TELOS: Citadel of Dreams

I like Dave Stone so picked this up way back when. But couldn’t remember any of it when it came time to rereading it. So I could go in fresh.

It seems that the way to approach these Novellas is to not feature the Doctor in them. Okay, this is only the second one, but both minimise his presence. This story really focuses on Joey Quine, a resident of the City and his abilities. There are a few other characters, but it is mainly his story and how he deals with the trouble the City is going through.

Dave, as Dave is wont to do, tries to be cute with the writing, with telling latter parts of the story earlier in the tale. I’m still not entirely sure what happened at the end, despite this being a second read, and the obvious hook doesn’t seem to add up, but neither does the second obvious interpretation.

It feels like Dave is trying to be more clever than actually getting down to telling the story, so we have a lot of set up and description, but not much actually clearly happening.

A story with bigger ideas than execution.

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