

Bookwyrm:

'We are told here that Thascales died in a car accident, his body destroyed beyond all recognition. This is presumably a UNIT cover-up of the Master's vanishing but, given that Delgado himself died in a car accident, it's also seemingly a joke in very questionable taste' - I wouldn't call it a JOKE, nothing wrong with reminding everyone of Delgado's TRAGIC AND INFURIATING (albeit Id-and-Ego-sparing) death, if it was even meant as such, which I doubt - of course 'car accident' is the first thing that springs to mind when you're trying to cover up a death.

(I mean, not speaking from personal experience or anything, but you wouldn't believe how many Malawian Ministers died in 'car accidents' straight after criticising His Excellency The Life President. The bodies were exhumed post-democracy-revolution and guess what? They didn't die in car accidents.)

'The plot tries to suggest that it has some kind of scientific basis and justifies this with the glorious line "Einstein was right. His assumptions were wrong." This is an incredible statement, which, like much of the rest of the book, has apparent deep meaning without, you know, actually meaning anything' - hey, I'm FINE with that.

'If anyone is prepared to explain exactly how this a) works as two consecutive meaningful sentences and b) helps to explain the scientific basis of the plot, ATB Publishing is prepared to give prizes' - so...Daniel? PRIZES!

'The chapter titles go on to reference pop songs, literature and even opera. They're all relevant, and it was probably cute at the time. Not so much now, when you feel that something that the author so clearly wanted to be considered literature is riffled with references to whatever CDs he had on his shelf' - would they even have been CDs? Or cassettes?

The Grey Man 'resolves the problem of Gabriel and Tanith by, essentially, saying "But your cunning plan forgot this!" to which they respond, "Oh ••••. Yeah." Horrendously, that last line is a direct quote, but it could have read "And we'd have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids"' - now THAT'S fair enough.

'Gloriously, Benny asks the grey man whether cathedral is "a parallel thingy, a virtual thingy or a computer thingy", thus summing up the three main strands of NA writing - is that TRUE? - 'It would be even more pointed, of course, if this novel hadn't ended up in a VR environment with ranting about chaos theory on the side' - *sigh*

'You can almost hear O'Mahoney [sic] enthusing in the background about how much further he's pushed the characters than anyone ever before. That's what Tanith and Gabriel are there for, to push people to their breaking point, and that is their only raison d'etre. Sadly, it appears to be the novel's as well, only we're the victims now...It's going for the angstiest angst in the angstiverse, but I honestly lost the will to live...' - it WORKED then! What are you complaining about!

'"It's become tiresome. The people here aren't fun any more...What happened to the really interesting ones?" "We killed them." It's so true, and you can't help but wonder how O'Mahoney could have written those lines without understanding what they were trying to tell him. And then you realise, to your horror, that there are still nearly 100 pages to go...' - There, there...the Doctor's still around and s/he's, y'know, QUITE INTERESTING. (Except for Five, obviously.)

'It's well-written, but it's also deeply, deeply annoying...When the plot is explained to Benny, she commits suicide, and I found it difficult to blame her' - blimey, is THAT what happens?!

'It's a really well-written, really well-constructed book that i absolutely hate' - geez, when you look at most of the OTHER NAs...just be grateful for a bit (OK...a lot) of good writing.

Though his co-author is more impressed (as befits the guy who has a Mandlebrot Set tattooed on his back) - 'Literate and powerful and has prose to die for (several times, probably with the loss of your eyes and sanity somewhere along the way)' - that's a compliment...right?

...but you wouldn't believe how many Malawian Ministers died in 'car accidents' straight after criticising His Excellency The Life President.

Why would I not believe something so duh!?

There, there...the Doctor's still around and s/he's, y'know, QUITE INTERESTING. (Except for Five, obviously.

Ah, so you find Six interesting, you just don't like the coat.

...but you wouldn't believe how many Malawian Ministers died in 'car accidents' straight after criticising His Excellency The Life President.

Why would I not believe something so duh!?

You just don't usually get three ON THE SAME DAY. You space 'em out a bit if you've got any sense.

the Doctor's still around and s/he's, y'know, QUITE INTERESTING. (Except for Five, obviously.

Ah, so you find Six interesting, you just don't like the coat.

Well, I don't find Old Sixie boring. Mainly because my brain's too busy screaming 'Why? WHY???'

'The Doctor's face was a fluid mix of features that never seemed the same twice, a face of infinite facets balancing dark wisdom and authority with childish wonder. It was the face he had been born to wear'

Interesting line from a guy who can't stand darling Sylvester McCoy, always throwing around words like 'wizened gnome' and 'sledge drawn by rabbits'...

Tbf, this book was published 18 years before the first Hobbit film was released. No one could have predicted that particular horror in 1994!

Excuses, excuses...

Didn't Winterdawn, like, DIE in Falls the Shadow? Cos in 2003, 'that old fraud Winterdawn [was] hurling himself around the Copenhagen conference centre in his souped-up wheelchair' (Quantum Archangel)...

Honestly, why don't they just have mobile phones like any SENSIBLE Companions?

Do you know what size mobile phones were in 1994? They wouldn't have been able to get them through the TARDIS doors.

Well, THAT'S why they should have nipped forward to the twenty-first century and purchased some nice slimline iphones and blackberries and, um, whatever we HAVE these days.

Or, hey, in 1984 Davison whipped out an ex-military comms unit so Turlough could keep in touch (Power Game)...