Love and War

It's the 51st century and the Doctor and Ace come to the planet Heaven. They are there just to relax while the Doctor looks for a book, but soon it becomes evident that the Doctor has some other agenda and Ace is once more a pawn in his plans. While she becomes involved with a Traveller named Jan, then Doctor crosses paths with one Professor Bernice Summerfield who is on Heaven for an archaeology dig, until she and her group are threatened by the monstrous Hoothi, and eventually by the plans of the Doctor himself.

Paul Cornell is back with one of the most intricate looks into the future that the series has had so far. Heaven is a massive cultural melting pot of different species, most notably though it is a refuge where Humans and Draconians exist together in peace sometime after a Dalek war, but the threat of attracting the attention of the Sontarans remains. And the Silurians have come out of hiding and also live alongside Humans, having taken on the new name of Earth Reptiles. And the Hoothi have plans for all of them.

Odd name, yes, but it's not actually Cornell's own. The species name is borrowed from one line from The Brain of Morbius way back in the Tom Baker era, when Maren says "Even the silent gas dirigibles of the Hoothi I felt in my bones while still a million miles distant,". Cornell, being a fan himself, has taken that one line and fashioned his whole story around it. Just who are the Hoothi? The best way to sum them up is intergalactic fungus that spreads through spores, and they're ready to invade, with Heaven being their first stop to conquest.

In dealing with them, the Doctor pushes Ace too far, and she finally leaves him in a rage, her life having been subject to his whims and under his control for too long. Ace has grown far beyond the 16 year-old girl she was when she met him in Dragonfire, and she can see what he has done to her and to others he has met along the way.

Assuming the role of new companion is Bernice Summerfield, a professor of archaeology from Heidelberg Unversity on Earth who prefers to go by "Benny". The first companion of many who does not appear on televised episode, Benny is older than Ace (late 30s is the best guess) and more mature, but still with parental issues of her own (mother killed in the Dalek war, father missing, presumed dead)and a bit of wariness around the Doctor after seeing what being with him has done to Ace.

At the time of the book's printing, Ace had been the sole companion for 6 years, and her departure was felt through fandom the same as any others who had been with the Doctor for a long time. There was a lot of complaining, and there was also the usual amount of "Thank god she's gone," from fans with nothing better to do than criticize everything about Doctor Who and not enjoy any of it (the Fat-Assed Anti-Fans as they are known). Myself I was annoyed that she was leaving, as the whole Doctor-Ace team had been one of the most successful in the series, right along with the fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, and the fifth Doctor and Tegan, and with the show off the air for 5 years at this point letting Ace go seemed like another admission that there would never been any more episodes made. But change is good; and although Virgin Publishing were not allowed to regenerate the Doctor, they changed the companions and made good choices doing it. I would eventually grow to really enjoy Benny's wry comments in the TARDIS, and she would become a fan favourite in her own right and earn not only her own spin-off series of novels and audios (the latter with Big Finish) but eventually the character would be cast to appear in some of Big Finish's Doctor Who range as well, alongside Sylvester McCoy and Sophia Aldred in their roles.

But before we get there, we have some more ground to cover.

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