Love And War
No Future
(by Paul Cornell)
Love and War Summary: 10/10 The Doctor and Ace, after attending a friend of her's funeral in Perivale, go to the planet Heaven, where all numbers of species are sending their dead as a giant graveyard in space. Ace falls in love, and we meet the archaeologist Bernice Summerfield.
No Future Summary: 7.5/10 The Doctor tells Benny to join a punk band in 1976 London, and the Doctor visits a number of old UNIT friends; but they not all of them seem to recognize him, just one sign that someone has been meddling with time.
Two of Paul Cornell's Doctor Who New Adventure novels, Love and War and No Future, in some sense couldn't be more different. Love and War is a dark, fairly grim piece taking place in the future. No Future is a far more comic work that takes place in 1976 England. The thing about both books is that they were both able to recapture the feeling of particular past eras of Doctor Who, however with the addition of the Seventh Doctor, Ace, and new companion Bernice Summerfield, but aren't simply repeats of what we've seen on the television either.
I couldn't begin to say enough good things about Love and War. The mood and general environment to me was like the early Tom Baker years, with a very strong horror feel. However, on top of this was placed the more manipulative Seventh Doctor and Ace. The book also introduces Professor Bernice Summerfield as a companion. This book does a really outstanding job of exploring why the Doctor must have a companion; both with the reasons behind the departure of Ace and Benny's introd uction. It is both the right explanation, and gives the book a real emotional weight.
With Ace, we see one of the younger companions grow up -- still the teenager from the TV episodes Curse of Fenric and Ghostlight. Significantly, we see her fall in love with Jan, a young wanderer in space, and how this effects the Doctor, Ace, and their relationship.
Bernice is different; we get a thirty-year old companion that is presented as being similar to the Doctor. An archaeologist with an interest in 20th Century Earth, and a good sense of humor. Interestingly, she at first starts with some romantic feelings towards the Doctor, which is unusual but also dealt with quite well.
In No Future, an older Ace, Bernice and the Doctor go through a completely different adventure. Where Love and War was the Seventh Doctor in something like an early Tom Baker style adventure, No Future is more like a more mid-period Tom Baker with tongue-often-in-cheek. This perhaps means that No Future won't appeal to people that had allergic reactions to the campier aspects of that period. Where Love and War kept continuity references to a minimum, and when they were they didn't really do anything to the gene ral line of the story. No Future is a UNIT story, with references to Cybermen, the Meddling Monk, Mawdryn Undead, Battlefield, and one other surprise that I would never expect to see referred to in Doctor Who again (which I want to keep secret in order to not spoil the surprise, because the revelation of which made me just die on the floor laughing).
Unlike Love and War, which I'd recommend to even a casual fan, No Future has enough references to a number of other New Adventures (which I didn't always get), and to a whole number of previous television episodes that I can't give it nearly the same o pinion as I did his other books. To start with, you get a companion from the future leading a punk rock band, joking references to the future, to the program itself, to fandom, and everything else. If you want a book that doesn't take itself or its subje ct to seriously, No Future is a good for a lot of laughs. It has some of the send-up feel of the Williams era Doctor Who (and in fact, it even sends up that particular era with the appearance of a "fictional" Professor X in a Land of Fiction-like plane).
However tempting it might be to only dismiss No Future as a comedy, and having fun with a few of the sillier aspects of the program's history. This would be to neglect one of the important messages I got out of the book -- by taking someone like the Monk, who was only "meddling", and comparing him with the 7th Doctor who leaves notes to himself, casually eliminates entire planets and fleets, almost cruely (and sometimes cynically) manipulating his companions, especially Ace.
My personal tastes lead me to give Love and War a perfect mark, a classic Doctor Who adventure all the way around. No Future is a little too dependent on cute-references to past Doctor Who episodes, but the humor of the book, and the comparison between the Monk and the Doctor gives it a 7.5 out of 10. With the pleasant experience I've had with these two and Goth Opera, if there is a new Doctor Who series on the horizon, it wouldn't hurt the producers at all to consider giving Paul Cornell a job.
Comment from 2005: And guess what, they did!