New Novels
Under the Pendulum Sun, by Jeanette Ng
From an alternate Britain, where Captain Cook discovered a (largely conceptual) passage to the land of Faery, Catherine Helstone takes ship to Arcadia in search of her missing brother, Laon(1), who has taken a post as a missionary there, preaching the gospel to the fae. Trapped for an unmeasurable period in Gethsemane, a house granted to the representative of the London Missionary Society. She learns a little about the fae during her stay, especially from the gardener, Mr Benjamin, the only convert in Arcadia, before her brother's return and a visit by Mab, one of the Queens of Arcadia, brings the offer of a chance to take the mission further into Arcadia, but also revelations about the nature both of Faery and the Helstones themselves which threaten to tear Catherine and Laon apart.
Under the Pendulum Sun is a gothic romance, with trappings of a Shakespearean fairy land, which reads as much as anything like a companion piece to Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell set entirely in Faerie. The Helstones are subjected to all the cruelties of the fae, and this makes the story hard going at times, despite - or perhaps even because - several of the story's twists are easy to see coming. The strength of the novel lies in rich language and worldbuilding, but the characters are less compelling. Laon in particular is viewed only through the almost worshipful gaze of his sister, yet comes across as a bit of a dick, and as an atheist I personally found it very difficult to relate to their burning desire to spread the gospel to the faery.
As a debut novel, this is an impressive piece of writing, and Ng is the author whose acceptance speech for the John W. Campbell Award got it renamed to the Astonishing Award That Isn't Named After a Known and Unrepentant-in-his-Lifetime Fascist(2). The audiobook is not all it could be, with an American reader doing posh British, with a few really odd bits of pronunciation and, honestly, not a tace of the Helstones' native Yorkshire to be heard(3). The book also features some of the most toxic relationships I've read lately - much Wuthering, so Heights - but it does seem in little doubt that that is what they are.
I'd definitely read something else by Ng, but the further adventures of the Helstones hold no specific interest to me.
The Tyrant's Tomb, by Rick Riordan
Following the tragic events of The Burning Maze, the all-too human Apollo, and his master, Meg McCaffrey, make their way to Camp Jupiter in northern California. There they must commit a friend to eternal rest, before facing off against a direct assault by the forces, monstrous and mercenary, of the Emperors Commodus and Calligula, and their mysterious and terrifying allywhose tomb holds the secrets of life or death, not just for Apollo, but for all the gods of Greece and Rome.
Book four of The Trials of Apollo brings Apollo through the dark nigth of the soul which began in The Burning Maze and - by way of battle and suffering - to a brighter, better day. Mostly. Like most of Riordan's books, it is a fast-paced, emotionally engaging read, with Apollo continuing to be a surprisingly sympathetic narrator despite his constant name-dropping, self-pity and claims to have invented or inspired every major cultural or artistic achievement of the last three millennia. The reading is good, capturing Apollo's air of ironic melancholy nicely.
What can I tell you? If you like Riordan's work, you'll almost certainly enjoy this, but it's really not a starting point(4).
Guardians of Magic, by Chris Riddell
In a world of magic and fairytales, children wish on the cloud horses said to hatch in nests in the Forever Tree. But the Forever Tree and magic in general are in danger from rat gangsters, giant slayers and loggers, with only a handful of ballet dancing bears to defend them. Three children, Zam, Phoebe and Bathsheba - a baker, a musician and an apprentice giant-slayer with... questions - receive mysterious gifts of carved wood which grant them extraordinary abilities. Each driven out of their community by those who would see magic destroyed, the three must come together to save the Forever Tree and restore wonder to a world in the grip of greed and cruelty.
The first book in a new series by former Children's Laureate and big favourite of mine, Chris Riddell(5), Guardians of Magic is an ambitious work, introducing three characters, their friends and their cities within the space of a modest-length book, as well as telling its own tale of adventure and friendship, in which the real magic is empathy and understanding.
An excellent adventure story for bedtimes and young readers.
The Secret Commonwealth, by Philip Pullman
It has been twenty years since Lyra Belaqua was saved from the great flood, and almost ten since Lyra Silvertongue returned from her adventures in the North and beyond. Now, she is a student at St Sophia's College, and still lives at Jordan under the shield of scholastic sanctuary, but that may be about to change. In the Levant, powerful forces - the Magisterium and the puritanical 'Men from the Mountain'(6) - are seeking to control production of a specific rose oil, linked to a place where daemons do not go... and a place where perhaps only daemons go. Lyra and Pantalaimon are at odds when they stumble on a murderous plot, and are thrown together with Malcolm Polstead and the extraordinary intelligence service known as Oakley Street. Together, and separately, they begin to move against a Magisterial body known as La Maison Juste, and a plot to bring Britain back under the complete control of the authorities spiritual, and the ambitious Marcel Delamare. Both Delamare and his aleithiometrist, Olivier Bonneville have a personal interest in Lyra, and when Lyra leaves Oxford in search of the absent Pan, she finds herself wandering in the demimonde of the Separated, and the mystical hinterland known to her Gyptian friends as the secret commonwealth.
I... really wanted to love this book. I'm a big fan of Pullman, and there's a lot in here that I do like, but there is also a lot that I don't. The conflict between Lyra and Pan is heartbreaking, the language often mesmerising, and the villains are a strong component, but the tentative romance between Malcolm and Lyra is frankly a bit squicky. The twelve year age gap isn't insurmountable, but the fact that he first met her as a baby and she first met him as her teacher makes the whole thing a lot more... Well, it's not helping my opinion of either character. There's also a lot of women being terrorised by men, including an attempted rape, which I think puts The Book of Dust at two for two in using rape as a device, and that's really not good.
So, yeah. I wanted to love this book. I don't love this book.
Rites of Passage, by Mike Brooks
The Lady Chettamande is a Navigator, the widow of Lord Azariel, head of the wealthy and powerful House Brobantis. Moving to take control of the House and secure the legacy of her children, Chettamande finds herself not only mired in the politics of the Navis Nobilite, but uniquely placed to investigate a series of brutal murders and - possibly - prevent the machinations of a Champion of the ruinous powers, bent on plunging world after world into the roiling hunger of the Warp.
I'm not a huge reader of 40K fiction, although I have a more than passing familiarity with the setting and its lore(7). I made and exception for Rites of Passage primarily because an internet commentator got het up about a positive depiction of a nonbinary character within the Imperium. I mean, as positive as you can really be while still being within the Imperium, given that the Imperium is a festering sinkhole of oppressive superfascism.
So, you know, it's not ordinarily something I would read, but I enjoyed it. It contains a good depiction of the Imperium, in all its messed up glory. The Champion of Chaos is a serial murderer intent on the deaths of billions, but he is aided by a local cult whose goals and motivations for rebellion are more in the order of 'wanting to get into the restricted section of the library,' 'wanting to be accepted for what she is and not fed to the monstrous life-support machinery of the corpse-Emperor,' and 'because this universe is a crapsack.'
It's probably not a good point of entry into the 40K universe, but then I'm actually not sure that the 40K universe really admits of a point of entry these days.
New Comics
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 1
Doreen Green, fledgling superhero, is going to college. Yes, this complicates her life of crime fighting and means moving out of the Avengers' attic, where they totally know she's been living, I'm sure, and it means living in halls with a roommate who might or might not be cool, and hiding her giant, fluffy tail down the back of her pants, but at least she can focus on a normal life, instead of fighting Kraven the Hunter, bank robbers or the world-eating monster Galactus.
Oh, wait...
I've heard a lot about Squirrel Girl for a while now, and I admit, at first I was kind of down on the idea of a character who seemed designed to make other superheroes look stupid. The more I learned, however, the more it sounded like it might be worth the hype, so I figured I'd give it a go, beginning with the first trade paperback of Doreen's own title.
And it's delightful. The key to its appeal is that Doreen is not overwhelmingly powerful, instead 'defeating' amazingly powerful foes through ingenuity and the willingness to engage them as thinking beings with motivations, rather than simple punchbags. I honestly dread the day that comic trends lead to someone writing a story where Doreen goes all dark and brooding - there's a lot of potential for a story in which Doreen is forced to confront challenges to her optimistic worldview, but it would have to be done with more nuance than, say, the 90s - but for now this feels like something very special.
Audio Plays
Jago and Litefoot, Season 8
Jago and Litefoot, investigators of the macabre and infernal, have faced many threats in their time, but many of the worst have emerged from the stage of the New Regency Theatre. Another of these appears in Encore for the Scorchies, a prequel to one of the Companion Chronicles, in which monstrous, psychic aliens in the form of puppets use the theatre to feed their hunger for lifeforce. Then a rival show of a scientific bent appears responsible for the appearance of The Backward Men. A long-dead gangster stalks the sewers; this is a case for Jago & Litefoot & Patsy, but when the peril proves too much, it falls to Higson & Quick to bring the case to a close.
When did I last talk about Jago & Litefoot? Probably a while ago, so as a reminder, the impressario Henry Gordon Jago, and London pathologist Professor George Litefoot were the joint Watsons to the Doctor in the classic, but problematic(8), Doctor Who serial 'The Talons of Weng Chiang'. The interaction between the blowhard Jago and fastidious Litefoot made the mlong-time favourites, and eventually Big Finish brought back original actors Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter for one of the Companion Chronicles, The Mahogany Murders. This was such a success that they went on to commission an ongoing series which ran to thirteen four-disc boxed sets before Baxter passed away in 2017.
Season 8 follows a tried and tested formula, as well as offering slightly expanded roles for regular supporting characters, Ellie the immortal, ex-vampire barmaid, and recently promoted police Inspector Quick. It also features a full-fledged musical episode, as the Scorchies telepathically force our heroes to sing their inner thoughts. Musical episodes don't always work, but this one is a cracker.
Aquitane
Aboard the space station Aquitane, the main computer, Hargreaves, and his various bodies struggle to keep up with a growing to do list, as well as providing daily support to the crew... who are no longer there. The arrival of a blue box and its occupants is just one more mystery, but the Aquitane is the scene of much timey wimey shenanigans, so the Doctor might just be what the situation demands.
Aquitane is a full-on time travel, space gothic mystery, with robots and plant monsters and ghosts. It's a strong look for Doctor Who, and the script manages to balance the companion duties between Nyssa and Tegan via the tried and tested method of sending one of them off on their own. In this case, it's Nyssa who goes solo after being infected with a mystery disease, which I seem to recall is kind of a thing with her. Tegan is high-minded and aggressive, without being whiny, which is a hard balance to write - this is true of a lot of companions who were very much of their time, and for modern audio need to be written both true to their original characterisation and in a way that isn't really grating ot a moern audience - but they really hit it here.
Re-reads
Ottoline and the Yellow Cat, by Chris Riddell
Ottoline Goes to School, by Chris Riddell
Ottoline at Sea, by Chris Riddell
Ottoline and the Purple Fox, by Chris Riddell
Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse, by Chris Riddell
Goth Girl and the Pirate Queen, by Chris Riddell
Ada Goth lives with her widowed father in a rambling hall, isolated by his grief and their geographical and social isolation. But then she meets the ghost of a mouse, and Emily and William Cabbage - the children of her father's resident inventor, and a new governess, and the Attic Club, a group of young servants who share their observations of the weirdness at Ghastly-Gorm Hall. With the annual metaphorical bicycle race and indoor hunt on the horizon, Maltravers the indoor gamekeeper is up to no good, and with her father sunk in perpetual melancholy, it is up to Ada to see justice done.
In Goth Girl and the Pirate Queen, our intrepid heroine takes a World Book Day trip to Brighton for the Prince Regent's ball, and must contend with high fashion, high society, theft, bathing machines and retired pirates.
The follow-up to the Ottoline series(9) features the adventures of Ada Goth, daughter of the famous bicycling poet, Lord Goth of Ghastly-Gorm. This book sets the format for the series, with a strange and eccentric event attracting strange and eccentric visitors, each of whom is a pastiche of an actual historical - or sometimes contemporary - figure. It is this that makes the book so rich for grown up readers, although it does require a pretty broad cutural base for a younger reader. On the other hand, it could provide an impetus to learn about 18th century poetry and art, or contemporary fashion and baking.
Sympathy for the Devil
The Doctor has been banished to Earth, but not in the 1970s (or is it the 1980s.) Instead, he has arrived in Hong Kong in 1997, just in time for the handover of British rule to China. Here he meets the Brigadier, retired and bitter and running a pub, and stumbles on a mission by the highly militaristic UNIT to extract a defector from mainland China; a defector who is not Chinese, but from somewhere far, far away. Someone who knows the Doctor of old, and has plans for a monastery on a hillside above Hong Kong.
Sympathy for the Devil is far and away the best of the Doctor Who Unbound series of audio plays, featuring alternative Doctors and exploring 'what if...' scenarios; in this case, what if the Doctor missed all of the alien invasions of the UNIT years, leaving the world to become increasingly paranoid and fragmented. David Warner as the alternate Third Doctor perfectly portrays the deep melancholy of the time traveller not only trapped in space and time, but separated from the place he was supposed to occupy. Nicholas Courtney did some of his best work as the aging Brigadier - both with Big Finish and in The Sarah Jane Adventures - in the years before his death.
It's been quite a month (or two) for since deceased Big Finish favourites.
It's steeped in Who lore, but Sympathy for the Devil is also one of the best things that Big Finish has ever done.
Full Fathom Five
Deep beneath the ocean, the work of a research lab is being co-opted by its military paymasters. Into this gothic nightmare of science comes the Doctor, a traveller in time and space, who will do whatever it takes to make sure that this research never sees the light of day. And many years later, the Doctor returns to the same lab, in search of... something.
Full Fathom Five was another Doctor Who Unbound audio play, and the only one in the original run released without a specific 'what if...' tagline, since its core concept was also its twist. It's a dark, dark tale, with David Collings as his most chillingly urbane as the Doctor, and Siri O'Neal as his soon to be disillusioned companion, Ruth, and the now-late Ed Bishop - seriously, what the hell? - as the driven and ruthless General Flint. It works best the first time, but the players still give it some punch on a second listen.
The Burning Maze, by Rick Riordan
I re-read this for my partner this month, but since I only finished it a few months ago, I won't go into it again. Short version - I love it, but my American accents suck.
(1) As always, kistening to books means I have to look up the spellings, and the fact that this was apparently not Leon, but Laon took me by surprise.
(2) Or something of the sort.
(3) Catherine had explicitly never left Yorkshire, but the reader's voice is 'generic posh' rather than remotely northern.
(4) One of the drawbacks to a set of strongly linked arc stories like Riordan's is that there are staggeringly few places to jump into his work, since his bibliography is basically one massive narrative, with even the Kane Chronicles and the Magnus Chase novels taking place in the same continuity.
(5) At a book signing, he drew a sketch of my daughter, which he absolutely didn't have to do.
(6) Who may be the same thing, or at least related.
(7) As was, at least; I'm a little out of the loop, and whatever some may say when vehemently denying that female Space Marines could ever be a thing, the lore has changed significantly over the years.
(8) The villain has such yellowface, so inscrutible.
(9) The first book appears in a bookshop in The Purple Fox, which is a bit meta, but was a grand hook for my daughter.
From an alternate Britain, where Captain Cook discovered a (largely conceptual) passage to the land of Faery, Catherine Helstone takes ship to Arcadia in search of her missing brother, Laon(1), who has taken a post as a missionary there, preaching the gospel to the fae. Trapped for an unmeasurable period in Gethsemane, a house granted to the representative of the London Missionary Society. She learns a little about the fae during her stay, especially from the gardener, Mr Benjamin, the only convert in Arcadia, before her brother's return and a visit by Mab, one of the Queens of Arcadia, brings the offer of a chance to take the mission further into Arcadia, but also revelations about the nature both of Faery and the Helstones themselves which threaten to tear Catherine and Laon apart.
Under the Pendulum Sun is a gothic romance, with trappings of a Shakespearean fairy land, which reads as much as anything like a companion piece to Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell set entirely in Faerie. The Helstones are subjected to all the cruelties of the fae, and this makes the story hard going at times, despite - or perhaps even because - several of the story's twists are easy to see coming. The strength of the novel lies in rich language and worldbuilding, but the characters are less compelling. Laon in particular is viewed only through the almost worshipful gaze of his sister, yet comes across as a bit of a dick, and as an atheist I personally found it very difficult to relate to their burning desire to spread the gospel to the faery.
As a debut novel, this is an impressive piece of writing, and Ng is the author whose acceptance speech for the John W. Campbell Award got it renamed to the Astonishing Award That Isn't Named After a Known and Unrepentant-in-his-Lifetime Fascist(2). The audiobook is not all it could be, with an American reader doing posh British, with a few really odd bits of pronunciation and, honestly, not a tace of the Helstones' native Yorkshire to be heard(3). The book also features some of the most toxic relationships I've read lately - much Wuthering, so Heights - but it does seem in little doubt that that is what they are.
I'd definitely read something else by Ng, but the further adventures of the Helstones hold no specific interest to me.
The Tyrant's Tomb, by Rick RiordanFollowing the tragic events of The Burning Maze, the all-too human Apollo, and his master, Meg McCaffrey, make their way to Camp Jupiter in northern California. There they must commit a friend to eternal rest, before facing off against a direct assault by the forces, monstrous and mercenary, of the Emperors Commodus and Calligula, and their mysterious and terrifying allywhose tomb holds the secrets of life or death, not just for Apollo, but for all the gods of Greece and Rome.
Book four of The Trials of Apollo brings Apollo through the dark nigth of the soul which began in The Burning Maze and - by way of battle and suffering - to a brighter, better day. Mostly. Like most of Riordan's books, it is a fast-paced, emotionally engaging read, with Apollo continuing to be a surprisingly sympathetic narrator despite his constant name-dropping, self-pity and claims to have invented or inspired every major cultural or artistic achievement of the last three millennia. The reading is good, capturing Apollo's air of ironic melancholy nicely.
What can I tell you? If you like Riordan's work, you'll almost certainly enjoy this, but it's really not a starting point(4).
Guardians of Magic, by Chris RiddellIn a world of magic and fairytales, children wish on the cloud horses said to hatch in nests in the Forever Tree. But the Forever Tree and magic in general are in danger from rat gangsters, giant slayers and loggers, with only a handful of ballet dancing bears to defend them. Three children, Zam, Phoebe and Bathsheba - a baker, a musician and an apprentice giant-slayer with... questions - receive mysterious gifts of carved wood which grant them extraordinary abilities. Each driven out of their community by those who would see magic destroyed, the three must come together to save the Forever Tree and restore wonder to a world in the grip of greed and cruelty.
The first book in a new series by former Children's Laureate and big favourite of mine, Chris Riddell(5), Guardians of Magic is an ambitious work, introducing three characters, their friends and their cities within the space of a modest-length book, as well as telling its own tale of adventure and friendship, in which the real magic is empathy and understanding.
An excellent adventure story for bedtimes and young readers.
It has been twenty years since Lyra Belaqua was saved from the great flood, and almost ten since Lyra Silvertongue returned from her adventures in the North and beyond. Now, she is a student at St Sophia's College, and still lives at Jordan under the shield of scholastic sanctuary, but that may be about to change. In the Levant, powerful forces - the Magisterium and the puritanical 'Men from the Mountain'(6) - are seeking to control production of a specific rose oil, linked to a place where daemons do not go... and a place where perhaps only daemons go. Lyra and Pantalaimon are at odds when they stumble on a murderous plot, and are thrown together with Malcolm Polstead and the extraordinary intelligence service known as Oakley Street. Together, and separately, they begin to move against a Magisterial body known as La Maison Juste, and a plot to bring Britain back under the complete control of the authorities spiritual, and the ambitious Marcel Delamare. Both Delamare and his aleithiometrist, Olivier Bonneville have a personal interest in Lyra, and when Lyra leaves Oxford in search of the absent Pan, she finds herself wandering in the demimonde of the Separated, and the mystical hinterland known to her Gyptian friends as the secret commonwealth.
I... really wanted to love this book. I'm a big fan of Pullman, and there's a lot in here that I do like, but there is also a lot that I don't. The conflict between Lyra and Pan is heartbreaking, the language often mesmerising, and the villains are a strong component, but the tentative romance between Malcolm and Lyra is frankly a bit squicky. The twelve year age gap isn't insurmountable, but the fact that he first met her as a baby and she first met him as her teacher makes the whole thing a lot more... Well, it's not helping my opinion of either character. There's also a lot of women being terrorised by men, including an attempted rape, which I think puts The Book of Dust at two for two in using rape as a device, and that's really not good.
So, yeah. I wanted to love this book. I don't love this book.
Rites of Passage, by Mike BrooksThe Lady Chettamande is a Navigator, the widow of Lord Azariel, head of the wealthy and powerful House Brobantis. Moving to take control of the House and secure the legacy of her children, Chettamande finds herself not only mired in the politics of the Navis Nobilite, but uniquely placed to investigate a series of brutal murders and - possibly - prevent the machinations of a Champion of the ruinous powers, bent on plunging world after world into the roiling hunger of the Warp.
I'm not a huge reader of 40K fiction, although I have a more than passing familiarity with the setting and its lore(7). I made and exception for Rites of Passage primarily because an internet commentator got het up about a positive depiction of a nonbinary character within the Imperium. I mean, as positive as you can really be while still being within the Imperium, given that the Imperium is a festering sinkhole of oppressive superfascism.
So, you know, it's not ordinarily something I would read, but I enjoyed it. It contains a good depiction of the Imperium, in all its messed up glory. The Champion of Chaos is a serial murderer intent on the deaths of billions, but he is aided by a local cult whose goals and motivations for rebellion are more in the order of 'wanting to get into the restricted section of the library,' 'wanting to be accepted for what she is and not fed to the monstrous life-support machinery of the corpse-Emperor,' and 'because this universe is a crapsack.'
It's probably not a good point of entry into the 40K universe, but then I'm actually not sure that the 40K universe really admits of a point of entry these days.
New Comics
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 1Doreen Green, fledgling superhero, is going to college. Yes, this complicates her life of crime fighting and means moving out of the Avengers' attic, where they totally know she's been living, I'm sure, and it means living in halls with a roommate who might or might not be cool, and hiding her giant, fluffy tail down the back of her pants, but at least she can focus on a normal life, instead of fighting Kraven the Hunter, bank robbers or the world-eating monster Galactus.
Oh, wait...
I've heard a lot about Squirrel Girl for a while now, and I admit, at first I was kind of down on the idea of a character who seemed designed to make other superheroes look stupid. The more I learned, however, the more it sounded like it might be worth the hype, so I figured I'd give it a go, beginning with the first trade paperback of Doreen's own title.
And it's delightful. The key to its appeal is that Doreen is not overwhelmingly powerful, instead 'defeating' amazingly powerful foes through ingenuity and the willingness to engage them as thinking beings with motivations, rather than simple punchbags. I honestly dread the day that comic trends lead to someone writing a story where Doreen goes all dark and brooding - there's a lot of potential for a story in which Doreen is forced to confront challenges to her optimistic worldview, but it would have to be done with more nuance than, say, the 90s - but for now this feels like something very special.
Audio Plays
Jago and Litefoot, investigators of the macabre and infernal, have faced many threats in their time, but many of the worst have emerged from the stage of the New Regency Theatre. Another of these appears in Encore for the Scorchies, a prequel to one of the Companion Chronicles, in which monstrous, psychic aliens in the form of puppets use the theatre to feed their hunger for lifeforce. Then a rival show of a scientific bent appears responsible for the appearance of The Backward Men. A long-dead gangster stalks the sewers; this is a case for Jago & Litefoot & Patsy, but when the peril proves too much, it falls to Higson & Quick to bring the case to a close.
When did I last talk about Jago & Litefoot? Probably a while ago, so as a reminder, the impressario Henry Gordon Jago, and London pathologist Professor George Litefoot were the joint Watsons to the Doctor in the classic, but problematic(8), Doctor Who serial 'The Talons of Weng Chiang'. The interaction between the blowhard Jago and fastidious Litefoot made the mlong-time favourites, and eventually Big Finish brought back original actors Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter for one of the Companion Chronicles, The Mahogany Murders. This was such a success that they went on to commission an ongoing series which ran to thirteen four-disc boxed sets before Baxter passed away in 2017.
Season 8 follows a tried and tested formula, as well as offering slightly expanded roles for regular supporting characters, Ellie the immortal, ex-vampire barmaid, and recently promoted police Inspector Quick. It also features a full-fledged musical episode, as the Scorchies telepathically force our heroes to sing their inner thoughts. Musical episodes don't always work, but this one is a cracker.
Aboard the space station Aquitane, the main computer, Hargreaves, and his various bodies struggle to keep up with a growing to do list, as well as providing daily support to the crew... who are no longer there. The arrival of a blue box and its occupants is just one more mystery, but the Aquitane is the scene of much timey wimey shenanigans, so the Doctor might just be what the situation demands.
Aquitane is a full-on time travel, space gothic mystery, with robots and plant monsters and ghosts. It's a strong look for Doctor Who, and the script manages to balance the companion duties between Nyssa and Tegan via the tried and tested method of sending one of them off on their own. In this case, it's Nyssa who goes solo after being infected with a mystery disease, which I seem to recall is kind of a thing with her. Tegan is high-minded and aggressive, without being whiny, which is a hard balance to write - this is true of a lot of companions who were very much of their time, and for modern audio need to be written both true to their original characterisation and in a way that isn't really grating ot a moern audience - but they really hit it here.
Re-reads
Ottoline and the Yellow Cat, by Chris Riddell
Ottoline Goes to School, by Chris Riddell
Ottoline at Sea, by Chris Riddell
Ottoline and the Purple Fox, by Chris Riddell
Ottoline Brown lives in the Big City, with her best friend Mr Munroe - a small, hairy Norwegian bog man - curating the collections sent home by her explorer parents. Ottoline and Mr Munroe are born mystery solvers, and love nothing more than a good problem to get their teeth into, be it a devious cat burglar targeting the wealthy, an alleged haunting at an exclusive school, Mr Munroe's homesickness, or the tangled love lives of urban foxes.
Chris Riddell's Ottoline books are little treasures. I have the original hardback editions of all four books, and the four Goth Girl books (see below), and I adore them. Illustrated in Riddell's characteristic style, with a single colour - different in each book - added to the black and white images, the querky adventures are told by a mix of text and images which makes them a sort of mid-point between picture books and an illustrated novel, and they are really lovely.
Goth Girl and the Pirate Queen, by Chris Riddell
Ada Goth lives with her widowed father in a rambling hall, isolated by his grief and their geographical and social isolation. But then she meets the ghost of a mouse, and Emily and William Cabbage - the children of her father's resident inventor, and a new governess, and the Attic Club, a group of young servants who share their observations of the weirdness at Ghastly-Gorm Hall. With the annual metaphorical bicycle race and indoor hunt on the horizon, Maltravers the indoor gamekeeper is up to no good, and with her father sunk in perpetual melancholy, it is up to Ada to see justice done.
In Goth Girl and the Pirate Queen, our intrepid heroine takes a World Book Day trip to Brighton for the Prince Regent's ball, and must contend with high fashion, high society, theft, bathing machines and retired pirates.
The follow-up to the Ottoline series(9) features the adventures of Ada Goth, daughter of the famous bicycling poet, Lord Goth of Ghastly-Gorm. This book sets the format for the series, with a strange and eccentric event attracting strange and eccentric visitors, each of whom is a pastiche of an actual historical - or sometimes contemporary - figure. It is this that makes the book so rich for grown up readers, although it does require a pretty broad cutural base for a younger reader. On the other hand, it could provide an impetus to learn about 18th century poetry and art, or contemporary fashion and baking.
The Doctor has been banished to Earth, but not in the 1970s (or is it the 1980s.) Instead, he has arrived in Hong Kong in 1997, just in time for the handover of British rule to China. Here he meets the Brigadier, retired and bitter and running a pub, and stumbles on a mission by the highly militaristic UNIT to extract a defector from mainland China; a defector who is not Chinese, but from somewhere far, far away. Someone who knows the Doctor of old, and has plans for a monastery on a hillside above Hong Kong.
Sympathy for the Devil is far and away the best of the Doctor Who Unbound series of audio plays, featuring alternative Doctors and exploring 'what if...' scenarios; in this case, what if the Doctor missed all of the alien invasions of the UNIT years, leaving the world to become increasingly paranoid and fragmented. David Warner as the alternate Third Doctor perfectly portrays the deep melancholy of the time traveller not only trapped in space and time, but separated from the place he was supposed to occupy. Nicholas Courtney did some of his best work as the aging Brigadier - both with Big Finish and in The Sarah Jane Adventures - in the years before his death.
It's been quite a month (or two) for since deceased Big Finish favourites.
It's steeped in Who lore, but Sympathy for the Devil is also one of the best things that Big Finish has ever done.
Deep beneath the ocean, the work of a research lab is being co-opted by its military paymasters. Into this gothic nightmare of science comes the Doctor, a traveller in time and space, who will do whatever it takes to make sure that this research never sees the light of day. And many years later, the Doctor returns to the same lab, in search of... something.
Full Fathom Five was another Doctor Who Unbound audio play, and the only one in the original run released without a specific 'what if...' tagline, since its core concept was also its twist. It's a dark, dark tale, with David Collings as his most chillingly urbane as the Doctor, and Siri O'Neal as his soon to be disillusioned companion, Ruth, and the now-late Ed Bishop - seriously, what the hell? - as the driven and ruthless General Flint. It works best the first time, but the players still give it some punch on a second listen.
The Burning Maze, by Rick Riordan
I re-read this for my partner this month, but since I only finished it a few months ago, I won't go into it again. Short version - I love it, but my American accents suck.
(1) As always, kistening to books means I have to look up the spellings, and the fact that this was apparently not Leon, but Laon took me by surprise.
(2) Or something of the sort.
(3) Catherine had explicitly never left Yorkshire, but the reader's voice is 'generic posh' rather than remotely northern.
(4) One of the drawbacks to a set of strongly linked arc stories like Riordan's is that there are staggeringly few places to jump into his work, since his bibliography is basically one massive narrative, with even the Kane Chronicles and the Magnus Chase novels taking place in the same continuity.
(5) At a book signing, he drew a sketch of my daughter, which he absolutely didn't have to do.
(6) Who may be the same thing, or at least related.
(7) As was, at least; I'm a little out of the loop, and whatever some may say when vehemently denying that female Space Marines could ever be a thing, the lore has changed significantly over the years.
(8) The villain has such yellowface, so inscrutible.
(9) The first book appears in a bookshop in The Purple Fox, which is a bit meta, but was a grand hook for my daughter.
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