Loving the Alien

"How do you measure time outside time?"

Writers: Mike Tucker & Robert Perry

Format: Novel

Released: May 2003

Series: PDA 60

Featuring: Seventh Doctor, Ace

Synopsis 

Ace is dead. Or at least she will be - soon... In a secret room deep inside the TARDIS the Doctor has been examining the body of Ace's future self. He knows how she was killed, where she was killed and when she was killed. What he doesn't know is why...

To find the truth the Doctor makes a dangerous decision and takes the unsuspecting Ace to the very time and place of her death, hoping to cheat Time and find her killer before he can strike - but Time has other ideas. With Ace missing and the clock ticking the Doctor turns to old friends for help and finds that there is unfinished business for him to deal with.

What is the secret experiment being conducted by the British Rocket Group? Why are giant ants appearing in the suburbs of 1950s London? Who is the mysterious figure that is watching the Doctor's every move?

As events spiral out of control the Doctor realises that someone is manipulating time with careless disregard for the consequences to Ace - or the rest of the universe...

Verdict 

Loving the Alien was a very good Doctor Who novel. It was full of shocks, surprises and even other dimensions and also acted as a direct sequel to Illegal Alien, a book I read not too many months ago. That book was excellent and when doing my follow up research on it (usually on TARDISWiki) I found that this book was its sequel. I was somewhat surprised by the inclusion of footnotes in an original Doctor Who novel and this is the first time that I have come across them in the same way that I footnote my History essays in university. There have been accounts of using an asterix in the Target novelisations but this was the first time I saw it numbered here. The only footnote that I knew about was the aforementioned novel that featured the Cybermen but after reading the acknowledgements at the end of the book, it turned out that the two writers had referenced their works together on at least one occasion. The story was a good one and it caught the Seventh Doctor and Ace at a bad time together. They'd just seen, to my utter shock, Mel dead in a previous book I'm yet to read and now the Doctor had found Ace's dead body whilst he was still travelling with her. She was off in the pool while he was experimenting on her future selve's dead body. That must have been a horrific experience! The cliffhanger at the end of part two of the novel in which we saw Ace die was simply sublime. It must go down as one of my all time favourite cliffhangers across any format because Ace was shot in the face from point blank range and then her body was dumped in the river! That's pretty tough to resolve and I'm not entirely convinced that it was. Ace's explicit sexual encounter with Jimmy was interesting as it was the first time a companion in the Classic era has been painted in that light. Sex was seemingly forgotten in the old days so to read that Ace, who I'm not convinced is only 18, was sexually active was interesting. She even got pregnant according to the Doctor but she would be having no baby. The return of George Limb as enemy was fantastic and I loved how he was still jumping through time, albeit in small distances, with the Cyberman time machine that the Doctor was convinced would scatter him through time. Instead, Limb kept on going back through his timeline to try and avert his destiny. The Doctor helped him achieve that in a brutal way though. I thought Rita was an excellent character and the way she presented herself as a decade younger than she appeared was terrific. Her venture to an alternate dimension was great and I liked how she was struggling to cope with an electrically surged human race. The constant comments of sympathy and isolation about her being American was good and I liked the differences in the outcome of World War II in that reality. The arrival of the Doctor certainly brightened up her day. She couldn't bare the thought of an electrical upgrade. The reference to The Tenth Planet was fantastic and the alternate dimension seemed to be like Spare Parts but in prose. The Cold War setting of 19 years after the last time the Doctor and Ace encountered Cody McBride was pretty good and I liked that the difference in appearance and age was directly mentioned on more than one occasion. It was great to see McBride back as well as Mullen although the latter suffered almost immediately after finding out the Doctor was back by getting his legs amputated thanks to an explosion. The other characters that appeared were decent with Drakefell and Crawhammer particularly impressing. Davey O'Brien, both of them, was brilliant too. The plot was pretty good with the British of an alternate reality invading although they were pretty easily sent back home in my eyes. The ending wasn't that great which is why the book doesn't get quite as high a rating as I would liked to have given and a lot of that is down to the randomness of Ace's return and apparent resurrection. Overall though, still a very good novel! 

Rating: 8/10