Surely this should be Relative Dementias?

I think it might be something to do with 'dimensions'.

But the title of the book *IS* Relative Dementias - rather than Dimentias.

Oh I see.
Do you want me to do an interpretive dance relating to Rags? Cos I got one prepared cos I knew you'd ask.......

OK...I'm asking...

Mike - isn't 'By His Bootstraps' the story where - taking Heinlein's incest obsession to its logical conclusion - someone becomes both his own parents? Cos Relative Dementias isn't anything like that. It's more of a Festival of Death rip-off, only with merely one nipping-back-in-time rather than a dozen.

No, you're thinking of "...All You Zombies." They both use time travel, but "Bootstraps" has the main character's time travel experiments being responsible for him traveling in time in the first place.

Ah. Thanks. Don't think I've read that one.

It's in a couple of anthologies, but doesn't appear to be in one that's currently in print. Look for his anthology "The Menace from Earth", or the Silverberg/Greenberg edited anthology "Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels."

Thanks! FINALLY got hold of 'By His Bootstraps'. Have absolutely no idea how it relates to Relative Dementias, but then have absolutely no memory of what actually HAPPENED in Relative Dementias...

'If you want a hint of what may become a bit of a "past Doctors" arc, then Relative Dementias could be the one for you' - Michalowski in DWM. Ooh - a Past Doctors arc?! *Glances around wildly* WHERE?!

'If you want a hint of what may become a bit of a "past Doctors" arc, then Relative Dementias could be the one for you' - Michalowski in DWM. Ooh - a Past Doctors arc?! *Glances around wildly* WHERE?!

*Shrugs* Absolutely nowhere that I can see.

'Graystairs didn't normally lose residents' - really? Cos on THE PREVIOUS PARAGRAPH it was all 'What do you mean he's missing? He can't be missing! Not again.'

Ace has never been as far in London's future as 2012 before?

'Ace imagined that if he hadn't been a time traveller, righter of wrongs and universal man of mystery, he could quite easily have been that odd little man who ran the antiques shop on the corner' - worse, Ace, worse. She wants a little GROCERY shop on the corner (The Vanquishers) - 'The shop that no one ever seemed to go into, and local kids were scared stiff of' - are you crazy! The local kids would LOVE him!

'It felt more alien than some of the worlds the Doctor had taken her to, that subtle sideways shift of everything familiar' - whatever happened to it just being 'nothing more than a slightly smoggier, considerably more crowded version of the London that she knew'?

Ace had AUNTS? Aunts that constantly warned her against LONDON? *Checks* Even TARDIS Wiki doesn't mention AUNTS!

The Archer Memorial Gallery? In London in 2012? Surely not JEFFREY Archer? Oh, and it's the 'fag end of summer', didn't we have some stupid OLYMPICS stuff going on then? (Usually I'd just assume it was different in the Whoniverse because no one wanted to be invaded by aliens whilst, um, curling or whatever, but thanks to Fear Her we don't have that happy option.)

'"Countess Gallowglass? She's a dear friend." He caught Ace's smirk and tutted' - why is she smirking? Why is he tutting? Is she assuming something...sexual? For the MCCOY Doctor?

'"Oi, Professor!" she complained. "I didn't think we had any secrets from each other."' *Glances at Ace Era on TV. Glances at several dozen NAs. Boggles*

'Oh, Ace, don't look like that. I'll explain one day.' 'That'll be a first'...'Go travelling through space and time with a weird codger who doesn't tell you a thing he's thinking' - boy you dropped that I-didn't-think-we-had-any-secrets-from-each-other stuff fast.

'It would only take her a few seconds' - to find a book in the TARDIS LIBRARY?!

Ace 'noticed the lights magically brighten and swell above her' - she lives in the TARDIS but thinks LIGHTS are magic?

'Ten centuries of time travel' - the Doc has his thousand-year birthday at around this time (being tortured on an alien spaceship - it WAS an Orman novel) so what's with a thousand years of TIME-TRAVEL? The first few centuries were spent boringly on the slow path. As far as s/he remembers, anyway...

'Leaning back in her chair to admire Mrs Denning's cross-stitch kittens-in-a-basket (cruelly described by Megan as sounding more like something off a menu)' - oh you Who books JUST CAN'T HELP YOURSELVES can you...

The Doctor assumed a Scottish B&B would be serving VEGETARIAN haggis? What even IS vegetarian haggis anyway...?

'If she were caught, she'd be in deep trouble' - having to claim that she's visiting a patient hardly qualifies as deep trouble by ANYONE'S standards, let alone a member of Team TARDIS's...

'As he scanned the book, looking for historical inaccuracies and scribbling notes in the margin' - aww, bless, the Doctor is One Of Us! A NITPICKER!

'You know, I'd almost forgotten what it was like to have a granddaughter' - and Ace DOESN'T start shrieking 'OMG! WTF!!' etc...?

'She caught sight of a commode through an open doorway and, instinctively, her hand went to her nose' - blimey, how does Ace cope with, y'know, HISTORY?

'Rather a lot of dogs and cats gone missing recently, don't you think' - uh-oh...

'Do you know the Doctor then?' 'I know of him. Everyone knows of him...everyone in UNIT' - Bambera didn't.

'And maybe Michael was exaggerating - bitter and unhappy, but exaggerating' - about what? He wouldn't tell her anything!

'Panic took hold' - just because Ace 'heard a muffled woman's voice give a cry of surprise and a dull, metal clang, like someone banging their head on a saucepan'?!

The baddie's listening to opera and 'The Doctor found his throat tightening' and decided not to confront him because 'he felt like he was listening in...on some private grief'?? Worst excuse for not confronting the baddie EVER.

'The Doctor couldn't bring himself to nod, couldn't bring himself to make a promise that he wasn't sure he could keep. He'd done that before. He couldn't do it again' - really? MCCOY the MASTER-MANIPULATOR can't bring himself to tell a whopper while later, FAR softer, Doctors have a Rule One that entirely entails LYING?

'Quietly, he rearranged her, made her a little more decorous' - when has the Doctor ever so much as closed a corpse's eyes? (Admittedly he looked quite approving when Martha did it in Smith and Jones...)

'Isn't this getting rather tiresome?' - ah, a Message From Fred...

To be continued...

The Doctor assumed a Scottish B&B would be serving VEGETARIAN haggis? What even IS vegetarian haggis anyway...?

An abomination, to be sure.

But at least an abomination WITHOUT SHEEP'S LUNGS...

I will NEVER eat sheep's lungs.

Me neither (and yes, I was once presented with a plateful of haggis at a Boxing Day shoot in Scotland) but at least it kinda makes sense that you should utilise every bit of the poor dead sheep, up to and including its lungs. Attempting to recreate the taste and texture of sheep's lungs with vegetables, however, just doesn't strike me as remotely sane.

'How could it have aged so much in just a couple of days?' - um, Joyce...you do KNOW he's a time-traveller, right...?

The Doctor HADN'T THOUGHT that the implant might be confused by the alien wiring of his brain?!

What the hell is this stuff about autumn leaves and a baleful eye?

'The activity of the array had shot up by eighty percent' - only eighty? Our Doctor's brain is worth only four-fifths of the combined brains of a handful of elderly HUMANS?

'He remembered, as a child, finding a dead cat' - *sigh* of course he did.

'He felt his hearts speeding up, losing their asynchrony, starting to beat dangerously in time with each other' - blimey, they've been beating out of time, all these centuries...?

'And the Doctor. How could he have changed so much in only a couple of months? Shrunk from a tall, dashing man with unruly white hair' - wait, what, it's 1982!!!!!!!!!!! that's not A COUPLE OF MONTHS after the Pertwee Era! (As this book actually knows, given that HER SON'S been in A POST-DOCTOR UNIT for years.)

'Well it looks like there's only one thing to do. I'm gonna have to dive back down to the ship and get back in through the airlock' - just because a couple of blokes refused you the use of their boat? Just HIJACK the •••• boat!

Ace doesn't have a PENKNIFE?

Ace didn't even check the (unlocked!) door?

'What can two old fogies do to us?' - boy Ace has changed her tune since THREE PARAGRAPHS EARLIER when she was visualising said old fogies dragging her back here and locking her in a coffin till she choked on her own vomit.

'Ace realised, ironically, that her best chance was to take on Megan on her own and then deal with the tweedies' - in yet another schizophrenic u-turn, Ace decides to take on Megan AND HER GUN rather than the old fogies despite the fact that a few pages earlier she was thinking that 'the worst that could happen would probably be that the dog would snuffle her to death'.

'Ace wished she hadn't left her rucksack on the boat: one can of nitro-9 and Megan would have been history' - a) Ace left her rucksack on the boat?! What a moron and b) Ace would have cheerily blown a person to Kingdom Come? Has she done this often? Does the Doctor know?

'Ace and Michael ran as fast as they could, dragging the limp form of the Doctor. She'd never realized that such a small, slight man could weight so much. Did he have transcendental pockets?' - a) DUH of course he does (Runaway Bride) but b) that shouldn't make him heavier cos, y'know, TRANSCENDENTAL and c) has she really never had to drag him anywhere before?

Sexy's 'part of UNIT folklore. When it makes an appearance, you know there's trouble round the corner' - well, that's rubbish. In the Pertwee Era she was parked innocuously in the corner and had NOTHING to do with the constant alien invasions and when she very occasionally deigned to pop back in later years the trouble had usually already started...

Ace doesn't know about the Zero Room? (Yeah Davison got himself another one according to Renaissance of the Daleks.)

Ace re Michael's arm across her shoulders: 'She wished she'd had the sense to do it the other way round, with him taking some of her weight. Her knee was still throbbing' - but, what, she's too polite to suggest they swap positions?

Eddie hasn't eaten in two days but is still more interested in a pint of Guinness?

'Ace swearing like a trooper as she laid into Michael' - swearing how? 'Bilge bag'?

So UNIT soldiers all hate the Doctor's guts and torture Michael just because his parents KNEW the Doctor? Yeah, right.

Why run away rather than tie up the enemy when you've got them stunned?

'Thrown by the sophistication of the explosive device thrown at them earlier' - SOPHISTICATION?

To be continued...

'Perhaps Michael's outburst had made an impact on him - perhaps he was realising the importance of "the little people". Wonders would never cease' - oh •••• off.

'I'm not human - at least not in the way you think' - NOT IN THE WAY YOU THINK?! S/he's not sodding HUMAN!

'"So they're wearing costumes made up of dead animals?" "Frogs and snails and puppydogs' tails. Not to mention cats and sheep."' - you just had to mention cats didn't you.

'The Doctor turned to Ace, his face painted with horror' - since when has any Doctor had their face painted with horror.

'She wasn't prepared to see her mother's future vanish in a puff of her own self-righteousness' - SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS? Has UNIT not taught her ANYTHING about alien Greeks bearing gifts?

'In all her travels with the Doctor - through all the ups and many, many downs - Ace had never felt quite as alone as she did now' - REALLY?

'For one silly moment, she wondered if she should call UNIT HQ and tell them what was happening' - yeah, how SILLY of the UNIT MEMBER to think of PHONING UNIT about the ALIEN INCURSION.

Ace thinks it's very unlike the Doctor to be shutting her out when she's spent the entire book bitching at him for shutting her out in a way unpleasantly reminiscent of •••••-Ace from the NAs.

'Cautiously, Michael waved Sooal through: he'd rather have the slimy little creep where he could see him' - why? Cos locking him in the cellar would be pretty safe, I mean, THE DOCTOR couldn't escape from there.

'The air around her thickened with static, as if the TARDIS was drawing the mysterious energies from the ocean floor towards itself. Eye-aching white ropes of lightning danced around its roof' - since WHEN!

'It was anger and outrage, sheer outrage - that someone else should be manipulating him' - really? Cos Ace and Hex manipulated the hell outta him in The Magic Mousetrap audio for a MONTH and he didn't seem overly upset.

'The Doctor...the other Doctor. She'd almost forgotten. Megan had said that he was dying, wired up to the computer aboard the ship' - yeah, who DOESN'T allow THE DOCTOR'S IMMINENT DEMISE to slip their minds every now and then?

'He'd promised to stop using people, pushing them about like pawns on a chessboard; and then he'd gone and deliberately - deliberately - tricked Connie and Jessie into coming downstairs and play-acting for him' - THE FIEND! THE MONSTER! He's no better than Davros! He got a couple of old ladies to SAVE PLANET EARTH with a couple of minutes of harmless play-acting! HOW DARE HE!

'A stunningly attractive young girl, Ace thought' - this isn't the Moffat Era, Companions don't go round FANCYING THEMSELVES! (And Ace isn't a young girl. And even if she had been she'd never have THOUGHT of herself as such.)

'Cats are so much nicer than dogs, don't you think?' - THAT'S MY DOCTOR! Though it's weird, if the oochie was a landine genetically and chemically conditioned to be loyal to the Doctor, how unimpressed it was by the Doctor's wriggling fingers at the beginning of the book.

Gods, that was like Wheel of Ice all over again, only instead of Doc n'Stray(s) spending the entire book going back and forth to Mnemosyne they're going back and forth to an old people's home...several of which trips could have been avoided if only Our Heroes had grasped the existence of MOBILE PHONES...Anyway, it's one of those books that I literally didn't remember a word of from my first reading and give me a few weeks I'll mercifully forget it all again.

'If you want a hint of what may become a bit of a "past Doctors" arc, then Relative Dementias could be the one for you' - Michalowski in DWM. Ooh - a Past Doctors arc?! *Glances around wildly* WHERE?!

*Shrugs* Absolutely nowhere that I can see.

What the hell is this stuff about autumn leaves and a baleful eye?

OK, so there were autumn leaves and eyeballs in Infinity Doctors...in a future regeneration from an alt-uni (or weevil-uni...or something...) which a) makes no sense and b) does not by any stretch of the imagination constitute an ARC.