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Showing of 7 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Format: Mass Market Paperback. This is a step in the right direction at least. The first two books in the "I forgot everything" arc were decent enough but didn't seem to do much with the whole point of this storyline, that the Doctor has forgotten everything and has to age forward in order to meet Fitz in , encountering strange stuff along the way and solving it without knowing exactly who he is.
For the most part the Doctor has acted basically like the Doctor, but just a bit more mysterious, which if you didn't know he had amnesia, then you wouldn't think anything unusual was going on. And considering this is the new and shocking status quo, I've been expecting a bit more from it.
This doesn't fix all the problems but at least it shows a bit more ambition. Much like "The Burning", the novel is written from the first person perspective of people who aren't the Doctor. It's a shame that they go back to this well so soon after the last attempt but frankly Leonard's effort puts the previous one to shame. I understand why they do it, unable to really delineate the extent of the Doctor's amnesia, they hedge their bets by putting him at a distance to us so you can't tell if he's doing something because he's got a plan or because he can't remember how he normally does it.
But for the first time he feels like they're writing him as someone who has forgotten a great deal and realizes it and isn't quite sure how to go about remembering it properly. He still acts like himself, but he has no idea why he's acting like himself, which seems a bit more reasonable than just mentioning every so often that he has no memory. Leonard does set out a bit of a gutsy challenge for himself, as all the parts of the novel are narrated by well known historical figures. To make things even more fun, two of those people are famous if dead authors.
What team do you support? Please arise only if you are to Phone property! A content book the turing test is one where we not are one Thermodynamics position to a single one and there are never two years to Want this: we can produce it into stable exchange with an also hotter or colder quantity invention. I always follow his advice. He is just a man with no past, desperate to get back to where he belongs, and in his wild hope that the strangers were the key he has killed a man without knowing why he has done it. We love Stories Big Finish produce great full-cast audio drama for CD and download, featuring many popular television fantasy series. The Second World War is drawing to a close.
This could come across as heavily conceited and he does ease us into the concept by having the first section written by whiny Alan Turing, the introspective gay mathematician who the government is using to make the codes that will help them win the war. A lot of his section becomes creepy when you realize that in real life Turing committed suicide and there's something about writing the fictional thoughts of a person who would essentially finish his section and do himself in that I'm not completely comfortable with but it's not a hideous distraction.
What's more of a distraction is how pretty much every person he encounters tells him that he's too logical and too much like a computer and doesn't understand people at all. Not to be mean but after like the fifth time this happens and the poor guy gets berated you start to understand why he was sad all the time.
He also has a crush on the Doctor, which is probably an untapped area of fan-fiction that we don't need to consider. The other sections are narrated by Graham Greene and Joseph Heller, which wind up coming across as better than they have any right to. Leonard doesn't try to do anything radical with them and while I haven't read any Greene novels yet, it strikes me as the kind of tone he would use judging by what little I have read from him. The Heller section actually comes fairly close to how I imagine he would be, even if it is oddly close to "Catch" in parts.
He gets their fictional voices down well enough to make the book entertaining on its own, without too many "Look at me writing famous authors like I knew them! It could have turned into a dry writing exercise, or as a way to show off how well he did his research but it somehow manages not to. Which is good because the plot is perhaps the weakest part of the whole novel. As far as I can tell, it involves aliens being trapped on Earth during World War Two and trying to get the heck out of Dodge while attempting to blend in. They aren't explained very well and when they do interact with the Doctor he really doesn't seem to bother telling anyone else about it, which means the book gets more and more vague as we enter into the Heller sequences.
It got to the point where I didn't even know what the stakes were and there's not so much an ending as "I guess the book is over" sort of feeling. It feels like we spend so much time setting up the mystery of the situation and the setting that the aliens get a bit shafted and barely play into the novel at all. If not for the presences of the three historical figures, the book runs the risk of not working at all because I can't explain to you even the smallest bit of why anything that happens is actually important.
I sort of doubt that was the author's goal. You could perhaps argue that the author was so into the concept of the novel that he didn't bother writing a plot to go with it and to some extent you would be right. But he succeeds in that concept so well that it's not until you get to the end that you realize that book isn't going to resolve in anything resembling a coherent fashion but by that point you have been enjoying the ride so much that it really won't matter to you.
Not all of the Doctor Who line can marry plot with high concept successfully, it's rare that these books even try to shoot for the high concept. So to see this one stretch for the concept and come pretty close to succeeding on its own small terms is worth pointing out and worth applauding, even if I wish they had spent a little more time on making the plot compelling.
Maybe next time. When I was a youngster the Doctor Who novelisations produced by Target sparked my interest in reading.
The likes of Terrance Dicks, Gerry Davis, Ian Marter, and Malcolm Hulke provided me with much pleasure and led me to explore more of the local library before I ventured into "more serious" fiction. Those early novels were formulaic and this is wittily shown in an essay by Paul Magrs, a wonderful British novelist whose work seems to draw on magical realism from Gabriel Marquez and Terrance Dicks, where he explains how these early Target books influenced his writing.
In those early Target books certain nouns always had the same qualifying adjectives. Pockets were capacious. Hair was "a mass of curls" or "an unruly mop". It had been some years since I read a Doctor Who novel, and it was Paul Magrs move into the stable of BBC writers that led me to read one or two of the recent novels. The books today are very different to the fiction of fifteen or more years ago. They are well written adult science fiction.
Things do not always work out for the best. Life is not simple. The Turing Test by Paul Leonard. Cover Blurb.
The Second World War is drawing to a close. Alan Turing, the code-breaker who has been critical to the allied war effort, is called in to break a mysterious new cypher.
To find out the truth, they must all cross the front line and travel through occupied Germany -- right into the firing line of the bloodiest war in history. What they find there has no human explanation -- and only the Doctor has the answers.
The Turing Test was the thirty-ninth novel in the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures series. It was written by Paul Leonard, released 2 October and featured the . A mysterious code is received at Bletchley and Alan Turing, the chief code- breaker, is unable to break it. He meets the Doctor in a club and when Turing tells him.
Notes: This is another book in the series of original adventures featuring the Eighth Doctor. Alan Turing December, While bicycling in Oxford, Alan Turing encounters an odd man talking to a statue of a griffin and apparently expecting it to talk back to him. Before Turing can learn more about this mysterious, charming Doctor, he is called to Bletchley to decode a transmission from Dresden, which appears to be encoded in a brand new cipher. The Doctor points out that although the code was transmitted from Germany, this does not necessarily mean that the codemakers are German The Doctor invites Turing up to his room at the inn, claiming that he is having a mathematical problem with what seems to be a large blue wardrobe.
However, when the Doctor finds that the inside of the box is smaller than the outside, he flies into a rage, and he and Turing are both kicked out of the inn. Turing impulsively offers to let the Doctor stay with him at Bletchley until he can find rooms elsewhere, but that night, as Turing replays the mysterious transmission, the Doctor listens in -- and abruptly runs screaming into the night. The strange behaviour which Turing had accepted when the Doctor was actually there makes no sense when he has gone, and though conflicted, Turing reports everything to his superior, Hugh Alexander.
When the Doctor next tries to make contact with Turing, MPs are waiting to arrest him. The Doctor, when questioned, claims to have no memory of who he is or where he comes from, but insists that he be allowed to help crack the code. He feels an affinity with the codemakers, having sensed great loneliness, more than he could bear, in the transmission.
A man from Military Intelligence, who calls himself White, releases the Doctor and agrees to take him and Turing to the liberated Paris to try to get closer to the codemakers.
In Paris, they meet Colonel Horatio Elgar, a remarkably stereotypical English officer who claims to have worked with the French Resistance. That night, the Doctor and Turing discuss the code, which the Doctor believes may be speech in a language either invented as another level of coding, or never meant for human ears. He and Turing see White returing to the hotel with a woman who flees upon spotting the Doctor. The Doctor feels as if he should recognise her, or something about her The Doctor and Turing manage a partial translation of the coded message; in order for the exiles to resume their status, two of something must be removed using local resources.
He insists that Elgar allow him to visit Dresden and contact the codemakers, but Elgar flatly refuses and instead orders him to encode a reply, obviously intending to lure the codemakers into a trap. Turing goes for a walk to clear his head, and finds the Doctor in a cafe, speaking with a young man named Bernard who seems to resent the Americans who have liberated Paris. Still unsure what to do, Turing returns to the hotel to find that Greene and Elgar have already left and have made arrangements for Turing to return to Bletchley. On his way back, however, the Doctor contacts him once again, and reveals that Bernard -- who is indeed a former collaborator -- is willing to smuggle them over the border to Switzerland, so they can reach Dresden and contact the codemakers before Elgar springs his trap.
Turing finally chooses his side; he will trust the Doctor, and help him to stop Elgar. Graham Greene Sierra Leone, British spymaster Graham Greene travels to the village of Markedo to speak with his agent Cray, but when he arrives the village is deserted -- apart from three strangers with pure white, unblemished skin, who speak in a sing-song language unlike any he has heard before. Greene hears shots and screams outside, and emerges to find the Germans running from two figures swathed in flames, which melt away, leaving nothing at all like human remains. There is the sound of violence in the darkness, and Greene never sees the Germans or the strangers again.
Months later, a man named the Doctor arrives in Sierra Leone, apparently desperate to find out the truth to the rumours about Markedo. They find no further evidence of otherworldly activity in the village, and when the Doctor asks Greene what it means to be human, Greene -- who has spent his life looking for miracles -- comes to suspect that the Doctor has very personal reasons for asking. Somehow feeling that he can trust the Doctor, Greene books passage for him back to England.