You have no doubt heard the stories of this magnificent, illustrious and quite obdurately enigmatic personage and wondered if they can by any way be true. Well, as a close acquaintance and valued confidant of the man in question, I am here to tell you that each and every one is as true as the day is long on Drasebela XIV, a place where – as even the most ignorant and parochial know – the sun and thirteen rather extraordinarily luminous planets never set. Except, of course, for those stories that aren’t. But then, there’s no helping those.
The last novel I read by Stone was the mildly comic New Adverture, Sky Pirates! which worked for me slightly against my instincts. The same was true of The Slow Empire, where there is a comically pompous narrator but a real evil empire to fight and destroy, lots of stuff for the Doctor and companions Fitz and Anji, and some genuinely novel riffs on traditional sf and Who tropes. The latest in a run of good Eighth Doctor Adventures.
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