Introducing "Scientific Advisor" in Forgotten Lives 3

There are only two weeks left to order Forgotten Lives 3 from Obverse Books. This is, almost certainly,
the last such collection of adventures for the Forgotten Doctors (AKA the Morbius Doctors, the Mindbend Doctors and the Pre-Doctors), and so my last opportunity to write for the Christopher Baker Doctor and his two children. (Well, excepting anything I write purely for my own enjoyment and post here, but this will be the last in print.)

The first Forgotten Lives was a real treat, taking those eight face in their various hats and false beards and extrapolating them into distinct characters, all unique versions of the Doctor. Andrew Hickey created the Christopher Baker Doctor in “The Cross of Venus,” a wonderful retro-futuristic adventure which introduced this jolly Doctor and the mischievous Jilly and Cedric. I practically begged editor Philip Purser-Hallard to be considered for the second volume, and was fortunate enough that he asked me to submit an idea.

I actually submitted two (there’s another reason for some indulgent fanfic), one for the Baker Doctor and one for his predecessor, PPH’s own creation, the Robert Banks Stewart incarnation. These Doctors – the explorer and doting father, and the wartime occult operative – were the ones who sparked my imagination the most. The second volume was presumably intended as the last, at the time, and was meant to deal with the various Doctors’ regenerations. By the time I was asked to submit, it had changed direction, with two stories for each Doctor, and only a handful involved regeneration. Andrew Hickey gave us another for his Doctor, “Swan Song,” a more melancholy story than his first, while I got to write “The First Englishmen,” very much a silly romp in an lost, imagined past than a lost, imagine future.

I was surprised when PPH asked me to submit another story for the Baker Doctor, with a short turnaround due to the upcoming revamp of the series which, potentially, could make it harder to get away with unauthorised publications. (These things go in waves.) He came up with a brilliant hook for this collection, tying the eight stories together and back to their inspiration. We batted some ideas back and forth, coming back often to the transition between our Doctors. PPH’s story “House of Images” had introduced the Banks Stewart Doctor into a fully realised setting, with his own fascinating companion, Miss Weston. Kenton Hall’s “The Hounds of War” and Matthew Kresal’s “The Rosewell Incident” expanded this, and PPH was now working on a story to move his Doctor and Miss Weston onto the next phase of their story.

Yet this Doctor had no regeneration, so my Doctor had no beginning. This, certain story coincidences, a joke by the first volume’s artist Paul Hanley (whose Doctor portraits were as vital in breathing life into these Doctors as the stories were), allowed us to come up with the bare bones of the story that saw the Banks Stewart Doctor become the Baker Doctor.

"Scientific Advisor" is not that story. It does impact on it, rather heavily, but it isn’t the story either of us wanted to tell. No, my story was informed far more by my own experiences. Between the second volume and my being asked to write for the third, my partner Suzanne and I had a mischievous child of our own. This led me to want to tell a very different story this time, although it also made it much more difficult to find time to sit down and write the thing in the very tight turnaround we had.

I managed it, though, with some much-needed encouragement and support, and a new and essential chapter in the Christopher Baker Doctor’s life is nearly here. So thank you to Philip for working with me and creating this wonderful set of books, Andrew Hickey for giving life to my new favourite Doctor, Suz for making me sit down and work, TVMigraine for being my first, honest-to-goodness fan, and to Astrid for changing how I view my world (through very tired eyes).

I hope you enjoy it, and the stories by seven other wonderful authors.

You can order Forgotten Lives 3 here until the 1st of December 2023.

Announcing Forgotten Lives 3 - available to pre-order until 1st December

I am thrilled to announce that the third and final collection of the Doctor's Forgotten Lives is now available to order from Obverse Books, featuring eight new Doctor Who stories including my second story for the Christopher Baker Doctor and his children Jilly and Cedric.

"How far, Doctor? How long have you lived?'

The Doctor has inhabited countless personas, some of which even he seems to have forgotten.

Long ago, in a deadly battle with a rogue Time Lord, eight of those past lives were brought briefly into focus, only to disappear once more.

Now, those Doctors return, in the final stories from their forgotten lives.

FORGOTTEN LIVES III - Available for pre-order from now until 1 December

https://obversebooks.co.uk/product/forgotten/

Featuring

‘The Seven Scholars and the Storyteller’ by Simon Bucher-Jones (featuring the Christopher Barry Doctor)

‘The Country of the Young’ by Philip Purser-Hallard (featuring the Robert Banks Stewart Doctor)

‘Scientific Advisor’ by Daniel Tessier (featuring the Christopher Baker Doctor)

‘The Swan and the Flame’ by Kara Dennison (featuring the Philip Hinchcliffe Doctor)

‘Hope Springs’ by Chris Wing (featuring the Douglas Camfield Doctor)

‘Admission to the Unknown’ by Ian McIntire (featuring the Graeme Harper Doctor)

‘Who Needs Enemies’ by Jay Eales (featuring the Robert Holmes Doctor)

‘The Lungs of a Birastrop’ by Paul Driscoll (featuring the George Gallaccio Doctor)

Edited by Philip Purser-Hallard.

Cover art by Jon Huff.

Cover design by Cody Schell.

Make sure you order soon - after 1st December all orders will be over and that will be that!

This is an unofficial publication with all profits to Alzheimer charities.

The Forgotten Lives Omnibus - up for preorder

 

I'm very pleased to announce that not only has Obverse Books decided to reprint both volumes of the unofficial Doctor Who collection Forgotten Lives as a single, hardback omnibus edition, but enough pre-orders have come in during just the first week to ensure it's viable to go ahead.

This is a fantastic response, meaning that these stories will get another lease of life, and that more money will be raised for Alzheimer's charities. 

If you missed out on either of the first volumes, now's your chance to get ahold of these limited run stories. The first Forgotten Lives featured, for the first time, stories for all eight of the "Morbius Doctors" - the mysterious faces in fancy attire seen in the Doctor's mind battle with Morbius in the classic serial The Brain of Morbius. It was hinted that these were incarnations of the Doctor from before William Hartnell's incarnation, that we know as the First Doctor, now all but confirmed by the latest revelations in Jodie Whittaker's run.

I reviewed Forgotten Lives here and absolutely loved it, so I was thrilled to be able to contribute to Forgotten Lives 2, writing "The First Englishmen," a story for the Christopher Baker Doctor and his two children. I'm rather proud of that one and had a ball writing it. 

The first volume had one story for each Doctor, with the second doubling that up and featuring an eight-part narrative woven between them. So that's now thirty-two stories you get for £25, plus they're in chronological order from the Doctor's point-of-view, in case you're a neurodivergent pedant like me.

Pre-orders can be made here from Obverse Books.

Forgotten Lives 2 - now available to pre-order!

I am very excited to announce that Forgotten Lives 2, the follow-up to 2020's fantastic Forgotten Lives anthology, is now available to pre-order from Obverse Books. 

Forgotten Lives collected eight stories, one for each of the so-called Morbius Doctors, mysterious regenerations of Doctor Who briefly glimpsed in the Tom Baker serial The Brain of Morbius, and since reinforced by the controversial retcons of "The Timeless Children." 

The second volume brings back the original authors and more, with each of these incarnations having new adventures and enjoying more fascinating exploration. Discover untold chapters of the Doctor's long life, experience new worlds and even glimpse a regeneration or two...

I am very  pleased to have been chosen to write for this collection by editor Philip Purser-Hallard (creator of the remarkable City of the Saved stories). I have contributed "The First Englishmen," an adventure for Morbius Doctor #3, who looks like 20th century TV producer Christopher Baker, and his mischievous children. Of my various silly little Doctor Who stories, this is one of my favourites. I've read the proof of the book, and I have to say, it really is a tremendously strong collection.

All proceeds from Forgotten Lives 2 will be donated to UK Alzheimer's charities. Be sure not to wait too long - the book is set to be released on August 8th 2022, and is only available by pre-ordering. Once these orders are in and they've been published, that'll be it.

Eight Doctors, sixteen authors, twenty-four stories, and a wonderful cover by the fabulous Cody Schell, Forgotten Lives 2 is available to pre-order from Obverse Books at this link right here.

WHO REVIEW: Forgotten Lives, ed. Philip Purser-Hallard

 

It's surprising that it's taken so long for a book like this to appear. We've had anthologies with unknown, invented and alternative Doctors before (such as Unbound and Walking in Eternity, and even to an extent with the BBC's Short Trips and Side Steps), but remarkably, no one has ever sat down and put together a collection revolving around the ever-controversial "Morbius Doctors" before.

Perhaps it's the controversial nature of these mysterious pre-Doctors that has prevented most fans from engaging with them. Fandom has had such a rigidly defined idea of who the Doctor is for so long that versions of the character that contradict this have been thrown out. Even before the eight faces of the Doctor appeared in the mind battle with Morbius, there were more versions of the Doctor than the official four incarnations played by Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee and Tom Baker. The introduction to Forgotten Lives chats happily about these extra versions, from Peter Cushing's eccentric inventor Dr. Who to Trevor Martin's theatrical incarnation, and goes on to say:

"When The Brain of Morbius episode four showed us (and it did so deliberately and, whatever the more conservative species of old-school Doctor Who fan may tell you, with no significant ambiguity) that Hartnell's 'first' Doctor had at least eight predecessors who'd never been on screen, it was really nothing revolutionary – just part of Doctor Who's long history of reinvention and revelation."

This is, of course, completely true. The eight faces seen in The Brain of Morbius were always and explicitly intended to be earlier faces of the Doctor, and while it's possible to interpret them as faces of Morbius or something more contrived, this requires deliberate misreading of the scene. Of course, this contradicted pretty much everything else on screen up to that point and beyond, besides very tiny hints at bits of the Doctor's life we hadn't seen. It was one of those oddities that exist in the series' continuity, which by 1976 was already full of curiosities and contradictions.

Aside from the lightest of touches and one inarguable cameo in Lance Parkin's Missing Adventure Cold Fusion twenty years later, these well-dressed gentlemen (being in actuality production team members in fancy dress) were forgotten about and dismissed by licensed fiction and mostly by fandom at large. Which was a crying shame, because the idea that there were some secret lives before Hartnell's Doctor is just so much fun that it's surely impossible not to want to play with it. Finally, Chris Chibnall's latest season of the revived TV series bombed continuity with the notion that the Doctor has had countless lives before, and explicitly included the Morbius Doctors in this by showing them in the Doctor's bombardment of memories. (Of course, if you wanted to be a real stick in the mud you could insist she was just remembering the mind battle and that they were still the faces of Morbius, but really, where's the fun in that? And would Morbius have such a fine selection of hats?)

So it's now quite right that Obverse Books presents us with a collection of full-fledged adventures for these Doctors, taking those tiny glimpses and extrapolating them into eight new versions of the character. These are timely children, indeed, and whether you're an old-school fan who's been pondering their existence since 1976 or a recent viewer who's desperate to know more about the Doctor's mysterious and ever-contradictory backstory, Forgotten Lives is a must. And nothing here, in The Brain of Morbius or The Timeless Children stops Hartnell from being the First Doctor. He always will be, no matter how many faces retroactively come before him.

Eight authors bring to life eight Doctors, in this beautiful volume illustrated by the uncomparable Paul Hanley, who I believe must have depicted more incarnations of the Doctor than anyone in his artwork. If there's one complaint to be had about the book it's that Hanley's artwork isn't given enough prominence inside, but I understand this is due to costs. Nonetheless, you're missing out if you only see the cover versions and the black-and-white prints at the back of the book, and must check out the full portraits on Hanely's Patreon. However, each of the plates in the book includes a wonderfully silly note on "The Changing Face of Doctor Who" which makes up for the lack of colour and clarity.

The collection kicks off with "The Knocking in the Mine Shaft," which puts the Christopher Barry Doctor, the earliest of these incarnations, in an adventure in historic Cornwall that involves spooky goings on down the tin mines. Drawing on the local folklore of the Knockers – mining goblins with a perfectly sensible name – who naturally turn out to be of a more extraterrestrial origin than expected. The Doctor here is very much a medical doctor, a practising one at that, who goes by the pseudonym of Doctor Medec and has very much assimilated into the local community by the time this adventure starts.

Each story presents a distinct era of the Doctor's life, and the feeling, in general, is that a very long time passes between each one. Collection editor Philip Purser-Hallard presents the next Doctor, portrayed by Robert Banks Stewart, who speaks with a distinct Scottish accent (I had in my head the voice of Bill Paterson as I read the dialogue). While still flitting about time, this Doctor has a base in WWII London where he acts as an observer for his superiors, while also being the most alchemical of this always mercurial character. The story is told by his secretary, the charming Miss Weston, who joins him on his investigation into what's essentially a vintage take on Terror of the Autons, but both funnier and more atmospheric than that implies. There's a fair bit of The Avengers (Steed and Peel, not Marvel) in there too. This Doctor has some of my favourite characterisation in the book, really coming alive on the page via the tellings of Miss Weston. His bow-tied far future self would be very disappointed in his lack of knowledge when it comes to silent comedy, though.

The Doctor's lives span long enough that we hear of multiple different families, but only in Andrew Hickey's "The Cross of Venus" do we actually see them. Featuring the Christopher Baker Doctor, this story feels rather like one from an old World Distributors annual, except that it's very good indeed. It's a clever extrapolation backwards (a backstrapolation?) to the 1940s, imagining how Doctor Who might have existed then, and sees the characters travel to the distant space year 1975 and the first manned mission to Venus. There's some clever playing with expectations when it comes to the nature of the villain, but the most striking element of the story is that the Doctor is travelling with his two precocious children Jilly and Cedric. They're wonderfully drawn characters, and I can't help but wonder... is one of them the parent of John and Gillian?

Based purely on the fleeting images of the Doctors, my favourite was always the fourth (or fifth in the reverse-order they were shown): Phillip Hinchcliffe's Cavalier incarnation. With so little to go on but their fabulous outfits, it's not surprising that many of these Doctors make a big deal of their clothes, and this flamboyant fancypants is no exception. He's only just regenerated, allowing for an age spent in the TARDIS fixing his look. This Doctor's wonderfully full of himself and I love him for it, sashaying onto a planet and immediately getting locked up, and naturally taking it upon himself to overturn the entire civilisation's corrupt legal system. Kara Dennison's "Gauntlet of Absolution" is a cracking adventure.

At the halfway point comes the only Morbius Doctor to have appeared in licenced print fiction before, the blond and bearded Douglas Camfield incarnation. This version always looked like a real charmer, but interestingly, Lance Parkin takes a darker, more serious view of him in "Past Lives." Parkin, of course, is the one writer who absolutely had to write for this collection without fail, and his story, while the briefest, is one of the most fitting thematically. Dealing with a Doctor seeking to secure justice against galactic war criminals, this story says a lot about retribution and responsbility with admirable restraint. I also feel that this is what Chibnall's version of the forgotten Doctor was trying to be, rather than what we got. However the Thirteenth Doctor complains about how harsh and ruthless Jo Martin's Fugitive Doctor is, her actions are no different to what we've seen various Doctors do before. The Camfield Doctor seems like he could genuinely take a step too far.

Aditia Bidikar has a unique voice within Obverse Books and Doctor Who fiction and it's always fascinating. "Valhalla Must Fall!" is a strange and intriguing tale that covers things from millennia-old virtual lives to a sentient mountain. In amongst these mind-bending concepts (careful, your brain case might explode) is the Graeme Harper Doctor, and the character has never seemed more otherwordly and mysterious. Each of these Doctors has their own parallel story in Hanley's illustrations, but with Harper's it's truly a whole adventure, as Hanley not only discovered a remarkable truth about the director's appearance in that odd costume but (with a nudge from Cody Schell) made this Doctor less gender-specific than we might have thought. Bidikar's story goes out of its way to never refer to the Doctor by any pronoun – they're always "the Doctor" – and so salt-of-the-earth bloke Harper becomes the face of a genderqueer incarnation.

Jay Eales provides the penultimate story, "The Other Side," and it's one of the best in the book, a storming adventure story which sees the Doctor land in a civilisation seemingly split in two by an alien forcefield. A rather Orwellian story of abuse of power, it sees the Robert Holmes Doctor, resplendent in his finery and chewing on his pipe, acting as a rather unwilling agent for the Time Lords. Rather like the Black Widow in The Avengers (Marvel, not Steed and Peel), this Doctor has red in his ledger and is only going along with these missions because he's trying to tip the balance back in the right direction. Plus, he's kind of kept on a lead. While he's perhaps the most troubled Doctor, he's also tremendously charismatic, forcing his way through the story on sheer personality. Things don't always go to plan for this incarnation though, and an unexpected encounter with his own future sees him at his most vulnerable.

Finally, the eighth of the pre-Doctors stars in Paul Driscoll's "Doctor Crocus and the Pages of Fear." George Gallaccio's Doctor always looked like the most fun travel with out of the eight, based more on the extra behind-the-scenes photos which showed him with a lovely, twinkling smile. Driscoll's jumped on that, with this dimpled Doctor revelling in his appearance as just "made for the 1880s." However, he arrives in what would be a contemporary adventure for an incarnation set before Hartnell and just starting out, so it's predominantly in the 1950s. The story deals with the notorious moral panic around comicbooks at that time, which is just like the moral panic around heavy metal in the 1990s and violent video games in the 2000s. It's quite right that the Doctor would be repelled by the idea that children can be warped by slightly dangerous adventure stories, games or music, but this is just the doorway into a ripping sci-fi adventure.

I really can't praise this collection enough. Each of the eight stories is a great success and each Doctor a bold and unique version of the character. It's an excellent set of stories and I recommend it heartily to any Doctor Who fan who's looking to broaden their horizons within the show. My only gripe is that I'm tremendously envious I wasn't involved.

Forgotten Lives available for pre-order

 Obverse Books hae announced that their new unofficial Doctor Who anthology Forgotten Lives is now available for pre-order. I'm sorry to say I wasn't involved in this - god, I wish I had been - but it looks like something really exciting and I'll definitely be reviewing it. Plus, all the profits to Alzheimers charities which is an excellent cause. 

Forgotten Lives features stories about the mysterious "Morbius Doctors," the eight faces seen in the mind battle during the Tom Baker serial The Brain of Morbius. During that scene, the two Time Lords fought with their minds, and on a monitor we first saw the face of Morbius, followed by the Doctor's. Then, as Morbius forced him "back... back to your very beginnings!" the images went through Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell... and then further, to show four other men in various period costumes. These were all backroon boys including writers and directors, and while it's possible to interpret them as faces of Morbius's earlier incarnations, it takes a willful misreading of the scene to do that. They were always meant to be earlier Doctors, the people responsible for the scene (who put their own pictures up) said as much. But, this is very difficult to reconcile with the rest of the series, and it's vague enough to explain away as Morbius.

But some of us always believed these mysterious men were Doctors, and finally, this year in "The Timeless Children," we got seeming confirmation that these were earlier faces of the Doctor before they got their memories wiped. I think this project started before that revelation, but it's a handy back-up and makes this more relevant than it otherwise would have been.

The authors include Lance Parkin (who had to be included, as the Morbius Doctor's novel champion), Simon Bucher-Jones, Philip Purser-Hallard and more excellent authors. Plus, Paul Hanley has made a project of illustrating the mysterious Doctors, taking the glimpses we saw on screen and beyond and creating whole looks for them to tie into the stories. You can see the pictures and read about the process on his Patreon, which includes a free blog. I adore these new pictures, each one giving each new Doctor their own personality and hinted at backstory. The Gallaccio Doctor has a Dr. Doolittle-esque style to him; the Camfield Doctor is a romantic adventurer all in purple; the Hincliffe Doctor (always my favourite) is a glam rock Cavalier; the Barry Doctor is a mix of Jimi Hendrix and Elizabethan courtier; the Holmes Doctor is an Enlightenment-era swashbuckler with a gleam in his eye; the Banks Stewart Doctor looks like some kind of Renaissance natural philosopher; the C. Baker Doctor is a Georgian astronaut; and the Harper Doctor is such an amazing story of deduction, creativity and thrown expectations that you should really just go and see for yourselves.

And all that's "just" the artwork. Imagine what the stories are like! Forgotten Lives is available to order from Obverse Books for £16.95 (plus shipping).