Author's introduction by Lance Parkin

Bex and I were also reacting against the TV Movie. I love the McGann movie. Bex was far less impressed. Both of us agreed it was a pretty poor ‘pilot’, in the sense that it didn’t really get across the essence of Doctor Who. But I saw some great ideas in there – and I loved the visuals, the sense of scale, Doctor Who in the style of Coppola’s Dracula.

What it was missing could be summed up in one word: monsters. The threat was too abstract, the scale of the final confrontation – two people shouting at each other in one of the bigger TARDIS cupboards – was just not grand enough. This book was going to end in a pitched battle– man versus an army of monsters. And the Doctor would get to demonstrate steel – in the TV Movie, the Doctor’s a passive figure, someone who’s tied up, follows Grace around. You see the velvet glove, and it’s a lovely glove, but there’s no steel inside it.

Bex and I had a phone conversation where we agreed that the TV Movie should have been that typical Doctor Who plot: monsters invading contemporary London, using subtle ways at first, then an all out invasion. Then it struck me... in sixty previous New Adventures, that had never happened. Alien invasions, contemporary stories... but never the two together.

Bex didn’t believe it – "No Future... that was set in the seventies", "Damaged Goods... no, wait, that was the eighties". We’d been banging on about how the TV Movie should have done something that the books had never done. And we agreed there and then that was going to be our story.