Oh. Wow.

Does this mean you're stunned speechless by this book, or less than thrilled?

Yes, Edje, spare a few non-spoiler hints for the foreign (or in my case, miserly) masses to keep us going during the long, barren weeks of waiting...for a start, does it have a young Brigadier, thus conclusively proving that the EDAs and NAs live happily together in the same universe, no bottles in sight?

I'm truly stunned by the amazing stuff that the book does. Yeah, it has a post HE Brig.

Oh and SLIGHT SPOILER WARNING
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
The Doctor enters a woman.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Well, sort of.

Let me guess...Marie from Alien Bodies - or a similar kind of 'woman'?

not Marie, though similar in, *ways*/

They send live nukes on low-flying practice across the English countryside?

NOBODY calls the Brigadier his real title of 'General'? What, even when he's commanding them in battle and suchlike?

'[Cronin] had written a much-read and utterly suppressed paper about how alien invasions were the expression of unconscious human desire. Nonsense, obviously. But it had impressed the top brass.' - WHY had it impressed them? Why had it been suppressed?

'Cavis the one-hearted' - why's she only got one heart?

'[Romana] had a tiny Prydonian Seal tattooed on her left ankle, or perhaps it had appeared there when she'd regenerated' - if that's trying to explain away Pertwee's tattoo, Christmas on a Rational Planet had a MUCH better reason.

Aha! 'Enemy' is capitalised. So why isn't it in the Faction universe?

'In case we do meet him, I think we'd better get hold of some disguises' - surely if the Doctor's Time Lord recognition thing is working at the moment, disguises won't help?

Well. WASN'T Cornell being rather pessimistic, back in 2000, in claiming that, in 2012, the monsters didn't come any more? (Sure, they haven't materialised YET, give or take a Metaltron and an Isolus, but YOU JUST WAIT till Autumn...)

I'm delighted Cornell is trying to be consistent with the NAs/MAs. I'm less delighted that this involves mention of those godawful ideas, KATE and GORDY.

'2012? Isn't that strange? And worrying, because that's one of the years that prophecy has always suggested for the end of the world. Terence McKenna's Timewave graph. The Mayan calendar. I hate landing in those years. I always end up having to save everybody' - sorry, WHAT? You're THE DOCTOR! You LOVE saving everybody! And you ALWAYS end up saving everybody no matter what the year is! And you ought to know better than believing that the Mayans thought for ONE MOMENT the world would end this year.

Hmm. Interesting how easily the Doc offers his life and allegiance to Queen Mab. Maybe he WOULD have sworn allegiance to Ti in Meglos after all. I've always wondered.

The Doctor sure takes his time bothering to mention Fitz n'Compassion. Given that these people have a habit of slaughtering visitors on sight, he might have said they were friends CONSIDERABLY earlier.

'The concept of Avalon recurs and reflects across the multiverse...I got caught up in one such recurrence myself, recently' DON'T MENTION THE WORD MULTIVERSE! It reminds me of Terraphiles. And when did Eight recently bump into an Arthurian lifestyle?

'Woad Rage' is an EXCELLENT chapter heading. Especially when you're used to the 'Capture' 'Escape' 'Attack' headings of a Dicks novel.

If the nuclear bomb's small enough to hang on a wall, why didn't any of the soldiers frantically searching for it check Compassion's suitcases, as she suspiciously sat at the very epicentre of its disappearance?

'Colonel Munro' - what, that bloke from Spearhead who mysteriously disappeared? What's HE doing high-up in UNIT?

'My TARDIS. And my friends who were passengers in it at the site of its destruction.' - Actually Compassion wasn't a passenger at the time.

'It was a relief to be back in [uniform], out of those wet clothes' - what, the Brig's clothes have remained sopping for HOURS? He attended a banquet in his own honour DRIPPING?

Hmm. Apparently in 2012 we have a female Prime Minister. And a male monarch.

So the Doc's finally resigned from UNIT? That's...quite a big thing.

Blimey. The Doc spends an entire MONTH building a wooden box and totally failing to look for Fitz and Compassion.

'Millions of people were going to die and he was going to watch. He gently thumped his head against the wood.' - Or you could, y'know...go north to the enemy court and try to STOP it. Cretin.

'I dress like a pop star, and I think I should act like one' - EIGHT dresses like a pop star?!

'The British pilots, thank the Other, must have been aware of that...' - since when has the DOCTOR gone round thanking that stupid OTHER person? (Especially as it's, um, HIM. Or something.)

'He saw, as he sometimes did when he encountered a mind, the future fate of this dragon' - oh, you're not still trying to reconcile THAT bit of the telemovie, are you? Not to mention the 'he remembered his father AND the Looms' bit. Just IGNORE those things!

'Maybe next time he'd be someone who could control his destiny, and not have to make these gestures' - Eight has been pretty good at controlling his destiny (if not for much longer) - why does Cornell think he's so HELPLESS?

And what makes him think he'll regenerate if he's shot in the back and then falls a REALLY LONG WAY off a dragon?

'He remembered a time when...he would have been utterly confident of winning. A time when he could be certain of what "winning" meant. He was doing this almost out of habit...' - oh for heaven's sake. NO Doctor has EVER been utterly confident of winning - even the Master Manipulator McCoy kept getting caught out by extra Dalek factions and suchlike. And since when has Eight been such a damp squib? There's an unconvincing attempt to blame Faction Paradox, but the Doc's encountered time meddlers before, and anyway he wasn't like this in, say, Taking of Planet 5 and hasn't bumped into the Faction since Interference. I would blame the TARDIS's destruction, but frankly he doesn't seem to give a ••••.

And since when have UNIT referred to him as 'Zachary?'

To be continued...

'Truly, they were the zenith of what the Other had intended when he founded the Interventionists, all those millennia ago.' - oh not the bloody Other again. God, the stuff they stooped to to get us through TSLABYOD...

'I knew your father, Cavis. He visited my family at Lungbarrow, once. Perhaps I bounced you on my knee' - look, if you're going with all that 'Lungbarrow' stuff, Cavis shouldn't have had a father. And Cavis would have come from the Loom full-grown and not really in a position to be bounced around on anyone's knee, let alone Hartnell's.

Silurian-Mel: surprisingly good idea. (Spiral Scratch.) Silurian-fairies: not so much.

So the Doctor was planning on regrowing a TARDIS by painting a wooden box blue HOW, exactly?

And why didn't he just send Romana one of those telepathic 'help' boxes from War Games/Doctor's Wife? He could have got himself a new TARDIS AND got help in finding his friends and stopping the war (well, he wasn't to know that Romana provoked the war in the first place).

'Like the millennium and the eclipse all over again' - when WILL the novels grasp the fact that NOTHING HAPPENED AT THE MILLENNIUM! Give or take most of Torchwood Cardiff getting shot dead, of course, but that doesn't just happen at millenniums.

This IS Dreamland. When the locals told him that Brigida was real, she actually AFFECTED things, unlike their other gods, maybe the Doc should've LISTENED TO THEM?

Look, it's Who, I'm kinda used to people doing whatever the plot requires of them for no readily apparent reason, but...:

Like the Doctor would EVER have been stupid enough to lead a bunch of SAS into the Fairy Court, in the happy belief that they'd plant some beacons and go away peacefully and undetected, and he could blackmail the king and queen with said beacons so they'd know he came in peace.

Ditto for Margwyn loyally nicking his queen's nuclear weapon and handing it over to her enemies to start a war, with the best possible motives (left mysteriously vague). Quite why Mab forgives him and all the little kiddies write letters at his grave saying how brave he was to admit he was wrong is beyond me.

'The blow connected. Cavis's head broke from her body...Some sort of energy was streaming from the corpse's head, swirling about something that was quickly developing there, as if a new head was swiftly being formed' - come OFF it! They can't regenerate if their HEADS have been chopped off!

The Brig SAID he didn't want to create a paradox to spare himself grief - so why did the Doctor go back and redeem the most hideous moment of his childhood and get him his balloon back? Surely that loss was what made the Brigadier the 'Five Rounds Rapid' guy we all know and love? (Though I can't deny it's a Doctorish thing to do, it's pretty much what Eleven did for Amelia in those Season 6 DVD extras. Only involving ice-cream instead.)

'She said it had already happened. That these living TARDIS things are part of Gallifrey's future.' 'Nothing, nothing is certain about the future! You and I know that, Fitz.' - Boy, hasn't HE changed his tune since the Hartnell days...

Pretty stupid of the Doctor not to think that Gandar might still be alive. (Twice.) I mean, he's only got a sword through him, and these days TIME LORDS CAN REGENERATE THEMSELVES NEW HEADS. Allegedly.

'You've regenerated. You look like my mother. How worrying.' - Great, suddenly the Doc has a MOTHER as well as one of these 'father' things. This is getting ridiculous.

Given that the Doctor rapes Compassion himself in the next book, I'm frankly amazed that he doesn't give TWO MICRO-SECONDS' THOUGHT to actually putting the survival of the Time Lords and the existence of delightful TARDISes like Marie above the feelings of his latest short-lived, Faction-loving, arms-dealing Companion. Especially as she usually DOESN'T have any feelings.

What a waste of a great opportunity. The three main strands - Compassion's apotheosis, the Brigadier's grief, and Fairyland - totally failed to gel with each other. Not to mention that Fitz spent most of the book thinking the Doctor was dead, the Doctor spent the whole book thinking his TARDIS was dead...and neither of them seemed to give a toss.

I'm delighted Cornell is trying to be consistent with the NAs/MAs. I'm less delighted that this involves mention of those godawful ideas, KATE and GORDY.

I apologise profusely for implying that Kate (Lethbridge-)Stewart is a godawful idea. Obviously SOME incarnations of her are great, at least, when they're not trying to nuke London or hand our planet over to Zygons.

Hmm. Apparently in 2012 we have a female Prime Minister. And a male monarch.

Who just keeps making the mistake of assuming Liz Two will EVER have the decency to die.

A female Prime Minister was quite possible though, we get through hundreds of extra PMs in the Whoniverse, SOME of 'em have got to be female. What year was Charlotte Pollard 2.4: The Destructive Quality of Life set in...?

So the Doc's finally resigned from UNIT? That's...quite a big thing.

The HELL he has!

Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (on a good day): 'Welcome to the only planet in the universe where we get to say this: He's on the payroll.'

'Maybe next time he'd be someone who could control his destiny, and not have to make these gestures'

Yeah, RIGHT.

Nine blundered around totally failing to save the day every time (give or take End of the World which doesn't count cos, y'know, THE WORLD ENDED) utterly and as it transpired entirely pointlessly crushed by War-guilt -

- Oh. Yeah. Sorry, I keep forgetting.

Don't think the War Doctor was big on the whole 'controlling his destiny' thing or he wouldn't have spent so many centuries fighting that stupid War.

Who just keeps making the mistake of assuming Liz Two will EVER have the decency to die.

My bad.

then flees with Compassion-TARDIS before President Romana can seize her to breed warships.

One can't help but think Romana would have done better to hit Compassion with a hammer rather than attempt to kidnap and forcibly breed her, but then I s'pose this was far from the worst sin-of-omission she committed during her Presidency...