By Lance Parkin and Lars Pearson

Mad Norwegian, out now

The Doctors’ futures outlined…

Splitting the original (doorstop) edition into three volumes has presented some interesting perspectives on the way in which the writers of Doctor Who and its assorted spin-offs have set their adventures over the past six decades. There seem to have been as many future stories as there were past, but you realise, as you go through this last volume if you’re of the slightly mad enough persuasion to read the whole damn thing chronologically, that the “future” is very much the next three thousand years or so with further bits scattered beyond.

Spin-offs help fill the pages – the entire K-9 series is set a few decades hence so they’re here; the New Adventures had multiple future-based tales; and of course Bernice Summerfield’s exploits are mostly around her own time. The TV series also has its odd multiple entry: in latter pages, Heaven Sent provides the authors with the opportunity to fill space with copy and pasted text (yes, the 12th Doctor is still chipping away at that damn mountain before dying and reappearing…) There’s the odd outlier that throws things – stand up BBC Books’ The Indestructible Man – but there’s a moderate consistency that makes Parkin and Pearson’s efforts not totally like sculpting unset jelly. There’s quite a lot of polite fist-shaking where inconsistencies do occur (the number of different ways that the authors point out such often avoidable errors is fun to read) and there are occasions where they simply have to give up and accept things. Given one of those is caused by the show’s first-ever sequel they don’t really have an option.

The reader has a little more to do here – text was clearly being moved late in the day, and there are quite a few misnumbered footnotes – but on a project of this size (and let’s be honest, jaw-dropping insanity) the fact that only one entry got missed is quite amazing. You might think that with no Who on air in 2019, this would give them some relief… but then look at how much Big Finish and Titan are putting out just this month alone, and you realise that 10 stories is just a drop in the ocean!

Verdict: The completion of the jewel in Mad Norwegian’s crown. 9/10

Paul Simpson