The one memory I carry of this book (it's been a while since I've read it) is that it's very wet. The Doctor is always (except when over the fire) being described as muddy, damp, bedraggled, etc. Same goes for Benny. It's get a bit depressing after a while.

I don't believe it. A kitten, an innocent, oochy-coochy little fluffy darling, gets TORTURED and you're worried about the Doctor getting a bit wet?! Frankly, the Doctor hasn't had his fair share of getting soaked over the centuries (especially given his favouritism towards England). The only times that spring to mind are Brain of Morbius and Android Invasion (where he hides in a lake, I mean he can hardly complain about getting wet). Actually, I suspect the Doctors have a secret phobia about getting wet, as evinced by their obsession with hats, scarves and umbrellas.

I'm not WORRIED about it; it just stuck in my mind. Just like all the snow in "Drift" started to get on your nerves, so did the constant mud and rain get on mind.

DON'T MENTION THE SNOW!

OK, so I'm more-or-less over it by now, with the help of much psychoanalysis, plus Heritage, whose obsession with a) dust and b) the Doctor's eyeballs REALLY put Drift's crimes in perspective.

'Mark has a handle on Benny that should be the benchmark for writing her' - DWM review. Frankly if she'd always been THIS cowardly I doubt she'd've managed to support quite so many novels and audios. And if she'd concernedly frowned THIS often she'd've need Botox...

Gatiss in DWM: 'I'm very much against organised religion. It's the source of most of the world's worries' - blimey, even I wouldn't claim that. Overpopulation is the source of most of the world's worries, and the Catholics are the only major religion relentlessly pushing THAT particular insanity.

'It came to me in a vision - a planet with a ring system, but the rings were artificial' - here's hoping that if I ever have a vision, it's a BETTER one.

'After the Earthbound Nightshade, I thought I'd better try something a bit "spacey"' - or, of course, given how well Nightshade went down with everyone who wasn't me, you could have just stuck to what you're (apparently) good at, and left the alien worlds to the myriad of OTHER writers...

'I...wanted a total change of pace towards the end of the book, like The War Games, where there are seven episodes of grim-and-grittiness, followed by three episodes of campness.' - Is this TRUE? I never noticed...(Obviously I'm talking War Games here, at least I remember MOST of that.) 'So I went form the grim warfare on Betrushia to some of the campest performances ever seen in a Doctor Who book! When I wrote about the head of the Chapter of St Antony, I had a Bond villain in mind...' - don't Bond villains LIKE cats? Instead of...y'know...TORTURING them?

'The hardest part was the characterisation of the Betrushians because they were aliens. I much prefer creating characters that can do things I can do. I found setting up a social system for aliens very difficult, because if you do things totally differently, you run the risk of losing your audience...' - so, again...WHY BOTHER CREATING AN ENTIRE ALIEN WORLD??

- don't Bond villains LIKE cats? Instead of...y'know...TORTURING them?

One of them most certainly likes cats.

Gatiss in DWM: 'I have no fondness for [St Anthony's Fire] whatsoever. It was difficult second book syndrome' - to be fair, your first one wasn't very good either, it's not like Proper Who where you fell from the dizzying heights of Unquiet Dead to the mild tedium of Idiot's Lantern - 'It's like a long, shaggy dog story. It's all about the aliens, up until the point where one of them has this hairy creature in a cage which he pokes with a stick. And then it says, "All in all, the Doctor wasn't having a good time." After that, you were supposed to find out how the Doctor got there, but the book was reordered editorially, which I wasn't very happy about, because it rather lost its point' - oh-kay. Pending a reread I'm prepared to accept that St Anthony's Fire MAY have originally had some sort of POINT.

Bookwyrm:

'Given that it's striving for perfection at a genetic level, it's odd that the finest form it can come up with is a mucus-drenched blob' - that's just RACIST against mucus-drenched blobs. Besides, the Nestene's perfect form also included a certain amount of...blobbiness (Rose) as well as octopusiness (Auton Invasion, Terror of).

'All the action, save the prologue, happens in 2148 AD. Given that the trans-star system craft appears to have left Earth around a hundred years previously, this seems phenomenally early' - well Vulcan was an out-of-solar-system colony world set in 2020 or, um, something...maybe...

'It's worth noting that the Dark Manipulative Doctor^TM has been absent for some time as well, despite the apparent contractual necessity of mentioning that he is dark and manipulative in the face of all the evidence' -

well Vulcan was an out-of-solar-system colony world set in 2020 or, um, something...maybe...

Hey, that's this year!

Haven't see anything on CNN about this though. Guess they're too busy with Covid-19 and Orange Hitler's latest meltdown.

They probably fled the planet really quietly to escape Trump...though in his infinite wisdom (he's the smartest as well as the most hard-working President in history, don't you know) he set up Space Force to pursue them...

Yeah, that's probably it.