NA10: Transit

In which there’s finally a Doctor Who story about trains.

Published: December 1992

Read: March 2021

I read this one because, as well as being the next story from the writer of Remembrance of the Daleks and Battlefield, it’s the only one of his two-and-a-half NAs I didn’t love as a kid. So what was I missing?

Still feels very futuristic – it’s odd to think this is now halfway through Doctor Who – and like Timewyrm: Revelation is unselfconsciously both fanboyish and novelistic. It uses continuity as fuel – The Seeds of Death, the Lethbridge-Stewarts, maybe even hints of The Sunmakers with the Pluto sections – but it’s not a story about continuity, it’s just using it as bricks.

And like Revelation it feels like maybe Steven Moffat took a lot from this. The stuff about the Doctor’s inner life (we literally hear his thoughts in places) and his decision to wipe records of himself from Earth’s history both feel like huge influences.

I’m not entirely sure what we’re meant to think of Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart. She fills the companion role, but both rejects and is rejected from it at the end – and it’s never fully articulated whether we’re meant to be scared of or root for her. Strange decision to sideline Benny in her second story too – I’m guessing she wasn’t fully developed when Aaronovitch started writing? [This and the previous book, Paul Cornell’s Love and War, were developed in parallel, each featuring a potential new companion.]

My god though the world building is incredible. The decision to set a story in the shadow of a war that happened a generation back feels like the writer thinking of Britain in the ‘60s. The way the cast are so casually international – all the Africa stuff, especially. The references to the Paris rock and Australian famine. People with multiple spouses.

Funny how large chunks of it are set in a virtual reality too – clearly something in the air in the early ‘90s as this is a huge theme in every story I’ve revisited so far.

Anyway. Proper brilliant expansionist Doctor Who story, as radical in its way as TW:R – and this time from a proper Who telly writer. Baffled i didn’t love it the first time around really.

And it’s about trains. Next up: more VR, as the 3rd Doctor and Sarah visit The Paradise of Death.