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I have three novels to write, all different styles, and I'm worried they bleed into each other, as would whatever I'm reading - but none of them are SF, so I'm going to read the EDAs from the start, as a palette cleanser as I go along. First up - the 8 Docs, which I remember as being shite.

And now BELTEMPEST by Jim Mortimore. Jim's one of the more interesting Who authors, or at least one of the most recognisable. Huge scope, lots of deaths, idea after idea after idea, many about religion - that's Jim. Which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. And, sadly, in this case it really

doesn't (a fact he recognised himself, when he issued a sort of Director's Cut of the book years later). For every reasonably good bit, there's another, worse bad bit - huge scope is often great, for instance, but in this case it just makes for a muddy, messy book, filled with many, many planets

called variations of Belliana II, II etc - and then he adds some more planets floating in from outer space. Elsewhere, he does something with Sam (which is a nice change), but what he does is a bit crap - turn her into a God or something, but one who has page after page of that naff, very 90s

terribly dense multi-clause writing, one description of the same thing after another, with commas to separate them, like waves on a beach, anemones sifting water, cilia moving in the throat...you get the idea. I found myself skimming paragraph after paragraph, hoping at least for a clever Mortimore

ending. But instead there's just more muddle and mess, more 'what's that all supposed to mean?' religious smudgery, until finally the book ends and I could go for a cup of tea.