Doctor Who: Trading Futures by Lance Parkin

Doctor Who: Trading Futures
by Lance Parkin

This book is kind of "Doctor Who does James Bond"—you can get that as soon as you look at the cover, which could come out of a Bond film title sequence.  But though it has its goofy moments, and definitely owes something to the Pierce Brosnan films in particular, it's not a parody. Rather, Parkin does that thing Doctor Who does so well: crash the Doctor into the conventions of a different genre and see what happens. Parkin explore the consequences with seriousness. Well, as serious as Doctor Who ever gets, anyway.

 

Published: 2001
Acquired: August 2022
Read: September 2022

What would a Bond villain look like in the Doctor Who world? Bond villains, when not Soviets themselves, were often trying to incite conflict between East and West for their own reasons. Parkin gives us a new Cold War in the twenty-first century, and then thinks of a Doctor Who way an arms dealer might trying to make money off this conflict: selling time travel. The result is a fast-paced action story, but one firmly in the Doctor Who realm. Especially early on, the way the Doctor gets out of James Bond-esque jams nonviolently is inspired, and a sequences where the Doctor stages a bank robbery to protect people from a tidal wave is delightful, a perfect extrapolation from the eighth Doctor in the tv movie. The Doctor's sort-of companion for the story, Malady Chang, feels exactly like a female ally character from a Pierce Brosnan film.

 

Parkin always does well by Eight, I reckon, and he also has a good handle on Anji, who here gets to plausibly bluff her way into the confidence of the villain. The subplot about Fitz pretending to be the Doctor probably could have gone further, but was enjoyable anyway. Some people praise Parkin for his Big Ideas about Doctor Who, and while he does indeed have them, he can also write solid Doctor Who books without them. A perfect example of the kind of fun you can have with a "regular" Doctor Who book.

I read a post–New Doctor Who Adventures novel every three months. Next up in sequence: Blue Box

Review: Doctor Who: Father Time by Lance Parkin

Published: 2000
Acquired: January 2021
Read: March 2021

Doctor Who: Father Time
by Lance Parkin

 

Reading this shortly after another "caught on Earth" arc novel, I could see that one of the real benefits of this storyline was how it let you see Doctor Who from the outside. This happens in three ways. One is that, since the Doctor is spending a century on Earth, and the stories are spaced decades apart, each can use a new, outsider viewpoint character. Some of my favorite Doctor Who stories are ones that introduce you to the Doctor from a new character's perspective: "An Unearthly Child," "Rose," The Harvest, "Smith and Jones," certainly others I am forgetting. The premise of this arc means that literally every story can take this approach! Here, we follow Debbie, a schoolteacher who takes refuge at the Doctor's house after a car accident, and becomes enraptured by him and his world. She's a well drawn character; Parkin makes her and her world feel very real, and we get the sense of an ordinary person seeking an escape that Russell T Davies would often use to excellent effect on screen.

It also is Doctor Who from the outside in that the Doctor himself doesn't know who he is. Now, amnesia has become a bit of an overused trope in Doctor Who tie-ins, especially for the eighth Doctor, but it's put to good effect here. He's Doctorish... but not exactly the Doctor. Here, he's a man who settles down with a daughter and does business consulting in the 1980s! But the kind of business consulting he does is pretty amazing.

Which leads me into the last way these stories really work. They are not traditional Doctor Who stories, but they still feel like Doctor Who stories. As a friend said, paraphrasing Elizabeth Sandifer, there are Doctor Who stories that "speak[ ] Doctor Who fluently, but with a charming accent you haven’t heard before." These "caught on Earth" stories are among them, and Father Time is particularly good at it. This has a lot of Doctor Who tropes you'll recognize, but in a new, unfamiliar context. How does the Doctor deal with evil aliens from the far future attacking the Earth to find another alien who's in hiding... when he lives on the Earth and lives with the alien? I've read four of the six caught on Earth books (five of the seven if we count the retroactively inserted Past Doctor Aventure Wolfsbane), and, except for the utterly mediocre finale by Colin Brake, they all do this successfully to varying degrees... but I think Father Time does it best of all. There's a particularly great bit where, when the Doctor realizes his daughter has been kidnapped into Earth orbit, he basically just shrugs and goes, "Well, I guess we're off to Cape Canaveral to steal a space shuttle." It's the kind of audaciousness you can imagine a Russell T Davies or Steven Moffat story having on screen... but the way the Doctor steals the shuttle is very different than what they might do because this is a Doctor without his usual technical resources.

The issue I have with the book, however, is that it's not long enough. It's divided into three sections: 1980, 1986, 1989. The first section runs about a hundred pages, and it is the best of them: strongly atmospheric and character driven. But the last two sections thus only get half the book between them and must be squeezed into fifty pages apiece; I felt the character work suffered as a result. Debbie, who really drives the first section, fades into the background. (Imagine if, having been the focus of "Rose," Rose spent the rest of series one just standing there and asking questions like a Chibnall companion. Why do all that set-up and do nothing with it?) And though there's a lot of focus on Miranda, the Doctor's daughter, the one thing I didn't quite see enough of was her relationship with the Doctor. They are usually separate in the actual novel; most of their time together happens off-page between the 1980 and 1986 sections. But if the 1986 and 1989 sections had got 100 pages apiece just like the first, I think this would have gone from a verging-on-great Doctor Who novel to surely one of the greatest of them all. The potential is all there in the first part, but the rocket doesn't achieve the heights it could.

Still, this is a blast. I always enjoy a Lance Parkin Doctor Who story. He knows how to blend cool concepts with over-the-top storytelling, and I wish we heard more of his voice these days.

Also, this is one of a few pre-2005 Doctor Who novels to get an official ebook release, for which I am immensely grateful. It seems to average $13-20 on the secondary market, but you can get it for $7 on Amazon.

I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: EarthWorld

Review: Doctor Who: The Infinity Doctors by Lance Parkin

Originally published: 1998
Acquired: July 2010
Read: August 2020

Doctor Who: The Infinity Doctors
by Lance Parkin

This is an odd book. The Doctor seems to be the one portrayed on screen by Paul McGann, but he lives on Gallifrey; the Time Lord we would call the Master is a government official called the Magistrate, and they are friends. There are hints that would indicate it's a Doctor who's settled down after a long time traveling the universe; there are also hints that indicate the tv adventures we know didn't happen. Is it a Doctor who returned home? Or one who never left? Or one who has yet to leave?

The real pleasure of the book is in the worldbuilding. When I was a young Doctor Who fan, I was fascinated by the Time Lords; after years of mediocre Big Finish stories about them, I've come to think that killing them off was the best thing that ever happened to them, and I'd happily go a decade without going to Gallifrey or hearing about the Matrix or transduction barriers. But Lance Parkin does a great job with the Time Lords and Gallifrey, arguably better than anyone ever. The details of how the Capitol operates, the Citadel, the relationship between the Time Lords and other Gallifreyans, the details on the technologies they possess, they're all so well done. You get an amazing sense of scale and power at the same time you see how and why a Time Lord can never actually do anything: a group of people whose power is so momentous they can never make use of it. The book is chock-full of great ideas; I loved the Needle and its inhabitants; I thought the Sontarans and the Rutan have rarely been so well depicted.

On the other hand, I did kind of wonder what the point of it all was. Why tell a story about the Doctor not leaving Gallifrey? What kind of point is this book making? I'm not quite sure. It's very epic-- but on the other hand, it feels like just another adventure in a storyworld where the Doctor lives in Gallifrey. Why tell this story in that world? What is Parkin trying to say about a Doctor who lives on Gallifrey?

I'm not sure, but I do think Parkin does a great job with the (kind of) eighth Doctor. You can hear Paul McGann saying the lines. More than that, this story does a good job of maintaining the Doctor's essential Doctorishness in a non-Doctor situation. This is the kind of thing Doctor Who writers often struggle with-- on audio, when the Doctor becomes someone else, you often wouldn't even recognize them as the Doctor except for the actor playing them. But if the Doctor did live on Gallifrey and try to work within its structures, this is how he would do it. He's playful and committed to justice and clever, and improvising so much he impresses himself; he just happens to be confined to one planet.

This book originally came out in 1998, for Doctor Who's thirty-fifth anniversary (is that really a thing?), when the television show had been off the air for nearly a decade; Big Finish wasn't even making Doctor Who audio dramas yet. There's an attempt to build up a new mythology around the character. There are hints about the Doctor's secret past, about his parents, about his past loves and losses; there's old friends we've never heard of, and new lovers. In some ways it's very like what Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat would do in the revival, but in others its very different. It adds romance and myth as they did, but it can feel a little backward-looking. Twenty years later, it feels like a bit of a dead end. I think it suffers a bit from being read out of context; it's part of something building through the novels of its era, but it's been around twenty years since I read Alien Bodies or Unnatural History or The Gallifrey Chronicles! A lot of it was lost on me. (It is fun, though, to imagine the coming doom for Gallifrey that is hinted at is the Last Great Time War against the Daleks.)

The ending is a bit sudden and definitely disappointing. But up until that point, it's always enjoyable even when it's odd. Parkin has a sense of tone that many tie-in writers don't. I might sound a little down on this novel, but I'm not really. I don't entirely get what it's trying to do, and I think some of what it's trying to do is a mistake-- but what it's trying to do is big and interesting, and pulled off fairly well, and I was almost always engaged. This is a weird side-step in more than one way, but it's a great one and well worth reading.

I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: The Turing Test

Review: Bernice Summerfield: Present Danger edited by Eddie Robson

Reviewing a book tied into some audio dramas reminds me that I actually haven't cross-linked my audio reviews here of late; there have been three. "Flight into Hull!", a Doctor Who: Short Trip read by Camille Corduri, features Jackie Tyler and the "metacrisis" Doctor. The Root of All Rage is the second Star Trek: Prometheus audiobook, presenting the German 50th-anniversay special. And Jeremiah Bourne in Time is a new, original concept from Big Finish about a teenager travelling between contemporary and Edwardian London. (Quoth my editor when I submitted the last review: "'famous magistrate and infamous nudist' is a hell of a character description, I need to listen to these." Indeed he does and so do you.)

Hardcover, 208 pages
Published 2010

Acquired August 2015
Read October 2018

Bernice Summerfield XIV: Present Danger
edited by Eddie Robson

Present Danger fills in the gap between the audio dramas Resurrecting the Past and Escaping the Future. Partially it serves to just move characters into position (in Resurrecting, Benny and Hass are on Earth, but when Escaping opens, Benny is travelling through time to fight the Deindum with a restored time ring, while Hass is a Deindum prisoner on Maximediras), and partially it serves to dramatize the Deindum War more completely, since it's mostly off-stage in Escaping, but of great importance.

So, it's kind of like Life During Wartime, but it doesn't work quite as well. Life During Wartime felt like a novel by many hands, showing the progression of the Bernice Summerfield range's cast of characters during the months (and months?) of Fifth Axis occupation. Present Danger is more spotty-- it often feels like things that ought to have been dramatized are skipped over in favor of things that are less important. Like, there's no story about how Bev manages to take control back of the Braxiatel Collection, which ought to be a key character point, and the refugees crowding the Collection is referenced in Escaping, but that's dramatized here in only a very cursory way. It would have been nice to see this in Present Danger; instead, the most we get for Bev is a story by Niall Boyce, "The Empire Variations," where she witnesses a time travel adventure Benny has by seeing how works of art in the Collection change as history does. It's a neat conceit, but if the book was going to tell just one Bev story, it doesn't seem like this is the one.

This goes for a number of stories. Like, I enjoyed a lot of them, but they often seemed like sidebars to the Deindum War. It's neat to have a sequel to Battlefield in Jim Smith's "Excalibur of Mars," but should working Brigadier Bambera in really have been a priority of this collection? There are a few too many Benny-on-strange-adventures stories that are tenuously incorporated on the basis of Benny scouring time for weapons to use against the Deindum. That said, Jonathan Blum's "The End Times" is a great Benny-and-Peter tale in the way that only Jon Blum can do, and I was unexpectedly delighted by the return of the tax assessor from Venus Mantrap in Mark Clapham's "In the Ledgers of Madness," where a group of reclusive monks keep their books in an ancient, dangerous language so that anyone who tries to audit them will go mad.

The book's best stories are those that deal with the Deindum War and the characters more concretely. "Winging It" by Lance Parkin focuses on Braxiatel figuring out how to fight the Deindum through time, and it's a clever time war story that I really enjoyed. Kate Orman's "Don't Do Something, Just Sit There" of course is a winner, with Benny trying to protect an indigenous population as Earth and the Deindum duke it out. Simon Guerrier gives us some Doggles and Adrian in "Six Impossible Things," a potent combination given their history; there wasn't just the space for this reckoning in the audio dramas, so I'm glad to read it here. (Is Doggles the worst? Yes.)

LM Myles's "The Better Part of Valour," Oli Smith's "Digital Dreams," and editor Eddie Robson's Hass-focused interludes were among the other highlights. But if this collection was meant to make us feel the immensity of Deindum threat in preparation for Escaping the Future, it didn't quite accomplish that as well as it ought to have.

Review: Bernice Summerfield: Secret Histories edited by Mark Clapham

Another review up at Unreality SF: the Fifth First Doctor (I think that's right) returns in The First Doctor Adventures, Volume Two!

Hardcover, 175 pages
Published 2009

Acquired July 2015
Read September 2018

Bernice Summerfield XIII: Secret Histories
edited by Mark Clapham

2009's Bernice Summerfield book is another anthology, with a frame story that fleshes out what Benny was doing between deciding to confront Braxiatel at the end of Secret Origins and being captured by a giant robot in Dead and Buried.  On a dig, Benny discovers a collection of sentient skulls at the site of a war crime, and ends up telling them stories to pass the time. The stories cover a wide range of her life, but there are essentially three or four clusters: a few from her youth, before she had her graduate degree; a couple from the heyday of the Braxiatel Collection, when it was her and Adrian and Jason; a couple from her freelance on-the-run-from-Brax years; and then a number following on from the end of Secret Origins, as Benny and company plan their next move against Braxiatel and in the meantime have some wacky adventures.

I like the diversity on offer here. It's nice to see a young, inexperienced Benny alongside an older, but more carefree Collection-era Benny alongside her present-day status quo. And Mark Clapham's frame story is suitably atmospheric, additionally raising the kind of issues that work well with Benny as a character: dealing with the consequences of history and memory. But though Bernice Summerfield usually thrives in the anthology format (during the Big Finish era, the weaker books have almost always been the novels), Secret Histories isn't among the best of them. It's hard for me to put my finger on it, but I just felt like a lot of the stories here were weirdly plotted, not really coming to climaxes even when they had a solid foundation.

For example, there's a set of stories built around a common incident, where a mysterious machine shunts Benny, Adrian, and Peter back in time: Benny ends up in 1914 England, where she once again encounters Mycroft Holmes and John Watson; Adrian lands in World War I-era France; and Peter ends up in a vaguely Victorian freakshow. Each of the stories is evocatively written, with a great concept. But each one just kind of stops: in Jim Smith's "A Gallery of Pigeons," Mycroft deduces a time-travel mystery but it's more of intellectual interest than dramatic; in Eddie Robson's "The Firing Squad," a pair of alien time travelers (who I think are meant to be pre-existing characters?) tell Adrian what was going on; and in Mark Michalowksi's "The Illuminated Man"... I don't really know what happened at the end. Each story seems quite good until the disappointing endings, though, which is all the more frustrating. Smith is good at the retro-Sherlockiana, Robson does a great job with Adrian's character in an unusual situation, and Michalowski likewise has a good handle on the adolescent Peter.

So it's not like it's a bad book or a waste of time. Benny is a great character, and it's nice to hear from Collection characters like Adrian who have had their roles diminished with season 9's format change, such as in Cody Schell's "You Shouldn't Have," where Adrian and Benny crash-land on a planet where it's the height of masculinity to wear flowers. I also really enjoyed Lance Parkin's "Young Benny" tale, "A Game of Soldiers," a brutal and effective story of Benny reluctantly having to play a role in the Dalek Wars when she's accidentally drafted. And Nick Wallace's "Turn the Light On" is creepy and disorienting.

I did find that the resolution to the frame story followed the same pattern as many of the individual stories, in that it ended disappointingly as well: Benny makes a sort of nonsense technobabble deduction to wrap it all up, which undercuts the emotional potential that had been built up in the until-then effective scenes of her interactions with the skulls. It's not the worst Bernice Summerfield anthology (that's either The Dead Man Diaries or Missing Adventures), but it is underwhelming given the quality this range often provides.

Review: The New Adventures: Beige Planet Mars by Lance Parkin & Mark Clapham

Mass market paperback, 242 pages
Published 1998
Acquired October 2013
Read November 2013

The New Adventures: Beige Planet Mars
by Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham

This Bernice Summerfield New Adventure is fun and light, and in that it achieves more than most of its brethren, but beyond some good jokes, Jason's job writing xenoporn, and villains Parkin would essentially recycle in Doctor Who: Davros, you can't point at a whole lot of note. There are rather a lot of good jokes, especially at the expense of academics, though, so there's that. As I near the end of the New Adventures, I am coming to feel like Virgin never really figured out how to use Bernice in Doctor-less adventures the way that Big Finish did a decade later.

Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Curse of the Standalone Novel

Hardcover, 169 pages
Published 2004
Acquired January 2012
Read March 2012

Professor Bernice Summerfield #6: The Big Hunt

by Lance Parkin

Back at the beginning of its Bernice Summerfield series, Big Finish Productions published five paperback novels.  The first two were dull romps (but then, they were by Justin Richards and Stephen Cole, so you ought to expect little else), while the last three demonstrated a rise in quality.  None of them sold particularly well, though, and the line was cancelled.  Three years later, Big Finish took another stab at a Bernice novel line, launching with Lance Parkin's The Big Hunt.

The Big Hunt was apparently designed to stand alone, and presumably attract new readers, or at least readers who had fallen away.  There's little reference to the recent harrowing events in Benny's life depicted in Life During Wartime, Death and the Daleks, and The Grel Escape.  This is a shame, because it stops Bernice from feeling like an actual character.  The novel seems to dodge characterization; the beginning hints that Bernice wants to take a break from the tough times she's been through recently, but avoiding even mentioning the Braxiatel Collection by name, those events have no weight.  As a result, Bernice feels like an unrooted character, existing solely to go through the motions of the protagonist in a pretty generic action-adventure/mystery plot.

It doesn't help that Bernice herself seems uninterested in what's going on.  Early on, a character dies to heighten the tension, but Bernice barely reacts emotionally.  If the novel did something with this-- such as look at how the Fifth Axis occupation has hardened Benny-- then perhaps that could be interesting, but it's just there, and so it falls flat.  If no one in the book cares that this person is dead, then why should I?  There's not a lot of interesting characterization in the book all around, with Beardmore being the only exception. (As a side note, I would like to make an addition to the Bernice Summerfield list of clichés that Simon Guerrier mentions in The Inside Story: the "surprise" revelation that the person who sent Bernice on a seemingly normal archaeological expedition but paid her an absurd amount of money has a hidden malevolent agenda.  It is long since played out.  Also the hidden agenda doesn't make a lot of sense; I'm not convinced that anything illegal was going on before the deaths started happening.)

The Big Hunt is a quick, light read, but therein lies its problem.  At a point where the Bernice Summerfield is finding its legs, dealing with complicated issues in a literary style, it's a return to the kind of storytelling that the series had managed to get away from.

Ten Years of Bernice Summerfield

Since the beginning of 2010 or so, I've decided to finally get back into Professor Bernice Summerfield, many years after I listened to the first two seasons of the audio dramas and read the early novels. I've been listening to an audio every now and then, but it occurred to me that I should be intermixing the books that go with them. (Bernice has a complicated storyline that constantly switches between prose and audio.) A Life of Surprises actually came out during Season 3, and now I'm on Season 4, so I've jumped back to fill in this gap:

Professor Bernice Summerfield II: A Life of Surprises
edited by Paul Cornell

Hardcover, 166 pages. Published 2002.  Acquired and read December 2011.

A Life of Surprises was published ten years after Benny debuted in Paul Cornell's Love and War, and the book claims to celebrate the full extent of her life, though for obvious reasons none of the stories feature her traveling with the Doctor, and most are set during her time working for the Braxiatel Collection.  It's a very nice anthology, with a lot of stories that tend to the more "literary" end of things, in terms of prose style and experimentation, which isn't a thing there's usually a lot of room for in tie-in fiction.  The looser nature of Bernice Summerfield works to its advantage here, I think-- there's no "franchise" or anything for it to be bound to, and so the authors are free to take the quite-varied tone of Bernice stories and spread their wings.

Most notable along these lines was "Kill the Mouse!" by the not-published-enough Daniel O'Mahony.  I mean, I don't fully get what happened or why, but it's an excellent look at Bernice under pressure, and it's dark without feeling overly so.  Paul Ebbs's "Something Broken" is similar, but less effective, maybe because Bernice is rarely so directly political as she is here. (I mean, I know she hates cruelty, but I feel that Beyond the Sun handled this more aptly.)  "Cuckoo" by Stephen Fewell was also a favorite; unlike many stories, it's set at a defintive point in the chronology (soon after Benny gives birth in The Glass Prison) and deals with the issue of Bernice's motherhood in a deeper way that we've seen in the audio series up until this point.

There are also weird or funny stories, such as "Alien Planets and You" by Dave Stone, which is written like an article about travel, with endnotes that explain what specifically happened to Benny. (For some reason, though, the endnotes are in a dark gray box, making them nearly illegible.) "The Collection" by Peter Anghelides is a strange time-travel adventure, but it works more than it doesn't, mostly thanks to the humor (though there's one bit that seems somewhat forced).  Steve Lyons's "Taken by the Muses" has a race of alien robots who must rhyme, and is worth it entirely for that joke.  "Time's Team" by David McIntee is also a fun romp, but surely the most humorous story in the book is Nev Fountain's "Beedlemania," features the Knyy'ds, a race compelled to use any pointed object once unsheathed before it is sheathed again.  Initially referring to swords, their honor code cause them to extend it to pens (they must write their mothers a letter) and more.

And then there's some continuity-pleasing ones (at least in theory), like Terrance Dicks's "A Mutual Friend," which takes a great premise (Bernice meets Sarah Jane) and manages to turn it into a complete non-event.  Mark Stevens's "Setting Stone" sees Bernice encountering the aftereffects of an adventure she had with the Doctor, but it didn't really come together to me-- perhaps because it's forced to be vague by its very nature.  "The Spartacus Syndrome" by Jonathan Morris is set during the old Virgin adventures, when Benny was based on Dellah, and is also disorienting but fun.  Lance Parkin's "Paydirt" is a nice tribute to Bernice (and her contradictory nature), but the best of these stories was "Dear Friend" by Jim Sangster, a simple letter from Bernice to the Doctor thanking him for what he's done for her.

There are a few stories I didn't mention, but most of those are dull at worst, not bad.  I have very mixed memories of Big Finish's previous Bernice Summerfield anthology, The Dead Men Diaries, but thankfully by this point, Big Finish had stopped pushing Bernice Summerfield as a series of sub-Indiana Jones adventures set in outer space, and let Benny return to the more literary and emotional tone of the Virgin stories.  A good celebration for a worthy character.

Archival Review: The New Doctor Who Adventures: Just War by Lance Parkin

Mass market paperback, 272 pages
Published 1996
Read December 2007

The New Doctor Who Adventures: Just War

by Lance Parkin

I'd heard the Jacqueline Rayner audio drama of this novel, which changes it from a Doctor Who story to a Professor Bernice Summerfield one (in fact, it's literally my current car listen), and I've always found it quite excellent, so I was eager to read the book, both to see if it was as good, and to see just how Rayner turned a story featuring the seventh Doctor, Benny, Chris and Roz into a story featuring Benny and Jason-- with a good deal less "running time"!

It was every bit as good as the audio-- I'd be hard-pressed to pick the better one, because they both do what they set out to do exceedingly well. Parkin captures all four protagonists perfectly, and his story's many subplots (the Doctor scheming, Benny tortured, Chris as action hero, and Roz in love) are all very different yet cohesive. The audio drama leaves Benny's part largely intact (though it gives her some of the Doctor's), and what remains of the Doctor's, Chris's, and Roz's plotlines wind up dumped on Jason. As I said before, I knew I needed more Paul Cornell in my library, and now I'm starting to think the same about Lance Parkin.

Archival Review: Ahistory: An Unauthorized History of the Doctor Who Universe by Lance Parkin with Lars Pearson

Ahistory: An Unauthorized History of the Doctor Who Universe

by Lance Parkin with Lars Pearson

Trade paperback, 336 pages. Published 2005.  Acquired February 2006.  Read October 2007.

This chronological guide to every Doctor Who episode, novel, and audio drama came out in late 2005, and I acquired it then.  Of course, like one should with a reference book, I dipped in and out it as I wanted to know things, but I also started a straight readthrough when I first got it.  Somewhere along the line, this stopped, but recently, the news of the forthcoming second edition of the book (which will add in the comic strips) caused me to go back to and attempt to finish from where I had left off, in the 1990s.  The future history of Doctor Who actually makes for enjoyable reading; the various random pieces we've seen over the years fit together remarkably well into a coherent whole, showing as Earth rises, is invaded, falls, creates an Empire, falls, joins a Federation, and so on time and again.