Skip to main content

Review: Dr Who: Harvest of Time

Image
By
By Alastair Reynolds

ISBN: 978-1849904193

When I was a boy I loved Dr. Who and Blake's 7. When I was at University, in around 1997, they used to show Dr. Who and Blake’s on UK Gold on a Sunday morning. While Blake’s 7 still had me totally captivated, Dr. Who didn’t live up to my memories. Of course I grew up with Tom Baker, Peter Davidson, Colin Baker (who I barely remembered at all at the time) and Sylvester McCoy. In my mind the illusion was complete, but watching them again aged around 20 I saw straight through the special effects and the memories were somewhat shattered. So I approached the Harvest of Time with a little apprehension.

As with everything Alastair Reynolds writes, the story is excellent. However, I don’t think the Dr. Who universe gave it anything and it would have been much better as a straight time travel and invasion novel. The Sild are a very Dr. Who type enemy and I didn’t really believe in them. Of course The Master was a superb character and I didn’t see the twist with the Red Queen until just before it was revealed. I don’t really remember UNIT from the original Dr. Who, but they came across a bit nieve, over enthusiastic and stiff upper lipped.

I did enjoy Harvest of Time, but I’m looking forward to the final book in the Poseidon's Children trilogy and what will come after. In the meantime I’ll be diving back into Pandora’s Star by Peter Hamilton. My recent change of job has given me far more reading time again, so expect more reviews.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Do software engineering professionals still read? - survey results

By
  In order to gauge the potential audience for my book, So you think you can lead a team? , I conducted a small survey of my colleagues, co-workers and anyone from Linked. I read regularly, for work and pleasure, and assumed everyone else did too but did the responses I received confirm this? I polled 173 people, all within the software engineering field (including Product, etc), with a range of ages and years of experience in their role. What surprised me the most was that the majority of people, young or old, just starting or seasoned, still prefer reading physical books to blogs or e-readers. It also seemed that the older and more experienced were the most keen in learning more, and reading to expand or update their knowledge.  When it comes to reading habits between different roles the survey showed that software engineers and team leads read more regularly for their career than other roles, with 55 years old and over and 16+ years experience being the biggest readers over...
3 comments
Read more