The Scarlet Empress

by Paul Magrs

Arriving on the almost impossibly ancient planet of Hyspero, a world where magic and danger walk hand in hand, Doctor Who and Sam are caught up in a bizarre struggle for survival. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0563405953
• ISBN13: 9780563405955
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: BBC Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 4.4" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

A departure from the gritty science realism of a man in his teleporting box

Oh boy howdy is this a change of pace. One thing that's nice about this series is just when you think they're starting to settle into a rut of telling perfectly nice but utterly pedestrian stories, they go and throw you a curveball like this. According to Magrs' notes toward the back of the book, he's written quite a few "real" books (i.e. not "Who" novels) and brings a slightly literary sensibility to something that normally is fairly silly. The narrative that gets draped over the plot is quite ornate, detouring for little aside stories and perspective tricks, shifting from omniscient third person to first person to the story seen through the lens of a camera. He's clearly given a lot of thought into the way you tell the story. Unfortunately, there's not much story on top of that, which may bother some people. The Doctor and Sam land on Hyspero, a place that is pretty magical and wind up joining in the misadventures of fellow Time Lady and Doctor-fan Iris Wildthyme, who has been forced into a quest by the Scarlet Empress who rules the planet, tasked with putting together an old band of four heroes in order to retrieve something dear to her. And that, children, is the plot. Yeah, I know, not much. If not for Magrs' gift in telling the story, his imagination and ability to make loopy ideas seem perfectly natural, this would be utterly dull. As it is, it starts to fall apart under close inspection but when you're inside it does the job. "Who" at its very best was able to construct whole worlds that were alien to what we knew and were functioning just fine, until the Doctor and company showed up to wreck things. Suggesting a world just beyond the borders of the screen. This story comes close to doing that, even if we never get a real sense of the world of Hyspero as anything other than a random collection of fantastic elements. But he tries. The other big addition to the Who canon is Iris Wildthyme, apparently one of Magrs' old characters that he adapted for the book. I'm not sure how I feel about her, on some level she's fun and on another level she feels like a commentary on fan-fiction and its propensity for Mary Sue characters, when the author basically writes him or herself in as a perfect person. Iris co-opts the Doctor's adventures for her own, seeks to live his life and is in love with him. If that's fan commentary, it's a brutal subtext. But she remains a nice way to reference old events without drowning the reader in old continuity references and works in Magrs theme about telling stories and who they're true for ultimately. And not for nothing, he writes a pretty good Doctor and Sam. Even when they're acting like the only sane people on the planet or just reacting to events unfolding around them, he makes them both fairly useful and gives them actual personalities instead of (in the Doctor's case) coasting on folk memories of how he should be or (in Sam's case) doing his best with what little the books have given him s

Finally, an EDA that is not just a third generation rehash.

It's Doctor Who because it's completely unlike anything that Doctor Who has ever done before. Better than that, it's good Doctor Who because it doesn't just stop at pushing the multi-faceted envelope; it's entertaining and interesting at the same time. It even stops at a few points for some interesting self-aware passages that offer some thoughts on the nature of story-telling that were well-written enough to stop just before they became too pretentious.It's a very complicated book, with many jumps in the narrative from different viewpoints, sometimes several within the same page. This can be a little difficult at times, but it's very rewarding overall. The perspectives from different characters and cultures are very rich and detailed, and all of them are treated with a good degree of respect.There are one or two weak points. At some places, the plot almost disappears and these sections tend to drag a bit. There are other spots where the suspension of disbelief that was required was just a more than what I was willing to give. I can forgive one or two little coincidences, but there are some in here that are just so great that I felt they hurt the overall quality of the book.On the whole, this is one of the best EDAs that I have read and is well worth a second read.

Odd but enjoyable

This is not a book for anyone who does not *really* enjoy reading, as it is as much a story *about* story-telling as it is a story in itself. Full of digressions, fillips, curlicues, dead-ends, jumps in the narrative, illogicalities, oddities, eccentrics, and just plain weirdness, it is also not for someone expecting a straight-forward adventure tale. The Doctor is as much spectator or participant, the plot is rather thin (until the end), and the prose style dense and ornate. But if you stick with it and savor it for what it is, rather than reject it for what it isn't, you will find it engrossing, delectable, unique, and unforgettable.

Brilliant!

One of the best Doctor Who books published... buy this, and Vampire Science, if you're new to the series...

Paul Magrs could be the saviour of DR WHO!

Having already read Magrs' novels MARKED FOR LIFE, DOES IT SHOW? and COULD IT BE MAGIC? I was already familiar with his style (and with Iris, who appears in all his books) and this book proves both a valuable addition to the canon of his works and to the canon of DR WHO books. This is definitely the best DR WHO novel since Virgin's LEFT HANDED HUMMINGBIRD by Kate Orman, and I'm looking forward to Paul's next, which he is writing with his boyfriend Jeremy.