The Slow Empire by: Dave Stone

 

The Slow Empire suffers from being the Eighth Doctor Adventures directly after The Year of Intelligent Tigers.  The Year of Intelligent Tigers was a masterpiece, full of beautiful prose and character work, fully establishing how the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji work as a team and creating conflicts especially in terms of who the Doctor has become and how withdrawn as a person he can be due to continually being disappointed with humanity.  The Slow Empire doesn’t do that.  The first indication of what kind of book The Slow Empire is going to be is looking at the author, Dave Stone.  Dave Stone is an author who I genuinely like.  His ideas are excellent and his prose can be utterly fascinating.  He has also written books like Burning Heart which is terrible.  Heart of TARDIS, his previous Doctor Who effort, wasn’t the worst thing he has written, but it was bogged down in references to The Simpsons of all things.  The Slow Empire, on the other hand, is a book whose plot succinctly put by a friend of mine only appears at the very beginning and very end of the novel.  This is a book that is about 250 pages of incredibly confusing prose where events happen, but they are narrated by a character who may or may not be the Spanish word for ham without an accent.  The plot involves creatures called Vortex Wraiths which inhabit the Time Vortex and there is also this Empire which doesn’t follow the regular rules of reality so Dave Stone can float from scene to scene with tenuous connections yet somehow it works.  This might be the most self-reflective Stone has been, with Jamon de la Rocas being an obvious self-insert for the author.

 

There are also several notes at the back of the novel where Stone places the punchlines to many of his jokes as well as even more worldbuilding, and yes The Slow Empire is a lot of worldbuilding.  Stone clearly is enjoying a lot of what he has created and nearly every page is riotous with laughter as the wit of a Dave Stone book is there.  But the plot is just not there and that is perhaps the book’s biggest problem.  As an experimental book, it’s an interesting idea to try and tell a story without a plot or really even characters, just interesting ideas playing around with time travel and a time without time travel.  Heck there is really some interesting bits that could be part of the Divergent Universe arc of the Big Finish Eighth Doctor Monthly Range Adventures which would only come out three years after this book is published.  This is also a book where one-third of the text is written in Comic Sans.  No, I am not kidding.  This professionally published and (hopefully) professionally edited novel written as the 47^th in a series, is written and printed using Comic Sans.  I think that gives you enough of an idea of what madness Dave Stone has in store.

 

Overall, The Slow Empire is a book that isn’t going to work for everybody, heck it barely works for me, but it is Dave Stone at his perhaps most esoteric and as the final Doctor Who novel he would write (outside of the Bernice Summerfield novels and audio dramas with Big Finish) it’s definitely one to go out on.  6/10.