Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [0]
Shock Tactic
Lawrence Miles
Five years ago, Sam Jones was just a schoolgirl from Shoreditch. Of course, that was before she met up with the Doctor and discovered that her entire life had been stage‐managed by a time‐travelling voodoo cult. Funny, how things turn out, isn’t it?
Now Sam’s back in her own time, fighting the good fight in a world of political treachery, international subterfuge and good old‐fashioned depravity. But she’s about to learn the first great truth of the universe: that however corrupt and amoral your own race may be, there’s always someone in the galaxy who can make you look like a beginner.
Ms Jones has just become a minor player in a million‐year‐old power struggle… and as it happens, so has the Doctor.
Both of him, actually.
Featuring the Third and Eighth Doctors, INTERFERENCE is the first ever full‐length two‐part Doctor Who novel.
* * *
FOREMAN’S WORLD:
MORNING ON THE FIRST DAY
WHAT HAPPENED ON EARTH
(PART ONE)
1: Gibberish
(introducing Mr Llewis and all his neuroses)
2: One of the Good People
(how Sam Jones got to be where she is today)
Travels with Fitz (I)
3: A Day in the Life
(18 August, somewhere a long way from London)
4: Four Rooms
(running around, getting captured, escaping, etc.)
Travels with Fitz (II)
5: Unfortunate Episodes
(Sam finally gets into television)
6: Dog Out of a Machine
(six characters in search of some exits)
Travels with Fitz (III)
7: The Smith Report
(getting to the bottom of things, the old‐fashioned way)
8: Another Day in the Life
(19 August, somewhere a long way from London)
Travels with Fitz (IV)
9: Definitions
(Sam learns a thing or two about the Remote, while Alan Llewis just gets the picture)
10: Nowhere is Better than Here
(at last, Anathema)
Travels with Fitz (V)
11: One Girl and Her Ogron
(the beginning of a beautiful friendship)
12: Faster than the Speed of Dark
(Ancient Gallifrey: The Mini‐series)
Travels with Fitz (VI)
13: The Last Day in the Life
(20 August somewhere a long way from London)
FOREMAN’S WORLD:
AFTERNOON ON THE FIRST DAY
WHAT HAPPENED ON DUST
(PART ONE)
1: Moving Target
(it’s always High Noon somewhere in the universe)
2: Explain Earlier
(how times change)
3: Patterns in the Dust
(the Doctor takes coffee while history unfolds)
4: The Show
(Sarah Jane Smith is not amused)
5: A Fistful of Meanwhiles
(what everyone was doing just before the big fight started)
FOREMAN’S WORLD:
EVENING ON THE FIRST DAY
* * *
Author’s Foreword
Interference is, for the most part, a political thriller. But ‘political’ is a loaded word, especially here in the Doctor Who universe. Let’s be honest, everyone expects us former New Adventures writers to be left‐wing right down to our DNA. ‘Political’ usually means that Sam’s going to spend the book lounging around in a Greenpeace T‐shirt, that Ace is going to start sharing her childhood memories of the Miners’ Strike, and that Prime Minister Thatcher is going to be revealed as the Valeyard in a wobbly rubber mask.
So here’s my personal disclaimer. Interference doesn’t have a left‐wing agenda, any more than it’s got a right‐wing agenda. And neither have I, come to think of it. My handy desktop dictionary tells me that ‘politics’ means ‘the complex of relationships between people in a society’, and, as you’ll soon be finding out, that’s what Interference is all about: the systems that hold our culture together, regardless of who we’re supposed to be voting for. (That said, a lot of the political background to the Earthbound parts of the book is based on fact. Even though the people/companies I’ve mentioned are fictitious – well, mostly – there’s a lot of truth worked into the plot, but I know the BBC lawyers wouldn’t be happy if I told you exactly what’s real and what isn’t. Let’s just say you’d be surprised at some of the things that go on behind the scenes. I know I was. I mean, if you thought Global Chemicals was a shady business interest…)
H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds – the book that pretty much invented twentieth