Product Description

A story featuring the eighth Doctor Who, Sam and Fitz. The Doctor regenerated in San Francisco at the turn of the millennium. When he returns there a few years later, it seems the catastrophic events that nearly sent the whole of Earth into cosmic oblivion have taken their toll.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1905374 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 279 pages

Customer Reviews

There's a lot going on here
There are a lot of things going on in UNNATURAL HISTORY. The good news is that the great majority are wonderfully intriguing, appealing and well written. The bad news is that because there are so many, they come across at times as being superficial and not fully developed. This is indeed very frustrating although the overall effect isn't enough to take away from the book as a whole.

First of all, we finally get to meet the oft-hinted-at Dark Sam. While the regular (blonde) Sam Jones is a squeaky clean (and at times dead boring) defender of causes, the Dark Sam is an altered version who has had thoughts and experiences that the original would never have dreamed of. Unfortunately, not much of this seems to affect her, and the Dark Sam is soon blindly trusting the Doctor and being innocuous in exactly the same way that she would have normally. She smokes, drinks and has done drugs in the past, but her character isn't significantly different - she still speaks and acts in the same manner. I had to keep reminding myself that this was supposed to be a changed person.

Now I realize that one of the themes of the book is that the past is not as important to the present and the future as the present itself is. I get the impression that Dark Sam was deliberately made inoffensive to re-enforce this philosophy; Dark Sam can have a different and more dangerous, gritty past than Blonde Sam, yet she still is, at her core, the same person. This may indeed be an interesting train of argument (and it definitely works well in the confines of this story) but extending the theme into the Dark Sam subplot didn't seem to work as well. In fact, it took me almost the first hundred pages or so to figure out what they were doing with her. And coincidentally it was around the point at which I realized this that they started bringing some of the darker aspects into the foreground. Although this did begin to distinguish her from the Blonde Sam it didn't seem to quite do enough, though I realize that this was probably the point.

That said, I thought the rest of the story was quite enjoyable. There are some wonderfully written sequences that are a joy to read. The "Wild Hunt" effect when Sam's mind would react to her past being re-written was executed tremendous well. This section highlighted the things that I enjoy the most in Ormanblum books; it's slightly surreal, it's full of wonderful imagery and it's true to the character going through the experience. I thought that there was only a single piece of wasted potential and that was that we only saw the occurrence through Sam's eyes. Since it was a slightly hallucinogenic experience I would have been interested to see Fitz and the Doctor's reaction to going through the same phenomenon and how it compared to Sam's. But this is only a minor quibble and did not detract from my enjoyment of the sequences.

Unlike some of their previous books, there are not very many secondary characters in the story. Instead it focuses on the three regulars (well, two regulars and one altered) and gives more attention over to the plot. The only downside to this is that there seems to be too much going on to fully justify the inclusion of everything

Despite some imperfections this is a story worth reading and is the best book in the Doctor Who range since THE FACE-EATER.

Summer Of Love 2002 - Kate and Jon Do It Again!
It's Haight-Ashbury all over, with a dark haired alternate Biodata version of Sam Jones who embraces the drug culture and degerates into the poster child for free love! Fitz, attempting as always to "fit in", dons Lennon granny glasses and a yin yang t-shirt. Underneath it all lies a twisted thread of anarchy with PRISONER-esque tones of downing the beaurocracy. The Doctor tells Sam about his trips dropping acid in 1968 and mentions him taking the snake poison in SNAKEDANCE to which she quips "ooh, riding the snake, very Jim Morrison". This one is a GREAT follow up for those who liked VAMPIRE SCIENCE. It'll have you racing to the Castro or searching for what lies in the water under the Golden Gate Bridge. It's Kate and Jon at their Kerouacky best. And Sam finally gets some...

Who is Samantha Jones?
Two years after his 7th regeneration, The Doctor is drawn back to where it began, San Francisco. While Fitz remains behind, the Time Lord goes to London to retrieve...Sam?
In the attempt to set events to right, our heroes are kidnapped (several times). Between captures they meet a juggler, a witch, aliens and unicorns. There are also Dr. James Joyce, Faction Paradox, and The Unnaturalist. Joyce and Faction Paradox seem to have a history with The Doctor. I hope to see them in the future. Or the past.
Watch for Orman's trademark pyramid. Each of her Who novels since "The Left-Handed Hummingbird" has featured one. And for those familiar with Benny, keep your eyes open.
"'It's all his fault...All the impossible heroic {stuff}, he does it. So you try to do it. You try to be a hero, and it blows up right in your face, because you're not him. I try to be Frodo, and the best I can manage is- well, Sam.'"