Doctor Who : Dreams of Empire

Written by Justin Richards

A Second Doctor Adventure.

The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria manage to find themselves on the brink of a civil war. A Republic is crumbling and an army are approaching the little prison asteroid that they find themselves stuck on. With mystery murders and a running theme of chess what will happen to the TARDIS crew?

***SPOILERS***

Like Players I won't give too much detail away, unlike Players I'm just going to go straight into my own personal view on this book.

It starts with a very long introduction to the setting. Like ancient Rome but set in the future as far as I could tell. Already the theme of chess was being placed strongly into our minds. There has been a bloody civil war, the man trying to make himself Emperor (Kesar) has been stopped by his friend in the name of the Republic (Trayx), to stop Kesar becoming a Mytar they've put him in prison on an asteroid but on his way he suffered bad burns and now has a Darth Vader, Man in the Iron mask thing going on.

The thing that stopped me liking this book from chapter one was that this set up took some time, and this meant that I was constantly waiting page by page for the Doctor and the TARDIS crew to pop up. Don't get me wrong, I can deal with it being a while before they show up, but as a fan of ancient Rome this really did feel like a boring history lesson.

I will defend this by saying that I didn't understand a lot of what was happening. At first I thought that we were dealing with a future colony LIKE the Romans, but soon we had things like VETAC and whatnot being thrown around the place and I got the feeling that it was futuristic but didn't really understand until later on (much later on) when it gets explained.

What I DID find great about the beginning is that I was instantly able to give faces to the characters. If I had to turn this into a TV episode I'd know exactly (in my dreams) who would be who. I always like that in a book, having a face to each character.

When we finally got to the TARDIS crew, oh my was I in tears of laughter over the sandwich jokes!

Personally I have never seen anything with Victoria in it, I've seen a few Troughton episodes two with Jamie in them (one being the Two Doctors) and I fell in love with this TARDIS team and this book made me love them even moreso!

When they leave the TARDIS the story really starts to move into gear and what a heartbreaking and amazing story it is. It is something that people say a lot about the Discworld, don't read the Color of Magic first because it might put you off, and if you do then at least give something further into the run a chance because it gets better. Well that is exactly what the beginning of this book felt. At first I worried the book might be too wordy, try to describe everything in so much detail that it would bore me. I love having a lot of descriptive text but I also like it to be the outside pieces and everything else is left for the reader to color in. Thankfully it was only the beginning that felt like that.

The story as I said revolves around the characters of Kesar and Trayx after the war. The prison is set in a medieval like castle, Kesars remaining personal were sent with him and his soldiers are given duties with their guards to keep them active, fit and never to make them feel like real prisoners. There is no real bad blood between them, it was a war, they chose a side and one of them won whilst the other lost. The old treat others the way you would want to be treated message.

There has been a mysterious death and suddenly Trayx has made a visit, whilst showing the Doctor around the Doctor notices an oncoming ship and they guess it isn't a friendly one. They soon end up in a battle against VETAC (robots basically, big bloody deadly robots) that they have no chance to win against. They want Kesar to make him Emperor.

I won't spoil the ending for you though as it took me a bit by surprise! I managed to figure out most of the mysteries but the ending was a bit of a jaw dropper!

I loved the whole theme of chess running through it, even if some of the analogies were a bit long winded, at times I felt like Jamie wanting things to move on a little. Even so it took me less then a day to read the story because when I put it down to get on with some other important task the story just kept calling me back.

The story is very sad, it has the charming ability to make to you laugh along with the Doctor but it doesn't lose any of the emotion and Richards does a stupidly brilliant job of bringing Troughton's Doctor to life in book form. He says in the introduction it is probably the biggest challenge and I agree with him, but he did fantastic! You could imagine Two acting the way he describes every step through the book and it always felt realistic.

If anything this book makes me wish I'd been able to see every single episode of Troughton's Doctor, he is a mystery to me, a wonderful mystery, and even though at times the book seemed a bit lumpy I will be back on this adventure time and time again.