Spoilers
lurk below so don’t read until you have bought and read the book in question!
DOCTOR
WHO NOVEL IDEA #1: CLOSED CIRCUIT
Tone: Timey-wimey Sapphire & Steel extremely
scary ghost story. Earth, 2011/1925.
You’re in a
shop, and spot yourself on a closed-circuit surveillance screen. You see yourself,
shot from above, in fuzzy black and white.
There is
something standing behind you. A shadowy, goblin-like creature, the size of a
child but with an aged, gnarled face. You turn to look – but there’s nothing
there. You look back at the screen – to see that the creature is still there,
closer. Looking up at the monitor, looking directly at you, smiling mockingly.
You turn again – there’s still nothing there. You look back at the screen – and
the creature is perched on your back, as though about to bite.
The Doctor,
Amy and Rory arrive in a deserted studio. Something terrible has happened. They
discover that the studio was restoring some newly-discovered old footage; the
very first television broadcast. But there was something else in that
broadcast. A creature, trapped in a recording like a fly in amber. A creature
with the ability to move from television to television through wires, tapes and
broadcasts. A creature which is now part of a ‘live transmission’, so it can
interact with, and kill, anyone who is appearing on a television screen it has
access to.
It’s been
removing people from existence, leaving them trapped inside video recordings.
The Doctor and Amy examine the recordings. They spot the creature, then rewind
it for a closer look, only to find it’s not there the second time. They free
one of the technicians responsible, a man driven half-mad and terrified of ever
being captured by a television camera.
The Doctor is
determined to trap this creature again, but then Amy makes a discovery. One of
the tapes features a recording of the three of them! The three of them are
freed and say they are the Doctor, Amy and Rory’s future selves. Apparently at
some point in the future they travel back in time to the invention of the
television and end up trapped by the creature. So the Doctor, Amy and Rory have
to work out whether the ‘new’ Doctor, Amy and Rory are their future selves – or
sinister creations of the creature designed to trick them?
It’s the
latter, of course. The duplicate Doctor not only frees the creature, but makes
a copy of it, so there are now hundreds of them. It escapes into the outside
world – meaning that anyone who is picked up by a closed-circuit surveillance
camera is now under threat. Our heroes are trapped, because there’s hardly anywhere
you can go without being spotted by a
camera.
How to defeat
it? The clue lies in the fact that the creature made duplicates of the Doctor
and co., meaning they must have been present at the time the creature was
trapped. So they travel back in time to see this moment – and meet John Logie
Baird. They also find out that the creature took its form from the first thing
seen on television – a melted ventriloquist’s dummy, Stooky Bill. The second
people to ever be seen on television are, of course, the Doctor, Amy and Rory.
As people
turn on their televisions to see this creature in the background of BBC
Breakfast and other shows... it’s up to the Doctor to defeat it by setting a
trap in 1925 that will only be sprung in the year 2011.
DOCTOR
WHO NOVEL IDEA #2: THE PARADOX MAN
Tone: Timey-wimey tear-jerking love story with
alien robot mantises. Earth, 2011/1983/1999.
Harold
Fletcher is obsessed with a mysterious figure from the latter half of the 20th
century, a Mr McIntyre. There are four odd things about McIntyre. One, he
appeared as though from nowhere in 1983. Two, he vanished in the year 1999.
Three, he became extremely wealthy through numerous prescient investments, yet
used his wealth to keep the fact of his wealth secret. And four – he looks exactly
like Harold’s father. Or an older version of Harold himself.
Harold is in
his early 50s and greatly misses his wife Jane, who died around the year 1999.
In an archive
on McIntyre, Harold discovers a folder of notes addressed to him, detailing how
to find the Doctor... and to inform the Doctor of all his suspicions.
The Doctor is
quick to realise the truth. McIntyre is not Harold’s father – he is Harold
himself, who has somehow found a way to travel back in time to 1983. But how
did he get back there? The Doctor, Amy and Rory head back to 1983 in the TARDIS
to discover the answer – little realising they have a stowaway in the form of
Harold.
Finding
himself in his own past, Harold at first makes the mistake of trying to contact
his earlier self/his parents – creating a brief temporal schism. The Doctor
warns Harold of the consequences of changing his own past. But that doesn’t
mean that Harold (as McIntyre) can’t leave himself notes, because he already
has a folder full of such notes which means he has no choice but to do so – and
these notes allow him to stay one step ahead of the Doctor.
Except we
soon learn that it wasn’t Harold who left these notes for himself. The notes
are, in fact, leading him into a trap. Because the temporal schism has
attracted dreadful aliens that resemble man-sized robotic praying mantises.
They are searching for an anachronistic Time Traveller. Why? Because they want
a time paradox to be created, because the resulting energy is just the right
sort of energy they need to survive. These are creatures that evolved during
the time-war, feeding on temporal energy. They will stop at nothing to force
Harold to change history – and have intercepted his notes-to-self and
substituted them with their own.
The Doctor,
Amy and Rory encounter these creatures and prevent them creating a paradox, but
then they are blasted forward in time to the year 1999. There they see
Harold/McIntyre, now as an old man. He is wealthy and has spent the intervening
years quietly influencing the destiny of his younger self, Great
Expectations-style, to make sure his younger self becomes obsessed by this
mysterious ‘McIntyre’ figure and thus completes the time circuit.
However,
Harold remembers that 1999 was the year his wife was killed – and he can’t
resist the opportunity to save her life. But this will cause a paradox – which
is precisely what the robotic mantises want to happen and just what the Doctor
doesn’t want to happen. Can the Doctor to convince Harold to do the right
thing? In the end they do, with Harold prepared to sacrifice his own life, and
allowing his wife to die as before, in order to defeat the monsters.
But Harold
doesn’t sacrifice his own life. The Doctor instead, as a reward, takes him back
in time in the TARDIS to see his younger self meeting the girl who will become
his wife for the first time. Harold even has the opportunity to speak to her,
though she doesn’t know who he is. Then the Doctor deposits Harold back in the
present day, 27-odd years older but wiser.
