The latest Doctor Who Magazine has a review of Short Trips: How the Doctor Changed my Life, which is very exciting, especially since reviewer Matt Michael speaks very highly of it! Here are a few quotes:
Big Finish’s new collection of short stories is a departure from previous releases in that it’s entirely written by new authors, featuring 25 stories that examine ‘how the Doctor changed my life’. That’s a brilliantly simple conceit, one that chimes very much with a TV series that, at its heart, is all about how the Doctor affects the people he travels with or encounters, and it’s allowed all of these writers to be creative in exploring their own ideas…
There are lots of really fun stories, too. Outstanding Balance is about alien traffic wardens chasing the Second Doctor for unpaid parking violations, while The Shopping Trolleys of Doom is an amusing and jolly critique of the rationale of, of all things, supermarket points cards.
…While there’s not enough space here to cover all the stories, each one is worthwhile, written out of genuine love for the series and with something to recommend it. With 25 stories and not one dud I can’t praise this enough.”
Meanwhile, Sci-Fi Online’s review of the book picked out my story as one of their favourites, which made my day!
The fact that these stories are all by first-time fiction writers might account for one of the recurring themes of this collection: people who are stuck in dead-end jobs! The individuals whose lives are altered in “Change Management” by Simon Moore, “Second Chances” by Bernard O’Toole, “The Shopping Trolleys of Doom” by Caleb Woodbridge, “The Man on the Phone” by Mark Smith and “£436” by Nick May all face such a situation, whether they work in a call centre, in a taxi, in a supermarket or even in space. Most of them manage to either escape the shackles of their jobs or defeat their satirically evil bosses. Two of these stories, “The Shopping Trolleys of Doom” and “The Man on the Phone”, are among my favourites in this collection.
I first had the idea for The Shopping Trolleys of Doom a few years ago when I was working at Kwik Save in the university holidays. After a particularly frustrating day on the tills, I thought that an uprising of shopping trolleys would be a fun idea for a Doctor Who story, and though I was no longer working there when the competition came along some time later, I remembered the idea and thought it was a good hook for a story.
If you’ve not got a copy of the book yet, it’s still available from Big Finish and from Amazon, and you can order it from all good bookshops. Short Trips: Indefinable Magic, containing my second short story, will be published in the spring.