Over the past few months I picked the stories out of this book that “precede” (I’ll get to the reason for the quotation marks) TV stories that I have seen, which is most of them but not all, and I can’t see any discussion post on the forum about it but I’d like to hear thoughts from anyone else who may have read this release.
My brief personal thoughts are that although many of the stories make for good, compelling stories with some great character work going into the new names we meet, calling most of them ‘prequels’ is a stretch. Some of them have a decent amount of connective tissue but are still standalone adventures in their own right that could comfortably sit elsewhere in space and time (the boy and the dalek, smiley’s mirror exhibit). Others just leave me confused on how anyone could call them prequels at all, besides maybe a couple lines tacked on the end to tie into the TV story, which two unrelated episodic serials could also do without anyone considering them related stories as a whole. So not what I expected going in, but each one still did provide an at least decent story in it’s own right. The last two stories, ironically including one that is a teaser for a different book, are the most fitting for what I expected going in and so leave the best impression on me.
I’d love to hear anyone else’s thoughts!!
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I’m halfway through and did not like The Boy and the Dalek at all, however I quite liked The Four Faces of Immortality.
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I got about halfway through the audiobook readings using my Spotify Premium, which has the anthology in its entirety, though never managed to finish. I can’t exactly tell specifically why I stopped, I just felt as though some of these stories weren’t really for me.
From what little I do recall though, I did really enjoy The Roots of Evil.
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Oh thats interesting cause that was actually one of my favourites, the second highest I rated of the ones I read at 8.5/10. I think I just liked for once actually seeing a good dalek when that concept is something that’s been teased and toyed with for so long but never truly realised as in that story. It also actually felt like a fitting prequel to me to the first dalek story to have such a creature watching on as the tardis crew take their first steps on Skaro
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I’ve only listened to Little Did She Know and The Four Faces of Immortality but both were Amazing. I think I rated them 4.5-5/5
Janet did an amazing job writing Tegan, her family and the family farm, it really captured the vibe of a regional aussie farm (my mum’s side of the family are also cane farmers). Kinda weird that she set it in Bundaberg tho since Tegan says she’s from Brisbane, which is a 350km/4 hour drive away. Yeah Brisbane is a capital city and she wanted Tegan to be a farm girl, but there’s still farms in Outer Brisbane and back in the 80s and prior even more so (my mum lived/went to uni in Bris during the 80s and says it was barely more than a large country town, especially compared to today. I mean, Tegan literally compared it to the Zero Room in terms of being isolated etc)
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I’m planning on getting this when I go through all f Nine’s stories (which is my mission for once I’ve 100%ed Thirteen).
I look forward to it!
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Haven’t so much as ordered it. I try to wait for paperback releases as much as I can due to considerations of cost and shelf space. If the stories are good, I’ll forgive them not being particularly prequel-ly, I suppose. When and if I ever get the book, of course.
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