The Witch Hunters, by Steve Lyons (BBC Novel)

The Witch Hunters was one of the original line of BBC Past Doctor novels, but was recently released in a series of reprints. Unlike the majority of Doctor Who novels, it is a pure historical; the only Sci-Fi elements being those relating to the regular cast.

This novel is about the famous witch trials that occurred in Salem in late 17th century America. It is open about its inspiration, referencing Arthur Miller's Crucible several times. While Steve Lyons has clearly put in a lot of research, as a theology graduate, I winced at some of his mistakes about Puritan theology. The characters refer quite frequently to Purgatory. The people of Salem would most definitely have abhorred the 'Popish' doctrine of Purgatory. He also has Rebecca Nurse believing she is damned as a result of her excommunication. That is not how the Puritans understood excommunication. While Rebecca Nurse would hardly have been happy at the disgrace of excommunication, she would not have believed that the minister had the infallible power to consign her to hell. I also thought it was a bit odd that the Ian and Barbara had not attended church meetings in Salem until the outbreak of the witch trials. There is no way that they would have been able to absent themselves for months in a community in which non-attendance was punishable by law.

The Witch Hunters is very heavy on high emotional drama, perhaps a little too much so. It does feel like Lyons is trying too hard to get an emotional reaction. The scene with Dr. Who taking Rebecca Nurse to see the future and her own memorial reminded me a lot of Vincent and the Doctor, a similarly emotion-heavy story. This novel is unusual for a Lyons story in its lack of humour (The Final Sanction being another exception); he is possibly better at working with a more comic tone.

I'm one of Susan's few fans, so I liked the attention given to her in this novel. It made good use of her developing telepathic abilities, as seen in The Sensorites. I also very much appreciated the chance to see Susan interacting with other young people, which she did not get to do very much on screen. However, I am unsure that she would have been so ready to try to change history and in her feeble efforts, she does come across as a little bit daft.

The First Doctor in this novel is very reminiscent of the Seventh Doctor in the New Adventures. The idea of him preventing Rebecca Nurse from being pardoned and returning her to be executed is a bit grim. I very much liked the fact that we have the Doctor making a solo voyage in the TARDIS following the events of The Five Doctors. This creates a gap in continuity which allows such stories as the First Doctor's solo travels in the World Distributor annuals, his TV Comic adventures with John and Gillian and his contest with Fenric and subsequent travels with Zeleekah.

This is certainly not the best Doctor Who novel, but it is an interesting work from one of the finest writers to work in the expanded universe of Doctor Who.

The Silent Stars Go By, by Dan Abnett (BBC novel)

This novel by popular science fiction tie-in writer Dan Abnett, was originally published as a deluxe hardcover volume, then republished as a paperback in a series of Doctor Who reprints.

This was actually the first New Series novel that I have read. I don't care for the New Series, so I was hardly likely to take an interest in its spin-off novels. However, this being the first appearance of the Ice Warriors in a BBC Wales Doctor story and it also being a Dan Abnett novel, I definitely wanted to read it.

Silent Stars is a novel that very much wears its influences on its literary sleeve. With the Christmas feel, it very much feels like a Moffat Christmas episode (though it is better than all of those dreadful affairs). On the other hand, it is not only the presence of the Ice Warriors that makes this feel like a classic four or six part Doctor Who serial; it is also set on a planet that appears to be inhabited by about ten people and has a council consisting of an elder hostile to the Doctor and an elder sympathetic to the Doctor. The simple and effective storytelling puts one in mind of a Terrance Dicks Target novelisation. The playful use of language, such as 'Guide E-manual' and 'Unguidely' also reminds me of Paradise Towers. Rather less fortunately, the novel seems to borrow from the New Series in giving a rather too easy resolution to the story. In the end, the Doctor finds a solution just by tinkering around with machinery, which feels a little uninspiring.

Dan Abnett is experienced in writing franchise fiction, so it should be no surprise that he crafts a very enjoyable and exciting tale here. It is very effective and efficiently told and captures the actors voices very well. Dan Abnett could easily be a Terrance Dicks for the Twenty-first century. What I felt was missing was Dan Abnett himself. When the BBC hires a writer of his reputation, you expect to get something special. I didn't really see that here. Perhaps if he had given us a darker and more militaristic novel, we would have felt more of the writer's individual style.

Shakedown, by Terrance Dicks (Virgin New Adventure)

Shakedown, originally a Virgin New Adventure, was republished by BBC Books as part of a series of novels called 'The Monster Collection.' These all featured images of New Series monsters on the cover art. Having a New Series Sontaran on the cover is fine with me, though the New Series Eocene on the cover of the newly repuglished Scales of Injustice seemed a bit weird. Nevertheless, I was glad to see Virgin novels being republished by BBC books. I was disappointed that the Remembrance of the Daleks novelisation rather than a New Adventure was re-released as the represenative Seventh Doctor novel. That said, the New Adventures were not really about reviving famous monsters, they were about doing new and exciting things with Doctor Who.

Shakedown began life as a fan made video production, featuring the Sontarans, but not the Doctor. It was scripted by Terrance Dicks, apparently for a very minimal fee. Terrance Dicks was later approached by Virgin, who wanted him to adapt it as a novel featuring the Doctor. Instead of changing the story of Shakedown to include the Doctor, Dicks did something rather more interesting. He wrote a basic novelisation of Shakedown, then included this as the middle section of a longer novel. This novel created a literary backstory for the fan movie. This involved the Doctor and his companions pursuing a Rutan spy.

Shakedown is written in that minimalistic, unfancy prose which characterised Terrance Dicks' novelisations. The middle section, based on the fan movie, is very reminiscent of his Target novels. However, it also draws on his Virgin novels too, with the playfulness and the endless references to other Doctor Who storie, especially Uncel Terry's own scripts. And with it being a Terrance Dicks, a female character inevitably gets threatened with rape.

As with some of his other novels, Dicks tends to make the Seventh Doctor seem more like Pertwee than McCoy, though he gets Bernice, Chris and Roz spot on. The Sontarans were portrayed more sympathetically here than in the Classic Series, one can see the emergence of the friendly Sontarans of the New Series. I was rather glad to see the Rutans getting a bit more attention here. I think they are a great monster.

There is some great world-buiding here, especially the planet of insectoid Oxford dons. Likewise, Dick's portrayal of the corrupt and anarchic Megacity has a cynicism to match the late Robert Holmes. The most striking character we are introdued to is the Ogron police chief, a polite and educated Ogron, who sips tea and eats cakes. Before we can applaud Dicks for breaking stereoypes, it turns out that this Ogron has been surgically altered. This is rather disappointing. Dicks just assumes Ogrons are all dumb because they conform to racially suspect stereotypes. Wouldn't it have been nice if Dicks had given us an Ogron who really did fail to conform to the cliche (without having been 'civilized' by surgery)? But we can hardly expect Uncle Terry to be progressive.

This is a fun novel with plenty of action. Readers who have grown up with Terrance Dicks' Target novels will very much enjoy this.

The Blue Angel, by Paul Magrs and Jeremy Hoad

I have been dreading writing a review of this novel. It's a really sprawling mess of a book.

The Blue Angel gives us a number of sub-plots, without bringing them altogether in a way that actually makes sense. We get a starship crew that are essentially a Star Trek parody, a group of old ladies who get whisked away to another world and are attacked by giant owls and a complex space opera about the various races living in a pocket universe. We also get a strange, dream-like sub-plot about the Doctor living in a Georgina house with Fitz and Conpassion and going for tea with a friend called Sally. It's never explained how this subplot relates to the rest of the book. In the centre of it all, we get Paul Magrs best known creation, Iris Wildthyme. Furthermore, the novel has no resolution. At the book's climax, Iris whisks the Doctor away before he can bring the story to the sort of conclusion that we would expect in a Doctor Who novel. This is a really clever idea, but it does leave one feeling a bit unbsatisfied. However much we might admire literary experimentation, one does tend to like some kind of resolution at the end of a novel as a reward for reading, even if it is a Virgin novel ending, with nearly everybody dead and Ace and Bennie absolutely furious with the Doctor.

Magrs and Hoad decentralize the Doctor from the narrative. He runs around trying to solver every problem that arises, but ends up looking useless and incompetent. Phil Sandifer suggested a while ago that in this, Magrs and Hoad were reacting to the Virgin books and the 'Time's Champion' idea. However, the Virgin books occasionally pulled off this trick, with the Doctor's plans frequently falling apart. The Blue Angel is basically an Iris Wildthyme novel with the Doctor making an appearance. This incarnation of Iris, resembling Jane Fonda's Barbarella, is undoubtedly the strongest version of the character. This Iris is not a dithering old lady, but a powerful and dangerous figure.

The Blue Angel is of course the second appearance of Copassion, after her debut in Interference. I like Compassion, but I don't think Magrs and Hoad handle her all that well. She is harsh and cold, which sets her apart from other companions, but in this novel her coldness ends up coming across as annoying. Fans have often compared Compassion to Seven-of-Nine in Star Trek: Voyager, yet that program utilised the ex-Borg very well. For all Seven's coldness, the viewer was able to like her and warm to her. Magrs and Hoad do nothing to make us warm to Compassion and everything to make us resent her presence. That the novel fails to follow the lead of Voyager is ironic, given the Star Trek parody going on here.

There is plenty of humour here, but it is not the kind of laugh-out-loud humour that Magrs achieves in Mad Dogs and Englishmen. I didn't find the Star Trek parody all that funny; Bang-Bang-a-Boom does a better job of that. I did like the attept at world-building, with all the various distinctive alien races. It is just unforunate that with all the various sub-plots and ideas in this book, nothing really gets enough attention. I'm afraid to say that on the whole, I found this novel rather disappointing.

The Crooked World, by Steve Lyons (BBC novel)

How could you not want to read a book with such a remarkable cover?

In Crooked World, the 8th Doctor, Fitz and Anji arrive in a strange world with different physical laws. The inhabitants are indestructible, observe oddly repetitive illogical behaviour patterns and nobody has sex; babies are delivered by a stork. The inhabitants also resemble the characters of classic cartoon shows. We have stand-ins for Porky Pig, the gang from Scooby Doo, Penelope Pittstop and quite a few others.

On the surface, Crooked World appears quite similar to Steve Lyons New Adventure novel, Conundrum. In both stories, the TARDIS crew entered a world of fictional tropes. Yet Conundrum experimented with a very different style of narrative technique. Crooked World is very much a conventional Doctor Who story in its structure. The TARDIS crew arrive on a strange alien world, they get split up and have to learn the rules of how this world works. In exploring fictional tropes, Conundrum felt quite original back in the Nineties. This story feels a lot less groundbreaking. I can imagine a postmodern enthusiast like Phil Sandifer dismissing it, as he does Conundrum and its sequel, Head Games. However, like most of Steve Lyons' novels, it is very well written and very enjoyable.

While there is plenty of humour in this, Lyons makes it all remarkably straight, perhaps sensibly. The cartoon characters are all very serious and seem surprisingly angsty once they start reflecting on their trope-driven lives. The story leads into a big discussion of the topic of free-will. This does not get beyond a very shallow covering of the topic, but indirectly one can take from this the sense that in a world where it was impossible to harm others, there would be little room for moral growth. One could certainly develop that into a theodicy.

The Doctor is as enthusiastic as ever about this world. Fitz makes an ill-fated attempt to get Angel Falls (stand-in for Penelope Pittstop) into bed. Anji, cool and rational as she is, finds this surreal world utterly bewildering. The 8-Fitz-Anji teams was one of the strongest ever TARDIS teams, being so different from other companions and this is a story that suits them really well.

Thankfully we are spared an inane scientific explanation of the cartoon world. It is left quite mysterious. It is perhaps a little odd that the TARDIS crew don't comment on the similarity of the inhabitants to cartoon shows. Do those not exist in the Doctor Who universe (I've heard Anji had referred to Scooby Doo in a previous novel).

Like the best of the 8th Doctor novels, Crooked World tells an interesting and creative story.

Verdigris, by Paul Magrs

I think Verdigris demonstrates that there is a difference between good writing and good stories.

Some of the writing in this novel is absolutely fantastic. Paul Magrs vividly recreates the Pertwee Doctor, along with Jo Grant. His satirical portrayal of the Pertwee era is very funny, with his lampooning of unconvincing monsters and bad CSO, the lack of characterisation of Mike Yates and the uselessness of the UNIT. This is not as hilariously funny as Mad Dogs and Englishmen, but the writing here is very entertaining.

On the other hand, while the writing is great, the story is not so good at all. The story is basically a sequence of one weird event after another, without much of a semblance of a plot. At times the tone feels altogether too silly. There is a place for silliness in Doctor Who sometimes. Magrs' Mad Dogs and Englishmen was silly, but it felt altogether more grounded than this work. It probably helped in Mad Dogs that Iris took more of a backseat in that story, whereas here she is central to the story.

I am one of those fans who enjoy Iris Wildthyme. I found it surprising how Magrs made her much more obnoxious and unpleasant in this story than in other works. This was perhaps appropriate given how obnoxious the Pertwee Doctor could be. I actually found that pairing the Third Doctor with Iris rather made him a little more likable.

I very much enjoyed the first few chapters of this novel, but halfway through I became very frustrated by the lack of plot progression. This is definitely not Magrs best novel.

Trading Futures, by Lance Parkin

The Troughton serial Enemy of the World is set in the early years of the Twenty-first century and is possibly the Doctor Who story most heavily influenced by the James Bond movies. Lance Parkin's Trading Futures is also set in the early Twenty-first century, just years before Enemy of the World. Appropriately, Trading Futures is from cover to back a homage to James Bond in all its glory. This novel has some of the key ingredients of James Bond, non-stop action, multiple locations, a sexy female spy (with the amusing name Malady), a girl in a bikini (in this case Dr. Who's companion Anji Kapoor) and lots of devious scheming. There is also a British agent called Jonah Cosgrove, who is clearly intended as an elderly version of James Bond.

This story is very much focused on Anji. She takes on an almost Doctorish role, effortlessly gliding through the adventure, improvising at every problem. She seems completely at home and at ease in this environment; only decades away from her own time and guided by the assumptions of markets and capitalism. I love Anji. Being a Tory and a right-winger, I'm inevitably going to like a character who is a capitalist who supports the establishment. It's remarkable how much Anji stands out in Doctor Who because of her contrasting values. This is especially striking in this novel when she defends the arms trade. I can't imagine any other companion expressing such sentiments. Even if the Brigadier probably would agree with her, writers would never have a beloved character like him defending the arms industry. Anji offered a right-wing diversion in a franchise that was consciously left-leaning. Of course, it would be awful to have a character like Anji in Moffat-Who. Doctor Who has turned into a show that is essentially conservative due to the unreservedly middle-class nature of its characters and assumptions. It has nothing to offer in the way of challenging society. As much as I am a Conservative, I prefer Doctor Who being left-wing, rather than having absolutely nothing to say except middle-class sentiments.

Both the Doctor and Fitz take a back seat in this story. Despite his secondary role, the Doctor is portrayed here as an unstoppable, seemingly indestructible whirlwind of energy. Fitz gets a really memorable role in this novel when he is mistaken by aliens as the Doctor. He does an absolutely fantastic job of improvising as a Doctor-stand in, attempting to say Doctorish things. It is remarkable that no other companion (that I'm aware of) ever got to do this.

Lance Parkin had me in fits of laughter with this book's warlike alien race, the Onihr. The Rhinoceros-like Onihr are deliberately portrayed as a bogstandard naff Doctor Who alien species. In a really Monty Pythonesque scene, they torture Fitz with a rubbish torture device called a 'Pain Inducer.' They even change into scarlet cardinal-like robes before operating it.

Despite my enjoying Trading Futures immensely, I did feel it had two problems. The first was the excessive number of factions at work. I don't think the two minions of Sabbath contributed anything useful to the plot. They could easily have been dispensed with, but seemed to have been brought in to keep up with the story arc about the villainous Sabbath. Secondly, speaking of villains, I think a story that emulates James Bond needs a much stronger villain. Baskerville is not particularly memorable and never captures the glamour and style of a Bond villain.

The Final Sanction, by Steve Lyons (BBC novel)

The Final Sanction is a really bleak, depressing war story. I did enjoy it though. Part of my enjoyment was down to the fact that the Selachians are such a great Doctor Who monster race and part of it was down to the really well constructed plot. This has a much cleanly and efficiently delivered story than Lyons' previous Past Doctor novel, The Murder Game. There was also a lot of NAstalgia involved in my enjoyment too. It is clear reading this that Steve Lyons is very much a writer in the mould of the Virgin New Adventures, with all their harshness. While there is a definite feeling that one has read this before, it still feels good. Like the best of the Virgin novels, it makes effective use of Doctor Who continuity, with a humanity scarred by the events of the Dalek invasion.

This is a novel all about war; about the complex morality of war, about terrible atrocities and about the war criminals who command unspeakable acts. In The Final Sanction, Jamie gets involved in the fighting directly, Zoe is captured and faces torture and deprivation in a Selachian prison camp, while the Second Doctor meets face to face with Wayne Redfern, who will be infamously remembered as the man who ordered the destruction of the Selachian's planet along with the thousands of innocent human prisoners held there. This TARDIS team feel a oddly suited to this role, being more generally suited to fun romps. However, they are written well and are not as badly served as they are in The Indestructible Man.

The Selachians are a great monster race; they're aquatic nature sets them apart from other aliens and their memorable visual image is impressive to imagine. They are fleshed out a little here and we see something of a different side to them. Their is a beautiful moment where a Selachian tells Jamie his name and it triggers images in his mind of another world, a beautiful and mysterious aquatic world. Yet they are as militaristic as ever, which does make them a little diffcult to sympathize with despite Lyons' efforts.

The war criminal, Wayne Redfern is perhaps a slightly cliched character, being a bellicose, gung-ho American with a Southern drawl. However, Lyons does give him enough complexity to make him interesting. I also loved the poignant ending the book leaves us with. The Doctor takes Jamie and Zoe back to the aftermath of the Dalek occupation, where we see a younger Redfern. The Doctor asks Zoe if she could kill the young Redfern and thus prevent so many future deaths. She replies that it would be logical, but she could never do it. In the next scene, we see Redfern saving the life of a young girl trapped under rubble. This is a beautiful way of showing the complexities of history and time travel.

One continuity complaint that I had was that the Doctor showed an awfully detailed knowledge of future human history. He had not previously shown such knowledge during the Second Doctor era. It is only in the Third Doctor era that the Doctor seems to show any detailed knowledge about future human history. I found it interesting that the Selachians regard the Doctor as a habitual enemy who has thwarted them many times. Do they mean only The Murder Game and the The Selachian Gambit (not published at the time of this novel!)? Did the Second Doctor have a further encounter with the Selachians with Victoria? Had the First Doctor tangled with them? Or did the Selachians recordss include defeats inflicted by a future Second Doctor from the Season 6B era? These questions really do fascinate me.

This book defintely reinforced my feeling that Steve Lyons is among my favorite Doctor Who authors. It is a shame that he is not better regarded for his output among fans.

Divided Loyalties, by Gary Russell

It's often little details that annoy me most about stories. I found myself feeling a certain annoyance at Gary Russell's drop of a hat revelation in this novel that Tegan's family are Jewish. Not that it wouldn't be great to find out a companion is Jewish, but this does not fit anything we know about Tegan.

So we have an Australian young woman who is from Brisbane, but does not have a Brisbane accent (apparently). A woman who has a Slavonic surname and an unusual Celtic first name, with Serbian grandparents. A woman who speaks the Aborigine's language. A woman who is apparently Jewish.

It's not impossible that Tegan might be Jewish. There are Jews who have the surname Frazer, the name of the other side of her family. There was a very old Jewish community in Serbia. There are still some Jews there today, but not very many. The Jewish population in Serbia was decimated by the Holocaust. Most of those who survived emigrated to Israel. Tegan's grandfather, however, still lives in what was then Yugoslavia. That does not help Russell's case for a Jewish Tegan.

Paul Cornell's novel Goth Opera had a scene in which our favorite Austalian air hostess chases off a vampire with a Gideon Bible in hand. We get the impression she would have been just as comfortable brandishing a crucifix. The scene very much suggests a Serbian Orthodox background. That I am discussing this shows I am just as much a continuity obsessive as Gary Russell, but that is neither here nor there. The disturbing impression I get is that Russell's logic was on the lines of "Lots of Jews have Eastern European names. Tegan's family is from Eastern Europe, so they might be Jewish," thus ignoring the impact of the Holocaust and the fact that there are not that many Jews left in many parts of Eastern Europe. It does not suggest much broader cultural awareness. Maybe events in former Yugoslavia made the thought of a Serbian Orthodox background rather unappealing for Russell. Being Serbian was not terribly glamorous in the nineties, with all that went on in Sarajevo and Kosovo.


So having dealt with the fascinating question of Tegan's religious background, we move to the more mundane question of this novel. Is it actually any good? This novel would probably make it on to a top ten list of hated Doctor Who novels. It has been savaged by fans and reviled as an example of the worst excesses of continuity fetishism. Some of this criticism is a bit harsh, but I did find the book difficult to enjoy. It was a very plodding story, with too many dreamscapes and the non-regular characters were largely uninteresting.

There were some things in the story that I enjoyed. Gary Russell has a great affection for the Fifth Doctor era and this very much came out in the portrayal of the regular characters, with all their bickering and conflicts. He does a great job of fleshing out the individual characters of Tegan, Nyssa and Adric (aside from the bit about Tegan supposedly being Jewish). Unlike a lot of readers, I rather enjoyed the high school style depiction of the Doctor and chums at school. I have always liked the idea of Dr. Who and other renegade Time Lords being at school together. I also enjoyed the exploration of Doctor Who cosmology and the insights into the Great Old Ones.

There is the question of whether it is really appropriate to write a spin-off novel featuring the Celestial Toymaker given that he is such a racist caricature. Phil Sandifer dismissed The Celestial Toymaker as racist garbage and seemed to suggest that the recycling of the character in spin-off media was a really bad idea. Gary Russell seems to try to remedy this by pointing out that the Toymaker is Caucasian, despite his oriental dress. I'm not altogether sure in my own mind. The Celestial Toymaker is a very significant figure in the Doctor Who mythos in that he is the first super-powerful adversaries of the Doctor, after the Animus. He is a mysterious and disturbing figure. While it might be politicall dubious to dress him up like a Chines Mandarin, it does create a striking and memorable visual image.


Divided Loyalties on the whole a disappointing novel. Terrance Dicks offered lots of continuity references to stir the hearts of fans. Yet he wrote novels that were tightly plotted and often quite gripping. Divided Loyalties is just not a very interesting story.

Interference, by Lawrence Miles (BBC novel)

Do you remember the Nirvana song In Bloom? In that song, Kurt Cobain sneered at the listener who:

likes all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along and he likes to shoot his gun
But he knows not what it means
Knows not what it means

I imagine I'm probably the equivalent reader of Lawrence Miles' books. I love Lawrence Miles books and count myself a fan, but I suspect I haven't really understood what they are about. I also suspect, in the unlikely instance of Lawrence Miles ever reading this blog, that he would hate the fact that a Tory like me, who stands for everything he is against, is a fan of his work. So I'm an odd fan for Lawrence Miles, and possibly not the best person qualified to review his work.


Interference is uniquely for a Doctor Who novel, published in two volumes, Shock Tactic and The Hour of the Geek. It seems very surprising that BBC books were willing to do this. This is certainly a novel written on a grand epic and cosmic scale, but it has to be said that it is overly long. The first volume is very slow moving, with the plot unfolding at a snail's pace. The Doctor in particular, spends a good deal of the first volume imprisoned in a jail cell, contributing little to events. The second volume is faster paced, but the whole novel is in much need of trimming down a bit.

While Interference is overly long and poorly paced, it is undeniably well written and of a much higher standard than a lot of Doctor Who novels. Miles switches between different genres; diary entries, movie scripts, television documentary dialogue as well as more standard novelistic prose. A couple of scenes are cleverly turned into film and television drama, with one character described as being played by Nicole Kidman and another by Wesley Snipes. In a particularly glorious chapter, the Dark Times of Gallifrey are retold as a BBC costume drama with Rassilon played by Brian Blessed!

Interference does all the things that I love about Lawrence Miles books. There is the cosmic sense of scale, the playful use of continuity and the grappling with big intellectual ideas. I think Miles does better with these things in his other novels, but I enjoyed them no less in this work.

Interference is very political. It deals with the issue of the arms trade and how British companies were selling electro-shock batons in the late nineties. While I am not against the arms trade in general (it does play a pretty big part in our economy and every country needs an air force), I think everyone ought to agree that this country should not be exporting torture equipment. Lawrence Miles deserves credit for spotlighting the issue.


The novel has generated a lot of controversy for the way it re-writes Doctor Who continuity. As a result of the intervention of Faction Paradox, the Third Doctor regenerates before his encounter with the Great One on Metebelis 3 and as a result of a gunshot wound. This is a really interesting trick, even if it falls foul of my own dislike of 'timey-wimey' (I hate that word) stuff. Whatever one's opinions of Miles subversive retcon, he does a beautiful job of portraying the Pertwee Doctor. His classic regeneration line, A tear, Sarah Jane? is made even more poignant when he follows it with This is wrong. In a typically postmodern touch, Miles has the Third Doctor observing that the story he is in does not feel like one of his typical adventures.

Miles' portrayal of the Eighth Doctor is a little more problematic. He does next to nothing in the story. He spends a major part of the first volume suffering brutal torture in a Saudi Arabian prison. I'm not quite convinced by the idea that the Doctor would be completely helpless in the situation in which he is placed. In all his adventures, has he never experienced the kind of random brutality that overwhelms him here? That sort of thing is pretty common on Earth, so I don't see why other worlds have not cottoned on to the idea of random brutality.

The Doctor's prison cell discussion is very interesting. He admits to his cellmate that he interferes on future colonies, but he never interferes on Earth without being able to give any rational reason why. I don't buy this. In my opinion, the reason the Doctor does not interfere on Earth is because he knows he can't change history, not one line. When the Doctor interferes in the future, he is not changing history, but participating in it. His knowledge of the future is not exhaustive, so he has no reason to worry about failure on his part. If he tried to overthrow Hitler in 1938, he would know his failure was inevitable. He has no idea of the fate of Terra Alpha, so he can try to overthrow Helen A without worrying about the consequences.

Sam is handled very well in this book. She is given real depth of personality. The only problem is that she ends up looking a bit stupid. Compassion suggests to Sam that if she is against electro-shock batons, she should also be against matchsticks, as they can also be used to torture people. I can't believe any intelligent person would be unable to see a logical flaw in this proposition. Strangely, Sam does a lot of running around in high heels for somebody who is not used to wearing them. I loved the use of the older Sarah Jane Smith in this story. She is given a personal life and an identity beyond her travels with the Doctor. She also interacts nicely with Sam. I am not a K9 fan, but he was great in this too.


Interference is an overly-ambitious work that has some problems, but I enjoyed it as much as any of Lawrence Miles' books. The cameo appearance of Iris Wildthyme is a nice treat too.

World Game, by Terrance Dicks (BBC Novel)

In some ways World Game is a Terrance Dicks' greatest hits. We have his trademark simple prose, references to his televised stories, notably including the appearance of a vampire and a Raston Warrior Robot, interaction with historical figures, skullduggery on Gallifrey and that famous line about the Mind-Probe. If you are a long-standing Doctor Who fan, you are pwobably familiar with all these tropes and love them too. We also get Terrance Dicks' worst literary tendency, with a female companion being threatened with rape.

Yet World Game also does something very interesting. This is the only novel set in Season 6B, that hypothetical period between The War Games and Spearhead from Space. This makes for something quite interesting and different. It also gets the Second Doctor away from Jamie, allowing us to see a different side to him. I am a believer in Season 6B. I think this makes the most sense out of anomalies in The Five Doctors and The Two Doctors. It also allows us a time period in which the events of the Second Doctor TV Comic strips can be squeezed.

Dicks' prose is as simple as ever, but it reads very easily and makes for a light and entertaining read. Yet at the same time, there is a massive amount of historical information squeezed in. Anybody reading this novel is going to learn a lot about the Napoleonic Wars. Dicks has always taken the educational aspect of Doctor Who seriously in his novels. I remember when I was eleven years old, how Timewyrm Exodus inspired me to read lots of books about the Third Reich.

I don't think Dicks quite succeeds in capturing the Second Doctor. As with other Doctors, he tends to make him seem a little too much like the Third Doctor. His companion, Lady Serena was very likeable, even if she was an awful lot like Romana I. I think it was rather a shame that she was killed off.

World Game lacks the drama and intensity of Timewyrm Exodus, but it is still one of Terrance Dicks' best novels and is very enjoyable. The cover with Troughton dressed up as Napoleon is delightful too.

Rags, by Mick Lewis (BBC novel)

Rags appears to aspire to be the most violent Doctor Who novel ever. It certainly succeeds. We are treated to chapter after chapter of savage and graphically described violence. People are butchered, sometimes by people they know. Every character is affected by the primal urge to fight and kill, except the Doctor, of course. Generally, I dislike strong violence in Doctor Who, however, I accept that Rags is a book that could never have been written without the shocking graphic brutality it is given. I doubt that it had many young readers, fandom at this period in Doctor Who having become a more mature company.

This novel is about punk rock. That in itself is an interesting topic because until the McCoy era, there are no visual references to punk in Doctor Who. The show and its writers appear to have largely ignored the punk movement when it was at its most prominent. While the New Adventure novel No Future dealt with the DIY performance side of punk, this novel deals with the nastier, more disturbing side of the movement and how the music was associated with a savage urge to deal out physical violence.

The real pleasure of this story is seeing the world of the Third Doctor era turned upside down. The kind of realistic violence we see here just didn't happen in Third Doctor stories. Best of all is what the author does with Jo Grant. We see Jo get into punk rock, smoke a joint and share a lesbian kiss. This is Jo Grant as you have never seen her! Mike Yates is as daft as ever and wears an appalling disguise as an hippy. Yet strangely, he is show to be rather useful in hand-to-hand combat.

While I certainly enjoyed reading Rags, I was very conscious of its flaws. It feels very much like it is a little too derivative of other novels, particularly in the New Adventures range. It almost feels like an ironic tribute to the Virgin New Adventures. It's plot is also a little too stodgy and slow paced. I also felt that the incident with Princess Mary was oddly handled. This was a massively significant event and its implications were barely touched on this novel.

On the whole I was disappointed with the way the Doctor was handled. He is described accurately, but he lacks the colour he might have been given. I would have liked to have seen him vent some snooty disgust at punk rock music. Unfortunately, he is written out of a good deal of the action and spends time in a kind of dreamscape (New Adventure cliche!). The way he stays out of the action and he keeps his plans to himself actually adds to the Virgin New Adventure feel of the story, but unfortunately fails to make it engage as a Third Doctor story.

The subplot with Kane and his family secrets felt somewhat out of place; this was very much supernatural horror territory. While this subplot was written well, it very much felt like a distraction from the much more interesting socio-political exploration of the punk theme.

Rags is an interesting installment in the BBC Past Doctors range and does something quite different, but perhaps fails to be a great Doctor Who novel.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen, by Paul Magrs (BBC novel)

Mad Dogs and Englishmen is not just a funny novel, it is laugh-out loud funny. I don't think any Doctor Who novel has made me laugh as much as this one.

This novel is mostly about poking fun at popular science fiction and fantasy. There is a character who is clearly based on J.R. Tolkien, a humourless academic who has written a vast epic about elves and goblins. The central premise of the plot is that the timeline has been altered so that the epic is now about talking poodles (who are in fact real). We also get a good deal of Star Wars parody. There is an hilarious moment when the poodle princess sends a message proclaiming "you are my only hope." George Lucas also has his stand-in as a film director who loves playing with toys and who regards all the boys and girls who watch his films as his friends. He earns the enmity of a character who stands in for Ray Harryhausen by replacing the animatronic effects in his films with CGI. Yet we also have a character from the real world; Noel Coward, who has been obtained the power to travel in time with a pair of magic pinking shears.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen is wonderfully written; it so light and easy to read. The plot is remarkably complex and does not make a lot of sense, but I didn't find myself caring. This book is gloriously bonkers and revels in its own silliness.

We get a return appearance from Iris Wildthyme, who is never actually named. This time she is in an incarnation that is clearly modeled on Shirley Bassey. Perhaps her appearance in this story is a surprise given that the previous novel, Adventuress of Henrietta Street had featured the Master. At this point, the BBC novels were wanting to jettison existing continuity as a source of stories. There is a degree of inconsistency at work here, because the Doctor has no memory of Iris or other Time Lords, despite his previous encounter with the Master.

The regulars are done really well here. The Doctor comes across as knowing what is going on all the time, but keeping quiet just because he enjoys the fun of investigating. Anji is really smart, sassy and very likable here. Fitz seems determined to enjoy himself regardless of how bizarre the adventure turns out to be. There is a wonderfully insane moment when the talking poodles force the Doctor, Anji and Fitz to strip naked, wear collars and walk on all fours. When they protest they are told "Bad people!" It's a delightfully camp scene.

As with other BBC novels set after Ancestor Cell, the presence of magic is very pronounced. There is no explanation for how Noel Coward's magic pinking shears work or how the animatronic monsters are able to come to life. These things are written so well that you don't really stop to think about them or question them.

There is a little bit of excessive violence towards the end and a surprising reference to bestiality, but none of this detracts from the light-hearted tone. This is a novel that I enjoyed immensely.

The Ultimate Treasure, by Christopher Bulis (BBC novel)

Quest stories are great for lazy writers. Just give the characters an objective, an opponent, some obstacles to face and throw in a twist or two to make it interesting. It is a banal strategy, but quite often it actually makes for an enjoyable story. Doctor Who has given us a few quest stories, most notably The Keys of Marinus and The Five Doctors. Christopher Bulis manages to pull this off rather well. Admittedly, it feels like it is aimed at younger readers and it is rather slow to get going, but halfway through it is a fairly exciting, if unadventurous read.

This is a Fifth Doctor and Peri novel. That is what got me reading it, as I am quite a 5/Peri fan, even though I admit the improbability and silliness of a gap between Planet of Fire and Caves of Androzani. Both Doctor and companion are characterised very well. Bulis manages to maintain the sense that Peri is new to the business of travelling in time and space. That said, he rather fails to capture the bleak and tragic feeling of Season 21. This feels in general like a positive and upbeat book that contrasts quite a bit with the televised story that follows it. In particular, Bulis gives us a silly retcon regarding Kamelion that rather undermines the tragic narrative of Season 21.

The Ultimate Treasure has a great cast of characters. The police officer,Myra Jaharnus is notably strong, but Alpha the villain is also interesting. Dexel Dynes the reporter is a bit of a caricature, but he is still very fun. The scene in which he interviews one of the criminal goons is very amusing.

That the treasure turns out to be something other than what is expected is no surprise. This novel borrows rather obviously from The Five Doctors in it's resolution.

This is not a deep or clever novel, but it does offer an easy, fun and undemanding read.

Vanishing Point, by Stephen Cole (BBC novel)

Did Stephen Cole really co-write the underwhelming Ancestor Cell? This book is so much better!

This is not a light-hearted book. It deals with serious themes, most notably that of religious belief. It is also very violent (though some of the Virgin NAs are more graphic). All of the characters are continuously put in physical danger and they have to be ruthless and violent just to survive. This actually led me to feel really involved in the book, reading each page with worry about how the characters were going to get through. I seldom find Doctor Who novels as engaging as this.

The society depicted in Vanishing Point feels so much more real than societies in other Doctor Who stories. This is a world in which there are hospitals and police, where people get into trouble for being late for work, where low-paid women have to prostitute themselves to pay the bills, where people have affairs and where there are mentally and physically disabled people. The last point being of particular significance. We have an whole group of people with learning disabilities in this story. How often do we find disabled people in Doctor Who other than a crippled or deformed villain? The writer even departs from convention and has Fitz having sex with one of the disabled girls.

Not only does the planet in Vanishing Point feel like a real place, but the characters feel so convincing and believable. You really feel for Etty with her tragic background and fearfulness, for Nathaniel with his doubts and confusion and for Vettul with her loneliness and frustration. These are characters the reader can understand and identify with. The two companions also come across very well; with Anji contemplating belief in God and Fitz getting involved with Vettul. Whatever one thinks of his going to bed with Vettul, it is done believably.

We see the 8th Doctor in this story as we have never seen him before. Right at the start of the book, he jumps right into the action. He is hardly ever portrayed as so decisive, determined and strong. He is a Doctor who protects the vulnerable and stands for justice. He is also prepared to use violence when he has to. This is a Doctor that evildoers really would fear. One thing that is interesting is that in this novel the Doctor defends the status quo and works with the authorities, even though they are clearly quite flawed. While in stories like Happiness Patrol and The Sunmakers, the Doctor overthrows the Powers-that-be, here he attempts to uphold society.

Where the book does not do so well is in its handling of the big themes. While the discussion about faith in God is interesting, it makes the common error of thinking that faith is incompatible with proof or certainty. The Greek word for faith (pistis) means the same thing as belief. All of us believe lots of things that can be proved and which we are certain about. The New Testament would use the same word faith to refer to those beliefs. The hard science stuff about genetics comes across as rather incomprehensible. I understand the concept of 'junk DNA' is actually quite inaccurate.

The Infinity Doctors, by Lance Parkin (BBC novel)

'The Doctor closed his eyes. This was her, there was no possible cause to doubt that now. She had lived so much longer than him, lived at his Family home for countless generations. She had tutored his grandfather and his father. She had been there at his birth. She had nursed him, taught him, danced with him, loved him, borne his children.'

Aesthetically, I rather wish this had been the last Doctor Who novel ever written. This novel shows us the Doctor on his own planet, shows him choosing wandering over a contented life on that planet, it shows the Doctor's great strengths and desire for justice, yet it also shows us the woman he loves who bore his children; it is the ultimate glimpse into his personal life. This is a Doctor that we can relate to and also a Doctor that we can celebrate and delight in.

The Infinity Doctors is unique among Doctor Who novels in that it is never made clear which Doctor is the protagonist. His close-cropped hair sets him apart from all of the Doctors except Ecclestone. His dialogue suggests the Eighth Doctor, but his oval-shaped face could suggest a younger Hartnell Doctor. I personally dislike the notion that the Morbius faces were pre-Hartnell incarnations so I don't accept the notion that this is an unknown older incarnation. It has been suggested that this is novel is set on a resurrected Gallifrey after the closure of the BBC novels, but the presence of Hedin and the apparent friendship between the Doctor and the Master (the Magistrate) does not support this idea. I prefer to see this Doctor as a pre-Unearthly Child First Doctor before his exile from Gallifrey. This Doctor is not the rebellious student some have imagined, but rather a respected academic who serves on the High Council.

One of the clever feats of this book is the way it puts together everything we have ever been told about the Time Lords. Every Time Lord story is referenced in some way. Lance Parkin admitted that a consequence of this was that inevitably these details contradict different stories in different ways. The story of the Time Lords was never written with continuity in mind and this book does not try to give us a story that fits into any watertight continuity. It is tempting to see this as an 'Elseworld' or 'Unbound Adventure' in which the Doctor has given up travelling and gone home to Gallifrey, but this was not Parkin's intention and I think this detracts from the beauty of what The Infinity Doctors achieves. The Doctor in this novel really is the Doctor.

One of the things I love about this novel is the way it restores grandeur and nobility to Gallifrey. The Gallifrey we see here is an imperfect society (we see crime and squalor in Low Town), but it is not the cynical totalitarian regime of The Deadly Assasin. This Gallifrey is a place of beauty and grandeur, but even more importantly, it is a place in which the Doctor is respected and loved. This actually fits in better with what we know of the Doctor then the Holmseian vision. The Hartnell Doctor really did hope to return home to his world of silver trees and burnt orange skies. He would never have wanted to return to the degeneracy and corruption of the Deadly Assassin Gallifrey. Readers know how much I detest the BBC Wales series, but one of the things they did right was to throw out the Holmes cynicism and to make Gallifrey seem like a wonderful place that was tragically lost. The Time Lords of this Gallifrey are not he god-like figures of The War Games or the Lawrence Miles books. They are also conscious of their own temporality. They are well aware that Gallifrey will not last for all eternity.

The plot of The Infinity Doctors is not the strongest we have read, but it is exciting. Incredibly, this novel offers us a reworking of The Three Doctors that is much better than the original. How this incident fits in with the Pertwee story I can't say, but it's very good. We also get to learn a good deal about the history of the Sontaran/ Rutan war, with the Doctor involved in negotiations between the two races. We are promised that one day the two peoples will be at peace.

She was wearing a loose-flowing gown in ivory silk and lace, with bare shoulders, gathered at the waist by a wide belt. Her long blonde hair was held up by a gold clasp, and swept down to the small of her back. She wore a necklace of white flowers, and held a feather fan. She was his height, a little taller as her feet were bare, and he was wearing shoes.

In this novel we meet the Doctor's wife, not the TARDIS and not that cardboard tart River Song, but the woman who bore his children. This is the same character as Patience who Parkin introduced in Cold Fusion. She was shot dead, but brought back to life in Omega's universe. This lady is definitely somebody we can imagine being the Doctor's wife. She is mysterious and ethereal, like a woman in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. That the Doctor had several children supports the notion that he might have had more than one grandchild, hence the possibility of John and Gillian being canon. It is difficult not to suspect that Parkin has something of a foot fetish; the Doctor's wife is barefoot and the other female character, Larna is barefoot for most of the book.

This is a book that blew me away with its beauty, its depth and by its delight in the details of the show. If you read any Doctor Who novel, read this one.

Placebo Effect, by Gary Russell (BBC novel)

Placebo Effect has Kleptons in it. Those aliens from the first ever Doctor Who comic strip; the ones that look like Greedo the Rodian. You know what that means? If Placebo Effect is canon, then so are the TV Comic strips. The Doctor really did have two grandchildren called John and Gillian, really did meet Santa Claus and really did call himself Dr. Who. That Gary Russell references the TV Comic without trying to exclude it from the canon (as Steve Lyons did in Conundrum and Head Games) makes me quite favourably disposed towards this novel.

Although this novel is not highly regarded among fans, I mostly enjoyed it. It's very light-hearted and packed with continuity references. Russell brings back Stacy and Ssard, who appeared in an 8th Doctor comic strip in the Radio Times not that long after the TV Movie. This novel offers some explanation as to how that strip fits into continuity.

Russell claims he originally proposed to write a novel about Nimons vs Macra, but what he gives us here is a novel about Foamasi and Wirrn. Russell does rather a better job with the Foamasi than he does with the Wirrn. His Wirrn lack sufficient body horror to be really disturbing. He does make his Fomasi quite interesting, however. He gives them plenty of character and explains how their disguises work. In a quite disturbing moment, a human realises that the woman he has been sleeping with was really a Foamasi in disguise.

The Doctor is very well characterised. He is dreadfully nice; always remembering the needs of his companions and doing his utmost to look after them. This is perhaps a little strange given that this is the same person who never went back for Sarah and seemed to forget about his own granddaughter. I suppose he has matured, but it makes it even stranger that he has still refrained from paying Sarah a visit. Russell is perhaps a little less successful with Sam, but then it is difficult to avoid having a teenage character coming off as anything other than mouthy and irritating.

Sam gets involved in an interesting debate between creation and evolution. This is not resolved, which makes a nice contrast with the materialistic tendency of the show. I am no longer a Six-Day Creationist, but I am not completely convinced by the theory of evolution. The actual arguments used against evolution are not all that impressive, but at least there is some acknowledgment that the not everybody is convinced by Darwin.

I really liked the Duchess of Auckland. She was a really fun character, even if a parody of the royal family. I thought it was a bit of a shame that Russell killed her off. Why do writers have to kill characters so easily?

Despite its reputation, Placebo Effect is a reasonably decent novel. The cover is good too; especially with its subtle reference to the V series.

The Gallifrey Chronicles, by Lance Parkin (BBC novel)

"My dear, one of the things you'll learn is that it's all real. Every word of every novel is real, every frame of every movie, every panel of every comic strip."

This novel was the last in the series of BBC Eighth Doctor novels. Lance Parkin was given the Herculean task of providing a conclusion to the various mind-boggling story arcs of this series. How Parkin did this is quite surprising. Rather than giving us a big epic event novel as one might have expected, he wrote a light and slightly fluffy novel with a very easy-going plot.

The result of the lighter tone means that the BBC novel series is able to end on an upbeat celebratory note. In every way, The Gallifrey Chronicles celebrates Doctor Who. There is a real sense of magic in the way that the Doctor appears to bring the dead back to life and reunite families with their apparently deceased loved ones. Likewise, the cliffhangar ending, with the Doctor leaping into action to deal with the monsters, for all its uncertainty is a celebration of just what the show is about.

There is a good deal of meta-textuality going on in this story, with the reference to John Peel's goof about Ace being in Paradise Towers, the Doctor being sent to sleep by reading about Gallifrey and the glorious line about every spin-off being true. This very much fits with the agenda of the book being about celebrating Doctor Who. There are also hints in the book of Parkin's frustration at the complexities and problems of continuity. If he it is true that 'every panel in every comic strip' is real, it would have been nice of Parkin to include the TV Comic stories in his majestic AHistory. It seemed a bit mean to me to include the DWM comics but leave out all those wonderful Sixties adventures with John and Gillian.

In Marnal, Parkin offers a really interesting character. Like the Doctor, he has been exiled to earth. Yet unlike the Doctor he feels only contempt for humanity and is obsessed with returning to Gallifrey. There is a strong touch of William Hartnell's Doctor about him and in his attitude and methods he does resemble the Doctor in An Unearthly Child. Marnal is the Doctor as he could have been. He ends up being paired with an human companion, his nurse Rachel. Rachel is well characterised and it was surprising that she did not become a new companion at the end.

The BBC range had already given us the disastrous Ancestor Cell and Parkin had to tie up the loose ends created by that book. The Gallifrey Chronicles provides a flashback to the Doctor destroying Gallifrey. This flashback is a much stronger scene than anything that occurred in The Ancestor Cell. The Gallifrey Chronicles offers the possibility of Gallifrey and its inhabitants being restored (only to be destroyed in the Time War, if you believe the BBC Wales series).

The alien menace, the Vore are oddly incidental to the plot, despite appearing to wipe out much of the Earth's population. They are rather scary and what they do is quite disturbing, but their main role is simply to show the Doctor shine at what he does best. As I said above, the way the Doctor appears to bring back the dead is just magical.

We are also treated to a scene on Gallifrey which features the Doctor's parents. Yes, the Doctor's parents. Those who had read The Infinity Doctors will be already aware of Ulysses and Penelope, the Doctor's mother and father. I'm not at all happy with the idea of the Doctor having a human mother, but as the idea has been done, I feel I might as well accept this admittedly rather intriguing couple as the Doctor's parents.

The Doctor's companions Fitz and Trix form a relationship in this story. This is quite believably done, if a little sudden. There is, however, a note of sadness to this as revealed by Fitz's song 'Contains Spoilers.' The Gallifrey Chronicles does not give any answers to Trix's past. We know she is wanted for murder, but did she do it? This is just a small fault I have with the novel.

The Gallifrey Chronicles is a lovely upbeat conclusion to the 8th Doctor novels.

The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, by Lawrence Miles (BBC novel)

The book in which the Doctor gets married, but not to River Song or the TARDIS!

The same day I began reading The Adventuress of Henrietta Street I re-watched Spearhead from Space, a story I first saw when I was eleven. It's strange to think that 19 years after that innocent Doctor Who experience I would be reading a Doctor Who novel partially set in a brothel which makes Tantric Sex a major theme.

Miles departs from all convention by writing this novel as a biographical account. All of the speech is reported, leaving very little dialogue. The identity of the narrator and biographer is never given and as with Dead Romance, there is the suggestion that he is not altogether reliable. This peculiar choice of style makes for a very distinctive experience of reading a Doctor Who novel, but it does make the whole story a lot more difficult. The reader has to work a lot harder to understand what is going on.

As surprising as it might seem, we see hints of the Moffat era in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. In The Wedding of River Song, we had the Doctor getting married, a marriage that had cosmic significance in that it repaired a breach in space and time. In The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, we have the Doctor getting married in order to establish a cosmic connection with Earth and it's fate. Scarlette, the woman that the Doctor marries has been compared to Iris Wildthyme, but she actually reminds me of River Song much more. Sadly, her character fails in exactly the same way that River Song fails. Both characters are portrayed as strong and intelligent, with a very blazen sexuality. Both characters seem to be created to appear an equal match for the Doctor. Yet in the end neither character quite lives up to the promise. We expect them to be amazing, but they end up just joining a list of strong, intelligent female characters. In fairness to Lawrence Miles, Scarlette does not fail nearly as badly as River Song because she is just a one-off character in a novel. Moffat made disaster inevitable by deciding to centre the last season around the character of River Song. Miles also wisely keeps Scarlette fairly mysterious. Moffat on the other hand, kept dangling hints about the identity of River and then deliver a big revelation that most of the viewers had already guessed. If you want to find out where Moffat got his ideas, you really need to read this book, along with Alien Bodies. Then you will see just what a mess he made of his influences.

The other main character introduced in the novel, Sabbath also has a similar problem to Scarlette. Miles seems to want to present him as this really amazing interesting character, but with the limitations of the biographical narrative, he never quite succeeds in showing this.I can't help thinking that making Sabbath so much like a James Bond villain renders him a little silly. His only outstanding moment is when he steals the Doctor's second heart, something no villain has ever done before. This development bothered a lot of fans, as it renders the Doctor a good deal more human.

The Adventuress of Henrietta Street is set after the destruction of Gallifrey in The Ancestor Cell. Miles presents the notion that the Time Lords have not simply been destroyed, but removed from history altogether, a notion that seems rather problematic to me. Despite their loss, a good deal of the book is spent presenting Miles' brilliant conception of the Time Lords as cosmic forces or elemental beings. The Doctor and his two companions are continually described by the other characters as 'elementals.' It's a quite fascinating idea and you do see hints of this in the new series. As with other Lawrence Miles books the removal of the Time Lords to an higher plane of existence and their remoteness from the action makes them a far more impressive force, as they had been in The War Games. The Doctor provides a wonderful description of the Time Lords as being like a steady rock in the middle of a river, around which the rest of the universe flows; the consequence of the removal of this 'rock' being complete chaos.

This novel takes Doctor Who about as far away from science fiction as it can go. Like Survival, it is all about the mysticism of female sexuality and menstrual cycles, hence the suggestion that the Doctor's success in 'summoning' his companions resulted from the fact that the prostitutes in the brothel were in their period. The Doctor had initially planned to marry a teenager called Juliette as there was power tied up in her virginity. His plans of course changed and he eventually marries Scarlette. It seems to be the case that the loss of the Time Lords has resulted in the universe becoming more chaotic, allowing magical and irrational forces to take root. In this world, the Doctor is a force of good and order, yet at the same time a sort of god and his companions spiritual beings themselves. Miles does an absolutely fantastic job of portraying the Doctor in this way. In this story he must turn his back on the old order of Time Lord dominance and unite his elemental power with humanity through marriage to a human woman.

The magical arrival of Fitz and Anji is the most enjoyable moment of the book. They just appear out of nowhere and are at once taken by the inhabitants of the brothel to be elemental spirits. Like the Terminator, they arrive stark naked which adds to the amusement of this scene. Despite their glorious arrival, Fitz and Anji get almost nothing to do in the book. Fitz offers some welcome comic relief and Anji gets to do some sulking and complaining. Miles is on record for his dislike of the character of Anji, but he does alright writing for her in this book.

The monstrous apes are really disturbing. They are summoned through Tantric rituals, which seems to connect them to the sensual side of human nature. The way they appear everywhere is very similar to the Sphinxes in Dead Romance. The Kingdom of the Beasts to which they belong is a really creepy place. There is a very Lovecraftian feel to this side of the book.

The Master appears in this book, in the form of the Man with the Rosette. He makes a very clever comment about how the universe has changed so that his struggle to the death against the Doctor is no longer significant at all. On the subject of rosettes, one minor quibble I have is with the politics of the period. The Whigs are identified in this book as defenders of democracy. While the Whigs were closer to this than the Tories, I don't think they would have seen their ideology in exactly those terms. They would probably have seen themselves as the defenders of Parliament and Protestantism, but not democracy as such.

This is a novel that does some really radical things. As with other Lawrence Miles books, it is not so much interesting for the story itself as it is for the way it presents and develops the Doctor Who cosmos. Like every other book by this author (except perhaps This Town Will Never Let Us Go) it is about grand cosmic themes. It's not his best written or most enjoyable novel, but it is one the most daring.

The Indestructible Man, by Simon Messingham ( BBC novel)

The Indestructible Man is very much a novel that I am in two minds about. Simon Messingham does something very clever and innovative in this book, yet at the same time there are some things about it which I really do not like.

As with Sky Pirates! the cover picture is very misleading. Having read the blurb on the back and seen a smiling Zoe wearing a purple wig, we expect a light-hearted pastiche of Gerry Anderson's various shows. While there is an element of parody in the book, what we actually get is a complete deconstruction of the world in which those shows are set. Instead of being filled with fun and humour, we get one of the bleakest and most depressing novels ever. Messingham turns the world of Gerry Anderson into a dark, violence-filled nightmare. To an extent this is only a step from what we find in the Supermarionation shows. The war of nerves with an unknown enemy in Captain Scarlet is a terrifying premise and for all its goofiness, Stingray is a very militaristic show about a savage undersea war. There is enormous scope for writing dark, adult-orientated fan fiction about the Anderson shows.

Messingham creates a very convincing and detailed world in The Indestructible Man. This world is so brutal and bleak that it makes the future society of Transit seem like quite a nice place. Though I have to admit, with the recent economic problems, the world of Transit actually does not seem that much worse than the real world. For all its miseries it still had stable governments and a welfare state. The Indestructible Man presents a world that has descended into utter chaos.

Although Messingham references a lot of Troughton stories, when it comes to continuity, Messingham is a law unto himself. What we get in this novel simply cannot be harmonised with other Doctor Who novels set in this period. For instance, Messingham has Africa with a decimated population, while Aaronovitch in Transit has rising superpowers in several parts of Africa. The book is also difficult to tie with many televised stories, such as Warriors of the Deep. To cap it all, Messingham puts Wheel in Space in the 22nd century, after this novel. Not only does this ignore the strong arguments that Wheel is set in the 21st century, but it becomes absurd that Zoe has no awareness of any of the events mentioned in the story. This stuff really does bother me. I like to see Doctor Who as a consistent mythos and I don't like authors playing fast and loose with continuity.

It is somewhat frustrating that the book is filled with bitter, cynical characters. Practically every non-regular character is like this. It does remove a lot of colour from the novel. Grant Matthews, who is based on Captain Scarlet seems to be the only character who has any life or holds any interest. Though not a speaking character, Captain Taylor is brilliantly portrayed. A terrible zombie-like figure, he captures the grim demeanour of Captain Black in Anderson's show.

The Myloki are an intelligent creation. Like the Mysterons of Captain Scarlet, we learn little about them. This makes them much more interesting and terrifying than your average alien race. I must admit, throughout the book, I was looking for hints that they might be connected to some other alien race in Doctor Who. It seemed that the Doctor hinted this was the case. I was irritated by the last chapter with its dream sequence. The Virgin novels did dream-like realities to death. It felt rather cliched seeing one here, complete with deceased relatives.

Messingham has a habit of putting his characters through an awful lot of physical and emotional pain. Jamie and Zoe have a really horrible time in this book, undergoing serious psychological trauma. This contrasts massively with the happy-go-lucky child-like pair that we see in Season 6. It's something likely to bother traditionalist fans and possibly even me. I think it's pointless for past Doctor novels to simply recreate an era in print; it's good to do things that could not have been done on television with past TARDIS crews. On the other hand, I don't quite feel able to believe the level of trauma that Messingham inflicts upon Jamie and Zoe. It's a huge leap of credibility to believe that all this happened to the pair somewhere between The Invasion and The Krotons. These are experiences that make or break people. It's impossible to watch Seeds of Death and believe that Jamie and Zoe went through the trauma of The Indestructible Man. On the other hand, Zoe's thoughts about the friendship between herself, Jamie and the Doctor being indestructible is very touching.

I would definitely suggest that readers find a copy of this and have a go. It's a grim and depressing book, but it is quite innovative in its approach, though definitely not without problems.