Author's Notes - Introduction
Human Nature arose out of my frustration with how bad my previous Doctor Who New Adventure, No Future, was. That novel had been an attempt to do the ultimate Who story. It was huge in scope, far reaching in intent. It collapsed onto its face. It was never going to fly.
So my next book, I thought, would be small and personal, and not set its sights too high. I had to finish off the 'seasons' theme that had united the first three of my New Adventures. I also had to deal with Bernice's horror and grief at the end of the previous book in the series, Dave McIntee's Sanctuary.
In that book, Benny's lover, Guy de Carnac, is last seen charging into overwhelming odds, surrounded by armed knights, the implication being that he's almost certainly killed by them, while Bernice escapes with the Doctor. And at the end of the book, I had to make sure that our heroes were on their way to meet their new companions in Andy Lane's book, which would follow.
I was 27, living in Aylesbury with my girlfriend of that time, Penny List, who the book's dedicated to. Most of it was written with me lying flat in front of my computer on the lounge floor, because I wanted all the amenities handy and didn't have a desk. We had a burglary during that time, but the thieves stepped right over my computer to take the TV, and left the machine, manuscript and all.
I also took a long holiday in Australia during the time I was working on the plot, during which Kate Orman and I came up with many versions of how things should go. This is one of the two New Adventures we plotted together, the other being her Return of the Living Dad.
In many ways, it all started when I got onto the wrong train at Aylesbury station, and ended up waiting around at the wrong halt, with a copy of Peter David's Star Trek: The Next Generation novel, Imzadi. Gareth Roberts and I had been talking about the possibilities of trashing continuity altogether, doing something that just ignored the series' accumulation of stuff.
I thought that David had managed to do something moving in that novel that, through taking the story forward and ignoring the shackles of the past, broke almost every rule of his book line. That in turn made me think that nobody had ever really done mythologist Joseph Campbell's 'Hero's Journey' for the Doctor, the plot that's most commonly recognised in popular culture as that of Superman II, where the hero gives everything up to discover what normal humanity is like. Fertile ground, I thought.
The central issue of the Doctor becoming human wasn't a problem. Everything else was. Kate and I hacked the plot back and forth endlessly during my stay in Sydney, and an Adelaide-based fan called Helen Reilly was a major help too, as were a group of wonderful Melbourne fans, notably Sean-Paul Kelly, whose hospitality overwhelmed me. All of Australia had a hand in Human Nature!
First the villains were ecologist terrorists with Krynoid pods, then they were the Hoothi, from Love and War, then all thirteen incarnations of one evil Time Lord, who went about in a big gang.
The last one was a possibility until series editor Rebecca Levene pointed out to us all the problems involved. The setting was going to be Cheldon Bonniface, in modern times, with Rupert Hemmings' head ( both from Revelation) being reinvigorated by Krynoids, Hoothi spores or whatever. (Some of that stuff ended up in Happy Endings.)
Then the setting changed to just before World War Two, but Rebecca and I were both fed up with Nazis, and I wanted the war that was looming on the horizon during the book to be a genuinely meaningless one. Finally, Kate and I made the plot work, and I went home to Britain to do the same with the book.
A lot of the research material was found for me by a friend called Esther Page, a specialist on World War One. Books are always written by a load of people working together, and as can be seen from the above, Human Nature was no exception.
In the accompanying notes, I don't intend to 'explain' the novel. Saying 'Do you see what I did there?' and underlining the point of every decision would just take away a lot of the point of reading a book. Either you get what's happening, or you don't, and I shouldn't be there like the elephant/shrimp comedy double act from Muppets Tonight, with a flipchart and diagrams, ready to tell you why the jokes are funny. I have to rely on the original material to get my point across.
What I will be doing is pointing up work issues, why I made some of the decisions a writer makes, making clear any references to the previous New Adventures and the TV series, so newcomers can keep up, and generally telling you about issues arising, and where my head was when I wrote this.
Prelude
This first appeared in issue 226 of Doctor Who Magazine. It appears here by kind permission of Clayton Hickman, having been found for me by Stephen Graves, to whom many thanks are due.
In those days, Doctor Who Magazine had a little bit of fiction for every Who novel, and I tended to write plots with that in mind. This just introduces many of the supporting cast, and lets Alexander display his full Simon Callowness.
Prologue
I wrote about five thousand words of a much more standard opening for Human Nature, and then just stopped, because it all felt very blah and I wasn't interested in it. I needed something that would give me a kick and make it all roar along, so I scrapped what I'd done and did this instead.
The book sort of stutters into life like the quick opening scenes of a movie, mostly to reflect Bernice's messed-up inner life.
The first two quotes (from issue 48 of the fanzine Paisley Pattern, an article by David Darlington, and from Melody Maker 27/7/94, Paul Mathur's review of The Prodigy in concert) are flung in, inside the narrative like that, almost as challenges to myself, to live up to that heart on the sleeve open-ness that Darlington had commented on in that fanzine article about the New Adventures (and, as a sort of joke, to address him directly), and to add some... noise, really.
I don't know why, as an author, I do a lot of things. I'm running on instinct a lot of the time. Sorry.
Clive is an old friend of Bernice's from Love and War. The Doctor has that Little Johnny Piper thought from the song Puff The Magic Dragon a couple more times in my books. Gareth Roberts' Sylvester impression used to include the line about clay models. After the book was published, a very talented fan was kind enough to send me a clay model of a Zygon as a result.
Bernice's 'recent acquaintance' is Sherlock Holmes, who she meets in All-Consuming Fire. Opeks and Grotzis are currencies from the TV series, and I get the first appearance of my signature owl in early this time. They play quite a big role in this one. John Smith is an alias adopted by the Doctor in the TV series from as early as The Wheel in Space, and more often during the Pertwee years.
Chapter One
The title, Don't Forget To Catch Me is a line from Saint Etienne's Hobart Paving. This was before I knew the band, but it's references like this, which made Gerard Johnson - who plays keyboards for them - get in touch with me.
I was privileged to write sleeve notes for their Places to Visit E.P., and even more privileged recently when Gerard accompanied the Saint Etienne vocalist, Sarah Cracknell, on Hobart Paving itself at my wedding.
This is me doing a movie again, introducing everyone during the bike ride, and throwing research at you quite fast so that from now on you tend to believe me whether or not I've made the details up. Doctor Smith displays the Seventh Doctor's early tendency to mix up proverbs. The Galactic geography displayed here is all implied in the series, as elaborated on in the Discontinuity Guide.
My friend Caroline Minall owned a cat called Wolsey, who was utterly disdainful of humans and everything about them. There are indeed, as various references from the TV series indicate, cats on Gallifrey.
Chapter Two
Maius Intra Qua Extra means 'bigger on the inside than the outside' in Latin. As does Rocastle's other version. One was suggested by Jac Rayner, the other by one of the many Aussie fans who contributed stuff. Jac had quite a big influence on this book, way before she ever had anything to do with BBC Books.
Little bits of Gallifreyan stuff keep turning up in Smith's memories, as well as thoughts belonging to the Doctor and to his companions. I'll leave you to spot them, unless a story is attached to them. More fun that way.
I'm particularly proud of Bernice's diary entry in this chapter. It starts, by the way, with a reference to Dr. John Watson, who was rather taken with Bernice, in an unrequited way, in the aforementioned Holmes adventure.
In Love and War, Bernice's introduction, we learn that she spent part of her childhood hiding out in the woods near a military academy which she was supposed to be attending.
Dr. Smith's stories are plotted by Steven Moffat, who these days is best known as the writer of the BBC2 (and BBC3) sitcom Coupling. We became friends after he read a review I'd written of his previous show, Press Gang, in The Guinness Book of Classic British Television. More recently he was my Best Man. He's always had some radical thoughts about Who, and it was good to be able to give expression to some of them.
Artron energy: as mentioned in many TV stories.
Cruk: the swearword of choice in the New Adventures, its derivation here made clear.
It occurs to me that, so far, I haven't told you exactly what's going on, or who Dr. Smith is. If this is all new to you, please bear with me: all will be revealed, and quite soon.
Chapter Three
Jac Rayner, now with BBC Books, and I were touring a museum, and she dared me to use Boudiccan Destruction Layer as a chapter title, so I did. I like to think I justified it too. Little limits like that can really help shape a piece of work, as long as the scaffolding isn't visible.
But now I've shown you where it is. Oh dear. But I'm really proud of the opening of this chapter. I think it sums up what my Who work was about.
I should mention that Alton's middle name may become important. But probably not here.
One criticism that's sometimes made of Human Nature is that we never get spelled out to us exactly why the Doctor has decided to embark upon this adventure. It never occurred to me that the question wasn't answered. It is, just in a rather oblique way. And here we have Bernice asking that question.
ESB is one of my favourite sorts of beer, of which I drank a lot while living in Lancaster.
The Doctor's list of things not to let him do includes a reference to his vegetarianism, continuing from his decision at the end of The Two Doctors.
Chapter Four
Just in case: the team Smith puts up on the notice board is of course the Hulton side, in which Dean and Hutchinson would of course be together. In the practice match shown here, they're not. I do keep track of stuff like that, honest!
The bunny hug, etc., are, of course, dances.
Wyndham Lewis and his vortices (Joan is just the kind of woman to use a playful plural) are from the field of art.
The end of the chapter is a take on the end of a Press Gang episode that I particularly liked.
Chapter Five
Hurt/Comfort is a style of fan fiction where one character tends to another's physical and emotional wounds. There are a few references in this chapter to Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey and his courtship of Harriet Vane, one of the greatest romances in literature. Harriet is a major influence on Benny, incidentally. She keeps it all in.
The landscape around the school is very much the landscape of where I grew up in Wiltshire. There was a similar statue, to a similar woman, on a hill that we used to pass on the road. And the school is quite like mine, though just a touch more brutal.
I'm surprised to find, reading this now, that the book contains quite a few touchstones to my current religious point of view, which I try not to call anything, but which boils down to a passionate correspondence between Anglicanism and Paganism. Tim's thoughts on going out of the window are exactly where this stuff connects to Who for me.
I think both traditions are there in the series big time, often hidden, often operating behind enemy lines. But that's an essay for another time.
H.G. Wells believed in 'free love', and smelt like honey. I wish he'd stayed on after Timelash.
Constance quotes from Hamlet, using one of the alternative takes on 'solid'.
I love owls, and I try and include them where I can. They've been audible outside the windows of my last two houses. This one is here for a purpose which will be revealed towards the end, in the subplot that keeps its head down throughout.
The picture of Aberdeen I paint is accurate to my own memories of the city. I spent a lot of time on that beach, with the lighthouse and golf course. The lighthouse may not have been there in 1914, but of course that doesn't matter! And: lighthouses, Aberdeen, Horror of Fang Rock... I haven't been telling you where Smith's memories come from in general, but I'm too pleased with that one not to point it out.
'Again?' tells its own story by the time of Lungbarrow. The authors on the New Adventures line were aware of Andrew Cartmel's plans for the series to varying degrees, but Peter Darvill-Evans had the whole picture, and would fill us in on what we needed to know. The intention of the book line was always to complete that plan, and we did! It incidentally clicked with my own mystical concerns.
Chapter Six
The title is from Kate Bush's Running up that Hill. Bernice's knight is, of course, Guy de Carnac [from Sanctuary].
In this chapter, in a dream, appears one of the Gods of Gallifrey, which were gradually developed during the New Adventures. The opinion I eventually came to, as we evolved them amongst the authors, was that they're Eternals, as in Enlightenment, who have left human prey for the much richer material offered by Time Lords. Here, one appears in a much more floaty form, but not one incompatible with that view.
I'm a great believer in villains that are as clever as our heroes, and I think the villains here go about their plan with great skill. They act like trained intelligence officers would, and stay focussed on what they're after. I find people like that, who don't mind killing when it's necessary, very frightening.
I also did my best to give them kinship and love for each other, something else one doesn't often see in Who monsters. It's the central New Adventures thought of adding a couple of levels of reality to the TV show. Once they've sealed off the village, overconfidence thankfully overtakes my villains.
The line that Smith quotes to Fiona in the bakery was originally the physicist Richard Feynman's.
I've always taken extreme reassurance from the chorus of Voice of the Beehive's I Say Nothing, which seems to me to be about the fan experience, and connects with the quotes at the start of the book. Smith slows down some of that chorus to Joan, semi-quoting it. Quotes weave their way in and out of a lot of my work without usually being announced as such, and sometimes without my knowledge.
The battle of Spion Kop happened during the Second Boer War, in January 1900, a recent historical event for the local characters.
Chapter Seven
In this chapter in the original novel, I have Joan use a racially-abusive word. It's there to show the gap between the era depicted and the here and now, an echo of Smith's lecture about how complicated the assigning of good and bad can be. Joan is a good person, but in 1914, this language was in the mouths of some good people.
It also makes Smith realise that, in finding the language objectionable, he has a set of ethics which come from nowhere, that he's not quite a product of his own time, a feeling with which many on the fringes of mainstream opinion, (those of the left, when the book was written) could sympathise. Ultimately, it's there to make an anti-racist point.
I've never worried about its presence in the book, but now it's on the net, which can be trawled through by search engines, BBCi were worried about the sort of attention it might attract, and I must say I agree completely. We've replaced it with 'N-'. I think it still makes its point.
Tim's thoughts in the tree echo the Cad Goddeu, a Welsh poem attributed to Merlin. Post Battlefield, I really took up the theme of the Doctor as Merlin, and followed the parallels as far as they went. For instance, the wink in the title sequence echoes Merlin's (and many other mythological heroes') loss of an eye to gain wisdom.
That Doctor Who Magazine poster of the Seventh Doctor hanging from some wreckage looks like the Hanged Man tarot card. I went so far as to propose a Who tarot pack to Peter Darvill-Evans. He looked at me sagely and went on his way.
Interventionists, as Greeneye calls them, are agents of the Gallifreyan Celestial Intervention Agency (as mentioned in The Deadly Assassin), to which he assumes the Doctor and Bernice belong. The Time Lord they encountered on Apertsu almost certainly was one.
The Time Lords meddling in the natural history of Earth is a thread that surfaces often in the New Adventures, one of those team narrative things we were vaguely putting together between us. I link it here to the race's sterility, as established by the Cartmel writers.
And 'periodic' here could only be used over a vast timescale. Time Loops are first mentioned as a Time Lord weapon in Image of the Fendahl, and Greeneye stumbles on the same way to get out of them that the Doctor uses in Meglos. A Time Space Visualizer is first seen in The Space Museum, and it seems an apt description for what the Time Lords are seen using to watch the affairs of other worlds in various stories.
The ring Dr. Smith produces is, of course, the ring that the First Doctor sometimes wore, and the tune he brings to mind is the Isley Brothers' This Old Heart of Mine. The Isleys are a shared interest between Bernice, the Doctor and me, and actually appear in Happy Endings. I recently discovered, to my shock, that their mother's middle name was Bernice.
The cat that Smith sees in his vision was the Doctor's previous cat, Chick, a reference to Andrew Cartmel's War trilogy of New Adventures.
Chapter Eight
The Martians Benny's referring to are, of course, her favourites, the Ice Warriors. Her Dad, Isaac, was lost during a battle against the Daleks, when she was very young. Bernice's quest to find him was resolved, in a manner you can probably guess at, in Kate Orman's book Return of the Living Dad.
Timothy has acquired some of the Doctor's Venusian Aikido, as demonstrated in Battlefield, and some of the Eighth Doctor's precognition. We didn't know that at the time, of course.
Rebecca Levene asked me, since this book was set in 1914 and was going to have soldiers in it, to create a soldier who could go on to appear in another book in the range. I think it might have been Toy Soldiers. But the book's author decided not to follow up on that decision, I think, for reasons I never learnt.
Wrightson encounters something in his vision that may be the Timewyrm, still imprisoned, but existing eternally. Or it may be something entirely different. I don't think anyone ever caught this particular 'open continuity' ball I threw into the air. If any authors are reading this, only in these later days has it become necessary to state clearly that they're welcome to run with it. During the time of the New Adventures, that would have been taken for granted.
Chapter Nine
The chapter title is a line from Why Should I Love You? on my favourite of Kate Bush's albums, The Red Shoes.
Jack Harkaway was the hero of the serials that the Master of the Land of Fiction, in The Mind Robber, wrote while he was still on Earth. The Hoothi were the monstrous threat facing the planet in Love and War, where the Doctor first met Bernice.
Chapter Ten
I don't know why I'd want to do this to my old school. Actually, yes I do. Despite the fact that it was where I met the original Bernice, I didn't enjoy my time there at all. The first Bernice was in my class, and she's just got back in touch with me via Friends Reunited.
She had a look for her name on the net, after I told her what had become of it, and is boggled by the Bernice industry. She was aware of the character so named in Emmerdale, if not the League of Gentlemen one, but didn't realise the roots of those names led right back to her. Hopefully, a few more children may be named Bernice these days as a result of the expansion of mates of mine into the TV industry!
Chapter Eleven
The Seventh Doctor uses chess as a metaphor in many TV stories. Dr. Smith refers to an old hermit the Doctor knew in his youth, who's referred to previously in The Time Monster, and appears in Timewyrm: Revelation.
Reference is made in this chapter to the growth of the character of the Seventh Doctor during the New Adventures line. We explored all sides of the master planner, gave him a depth that I don't think any other Doctor has had. The death of Ace's lover, Jan, in Love and War, and several other hard decisions the Doctor had to make had been coming back to haunt him for some time.
Chapter Twelve
This is my Marxist chapter! Tim is, of course, mentally paraphrasing what's written on the sign on the front of the TARDIS. Ahem. I got the wording wrong, much to Steven Moffat's anger, as he repeated my error in his short story for Decalog, Continuity Errors.
Similarly, Dr. Smith gets the Lord's Prayer wrong, which is an interesting character point, especially since he repeats the line about our daily bread instead of 'lead us not into temptation'. Unfortunately, the error was mine, not his. Which might be even more interesting. Neither myself, nor Rebecca Levene, both people with religious interests, caught the error.
Flavia was Time Lord President at the time of Human Nature, following on from the TV series, and not dealing at all with what Gallifrey time is like compared to Earth's. (This is a vision of the future, after all, and we don't know when.)
Romana had become part of the High Council following the Missing Adventure Goth Opera. The method of accessing the Matrix is the one seen in The Deadly Assassin and The Invasion of Time. A flutterwing is a species native to Gallifrey, according to the TV series.
Bernice's archaeological tools come in handy here. They include an ion bonder, a standard tool which Nyssa made good use of in the TV series. The downs in general remind me of the downs above my family home in Wiltshire, which had flint workings and an iron-age hillfort.
Chapter Thirteen
The title is a line murmured by Sarah Cracknell during the Saint Etienne song Nothing Can Stop us Now. The scene where Smith's party are pulled off their feet echoes one in Timewyrm: Revelation. In that one, Ace lets go of the Doctor's hand so he can get away. This time, Smith doesn't let go.
Smith's threat to August echoes one the Doctor makes to his enemy in that book also. These are some of the many ways in which this book thematically rounds off the seasons cycle formed by my first four New Adventures.
Smith's words to Benny toy with the edges of Terrance Dicks' famous 'never cruel or cowardly' lines, originally from The Making of Doctor Who and used so many times in the New Adventures that they virtually became a credo, then Verity comes out with them in complete form.
'There should have been another way,' is the closing line of Warriors of the Deep, and is used as a theme throughout this book. Some of these lines, and in the next chapter, echo quotations from Excalibur, one of my favourite films, and apt for the Doctor's Merlin identity.
Death takes Smith in return for the Doctor's dream bargain with her during Love and War, another way in which the cycle of books is concluded. 'Another owl for Lord Rassilon.' Hee hee hee! And the gods of Gallifrey are here directly identified as the Eternals from Enlightenment.
The First Doctor, on television, makes a couple of references to his ring being spooky and powerful, without ever letting us know in what way he means that, exactly. I make use of it in one of my Doctor Who Magazine comic strips also.
The Monks of Felsecar popped up in some of my fan fiction stories, and I reference them again a few times, most recently in the audio Seasons of Fear. It'd be nice if someone set an adventure amongst them one day. Then I could find out what they're really like.
Chapter Fourteen
The Doctor is talking about his victory over Morgaine in Battlefield. And, as it turns out, making a bit of a pun.
In the first draft, the Doctor did just take Bernice and go. And I instantly knew it was a huge mistake. Having him go back and see Joan, that extra level of reality, is something that began in the Cartmel years on television, and was continued to great effect in the New Adventures. Besides, if it wasn't for getting the Doctor to do things like that, what's a Bernice for?
The conversation between the Doctor and Joan is one of my most scary scenes, I think. And it picks up on Love and War, that pulling together of the threads again. In this book, the Doctor finds that he's done to himself what he did to Jan in that one. Joan... Jan... Did you think this all happened by accident? Actually, a lot of it did. If there are accidents.
And here's where the matter of Alton's middle name pays off. The Time Lords, throughout the New Adventures, enjoy meddling with the biology of humans. Getting Greeneye into the food chain is quite a triumph for the Interventionists.
The last couple of lines were a matter of huge internal debate for me, whether to keep them or get rid of them. I knew they'd be popular with the audience, but I didn't know if they were also true to the material. In the end, I think I went the right way.
Epilogue
The history retold here seems even more relevant now, concerning how wars are started for reasons other than ethics.
The military action described here is real, and took place at this time and date. Also, various British units were indeed forced onto their troop trains at gunpoint.
Conchie: a conscientious objector, one of the many who performed heroic service as medical staff and fire crew, having been branded cowards for refusing to go to war.
The last scene of the book echoes the first scene of Revelation, to complete the cycle. As what Tim's great-granddaughter says completes the plot and theme of this book. The white poppy is the pacifist poppy.
The Doctor anticipates Oolis, the setting for the next book, Andy Lane's Original Sin. That book begins at high speed, as it should to start the ball rolling again with its new companions, and Andy and I agreed that a set-up here was a good idea.
The ending echoes the start of Revelation again, with the Doctor quoting Oscar Wilde, someone else who liked to wear something shocking in his buttonhole. And do you know, I think Oscar got it exactly right.
Final Thoughts
I'm amazed that I managed to write this book with a floating point of view throughout. One of Rebecca Levene's most sage pieces of advice, during the time she was presiding over her Golden Age of the New Adventures, was that prose worked best when it was characterised through the thoughts of one particular participant. One changed that viewpoint character, if necessary, only when one changed scenes.
I agree with and believe in that. But in Human Nature, I, the author, am hanging around the text like a ghost, dropping us into the thoughts of whatever character we need to hear from when we need to hear from them. The book's written from a vague omniscient point of view, and rarely settles on a viewpoint character.
Reading it now, the effect is like watching a home movie of myself whizzing down Everest on a tea tray, screaming as I fall from rock to rock, but always miraculously bouncing onto the next one. I don't know how I did that. I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone else. But it seemed to work at the time.
If you've enjoyed Human Nature, may I humbly suggest that you take a look at my two mainstream SF novels, published by Victor Gollancz, Something More and British Summertime, which explore many of the same themes.
Thank you for coming along on this ride with me. Revisiting the book has made me realise how much I still love it, and how much I'm still in love with prose. I hope you enjoyed it too.
