Hey, I saw this over at Outpost Gallifrey:

"Previously canceled in a highly-publicized squabble between BBC Books and the author, Jim Mortimore has self-published "Campaign," a First Doctor novel."

Does anyone know what happened?

Jim Mortimore handed in a book not resembling the book he'd been commisioned for in very many ways, rather late.

Apparently it's quite good.

Yeah, Campaign right? I heard Lawrence Miles say it was Mortimore's best work yet. Aapparently it's really screwed up continuity wise, but good. Can't wait to r43ead it.

So presumably he's not likely to be commissioned again?

Probably. That sukks. Just because he went outside the guidelines doesn't change the fact that he writes some really good books. However, Gary Russell, who obeys the trad Doctor Who way, will continue getting commissioned for a while i fear...

It's not about going outside the guidelines, it's about beingf bad with deadlines, which Jim has something of a reputation for, and allegedly not handing in the book which he had been commisioned for- i.e. the plot was rather different from that Justin had agreed to publish.
Nothing to do with guidelines.

Hopefully Justin can improve Gary Russell's next book at least- he seems to have a done a good job editing Terrance's latest.

I heard different, with chapters being written from conflicting perspectives and such.

As for the editing for Terrance's latest: I take it I have no fears in reading 'Endgame'? Cause Eight Doctors was truly dire.

Justin himself used conflicting perspectives in the Banquo Legacy, why would he be against that? IIRC this is from the likes of people like Jon Blum and Lance Parkin, who have a pretty good handle on the inner workings of BBC Books...

Terrance can write bloody well when he wants to, look at Exodus. Endgame isn't quite that good, but it's still good.

no, conflicting perspectives, as in conflicting continuities, like the Ian who recoutns something in one chapter is a different character continuity-wise to the Ian in another. It's only what I heard anyway, this aint straight from the horse's mouth or nothin'.

I don't understand the stuff you said about Jon Blum and Parkin, are you saying that they have a better handle on BBC Books to Mortimore or that they may have edited Dicks' book?

Yeah, I loved Exodus and didn';t think Blood Harvest was that bad either, but this just made it harder for me to accept that Eight Docs was written by him as well.

I get the impression with The Eight Doctors he was working more to a specific brief, like he was with The Five Doctors, but the Exodus and Blood Harvest were more his own ideas.

Read the guidelines, absolutely nothing against this. If Mortimore did this without mentioning it in his proposal (which strikes me as likely), I can see why Justin might not want to publish it- especially since it was late, leaving Justin without much time to edit it.

I'm saying Jon and Lance have posted to a books mailing list about the reasons behind Campaign being cancelled- and they know how the system works, both being current authors.

okay

Man, was I dissapointed by the end. I'm not a big fan of Who books that are 90% toruture the Doctor and Co., and this one had to set new records in pain. And then to end the book with NOTHING resolved!

Frankly, I don't see what the Doctor's problem was with destroying the Artifact. If those little monkeys starting shouting "Exterminate!", he would have popped them off in a sec.

The last chapter struck me as if Mortimore had suddenly gotten bored with the book; he couldn't even be bothered to kill Gail and Drew on stage (or explain how the heck Bannen got there in the first place).

Pain, unrelenting misery and agony - and that's just what the reader has to deal with; the characters suffer even worse. It wasn't a book I looked forward to re-reading and I was right. The main problem was that despite Mortimore banging on about how big the place was I never got a sense that it was. Perhaps it's not being able to comprehend such vastness but a throwaway line relating the Artifact's size to our solar system would have clarified things a lot.

Then there was the ending. I got the feeling Mortimore suddenly realised he only had ten minutes until deadline and then wrote the last chapter in that time. The rentire ending felt like a cop-out. Overall it seemed like Mortimore had a great idea for a world and then needed to find a decent story and characters to populate it. He failed.

Well, apparently all the unrelenting pain, misery, agony, torture etc etc were all supposed to be a build-up to...the Doctor's death. Yes, in case you wondered how he was supposed to survive getting that bullet in the heart - he wasn't. Jim Mortimore regenerated him. Needless to say, he didn't bother mentioning this in his original synopsis, and was forced to change it, which maybe explains the 'can't be bothered' attitude at the end. (That you both spotted at the end, that is, obviously I wouldn't know.)

Interesting letter to DWM 224:

'Is Parasite an abortion story on the same level that Love and War was an AIDS story?' - Love and War was an AIDS story?!

'All the arguments about life and Life' - life and Life - wtf?

'Plus the Doctor being shot through the heart by a zealot who is "protecting the sanctity of life"' - blimey, THAT was why he got shot? Not that I care so much about WHY ('To quote Amy Pond, 'Why would anyone want to kill you? Unless they'd met you') as about HOW IT DIDN'T DO HIM ANY HARM.

'Along with Ace's surgical operation on Benny and Benny's subsequent feelings of guilt' - *Checks Reference Guide* - ah, Benny felt GUILTY about Ace killing a parasite that was growing inside her? Why? And why did she never mention this experience to Roz n'Chris after they went through a similar abortion of the Sloathes growing inside them a few books later in Sky Pirates!? Oh, maybe because Roz n'Chris never showed the slightest sign of guilt...

Jim Mortimore in DWM: 'Virgin...asked me if I could put a baddie in it. Now, having a baddie provides a viewpoint in opposition to the good guys, but there wasn't any plot left over for the bad guy to do!...I liked the original plot, and did have to change it quite a lot. The book suffered, and I suffered: I didn't enjoy writing Parasite...' - well, GOOD, cos I sure as hell didn't enjoy reading it. (TRYING to read it. I still haven't made it all the way through.)

'I had got into the different prose style for [novelising an episode of] Cracker. At the end of the day, I decided to get whatever enjoyment I could out of Parasite' - chance would be a fine thing - 'and deliberately experimneted with different voices, such as Arthur C Clarke' - look, Clarke's boring but he's not THIS boring - 'and Jimmy McGovern. But at the end of the day, writing Cracker was like eating ice cream, and Parasite was like eating the final biological result!' - well, I like a refreshingly honest author. But it'll take more than THAT for me to forgive the fact that Parasite is •••• to read too.

Bookwyrm:

'The idea that an enormous celestial body could in fact be an egg is almost exactly the plot of 2014's Kill the Moon. As it's not something we've come across anywhere else, that means there's a very good chance this really is the source for that story. The bit that shows a bunch of annoying students trapped in a forest environment with an ineffectual teacher and a bunch of predators reminded us briefly of In the Forest of the Night' - BOTH OF THEM! Not only is Parasite the most excruciatingly boring book in human history but it's responsible for BOTH OF THEM?!

'In possibly one of the funniest and best-hidden jokes of the NAs, Mortimore has based his entire novel on the premise of hanging a catastrophically huge vagina in space and making our heroes explore it' - yeah, hilarious.

'There's also a bit of really bad physics where Benny looks at the distant ocean and has to wait "several minutes" for the sound to it to hit her...Surely the sound the ocean made several minutes ago would be hanging around in the vicinity of Bernice' - Oh. Yeah. Probably.

'In the flashback scene of Benny having dropped her doll, said doll is named Molly, whereas it was Rebecca in Love and War Though, to be fair, "Molly" sounds exactly like what a child would call a doll, whereas "Rebecca! sounds exactly like Paul Cornell namechecking one of his girlfriends.' -

'The idea that an enormous celestial body could in fact be an egg is almost exactly the plot of 2014's Kill the Moon. As it's not something we've come across anywhere else, that means there's a very good chance this really is the source for that story. The bit that shows a bunch of annoying students trapped in a forest environment with an ineffectual teacher and a bunch of predators reminded us briefly of In the Forest of the Night' - BOTH OF THEM! Not only is Parasite the most excruciatingly boring book in human history but it's responsible for BOTH OF THEM?!

Again how is a 1990's writer supposed to know of two television stories from twenty years later?

The other way round.

You don't even need to (try to) read Parasite for it to have RUINED OUR LIVES.