doctor who: tomorrow windows is one of the classic bbc books
not to be confused with the newer ones
those are mostly the current doctor
these adventures carried on when the series was not!

good read

It was okay to read.

Very confusing, way too many subplots,too many characters. Little to no plot resolution. Very disappointing. I usually like Dr Who books.

As far as I'm concerned, Jonathan Morris is allowed to do whatever he wants with "Doctor Who". "Festival of Death" proved that you could write time travel twistiness without throwing it in our faces all the time how clever you are (it's heartening to see even the BBC recognized its quiet genius by reissuing it recently) and "Anachrophobia" had some wacky ideas that didn't fall apart under the weight of themselves, and some chilling setpieces to boot. He comes across as someone who knows the show up and down, but isn't so in awe of it that he isn't afraid to mess with it.

Here he seems to be attempting to fuse the lighter comedy of the Douglas Adams years with the sensibilities of the Eighth Doctor and, not surprisingly, it works. The Doctor and his Faithful Team of Companions runs into a exhibition of "Tomorrow Windows", pieces of glass that allow you to see your probable futures (kind of the opposite of Bob Shaw's "slow glass" concept). One bomb later hidden inside the mayor of London later and they're teamed with the exhibitor to try and uncover the culprit, not long before getting involved in an auction of worlds that seems to be resulting in the demise of the populations.

There's a certain vibe that only comes when you have absolute confidence in what you're doing and while maybe Morris was undergoing cold sweats every time he brought up a draft of this, but it doesn't show in the story itself. Comedy in SF is not the world's easiest thing . . . too close to the real world and comes across as clunky parody but get too strange and the audience doesn't have enough familiarity with the material to figure out what's supposed to be funny and what's merely part of the scenery. But Morris more often than not hits the mark once you get past the adjustment in the opening scenes that is going to be one of the stories that you don't have to take quite so seriously, as we whip through various planetary scenarios and their oddball cultures. At first glance you might think it was a Dave Stone novel, except that instead of being wacky for the sake of being wacky, Morris manages to write an actual plot, even if a lot of it is an excuse for him to discharge all his strange ideas, like the world where soup is sacred, or a planet of homicidal cars (like if David Cronenberg suddenly bought Pixar). Even the sequences where the "god" comes down to the various planets has its own amusement value, as everyone's reactions are realistic, yet tongue in cheek.

None of this would work if the characters didn't play it straight and most of the time Morris manages to hit just the right tone. The aliens involved in the auction are strange (a pair of balls named after the sound of a question, a nonviolent violent lizard, a lava lamp with a lisp) but all of them have recognizable qualities that make them both gut-bustingly funny at times (conversations between the lizard and Fitz are often hilarious) but relatable. It helps that the Doctor and Fitz aren't fazed by any of this, with the Doctor acting as the off-kilter center in a quieter way than Tom Baker would have done and Fitz being useful in a way that only someone who has traveled on the TARDIS for this long should be. The constant jumping of locations and concepts could have made the book feel scattershot, an excuse for the author to clear out all his random ideas, but his constant parceling out of other elements give the sense of a puzzle that can only be pulled together at the last second.

In the midst of this there's surprisingly few weak spots considering how much of a high wire act this one is. Trix remains the weakest link, as it were, and Morris gamely attempts to give her depth in her scenes by questioning whether she has an identity in all the roles she takes on, but increasingly she feels like a concept that sounded good on paper even as the authors prove they have no real good way to execute that concept. She does better here, and the reason behind her first person narration is clever but it's not clear that subtracting her from the novel would be a big loss. The ending ties it all together somewhat abruptly, with a minimum of fuss, and it was surprising how quiet the climax was, and slightly out of left field. I give him credit for being oblique but I wonder if he was hamstrung by the seemingly mandated page count.

Still, when the ride to get there is as fun as this one I don't really have too many quibbles. This late in the Eighth Doctor game you don't expect to find many gems so it's been heartening to see some of the newer, better authors getting a final crack at the Doctor with the great hair. I like searingly gut-wrenching psychological drama as much as the next person, but when "fun" is done right, that's quite okay too.

While the book's closing acknowledgements proclaim a dedication to the late Douglas Adams, it also mentions that this is not meant to be a pastiche of his work. Indeed THE TOMORROW WINDOWS does not feel like a rehash or a rip-off of Adams, but it certainly feels informed (or at least influenced) by his fiction. There's a worldview present in Adams' writings that Jonathan Morris captures quite well. I wasn't sure I was going to like the book, but somewhere near the middle it won me over.

It actually took me a while to get a handle on this book, because it kept confounding my expectations. There are a lot of different locations/settings that focus is placed upon and then quickly removed. So I initially didn't pay much attention to the introduction of the main group of secondary characters because at the relatively late stage in which they appeared, I was expecting them to be introduced and then leave within twenty pages. I'm not mentioning this as a criticism, I merely wish to describe how loose and fast the book plays with its locations and casts of characters. It's actually a nice effect. It gives the book a quick pace and makes it feel very different from the EDAs that came before it.

As for the jokes, well, humor is very hard to do and extremely difficult to maintain over the course of nearly three hundred pages. I thought a lot of the witticisms near the beginning didn't quite hit their mark (although the stuff with "God" addressing various cultures was hilarious). Yet somewhere near the middle, the book had finally made enough of an impression into my slow brain that I was able to appreciate the jokes. Maybe it just takes a little while to get into this book's style. I suspect that if I read it a second time, my appreciation would begin earlier in the page count.

Like the Douglas Adams books that, perhaps, inspired parts of this story, one gets the impression that there's actually more here than meets the eye. Take the whole "there's someone else inside my mind!" subplot. This has been told a million billion times before, but Morris manages to tell it in a slightly new way, giving it exactly the sort of creepy, unsettling feeling that sort of story element should invoke. The political satires are done well do. They're certainly broad and obvious (not necessarily a bad thing), but work because they're so blasted funny.

What I really ended up liking about the book was how rich it was. There are lots of mad ideas all over the place that you can't quite imagine the author getting away with in an overly serious tome. But they're very welcome here.

I initially thought through the opening passages that I'd be coming down hard on this one. I figured I'd be slamming it as an unfunny mess, relying on in-jokes to other series for its attempts at humor. But it kept working and working until it finally wore me down and won me over. I'm glad it did and I think I'll be revisiting it at some point.

This is my first Dr. Who book and also my first time reading Mr. Morris. I'm very impressed. This book covers a vast span in both time and space, and does quite a bit of jumping back and forth. But eventually, an intriguing story emerges and all the loose ends are tied up neatly by the end. Since I had no prior experience with Dr. Who, most of the ideas introduced in the book are very refreshing. This book manages to mix mystery, humor and some action into a very captivating read. I'm planning to read more Dr. Who and more books by Mr. Morris.

Fair