This is the best 8th Dr novel, so far.

A very good book, and sets up a lot of stuff for the current arc. I recommend reading this before Unnatural History and Interference.

Fabulous book! At last the Doctor acts like the Doctor, not some incompetant clown. And I love Marie the TARDIS.

Nits:

Sputnik II was an Earth-orbital satellite and burned up in the atmosphere 128 days after its launch. It did not head off into deep space. Also, it weighed over 500 kgs; I don't know if this is the sort of thing the Doctor would want to lug into his TARDIS.

Well, either a) you are wrong (impossible!) b) Lawrence Miles is wrong (even more impossible!) or c) this is further proof that Dr Who does not take place in our universe.

You'd be surprised at what the Doctor's prepared to lug into his TARDIS, though - including a whole herd of Skarasen in The Bodysnatchers.

I would've thought there'd be more discussion on such a great novel as this one.

We're nitpickers - we (well, me anyway) obviously prefer a rubbish book that can be ripped into little pieces instead.

So...any ideas as to who the Enemy are, anyone?

I guess we'll never know.

There was once a thread on Outpost Gallifrey about the enemy that went for 20 pages or something.

I imagine the enemy will turn out to be some form of the Time Lords themselves. Some later civilization who decides the current lot need to go to make the universe a better place, or another High Council from an adjacent universe, or some alternate future something. Why else make them such a secret? No one's interested in another new boogey race out to destroy Gallifrey.

The enemy could be led by a later incarnation of the Doctor........

Grandfather Paradox?

A couple of lovely little bits in among the huge concepts : a mention of Marie getting stuck in the form of a 1960's British policewoman; and the sexless Krotons being universally considered as male because of their loutish behaviour.

And, of course, the explanation for why the Doctor always finds the right thing in his pockets...

The enemy could be led by a later incarnation of the Doctor........

Grandfather Paradox?

GRANDFATHER PARADOX IS NOT A LATER INCARNATION OF THE DOCTOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't CARE what that SICK Ancestor Cell says! (Even BEFORE the new series proved it got EVERYTHING about the Time War wrong...though in some ways this WAS a bit misfortunate since Lawrence's 'the Enemy isn't something stupid like the Daleks' was SO much more intriguing than the Enemy being, er, the Daleks. And the Doctor's second heart pumping the poison of a dead Gallifrey into his system until it was ripped out was a WAY more interesting reaction than just moping around and falling in love with a peroxided Earth teenager and suchlike.)

Sarah thinks the Third Doctor would create an entire world just to hold a funeral on it? I don't remember her regarding Pertwee (or ANY of 'em) as THAT godlike.

Why doesn't he rescue the poor dog while it's still ALIVE? Aha! Because he doesn't want one of THOSE smelly stupid things aboard the TARDIS for one minute!

Who'd bury the Doctor...? The Shansheeth, of course! DUH!

Speaking of which, anyone else getting the impression RTG was inspired by Alien Bodies when it came to Death of the Doctor? Just as you could see Faction Paradox ALL OVER the Sycorax. And the Time-Lords-turning-themselves-into-pure-thought-to-escape-the-War was nicked from the Celestis. Though I'm not sure how far THIS War in Heaven inspired the Time War. Given that it cheekily (well...retroactively cheekily) assures us that the Enemy is WAY more scary than the Daleks. ('Earth had been lucky, too. It had been invaded, yes, but only by a bunch of mindless biomechanoids with speech impediments. The Time Lords, meanwhile, were up against something really dangerous.' and 'If the Time Lords are at war, the enemy's got to be someone big. I mean, forget the Daleks, I'm talking big.')

It's just so...witty. And as saturated with Who-ness as Christmas on a Rational Planet, in its own sarcastic and slightly more subtle way. Sticky-backed matter augmenters. Politely avoiding the more intelligent-looking plants. A number of little flashing lights, but he had no idea what those were. Some disagreement in Time Lord society as to what the First Law actually was. Marie-TARDIS getting stuck in the shape of a 1960s British policewoman. '"And I said I didn't believe in ghosts," he said, addressing any major supernatural powers who might have been passing by.' The Doctor's Dalek history being rusty because it keeps changing all the time. The Raston cybernetic lap-dancers failing to arouse unquenchable lusts in humanoids - Raston tended to go a bit OTT when it came to marketing. 'The Doctor remembered the Hand of Omega, and all the happy hours he'd spent taking it for walks when he'd first made a home for himself on Earth.' The Doctor actually being in pain, 'not just gurning for comic effect.' All the weaknesses of Who (and even Who-obsessed Blue Peter, for god's sake) having the mickey so unerringly and affectionately taken out of them.

It gives the Eighth Doctor more character in any one line than his entire TV output managed (despite the fact he was the one great success of the telemovie). 'You could tell, by the look on his face, that the Doctor thought his eyes were full of madness and poetry. They weren't, though. In a previous life, this had probably been his best hypnotising stare, but his face was built differently now.' (Mind you, I'm not sure McCoy exactly mastered the madness-and-poetry look either...)

'I'll tell you why Earth puts up with you, Doctor. Because it thinks you're immortal. That one misguided belief is what keeps you alive. It's what stops our fingermen blowing your ugly changeling face off the second you step out of that police box of yours.' Blimey. Maybe New Who nicked its UNIT-is-a-bit-evil policy from Alien Bodies too. Anyway, why is UNISYC so anti-Doctor? They of all people know how often he's saved this wretched planet.

Boy, does this TOTALLY contradict Ancestor Cell (I mean, even aside from the fact the latter has the Doc change history and blow up Gallifrey in the first battle of the Time War.) 'Like the enemy's first strike on Gallifrey, their botched attempt to kill off the High Council.' 'The High Council got taken by surprise when it all started.' Etc.

Sadly, unlike all the other books I can remember, Lawrence didn't choose to cope with the half-human rubbish by totally ignoring it. 'The bits of him that were human'. 'He wanted to be a force of nature again, he wanted to be the incredible escaping equation all the time, but instead he was trapped in a half-human body with a baby-face and floppy curls.' 'There's still that little question of my ancestry to be cleared up'. 'The Doctor had a thing about humans, according to the old stories; something to do with his retroactive ancestry, apparently'.

'Other species had it lucky. Other species weren't alcohol-immune' - there's been some contradiction in the novels about whether the Doctor can get drunk, but I don't remember ALL the Time Lords being IMMUNE to alcohol. Didn't that ghastly one in Twin Dilemma get thoroughly legless in a fountain or something?

'Now he'd run into them, twice, within a couple of decades. Twice in two regenerations' - when did the Seventh Doc run into Faction Paradox?!

'Perhaps something had happened to the universe, something so large you couldn't spot it from down here at ground level...Did he have the same history he woke up with, [the Doctor] wondered' - surely the DOCTOR would have noticed history changing around him? Even SARDICK did. (Plus...the Doctor SLEEPS?)

'The man was English, and therefore naturally reserved. Or, to put it another way, no one cared what he had to say, most of the time' - oh. Looks like the UK doesn't maintain its pre-eminent position in the Whoniverse forever...

Marie certainly takes her time to realise the Doc's a Time Lord. TARDISes can be so thick.

'He could stop the war before it even began. History would bend that far, if [the Doctor] asked it nicely' - why the hell DIDN'T he, then? 'So the Time Lords need my body to stand a chance of survival. But you've decided to sell it to the highest bidder' - if the Doc's so outraged, why does he destroy the body at the end instead of giving it to the Time Lords? As Homunculette put it, 'The Relic was our last chance, and he knew it...I'll tell you what really gets to me. He was the worst interventionist we ever had. He was supposed to be famous for the way he kept sticking his nose in. And all of a sudden, he's lecturing us about causality.'

They put THETA SIGMA on the Doctor's coffin?! Why the hell didn't they use his REAL name??

'Over my dead -' most appropriate use of THAT phrase EVER.

'Escapology, he'd thought, hadn't helped most of the Time Lords get off the original homeworld before it had been wiped' - what a fantastic way to destroy Gallifrey. Even Matt's 'It was a bad day' wasn't THAT casual.

'If the girl was the Doctor's pet, he could easily get hold of another one. There were nearly ten billion of them on this planet' - would there really be? So soon after the Dalek Invasion wiped out whole continents?

If the Doctor was such a universal legend then the bidders for his body ought at least to have a River Song-style album of all his faces...not to mention some pretty good Doctor-detecting equipment to ensure Qixotl doesn't rip them off...but none of them recognise him.

'It's over forty storeys, Sir. When he hits the ground - '
'He won't hit the ground,' said Tchike.
'Sir...?'
'He won't hit the ground. He's the Doctor.' - you heard it here first. NOT in Forest of the Dead ('I've seen entire armies turn and flee...'). The realisation of Who and what the Doctor is. Can do. Whatever. The whole unstoppable-force-of-nature thing. (Ironic, given that this is the book that BLOODY KILLS HIM.)

'The pause returned. And this time it brought some of its friends along with it.' 'The muzak became 3 per cent more irritating than it had been previously.' I love the writing. Only Moffat ever has so many quotable lines per page.

'[The Kroton] watched one particularly striking humanoid, a male unit with curly blond fur and clothes so bright they seemed deliberately designed to jam Kroton sensory systems' - and at last, ladies and gentlemen, we have an explanation for the Sixth Doctor's costume...

'Earth was a low-interest world, according to the techno-pundits, but it had a kind of political value. The place was a nexus world, just like Dronid, or Solos, or Tyler's Folly; insignificant on first sight, but when you looked at the bigger picture, you realised it was linked to the destinies of a whole host of intergalactic powers...' - nice START on explaining Who's utter Earth fixation (let's just ignore its the-Doc's-fixated-by-humans-cos-of-his-mummy hints).

'Ever since the Doctor had arrived in the ziggurat, he'd been suffering erratic mood swings, even tendencies towards extreme violence. He'd assumed it had been something to do with the chemistry of his latest incarnation' - what, after THREE YEARS as McGann!!

'The Time Lords aren't nearly interesting enough for the Celestis' liking...The Celestis are idea-based life-forms. They need new ideas to survive, but the High Council hasn't had a decent new idea for thousands of years' - that's a bit mean. Five hundred years ago they entered into the greatest war in universal history. It must have resulted in a FEW new ideas, or they'd've been mincemeat long ago.

'"There's no room for destiny in a universe this small." The slightest of frowns appeared on the Doctor's face. "With one or two notable exceptions."' - interesting, given the Web of Time and all. This, of course, was before the new series belatedly came up with the 'some points are fixed, some are in flux' claim to get over the old time travel/predestination paradox.

'It was the face of one of the bipeds, the one with the blue visual apparatus and the excessive cranial fur' - can't you just TELL this man is a BIG Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters fan...?

'The pedigree of the corpse wasn't as cut and dried as everyone seemed to think, not by a long chalk.' Oh great - in the book about the Doctor's death, maybe he ISN'T dead after all! What a cop-out! 'The true story of the Doctor's death was complicated, very complicated, and [Qixotl] doubted the Celestis would be happy if they found out the full extent of his involvement' - wait a minute...the Doctor is DEFINITELY dead?! You MURDERER!

I've seen it casually referred to as 'the notorious Alien Bodies review' and I've finally read it. I realise Jackie Jenkins is only a guest reviewer (and a fictional character) but...:

'Expanded upon is the already expansive Time Lord history, something which seems to be de rigeur in most Doctor Who fiction - adding a myth here, a legend there to the point where the excesses border on meltdown. It's not that it's poorly executed, it's just that the constant multi-layering of this and many other societies wasn't really what the show was about' - er...so of course the 300-page novels for adults shouldn't have the temerity to EXPAND on anything, they should just give us exactly what we saw on 22-minute kids' TV on Saturdays...?

'Whenever the Krotons shuffle back onto the scene, they're never taken seriously...Alien Bodies demonstrated that while the Daleks bursting in will add an extra thrill to any situation, if it turns out that there's a Kroton behind the door instead, it's more likely to elicit a chuckle.' - aaaaand yet again DWM spectacularly misses the point of Alien Bodies. The Krotons PEELED THE DALEKS AND ATE THEM LIKE BANANAS. Ergo, THE KROTONS ARE FINALLY SCARY.

Curiously, this book was published a few months after Thomas Pynchon's 'Mason & Dixon', in which the 11 days expunged from Britain's calendar in 1751 are bought by the mysterious "Count Paradicsom" and subsequently occupied by a mysterious supernatural tribe, who live out of synch with normal time.

Hmmm.

You can't possibly be accusing Lawrence of ACTUALLY READING SOMETHING.

Besides, his novel proposal would surely have been submitted 'a few months' before publication...

Hmm. Guess Under the Lake proved that UNIT hasn't been replaced by UNISYC, after all...

On the other hand, next week's episode might give Lawrence grounds for a plagiarism suit. Again.

Ooh, excellent! Episodes ripping off Lawrence are always better than episodes with their own inferior ideas. What are you expecting Before the Flood to DO?

Well, fancy that. It didn't rip off Alien Bodies by having the Doctor's REAL corpse in that coffin after all. It ripped off Sleep of Reason instead, which is MUCH less interesting.

"There were less insects..."

'Fewer', Lawrence.

*Sigh*

It's OK, like me he's been infected by ceaseless nagging from Daniel O'Mahony on this very subject and we're both less/fewer pedants these days. Despite putting up a good fight. ('Take no notice of him,' Lawrence once urged me. 'Well, fewer notice anyway.')

"There were less insects..."

I hope he's not counting spiders as "insects" there...

GRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

Guess Under the Lake proved that UNIT hasn't been replaced by UNISYC, after all...

On the other hand, after Resolution...

On the OTHER other hand, the Council of War Companion Chronicle stars a United Galactic Intelligence Taskforce...

'You could tell, by the look on his face, that the Doctor thought his eyes were full of madness and poetry. They weren't, though. In a previous life, this had probably been his best hypnotising stare, but his face was built differently now.'

Well, when in the Eighth Doctor's body in the War Master: Hearts of Darkness audio, the Master seems to have zero problem hypnotising people - incredibly strong-minded people who a) have dedicated her life to destroying him for murdering her sister and b) he helpfully informs that 'I'll kill you, horribly and imaginatively' which you'd THINK would jolt 'em out of being hypnotised pretty easily (see: Tennant's claims in Christmas Invasion).

McGann obviously CAN do a good hypnotising stare after all.

On the OTHER other hand, the Council of War Companion Chronicle stars a United Galactic Intelligence Taskforce...

.U.G.I.T.: You Git!

"Call .U.G.I.T.!".
"Oi! Who are you calling a git?".

I'd suggest 'git' may have gone out of fashion by whatever-century-this-is but it WAS one of twenty-sixth/seventh century Bernice Summerfield's favourite descriptions of her beloved Seventh Doctor...of course, she WAS unhealthily obsessed with the twentieth century...

Guess Under the Lake proved that UNIT hasn't been replaced by UNISYC, after all...

On the other hand, after Resolution...

On the OTHER other hand, the Council of War Companion Chronicle stars a United Galactic Intelligence Taskforce...

Well, Ten Tales of Christmas has UNIT (sadly still the UNified Intelligence Taskforce) going strong (on the moon) in December 2183...