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The Stealers of Dreams Author: Steve Lyons Review The Stealers of Dreams is set in the future on an Earth colony world where the settlers have become obsessed with fact and truth to the exclusion of all fiction. People who tell lies, stories or even dream are arrested and committed to an asylum. On the face of it this is a bizarre twisted society and it would appear as though there is a hidden foe controlling the populous in this. The justification for the laws being such becomes clear when you read that people are effectively hallucinating their dreams, even interacting with them. Rose does battle with imaginary zombies, local boy Dominic is constantly running from imaginary Police and other locals have episodes where ficticious characters become solid to them. The dialogue from the main characters is good here, and all the lines are believable. They could easily have been scripted into one of the Eccleston TV adventures. One of the main things I liked about this story though was that all the main characters had their own plot lines and were largely given equal time in the book. Too often I think when there are multiple companions one of them at least becomes largely redundant. The fact that they operated seperately for large parts of the book also meant that more aspects of the story could be seen from different perspectives, a nice touch I thought. The one problem that I found was that I managed to work out the main plot twist very early on. I won't spoil it by saying what it is, but suffice it to say that the identity of the 'baddies' seemed obvious to me at an early stage. Some of the other twists though worked in at the end were very well done though, and showed that Steve Lyons had really thought through the plot before writing the story. So, overall The Stealers of Dreams is a very enjoyable romp, and one that is pretty easy to read. I get the feeling that the new adventures for the ninth Doctor are being written specifically with a wider demographic in mind, which makes them generally easier to read and means that they tend to be a bit shorter than the past doctor adventures in books. With the main plot element being a bit obvious to me it spoiled it slightly, but the book is a good read nonetheless. Rating:  |