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Past Doctor Adventures #36
Doctor Who: Independence Day
The TARDIS lands on the planet Mendeb, where Ace meets a merchant adventurer named Kedin. She falls for him, seduces him -- and then discovers him to be a slave trader. When, horrified, she tries to flee, he feeds her the will-sapping spore drug that turns independent citizens into obedient slaves, and sells her. The Doctor is on a mission to liberate the Mendeb slaves and lead them in revolt against the emperor Vathran -- but can they survive without the support of their generous employers? Meanwhile, Ace finds herself sold into the henads of Kedin's arch-enemy Vathran, where she learns the reason for Kedin's slave trading -- Vathran has imprisoned Kedin's family and is threatening to have them put to death.
286 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published October 15, 2000
1 person is currently reading
223 people want to read
About the author
Peter Darvill-Evans
14 books6 followersPeter Darvill-Evans is an English writer and editor.
He was born and lived in Buckinghamshire until he went to university, graduating in 1975 from University College, London with a degree in History.
In 1976 Darvill-Evans joined the staff of Games Centre, a specialist games shop in London. He became the manager of a branch of the shop, then manager of wholesale sales, selling board games and eventually role-playing games.
In 1979 he became employed by Games Workshop, becoming first its Trade Sales Manager, then General Manager, responsible for purchases, sales, distribution and magazine publishing. When Games Workshop relocated to Nottingham, Darvill-Evans left the company, preferring to stay in London. He then wrote his first of three Fighting Fantasy gamebooks for Puffin Books.
In 1989, he became the a junior editor at W. H. Allen Ltd, initially overseeing the Target Books imprint. He also oversaw the Nexus imprint of erotic fiction for men, redesigning its logo and cover style as well as changing its editorial direction.
Target's main output was novelisations of the popular science-fiction television series Doctor Who, and when Darvill-Evans arrived he immediately realised that there were very few Doctor Who stories left to novelise. This problem was exacerbated by the cancellation of the television series at the end of 1989. When WH Allen sold the Nexus and Doctor Who lines to Virgin Publishing, Darvill-Evans went with them. Deciding to go freelance, he was made redundant at his own request, and entered negotiations with the BBC to licence Virgin to produce full-length, original novels carrying on the story of the series from the point where the television programme had left off.
Launched in 1991, this hugely successful line of novels were known as the New Adventures. Darvill-Evans set down guidelines for the writers, and even wrote one novel himself, Deceit. Other output from the Virgin fiction department during his time there included another series of Doctor Who novels (the Missing Adventures, featuring previous Doctors and companions); a series of novels following the character of Bernice Summerfield; the Virgin Worlds imprint of new mainstream science-fiction and fantasy novels. Non-science fiction lines included Black Lace, the first mainstream erotic fiction imprint targeted at women; the Crime and Passion imprint; Idol, a homoerotic fiction imprint for men; and Sapphire, a lesbian erotica line.
Other successes included media-tie in books such as the Red Dwarf Programme Guide, which served as the template for guides about other cult television series, and a series of novelisations based on the Jimmy McGovern-scripted series Cracker starring Robbie Coltrane.
By 1997, however, Virgin Publishing decided to emphasise more non-fiction books by and about celebrities. Their license renewal negotiations fell in 1996, a year in which the BBC was seeking to bring all the Doctor Who licenses back in house. Consequently Virgin's Doctor Who license was not renewed and instead the BBC opted to launch their own series of Doctor Who novels. In 1998, Darvill-Evans managed the editing and production of Virgin’s Guide to British Universities, and personally supervised the copy-editing and proofreading of Richard Branson's autobiography Losing My Virginity.
Virgin closed its fiction department in 1999, with Darvill-Evans departing the company and moving to Southampton. He continued to freelance, writing several Doctor Who novels for BBC Books, amongst various other editing and writing work.
In 2001 he began working for the Inland Revenue, and is currently an Inspector of Taxe
He was born and lived in Buckinghamshire until he went to university, graduating in 1975 from University College, London with a degree in History.
In 1976 Darvill-Evans joined the staff of Games Centre, a specialist games shop in London. He became the manager of a branch of the shop, then manager of wholesale sales, selling board games and eventually role-playing games.
In 1979 he became employed by Games Workshop, becoming first its Trade Sales Manager, then General Manager, responsible for purchases, sales, distribution and magazine publishing. When Games Workshop relocated to Nottingham, Darvill-Evans left the company, preferring to stay in London. He then wrote his first of three Fighting Fantasy gamebooks for Puffin Books.
In 1989, he became the a junior editor at W. H. Allen Ltd, initially overseeing the Target Books imprint. He also oversaw the Nexus imprint of erotic fiction for men, redesigning its logo and cover style as well as changing its editorial direction.
Target's main output was novelisations of the popular science-fiction television series Doctor Who, and when Darvill-Evans arrived he immediately realised that there were very few Doctor Who stories left to novelise. This problem was exacerbated by the cancellation of the television series at the end of 1989. When WH Allen sold the Nexus and Doctor Who lines to Virgin Publishing, Darvill-Evans went with them. Deciding to go freelance, he was made redundant at his own request, and entered negotiations with the BBC to licence Virgin to produce full-length, original novels carrying on the story of the series from the point where the television programme had left off.
Launched in 1991, this hugely successful line of novels were known as the New Adventures. Darvill-Evans set down guidelines for the writers, and even wrote one novel himself, Deceit. Other output from the Virgin fiction department during his time there included another series of Doctor Who novels (the Missing Adventures, featuring previous Doctors and companions); a series of novels following the character of Bernice Summerfield; the Virgin Worlds imprint of new mainstream science-fiction and fantasy novels. Non-science fiction lines included Black Lace, the first mainstream erotic fiction imprint targeted at women; the Crime and Passion imprint; Idol, a homoerotic fiction imprint for men; and Sapphire, a lesbian erotica line.
Other successes included media-tie in books such as the Red Dwarf Programme Guide, which served as the template for guides about other cult television series, and a series of novelisations based on the Jimmy McGovern-scripted series Cracker starring Robbie Coltrane.
By 1997, however, Virgin Publishing decided to emphasise more non-fiction books by and about celebrities. Their license renewal negotiations fell in 1996, a year in which the BBC was seeking to bring all the Doctor Who licenses back in house. Consequently Virgin's Doctor Who license was not renewed and instead the BBC opted to launch their own series of Doctor Who novels. In 1998, Darvill-Evans managed the editing and production of Virgin’s Guide to British Universities, and personally supervised the copy-editing and proofreading of Richard Branson's autobiography Losing My Virginity.
Virgin closed its fiction department in 1999, with Darvill-Evans departing the company and moving to Southampton. He continued to freelance, writing several Doctor Who novels for BBC Books, amongst various other editing and writing work.
In 2001 he began working for the Inland Revenue, and is currently an Inspector of Taxe
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 31, 2019
The Seventh Doctor and Ace arrive on Mendeb after the Time Lord realises that he needs to return a piece of communication equipment after a previous visit in his Second incarnation.
This had such potential to be a great novel, I like stories that focuses on the Doctor’s implications on the universe.
Especially the subject of slavery, but this one just fell flat.
Almost all the BBC novels featuring this TARDIS team are set directly after the TV story Survival, where as the Virgin New Adventures matures the characters (especially Ace).
Darvill-Evans was the range editor of them books and it feels like this story is set somewhere amongst them.
I’ve not read any of those books and subsequently didn’t like the way Ace was written here.
The promiscuous antics of practically sleeping with the first guy she met didn’t feel right.
In truth this novel has put me off reading that range!
This had such potential to be a great novel, I like stories that focuses on the Doctor’s implications on the universe.
Especially the subject of slavery, but this one just fell flat.
Almost all the BBC novels featuring this TARDIS team are set directly after the TV story Survival, where as the Virgin New Adventures matures the characters (especially Ace).
Darvill-Evans was the range editor of them books and it feels like this story is set somewhere amongst them.
I’ve not read any of those books and subsequently didn’t like the way Ace was written here.
The promiscuous antics of practically sleeping with the first guy she met didn’t feel right.
In truth this novel has put me off reading that range!
December 13, 2025
2.5
The original New Adventures editor returns with a pretty straightforward “slave uprising” story that favours action and world-building over characterisation. You can tell he’s mapped out his planets if nothing else.
There are shades of the darkness and ambiguity of the NAs in most of the characters’ actions, but none of that really pays off, creating an oddly uncertain tone. The Doctor for example is responsible for the problems here, but he never has to answer for it, and an attempt is made to give Ace more (ahem) independence but it doesn’t ring true, if anything selling her short instead. The supporting characters are all murky and unpleasant but the book doesn’t seem to notice.
It’s somewhat diverting as SF/fantasy fodder, but it could have been something more.
The original New Adventures editor returns with a pretty straightforward “slave uprising” story that favours action and world-building over characterisation. You can tell he’s mapped out his planets if nothing else.
There are shades of the darkness and ambiguity of the NAs in most of the characters’ actions, but none of that really pays off, creating an oddly uncertain tone. The Doctor for example is responsible for the problems here, but he never has to answer for it, and an attempt is made to give Ace more (ahem) independence but it doesn’t ring true, if anything selling her short instead. The supporting characters are all murky and unpleasant but the book doesn’t seem to notice.
It’s somewhat diverting as SF/fantasy fodder, but it could have been something more.
October 30, 2021
Peter Darvill-Evans is a writer who should understand what makes Doctor Who work. He edited most of the Virgin New Adventures and Virgin Missing Adventures, contributed Deceit as a test to see if he could constrain himself to the requirements. Yet, he didn’t write for Virgin after Deceit, but BBC Books would contract him for a Seventh Doctor Past Doctor Adventure, bringing him back to Doctor Who with some fanfare. Independence Day is a novel with a plot that should work on every level, Darvill-Evans plays around with a mix of science fiction and historical fiction with a binary planet system where a space station hangs while the society below doesn’t have the technology to make a space station. Invaders arrive, capture and drug the locals, ready to bring them into slavery. This should be the perfect setup for a story, and from one of the minds involved in bringing the Virgin New Adventures together means the Seventh Doctor and Ace should be great, but Independence Day falls flat at almost every turn in the tale. The odd trend of including the Second Doctor and Jamie McCrimmon in books for small cameos in prologues with a prologue which really isn’t necessary for the setup, if this were a television story it might be mentioned in passing near the beginning. Sure Darvill-Evans has a handle on their characterization, but once we move into the Seventh Doctor and Ace, there’s less of a spark in the writing making the reader long for more of the prologue.
There isn’t any direction in how Darvill-Evans characterizes the Doctor and Ace here which is one of the problems with the book. Now I wasn’t expecting anything to be referencing the Virgin New Adventures development or characterization, but the blurb on the back says this is a long time after Survival implying that a lot of time has passed while the Doctor is barely recognizable as the Seventh Doctor and Ace is barely recognizable as Ace. The Seventh Doctor is the Doctor, the one helping out wherever he can which is great and the scenes where he takes control of the situation, analyzing what drugs are in the soup and rallying the people behind him are there, but you never get the sense that he is in control of the situation. He doesn’t really have a plan, despite the implication that the situation which the prologue lays out as something the Doctor meant to come back to, but he doesn’t actually know anything that’s been going on throughout the book. It comes across more as a generic Doctor, perhaps closer to the Fourth Doctor, but the expectation was that Darvill-Evans would write for the Seventh Doctor, so for the Seventh Doctor Independence Day becomes.
Ace is perhaps treated somehow worse. Now for the first third of the novel she’s fine, portrayed as if we were still around Season 25 or 26, but fine. There’s some great little moments where we get inside her head and see how she’s reacting to travels with the Doctor and how their relationship is changing, one of the few things that makes this feel like a Seventh Doctor book, but then she’s just kind of pushed aside and forgotten about. Well not forgotten about, but hypnotized and brainwashed and possibly assaulted. Darvill-Evans’s biggest issue in Deceit was perhaps the portrayal of sex and LGBT characters, something I didn’t mention in my original review due to ignorance and the folly of youth, and that hasn’t actually improved here. Ace, spending much of the book in essentially a trance where the either becomes really docile or really aggressive depending on the scene ends up having sex with a character and the vibes of that scene are off. It feels like it bleeds into some issues with consent and once again Darvill-Evans makes the reader in a very odd position as this is a very weird book to read. His prose is also incredibly dense, making the 280 page novel feel all the longer. This is not in a larger wordcount, but in a stylistic manner where there is the sense of little movement. The chapters are also incredibly long when they really don’t need to be, contributing to the pacing issues.
Overall, Independence Day is a novel that should at least work as a decent Doctor Who story but it falls flat through some generally poor characterization and a plot which treads stories that we’ve seen before and done better elsewhere. There’s also Darvill-Evans’ issues with Ace and her subplot which contributes to a book which already suffered from pacing issues. 4/10.
There isn’t any direction in how Darvill-Evans characterizes the Doctor and Ace here which is one of the problems with the book. Now I wasn’t expecting anything to be referencing the Virgin New Adventures development or characterization, but the blurb on the back says this is a long time after Survival implying that a lot of time has passed while the Doctor is barely recognizable as the Seventh Doctor and Ace is barely recognizable as Ace. The Seventh Doctor is the Doctor, the one helping out wherever he can which is great and the scenes where he takes control of the situation, analyzing what drugs are in the soup and rallying the people behind him are there, but you never get the sense that he is in control of the situation. He doesn’t really have a plan, despite the implication that the situation which the prologue lays out as something the Doctor meant to come back to, but he doesn’t actually know anything that’s been going on throughout the book. It comes across more as a generic Doctor, perhaps closer to the Fourth Doctor, but the expectation was that Darvill-Evans would write for the Seventh Doctor, so for the Seventh Doctor Independence Day becomes.
Ace is perhaps treated somehow worse. Now for the first third of the novel she’s fine, portrayed as if we were still around Season 25 or 26, but fine. There’s some great little moments where we get inside her head and see how she’s reacting to travels with the Doctor and how their relationship is changing, one of the few things that makes this feel like a Seventh Doctor book, but then she’s just kind of pushed aside and forgotten about. Well not forgotten about, but hypnotized and brainwashed and possibly assaulted. Darvill-Evans’s biggest issue in Deceit was perhaps the portrayal of sex and LGBT characters, something I didn’t mention in my original review due to ignorance and the folly of youth, and that hasn’t actually improved here. Ace, spending much of the book in essentially a trance where the either becomes really docile or really aggressive depending on the scene ends up having sex with a character and the vibes of that scene are off. It feels like it bleeds into some issues with consent and once again Darvill-Evans makes the reader in a very odd position as this is a very weird book to read. His prose is also incredibly dense, making the 280 page novel feel all the longer. This is not in a larger wordcount, but in a stylistic manner where there is the sense of little movement. The chapters are also incredibly long when they really don’t need to be, contributing to the pacing issues.
Overall, Independence Day is a novel that should at least work as a decent Doctor Who story but it falls flat through some generally poor characterization and a plot which treads stories that we’ve seen before and done better elsewhere. There’s also Darvill-Evans’ issues with Ace and her subplot which contributes to a book which already suffered from pacing issues. 4/10.
October 3, 2021
Peter Darvill-Evans' "Independence Day" is a bit of a mishmash of multiple elements that do not quite come together. The plot is basically rescue the princess from the tower, done twice. The setting is the twin planet system of Mendeb Two and Mendeb Three. The novel has a little vignette opening with Doctor Two and Jamie in which Jamie takes a communicator component from a ruin as a kind of souvenir, and The Doctor does not really recognize its significance. When the main plot starts, it is now The Doctor several regenerations later with Ace, who discovers the old communication device and sets it up as a kind of objet d'art in her room. The Doctor recognizes the object, this time realizes its significance, and heads off to Mendeb Two to return said object. However, this becomes the excuse for yet another blame The Doctor. The situation is not quite what The Doctor has expected. The two planets, both with Earth colonists from centuries before, have devolved into lower level societies. On Mendeb Two, you get fisher folk and farmers at a medieval level who have no clue that there is another civilized planet nearby. On Mendeb Three, you get a mixed up society of medieval political structures, 18th-century military styles, and 20th to 21st century technology being reintroduced. This is all thanks to two aristocrat scientists, the impossibly perfect in every way pair of Kedin Asher and Tevana Roslod. These two have sold their technological rediscoveries of the former Earth colonists to a local warlord, Vethran, who uses it to make himself king of the planet. To ensure Kedin's cooperation, and because he has the hots for her, he takes Tevana captive. Using the new technology, he has his armies invade Mendeb Two to steal the population, give them a drug to make them docile, and then turn them into slaves. Along come Ace and The Doctor. Ace apparently cannot control her sex drive and falls instantly for Kedin, who apparently looks quite a bit like Richard E. Grant. Kedin extracts information from her, uses a modified form of the slavery drug on her, and sells her into slavery. But that's ok. He's good looking and impossibly perfect in every way, and so late in the novel when she comes to her senses she forgives him and wants to become his new consort. Go figure. Kedin has been secretly plotting to overthrow the evil Vethran, not so much because Vethran is evil, but because he wants to get back Tevana. But they are both impossibly perfect in every way, and so that is ok. The plot splits The Doctor and Ace for almost the whole book. So, while Ace is enslaved to advance Kedin's plans of rescuing his princess, The Doctor unwittingly becomes a kind of Spartacus to the enslaved people of Mendeb Two so that he can rescue Ace, his princess so to speak. The novel has quite a bit of political scheming, and seems to be a means of getting medieval politics joined with high technology. It reads more like a historical than a science fiction story on alien worlds. Darvill-Evans keeps the plot going apace. There is plenty of action and subterfuge. It's entertaining enough, even if the various different kinds of story do not fully gel.
May 30, 2023
Very little of the story is about the Doctor and his companion Ace. The story contains some adult themes that would not be appropriate for the TV show.
(Razor got bored with the book and went to get something to eat.)
(Razor got bored with the book and went to get something to eat.)
October 2, 2019
Seriously, Doctor Who? A rape on page 10 when a man allows "his woman" to go off with a wealthy man to secure a weapons contract? Poor showing, you can do better than that. I am appalled.
June 5, 2021
It certainly wasn't the best book I've ever read, but I've read worse
December 11, 2016
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2726103.html
A story about the Doctor and Ace visiting twin planets and freeing the population of one of them enslaved by the other. All fairly standard, though there is some gruesome offstage violence, torture and sexual assault. Ace gets to have a little fun but both she and the Doctor are thinly drawn. I see other reviewers on the net complaining that this was a disaster; not really fair, it's just a little below average.
A story about the Doctor and Ace visiting twin planets and freeing the population of one of them enslaved by the other. All fairly standard, though there is some gruesome offstage violence, torture and sexual assault. Ace gets to have a little fun but both she and the Doctor are thinly drawn. I see other reviewers on the net complaining that this was a disaster; not really fair, it's just a little below average.
January 16, 2011
Some people should stick to editing a Doctor Who novel range, rather than writing for that range. This is a novel so hollow and shallow I'm surprised it made it to the printing press. Former New Adventures editor Peter Darvill-Evans has written three less-than-stellar Doctor Who novels over the years...and this one is by far the most ghastly. Avoid, if possible.
October 14, 2015
The Doctor and Ace get involved with slavery and a coup on an alien planet. The interesting part about this story is how the slavery is accomplished and its effects on both the slaves and their loved ones. It feels quite an early adventure with Ace wanting to assert her independence from the Doctor. A good read.
September 28, 2012
Poor writing, bad characterization, entirely tepid and unbelievable love-at-first-sight romance, and an almost misogynistic view of woman who are seen as little but objects of lust and victims. If this weren't part of a series that interests me, I would surely have put it down halfway done.
March 9, 2010
Not entirely sure I actually ever finished this!
January 14, 2013
Good idea for a story, I just wish it was written better.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews