This was not the book it was meant to be, which was already a kind of weird adventure for the original and best TARDIS team (the first Doctor, Ian, Barbara, and Susan) featuring Alexander the Great. Rather's it's a meditation on that TARDIS team... and the universe. Time is coming unraveled after a trip to Alexander's era, and who the Doctor's companions are keeps on shifting. Barbara is dead... or is Ian?

Big Finish's Companion Chronicles have reignited my love for the first few seasons of Doctor Who, when the show really could go anywhere and do anything. If they had done original tie-in novels back then, and allowed them to be as inventive as the parent show, one would imagine they'd come out something like this: it's like a literary version of The Edge of Destruction mashed with The Aztecs. And about as amazing as that sounds. The ideas are inventive, the prose is clever, and even though it takes place in a multitude of alternate realities, Mortimore gets the voices and personalities of the original TARDIS team completely perfect. You feel them as real people (an approach I'm not convinced a lot of post-1964 TARDIS teams could even support); the only other work to handle them with such deftness being, I suspect, Daniel O'Mahony's "Nothing at the End of the Lane" in Short Trips and Side Steps.

The ending's a bit nonsensical, and the essays at the end are far too long, but I suppose you can't have everything. Is this the best Doctor Who novel ever? Probably not, but it's the best one I've read in a long time.

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1116177.html

This was the Doctor Who novel which was turned down by the BBC and which Mortimore subsequently managed to get published privately, now downloadable for free thanks to those awfully nice New Zealand chaps. There is no way the BBC could have published it - by Mortimore's own (rather too extensively documented) account, it is about a million light years away from the novel he actually agreed to write. But it is a brilliant read all the same, though I think you would need to know who Lola McGovern and Cliff were to really appreciate it. It is the story of the First Doctor, his grand-daughter and the two people from 1960s England who travel together, in the Tardis after an adventure with Alexander the Great and several ambiguous outcomes, trying to cope with the disappearance of the entire universe outside the Ship. Mortimore takes the narrative to very peculiar structures and places, but it kept me reading.

The New Zealand edition includes both Mortimore's authorial notes, describing his bitter struggles with his muse (incarnate as a monkey), and an account of his dispute with the BBC publishers which I think could usefully have been summarised into rather fewer pages. ( )