Saturday, December 22, 2007

First review of Pirate Loop

Stuart Ian Burns seems to be the first person I don't actually know to have read Doctor Who and the Pirate Loop, which he's reviewed for Behind the Sofa. My "bizarre fantasty" suffers from "an over-familiarity of ideas", while "the characters too, with the exception of a well interpreted Doctor and Martha, are all fairly irritating". Ho hum.

He's critical of the characterisation, and says "the author takes great pleasure in reproducing" the badger pirates' West Country accents. Which is odd, because the book specifically says that they don't have accents like that.

"Despite all of that it’s not an unenjoyable read and sometimes quite ingenious," he concludes, which I guess is good. He's pleased with my structuring and foreshadowing, and my Martha is made of win. But hell, I'm gonna quote the last bit of his review, because it seems whatever my failings, so am I:
"But you know what in the end makes this worth reading? A single paragraph of introspection in which our hero ruminates on what would need to be done were he really to lose his companion. It’s perhaps the most powerful bits of writing about the lonely god since the bottom end of The Family of Blood."

Stuart Ian Burns, Yeah, well, you know I once saw Mika live in Denmark...", Behind the Sofa, 21 December 2007.

2 comments:

Rob Stradling said...

"I know it's very bad form to quote one's own reviews, but..."

- Tom Lehrer

Anonymous said...

Ah, well, for what it's worth, I've enjoyed everything of yours I've read.
I asked for Pirate Loop for Christmas and no one got it for me, so I've got to save some money up to order it. What I did get, however, was the Completely Unofficial Doctor Who Encyclopedia, which has an entry on badger pirates, though it obviously needs to be updated to mention yours!