Anachrophobia

This is my second Jonathan Morris novel after Festival of Death. I enjoyed the book overall. The plot and story are orginal, inventive, and unique, yet still very Doctor Who. The dialogue is good, and the supporting characters are well-written. I especially liked the "monsters" The Doctor has to stop in this book. Morris has a very clever idea which is fleshed out well and explained satisfactorily at the end. However, I noticed at times, the book felt padded in some places to meet the required number of pages by BBC Books. It seemed to get slow in certain places, and events seemed to drag on, and dialogue seemed to drag on, and nothing much would happen. Or the same things would happen, or it would take forever to explain how an event happened. Such padding, while annoying, is actually ironic for a story about time repeating itself, slowing down, or speeding up, but I don't think this irony was intentional.

For the first thirty or forty pages, I wasn't sure if I was going to like ANACHROPHOBIA at all. The beginning felt slow and unengaging. The characters that Jonathan Morris introduced initially failed to interest me. But as the book progressed I found myself becoming more and more intrigued by the story-line and the carefully constructed plot. By the time I reached the end, I had become completely engrossed, and I was still thinking about the complexities of the plot for some time after I completed the book.ANACHROPHOBIA is mainly a plot-driven story and it seems clear that there must have been a very complicated outline behind this book. It's a story that involves a lot of messing around with time travel and related temporal jiggery-pokery, but everything fits together just perfectly. The plot has been meticulously structured, yet it is never obscure or confusing. While it takes a little time to get started, once you get into the story, it never lets you go. Even some spots in the middle of the book that seemed like unrewarding padding take on a new meaning as later events unfold. It's a clever and well told story that carefully reveals just enough of the plot along the way to keep one's interest, but not so much that the reader figures out what is going on before the characters do.The characterization of the Doctor is another aspect of the novel that I initially thought I was going to hate. The Doctor spends far too much time at the beginning doing little apart from a lot of grinning. I was hoping that this wasn't going to be an unwelcome flashback to the ineffectual, smiling Eighth Doctor Idiot of many of the pre-BURNING books. My fears were for naught. Morris manages to slowly increase the Doctor's role as the story progresses until, by the time one reaches the end, the Doctor has taken the center stage and is the powerful, intelligent and eccentric character he always can be. The Doctor is the center of the Whoniverse, and the last forty pages do a marvelous job of demonstrating this.On the other hand, many of the secondary characters fall into the trap of being distinguished almost solely by their job description. Near the halfway point in the story, Morris attempts to give some of them a dose of much needed humanization, and only has mixed results. This additional characterization (done almost purely for plot related reasons) manages to triumphantly pull some of the individuals out of the whitewash, but for others the undertaking mostly falls flat. I enjoyed the clever attempt to base some of the plot around key moments in the lives of the characters, but I don't think it was an entirely successful effort.Still, the thoroughly engaging plot and the wonderful use of the Doctor more than make up for any misfires on other fronts. It's great to get a book on time travel that makes heavy use of the device and manages to stick so well to its internal logic. Morris made the art of explaining complicated plots look easy, and he ef

Johnny Morris has built himself quite a reputation based on one past Doctor adventure, the macabre yet utterly Season 17 "festival of Death". For his sophomore effort he has turned to the heavier world of the Eighth Doctor adventures with "Anachrophobia". Let me start out right away by telling you that this book is utterly superb. I may be biased in that I loved Festival, but this book easily surpasses it. Plot wise it's quite straight forward on the surface, Doctor visits outpost, outpost is conducting time experiments, aliens invade, Doctor saves the day; but there is much much more than this. The book constantly plays on themes of "What If?" and regret, something that with the way the line is going at the moment the Doctor is very familiar with.Fitz and Anji get very little to actually do except run around a bit, and the supporting character saren't terribly likeable. The ideas behind the Plutocrats and the Defaulters are interesting and added a certain satire to the proceedings.The ending is ingenious and fun. Then when you think it's all over the book blows you away in the last 3 pages. One of the twists is pretty well sign posted; however the rest isn't so obvious and suddenly this book turns from a great read into potentially one of the most important books of the year. There is a great cliffhanger too; is it really a month til Trading Futures?