NA23: No Future

In which Paul Cornell continues to invent modern Doctor Who.

Published: February 1994

Read: April 2021

It came out about two months late, but this is absolutely, definitely the real 30th anniversary story. So there.

Things that struck me on this read:

1) It’s (forgive the cliche, but needs must) a love letter to all of Doctor Who. The Monk, the Land of Fiction, the Chronovores, the Vardans, UNIT, the Cartmel Masterplan... There’s something from all eras in there. JNT is a minor character in it, FFS. It doesn’t play the game of pretending that some Doctor Who counts more than other bits. [This felt like a big thing in the ‘90s, when fandom was in the hands of a generation who thought the ‘60s still was only half formed, and the ‘80s were a long decline, and only the 1970s could provide proper, proper Who.]

2) It uses continuity as a source of symbols, archetypes or fuel. It’s an approach kind of there in Revelation or Transit, and probably other books I’ve not re-read too, but this one really goes with it. For the first time the Brig is explicitly the Doctor’s best friend. Mike is probably gay, etc. “The rest of Doctor Who definitely happened, so what does it mean” is an approach Lance Parkin would explicitly take in The Dying Days (the Doctor “dying” and disappearing for a few dozen pages feels like a direct lift?) and The Gallifrey Chronicles, and which Moffat basically put on television for eight years.

3) It’s striking that the viewpoint character is the one of the regulars who never appeared on television but who feels as real as any of the others. 

4) The Doctor, even the game-playing master manipulator one, is also a real person here... We feel his pain, there’s a scene with a riot on the train and a kid basically dying in the Doctor’s arms. The NAs in general but Cornell in particular really bring the idea that the Doctor’s adventures have an emotional cost – that being witness to so much suffering hurts. That’s something largely absent from the original series – the only example that leaps to mind is the end of The Daleks’ Master Plan – but impossible to imagine the current show without.

5) The scene where the Doctor and Benny wander through the mediasphere, and it’s the psyche of contemporary Britain, taking the form of popular TV characters... That’s basically the book’s approach to the history it portrays, a collage of bits of half remembered pop culture and news clips. It’s also the approach RTD would take to history with the new show.

I think No Future might be as influential as Timewyrm: Revelation, maybe more so. Its approach to continuity, the series’ history, intertextuality, the recent past, how to characterise the regulars... Tt does a whole bunch of stuff the series never had before but now does all the time. It also includes a wise cracking and flirtatious US military captain who is not remotely what he seems .

And at the end, the characters all go to the Tav. [The Fitzroy Tavern, for decades whom to a monthly fan pub meet on the first Thursday of every month.]