There's the way for example that Miles reinvents one of the most maligned monsters of the old series echoes some of the more successful reintroductions of recent years.

There's more to it than that though.Īlien Bodies also features pre-echoes of the New Series in style as well. Anyone even vaguely familiar with the New Series will see the influences on The Last Great Time War that has dominated much of its back-story as well as the influences on several Moffat stories including Impossible Astronaut/Day Of The Moon and Name Of The Doctor especially. There's the idea of a war in the Time Lords future, the Doctor encountering his own future dead body, a companion whose revealed to have multi-time lines (or sets of bio-data as its referenced to here) and a sequence early in the novel where someone jumps into the TARDIS as it sits parked on the side of the building to name just a few examples. Those readers familiar with the New Series, especially its most recent seasons under Steven Moffat, will likely find themselves experiencing a bit of deja vu. That time period though produced some extraordinary and influential tales including this 1997 novel from Lawrence Miles, a book I've spent years trying to track down at an affordable price and one that I've finally managed to read at last.

Then again, I came into Doctor Who in 2007 when the New Series had established itself and the Wilderness Years were well and truly over. Looking back at that gap between televised Doctor Who that listed between December 1989 and March 2005, it is sometimes hard for me to understand how it could be called the “Wilderness Years.” There was one book after another virtually every month, Big Finish audios coming out monthly from 2000, a new issue of Doctor Who Magazine coming out every month and so forth.

They're clearly the same Doctor Who, whatever anyone might say to the contrary. Who, even in death, can mess with events. That relic being.the corpse of a future Doctor, whose adventures in the meantime have left his biodata even more valuable than it already was. For all that he complains about Moffat's overuse of the Doctor's reputation as a weapon in itself, or the tendency to upgrade the Doctor into an all-round superhero, this is the story of the great powers of the galaxy (and some less celebrated parties trying to get on to that level) gathering to bid on a relic of great and unspecified powers. You can see why a man might be bitter, though, when he came up (in the space of this one book) with the Time War, a human female TARDIS, and a story in which the Doctor's corpse is the starting point.īut then, some of the stuff he doesn't like is here too. A startling reminder that, before he was a ranting man on the internet, Lawrence Miles wrote startlingly good Doctor Who.

Doctor Who by Lawrence Miles