Author's introduction by Lance Parkin

By happy chance, I’d been toying with a Pertwee Missing Adventure proposal a couple of years before, while I’d been waiting to hear back about Just War. The basic concept – Pertwee UNIT story as Tom Clancy technothriller was just so fundamentally wrong that I could never get the book to work, but I did have a usable plot.

The book was called Cold War, and featured the Ice Warriors. In one page synopsis form, it’s almost exactly the same as The Dying Days, although it would have been a completely different book.

The Dying Days is also about the end of the New Adventures era, and the passing on of the torch. In 1995, just after I’d been commissioned to write Just War, I joked that we were in ‘the Rebecca Levene Golden Age of Doctor Who’.

No-one, least of all Bex, took the remark seriously. Five or six years on, the phrase pops up in internet discussion of the books completely unironically. There’s even a word for it: NAstalgia.