Doctor Who: The Death of Art by Simon Bucher-Jones

Doctor Who: The Death of Art Reviews

• 
  Mikey

  Hm, not my favourite by any means. Not the worst either though. There’s so much going on but a lot of the time it really feels like not much is actually happening. The Quoth, which conceptually are pretty interesting, take up pages and pages of the word ‘patterns’ and ‘Clusters’ and ‘Blights’ and ‘War’ and it’s a bit of a slog for those segments.
  
  The Doctor is mostly operating behind the scenes while Chris and Roz are doing a lot of the legwork, but he does eventually start to get more of a focus as the page count rolls on. Chris gets to have a go at being the Doctor (and there’s a funny bit where he’s going for Five after their recent meeting in Cold Fusion but the person he’s trying to deceive thinks he’s Six). Roz doesn’t really get anything as fun, but we occasionally get some nice insights. As it is, they’re all separated for the majority of the book which is a shame.
  
  The other characters for the most part are... weirdly forgettable besides the crazy dramatic Montague, but even then he’s a bit stock villain. Aunt Jessica is probably one of the most interesting characters despite having very little presence for the majority of the story, but her meeting with the Doctor is one of the more interesting sequences.
  
  But, yeah, besides that... not much to report. The story itself unfolds in a fairly disjointed way that kind of feels like it doesn’t deliver on its opening with Ace - though she has to stay away sometimes, I suppose. There’s a nice kind of tie-in to Christmas on a Rational Planet too, which sort of feels like it’s setting things up for a future encounter...
• 
  Daniel Kukwa

  After all these years, I forgot just how densely packed a New Adventures novel could be...especially those with hard SF ambitions. This is definitely such a novel, and I think it's rather too packed with plot...but I admire its ambition, and I highly approve of the setting. I also feel the Doctor is a touch too generic here for my taste -- I think the 7th Doctor works best when his stories hit the right balance between magical imp & melancholy clown. All in all, more of a triumph of substance over style.
• 
  Laura

  There was a lot of stuff I found generally interesting here, and on a craft level I thought it was very well written! At the same time, it felt like a lot of stuff was being thrown at the wall and not all of it stuck - the David/Claudette stuff felt like a lot of emphasis was placed on it only for it to be completely dropped, and Chris's plot...did not feel entirely necessary. Maybe it needed another draft or two? But it's definitely going to stick in my head more than some of the VNAs I've read.
• 
  Kris

  This is a bit of an odd one. It is confusing and chock full of references that don't seem to add much...but it seems to be designed that way. With the way it is designed misunderstanding is the main view to reading it.
  There is some good character stuff in it but overall my question from it is, why?
• 
  Herb Costello

  I do not appreciate when an author takes you on a painful journey of prose, telling what may have been a good story in such a convoluted manner. He is holding the reader to ransom and only a die hard Doctor Who fan could make it to the end of this novel. The author has taken the story, chopped it into a thousand pieces and attempted to put it back together again. Make sure you have a notebook with you as you are navigating your way through this one as the plot chops and changes with almost every paragraph. Of all the NA's I have read over the years (54 in total) this easily rates as the hardest to follow. It is a little off balance and painful to read.
  Vintage doctor who is well renowned for running down the same corridors a number of times at a number of different angles to appease the budget and the cumbersome cameras of the time but why carry this trend forward into a novel and torture the reader.
  I made it to the end and I believe that all others and I who have done so deserve a badge, not of mathematical excellence, but of sheer persistence.
  The Death of Art....
• 
  Shannon Appelcline

  So, I'm getting tired of the psychic powers story arc. Look, it's another story about psychics. And it has yet another explanation for psychics. Sigh. Here's it a race called the Quoth activating humanity's psychic potential.
  
  This book also felt very much like a sequel to (or even a repetition of) Christmas on a Rational Planet, which really wasn't to its benefit. But once more we get a society hovering on the edge of the industrial age and weird aliens and way too many characters and very staccato sections of writing. Everything spun way too quickly and was too confusing and didn't necessarily make a lot of sense. The Shadow Directory even makes a return visit, though they get fairly minimal screen time.
  
  The only real stand-out in the book is the characterization of Chris and Roz. They get to be detectives and police officers, which is too rare of an occurrence, and they're clearly depicted as coming from the future.
  
  Beyond that: [i]meh[/i]. It's not going to be on my reread list. I gave it a 4.5 out of 10.
  
• 
  Nicholas Whyte

  
  
  http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2297663.html[return][return]The Seventh Doctor, Chris and Roz end up in Paris all involved with the Dreyfus case and Ace. I'm afraid I thought this wore its historical research a bit too heavily, without compensating gains in characterisation or plot