A Target For Tommy

No amusing caption, it's for charity.
A love of Doctor Who pervades everything I've ever written, with only the possible exception of my Casanova translation. Even my MPhil Film Studies thesis was inspired by the eye for screen violence that 80s Doctor Who gave me, and I'm still smirking over the fact that I not only managed to shoehorn Marc Platt's Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible into the bibliography for an essay on Beckett in 1997, but that the citation about "concurrent time strands" was relevant enough that I didn't even get a bollocking for it.

It goes without saying that I've always wanted to write Doctor Who.

Now, a bunch of brilliant writers have got together to create a fanthology of Doctor Who fiction to support Tommy Donbavand in his fight against cancer. Tommy is a brilliant writer, and a thoroughly nice chap, and this is an excellent book, so really you have three reasons to go and buy a copy from Obverse Publishing here!

My own story is called Time War Cutaway and is a segment from my attempt to novelise the Time War from Doctor Who.

Without going into spoiler territory, it's always annoyed me that when the series talked about the Time War, it was this big, grim, apocalyptic nightmare. It was a good hook to drive a relaunched series of Doctor Who in 2005, but it never sounded like the sort of war that would actually happen within the series (and I was proved right in 2013, when we did finally get to see some of it, and of course the fearsome Time War turned out to be a wonderfully cheap three Daleks in a street). I thought that really the Time War would be much like most good Doctor Who: full of horror and danger, but also moments of charm, wit, and pure whimsy. So I went to work to tell that story. The prologue began with the Daleks finding the 4th Doctor and Romana in E-Space, before a lengthy first volume in which the 7th Doctor and Ace uncover a Dalek attempt to infiltrate Gallifrey through the Matrix.

The story in A Target For Tommy picks up at the start of the second volume, with the War underway, and the 8th Doctor not quite fitting into his new role as a military leader. A... very different kind of assassination attempt reveals that the Daleks have made an audacious attempt to spy on Gallifrey, a tactic that has altered the very fabric of reality...

Paperback copies of this book are already incredibly close to selling out, so do take a look.

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