Review: Doctor Who: Human Nature by Paul Cornell

This week, I've rotated back to my ongoing reading of selected New Doctor Who Adventures I happen to own, beginning with arguably the greatest VNA of them all:

Trade paperback, 272 pages
Published 2015 (originally 1995)
Previously read January 2004

Acquired April 2018
Reread July 2018

Doctor Who: Human Nature: The History Collection Edition

by Paul Cornell

This is my fourth time experiencing Human Nature, each time in a different medium. The first time was way back in 2004, during the Wilderness Years, when Human Nature was one of the out-of-print novels that BBCi selected for its ebook program. In those pre-Kindle days, I would have read the whole thing on my dorm room computer screen. Then, in 2007, I actually got to watch the story, when an adaptation starring David Tennant was broadcast to the nation. About ten years after that, I listened to the audiobook of the novel, read by Lisa Bowerman (who plays companion Bernice Summerfield on audio) when I reviewed it for Unreality SF. Now, I've actually read in in print for the first time, albeit via the 2015 reprint from BBC Books, not its original 1995 Virgin publication.

I had ambitions of writing an in-depth thematic overview and got about 3,000 words into it before events caught up to me. Hopefully I'll come back to it someday, but somewhere else-- I think I could get it published in some kind of pop-culture general-audience critical venue. So I'll be short here: this is almost certainly the best Doctor Who novel that has been or will be written, with the most depth and nuance and themes, far more than a tie-in work even deserves, honestly-- but then again, it's Doctor Who, and it deserves everything we can give it.

Random Notes:

• This book mentions Ellerycorp as a far-future giant corporation. Jason Haigh-Ellery is the entrepreneur who owns, among other companies, Big Finish Productions. Presumably Ellerycorp is a far-future descendant of Big Finish.
• H. G. Wells is referenced; a suffragette uses him as a touchstone for the concept of free love. 
• The Doctor's human persona, Smith, has memories from a mixture of the Doctor's companions over the years. There's a montage of them on pp. 92-3, most of which I can't identify, but I'm pretty sure the first one is a post-coital Ian and Barbara during The Romans.
• Steven Moffat is in this book; he's a Scotsman who criticizes Sylvester McCoy's accent for being unrealistic.

Next Week: The Doctor, Benny, Chris, and Roz investigate a planet that builds death... Zamper!