Transit

By Ben Aaronovitch

In the 1990s there was no Doctor Who. The BBC had killed the TV series off, the movie was only a twinkle in someone's eye and Russell T. Davies was then only writing fan-fic.
For a while, five years even, there were novels, Virgin's New Adventures series. Some were terrible, some quite good. I'd downloaded a couple with the aim of lending to a friend (why do people imagine that PDF is a sensible format for fiction?) and so wound up pretty much speed reading the book while reformatting it into something user friendly.
Transit was one of the first dozen published, and the first I read. In the old days Doctor Who novels had always been aimed at kids, and rather shockingly, this was not. There was a deliberate attempt to make this 'real' grown up SF, not just a TV friendly adaptation.
The Doctor of the 90s novels was the Seventh Doctor, the one from the last season, only more so. Mysterious and manipulative, you could never quite be sure that he could be trusted, that he didn't see anybody as a pawn to sacrifice in order to achieve mate.
To be perfectly honest this was a pretty bad book to start with, there was a new companion, and the story was pretty much 'throw them in at the deep end. But it delivered.

Looking over the New Adventures I'd guess that there are probably only about eight really worth re-reading nearly twenty years on. (20 years. Jeez.) I don't think it's a co-incidence that two of them were written by Ben Aaronovitch. Of whom I shall write more later.