The Audio Novels

Review by Jacob Licklider

The Audio Novels range after three releases has taken a very important step. Big Finish Productions has deemed it profitable to publish an audio novel without a returning villain such as the Cybermen or the Daleks. The Dead Star doesn’t have a returning villain and that alone would be enough to get me excited, but then Big Finish made my New Adventures loving heart sing with the triumphant return of Kate Orman to Doctor Who. Orman is perhaps my favorite writer of Doctor Who and for a whole new generation of fans (and several old generations of fans) this will be their introduction to just what she does oh so well, and what an introduction. The Dead Star is going right into new territory for Orman, her first story to feature the Second Doctor and only written because Orman and her husband and frequent collaborator Jonathan Blum were watching the recent animations. While Orman in the behind the scenes doesn’t mention which animation in particular inspired this story, there is a great sense of a direct continuation from The Power of the Daleks as well as The Macra Terror specifically for its aesthetics.

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Review by Jacob Licklider

The Audio Novels have released their third installment and instead of continuing to stay in the classic series it adds to the rather low number of Twelfth Doctor novels with Emancipation of the Daleks by Jonathan Morris, a book set in the middle of Series 10. Jonathan Morris was brought on to write the novel and depart from the previous two instalment’s format of six, one-hour episodes. The length is the same with approximately six hours of an audiobook, but it is shifted to three, two-hour episodes roughly the same word count as a televised episode according to the behind the scenes interviews. I’m bringing this up so early since the format of this novel is one of the releases biggest issues, the length of the episodes make it so that a lot of it drags and doesn’t feel like a book. This has been a slight problem with the previous two releases but as Scourge of the Cybermen and Watchers have double the chapters and double the points where the narrative stops and listeners can take a break. And with Jonathan Morris treating each part of Emancipation of the Daleks as it’s own episode, it’s paced as if it is supposed to be a full-cast episode and not an audiobook which makes everything throughout drag. Morris structures the book as three distinct ideas each following a distinct version of Bill Potts, with the inciting incident of the story being Bill Potts from 20 years in the future showing up on her own doorstep in the present before a Dalek spaceship crashes into St. Luke’s University.