Product Description

An Eighth Doctor novel with Fitz and Anji. The Doctor, Fitz and Anji are forced to land in inhospitable terrain as something disables the Tardis. Reconnaissance proves it to be a planet in revolt, with colonists trying to break free from the harsh clutches of the Plutocratic Empire. The principal weapon in this war: time itself. Soldiers continually find themselves in Time Storms: without protective clothing, they are aged to death in seconds. The Tardis crew are picked up by empire personnel, and discover the empire's hope for victory: a primitive time-travel capsule. It is undergoing tests at the moment, but the men who return from these missions return horribly changed. They're picking up a terrible infection: anachrophobia; losing their time-orientation; travelling backwards and forwards within their own lifetimes; losing their minds. The Doctor is desperate to halt the spread of the disease, but his efforts are constantly frustrated. The plague reveals that there's a lot more about the motives of all involved than anybody had imagined...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #798568 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

Time and tide and buttered eggs wait for no man
Back cover blurb:
The Doctor, Fitz and Anji land in the middle of a war zone. The chief weapon in this particular war is time itself: decelerated time fields bring armies to a virtual standstill, while accelerated time can age a soldier to death within seconds. In a nearby outpost, scientists are attempting to send subjects back in time. But two subjects bring a strange temporal infection back with them...

As with Morris' previous Doctor Who novel, Festival of Death, this novel is all about time. The old Sci-fi theme of what would happen if you were able to go back in time and avoid your own death lies at the heart of the book, as a sinister race of clock-faced time beings, tempt their victims to try and rectify past mistakes before erasing them from the time lines altogether.

The Fourth Doctor and Romana would have fitted into this story well, there are some distinctly Douglas Adams like moments and the clock faced entities even reminded me of the café artist's sketch for Romana in Adams' 1979 serial The City of Death.

The novel starts well but gets a bit bogged down in the middle. Fortunately, Morris provides an effective and nail-biting ending that saved this from being a complete doozy.

It's not all bad.
There were *some* things I liked about this, the allusions to the first world war and the imagery around that, the ideas about the immutability of Time, the inadvisability of messing with your own time-line, the use of time as a weapon - the time-storms, especially, were terrifyingly executed and excitingly done - The story had tremendous promise but none of it actually went anywhere. Full of loose ends, red herrings and good but not fully thought-through ideas.

As for the clock-face people; I thought there'd be an interesting explanation, an illusion caused by X, leading to Y and a really great conclusion but, no - it was just clock-faced people which is... a bit daft and disappointing.

The quality of the writing and the imagery is the only thing keeping this from a one-star rating. Worth a read, but don't expect too much.

too much time
A nice idea for a book, but a disappointing effort. This is a short story blown up to novel size, and it shows. The doctor and company are stuck in cliched situations for most of the book, the end is predictable and not fully explained, and the big surprise is so painfully obvious you wait a long time for it to finally happen.

Look at the cover. The image there is the best idea of this book. Nothing inside is quite as good.