About half way through, this novel came together for me. Suddenly, all those little odd comments began to click, and I was really impressed. I was all prepared to nitpick Anji's behavior, when suddenly Walter pulled it off. Kudos to him.

I agree about the amount of progress made since the Daleks'(excuse me, the Invaders) occupation. I was okay with it, until the mention of an orbital elevator on both Earth and Mars. Jeez, that would take more than 20 years on a fully functioning Earth!

Nice obscure mention of the 1000 day war from "Transit." All we needed was a nod to the Slitheen for a trifecta.

I was all prepared to nitpick Anji's behavior, when suddenly Walter pulled it off. Kudos to him.

Yeah, but admit it - you always feel a bit cheated when an author suddenly pulls off something you had already mentally composed several stinging comments about for Nitcentral. (OK, by 'you' I actually mean 'me'.) This book is PARTICULARLY infuriating in this regard, even managing to get away with the utterly ludicrous attempt to shove in four extra years between EarthWorld and Vanishing Point.

I don't have any problem with the extra 4 years, seeing as there is nothing in either novel that comments on it. And Wallace even managed to find a way to keep Fitz and Anji not show that 4 years, AND to make it part of the plot. Pretty clever.

And weren't you impressed that Wallace managed to write an entire novel around the aftereffects of the Dalek Invasion of Earth, and yet never mentioned the D-word? Or Ice Warriors, for that matter. Must be a copyright infringement thing.

I thought you would have mentioned something about all the post 9/11 parallels.

And weren't you impressed that Wallace managed to write an entire novel around the aftereffects of the Dalek Invasion of Earth, and yet never mentioned the D-word?

Actually that sort of thing was a lot more fun in Beige Planet Mars.

I thought you would have mentioned something about all the post 9/11 parallels.

Didn't notice 'em.

A major government, reeling from an attack on its land, begins secret projects that violate both human rights and privacy rights. Reports of additional attacks by the enemy are fabricated and used as an excuse to continue said projects.

Sound familiar?

Blimey...that all happened in Fear Itself? I can remember the nasty experiments...ON MY DOCTOR!...but when were the enemy attacks fabricated?

'Did the Doctor want to know the how and the why of his lost memory? Fitz had assumed not' - hang on, as this book has just mentioned the Doc has just taken considerable risks to try to retrieve said memories, so why on Earth would Fitz think that? (Other than the otherwise-inexplicable fact the Doc never bothers bloody ASKING him what the hell happened.)

So Anji doesn't make a single inquiry about the Doctor and Fitz for fear of drawing unwanted attention...but gets her own TV programme??

Why don't people ask more questions - the survivors about the war and rescue, Anji about the Doctor and Fitz?

Never reread a Who book you remember as good (unless it's by Lawrence Miles, obviously). Having said that, Fear Itself IS still good (and I wouldn't say THAT about more than a handful of PDAs, in fact I'm lucky if I can get up to a whole handful), it's just that I'm surprised how little actually HAPPENS once you know what's going on so it's stripped of the 'WTF??!!' factor.

'It was the first lesson we learnt when we reached for the stars: for everything, there is a limit.
No matter how far we had come, how hard we had struggled, there would always be things out there beyond the comprehension of man' - OK, leaving aside this 'man' nonsense...hadn't you discovered that SOONER? Alright, this is narrated by an amnesiac Doctor, but even HE can still remember all those alien weirdnesses that popped up during his nineteenth-century-onwards exile to Earth.

How come Anji STILL managed to fall to the ground even when she's holding onto a table and someone is holding her arm, keeping her upright?

'American GIs who didn't know his surname' - but they DID know his first name? Wouldn't 'Fitz' be a bit of a give-away?

'"Oh. God," groaned Fitz. "I've heard about your initiative tests."' - he has? From whom? Surely HE'S now the world-expert on the Doctor, far more so than the Doctor himself?

If the Doctor's still trying to get Anji home, why the hell DELIBERATELY go to MARS?

'The Doctor worked on their statements, keeping the grammar loose to non-existent on the one Fitz would sign. For some reason, that seemed appropriate.' - for FITZ, yeah, but given that he's pretending to be an ACCOUNTANT at the moment, not so much.

No one has even mentioned the word 'Dalek' in Fitz's presence? I find that hard to believe. (I'm not expecting a Jubilee-style obsession with 'Dalek juice' and suchlike, I'm just not expecting an almost-superstitious refusal to name the creatures EITHER.)

'Unfortunately, the Station's security systems were tighter than he'd thought....records for all the military...remained sealed behind firewalls' - sorry, the Doctor didn't expect firewalls at a top-secret military weapons-research Station? And can he not HACK them? He later implies that - unlike AuDoc - HE wouldn't be caught 'breaking and entering' so why DOESN'T he? And if he CAN break and enter so easily, why does he need to take massive risks to slow the Station's computing power in the hope of breaking through the firewall?

I'm also not convinced that the Doctor's so scared of tipping off the Station's medical equipment one minute that he'll stagger round with a hole in his stomach, yet so happy to use it the next and just wipe its memory - or even unnecessarily join in incredibly-heavily-monitored experiment.

Why would a technician on Jupiter who isn't even a particularly great player have a Stradivarius cello?

Anji can seriously beat all those professional male athletes? I suppose the virus gives her a bit of a boost, but still...

'He suspected [the virus] was trying to use his DNA's recuperative abilities to his advantage somehow. If Anji was infected, he hoped it was taking the same approach. Otherwise, by the time they got back to Mars she'd have been driven mad' - why SHOULD it use the same approach on someone without the Doc's regenerative abilities? (Alright, it's later explained that the virus learnt from its earlier mistakes in driving the troopers mad, but shouldn't the Doctor have been hoping for THAT instead?)

What's Shim Shady?

I'm sorry - Legacy of the Daleks has Earth sunk into regional warlords/knights-in-armour barbarity thirty years after the Dalek invasion. And THIS has humanity so far advanced that they're holding a station in Jupiter orbit, for god's sake. If LotD was an NA then fair enough, I've given up hoping to reconcile the two series (though there IS an interesting reference to the NAs' 'Thousand Day War' here, for some reason) BUT IT'S A PDA! JUST LIKE THIS ONE!! WHAT THE •••• IS GOING ON!!! (NB: AHistory dates this as 2192-6 and Legacy of the Daleks as 2199 but you can't even say that everything drastically collapsed in three years cos the Earth set-up had been going for DECADES. Incidentally, I'm not sure why AHistory is talking about thirty years after the Dalek Invasion when Fitz refers to 'a couple of decades'.)

'It was the first lesson we learnt when we reached for the stars: for everything, there is a limit.
No matter how far we had come, how hard we had struggled, there would always be things out there beyond the comprehension of man' - OK, leaving aside this 'man' nonsense...hadn't you discovered that SOONER?

My reaction to that quote is pretty much the opposite now - there IS no limit, there IS nothing beyond the comprehension of man, or if there was we just kept calm and carried on swarming across the universe anyway. And became the last species standing* at the END OF SAID UNIVERSE.**

sorry, the Doctor didn't expect firewalls at a top-secret military weapons-research Station? And can he not HACK them?

Judging by Frontier Worlds...probably not.

*Well...zooming around in a metal ball anyway.

**Going by Utopia instead of Ascension of the Cybermen obviously, where we all got wiped out for a sodding Shelley poem.

There's no way - even disregarding Legacy of the Daleks - that humanity could be so advanced a mere 20 years after the Dalek Invasion.

People are talking about 'Finally getting off this planet' in 2233 in the Master! audios. Just sayin'.