BASIC PLOT
To lose one set of memories may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two smacks of carelessness. The Terran colony world of Espero seems the unlikely source of a sophisticated distress call. And the Doctor, Fitz and Trix are not the only ones responding to it. While Fitz consorts with royalty, the Doctor's on the run with a sixteen year old girl, and Trix meets a small boy with a dark secret. In a race for the minds and souls of an entire planet, the Doctor and Trix are offered temptations that may change them forever. At least one of them will be unable to resist.

DOCTOR
Eighth.

COMPANIONS
Fitz and Trix.

Madame Xing is very likely Compassion.

MATERIALISATION CIRCUIT
Pg 18 Near some bushes, on the outskirts of the city of Saiarossa, Espero, the future.

Pg 150 Inside the barrel room, the cellar of the Imperator palace.

PREPARATORY READING
Escape Velocity, Trading Futures, Sometime Never...

CONTINUITY REFERENCES
Pg 5 "Joshua tipped his head back and stared up at the stars, feeling momentarily dizzy. Which ones had other worlds around them, he wondered. Which ones had other human colonies? Where were Bliss, and Heritage and Availon?" Heritage.

Pg 16 "At times like these, when the TARDIS wasn't in flight and she was the only one aboard, it was easy to remember what it had been like before: when she'd lived like a mouse in the skirting board, the Doctor, Fitz and Anji knowing nothing of her existence aboard the ship." The Infinity Race through to The Last Resort.

Pg 17 "She felt a bit bad for begrudging the Doctor his happiness - particularly after what had happened to Miranda" Sometime Never...

Reference to Anji.

Pg 19 "Something like that ointment he gave to Guy?" Timeless.

Pg 32 "It reminded him of Venice, a city sliding graciously towards its final end." The Stones of Venice.

Pg 58 "Are you aware that your memory has been interfered with on thirty-seven separate occasions - eight of them still outstanding?" Some of the big ones include the Doctor wiping his own memory in Timewyrm: Genesys, his various post-regenerative amnesias, losing his memory in The Eight Doctors and, of course, in The Ancestor Cell. "Some of your recent memories have been excised, removed. Not repressed. they are not there to restore." The Ancestor Cell.

Pg 62 "- Miranda, falling to her knees at his feet, her whole life racing across her features as the Time Winds tore through her."

Pg 70 "Do you have a girlfriend? A boyfriend?" Model trains set? Love and War.

Pg 72 "I'm from Ceres Alpha" Dark Progeny.

Pg 74 Reference to Anji.

Pg 99 "She didn't normally 'do kids', but she remembered rather enjoying telling Cindarella to the two princes recently" Sometime Never...

Pg 100 "She thought of Anji and Chloe and wondered what they were doing now." Timeless.

Pg 102 Reference to Anji.

Pg 105 "Most of the princesses I meet end up trying to kill me." EarthWorld.

Pg 113 "She remembered what Fitz had told her about his time in Russia, with that madman Garudin riding around in his body." Emotional Chemistry.

Pg 126 "In case you hadn't noticed, we're not many rungs up the technological ladder from Axista here." Colony of Lies.

Pg 127 "I woke up on a train, remembering nothing of how I got there" The Ancestor Cell.

"I spent a century - yes, a whole century - wandering around on Earth" The Caught on Earth arc.

"And then Fitz came along and told me that he was a friend of mine." Escape Velocity.

Pgs 129-130 "It's not one of those virtual reality things . Again. I'm not suddenly going to find myself swashbuckling all over the place, and challenging you to a duel for the hand of a fair maiden, am I?" The Book of the Still

Pg 131 "But don't hang it all on Miranda's death." Sometime Never...

Pg 138 "Perrier perhaps. He frowned - the phrase somehow had a resonance, an in-joke that he didn't understand." Vengeance on Varos.

Pg 151 "The old girl must have a thing for cellars" Reckless Engineering.z

Pg 154 "'Snap,' said the Doctor grimly" The Two Doctors.

Pg 172 "It looked like a tiny, slightly ginger monkey - as if she hadn't had her fill of monkeys and apes recently." Timeless, Sometime Never...

Pg 175 "She froze beside a table bearing a particularly piece of crystal in the shape of an eagle (she never wanted to see anything made of crystal ever again!)" Sometime Never...

Pg 185 "She asked Tannalis what Trove looked like, but the description didn't tally with the Sabbath she'd met." Time Zero through to Sometime Never...

Pg 192 "And there had been no announcement that immortality was suddenly on the market, despite the rumours of cloning on Heritage." Heritage.

Pg 195 "If that was the case, then how come the Doctor didn't remember blowing up his own planet?" The Ancestor Cell.

"Fitz felt a cold shudder run through him as he realised that he didn't remember much about it either." Trading Futures.

Pg 215 "'And why does the name "Maker" sound so familiar?' A cold shiver stroked his spine. 'They called themselve "Us".' The phrase drifted through him like a spirit seeking redemption." The Space Age.

Pg 225 "He suddenly remembered playing Super Mario Brothers in a pub in Bradford, back in the eighties" The Caught on Earth arc.

Pg 242 Reference to Anji.

Pg 249 "It brought back memories of Scale's camera obscura and the images it had shown him, the strangers who seemed, somehow, familiar." Camera Obscura and the Doctor seeing images of his former selves.

Pg 262 Reference to Anji.

"A long time ago something happened to me. I died. And then I was brought back to life by being recreated. Being remembered." Interference part II.

Pg 264 "I got ridden around by a mad old Russian and how much concern do I get shown?" Emotional Chemistry.

Pg 267 "You weren't expecting that, were you?" Madame Xing knows the Doctor. It's possible, maybe, that she's Compassion.

Pg 268 "I don't quite know how it happened, but I have my memories back - memories of things that have happened since I started travelling with the Doctor." Fitz's memories started to disappear in Escape Velocity.

Pg 269 "If you don't know where you've been, , how can you know where you're going?" Paraphrase of the fourth Doctor's line in City of Death.

Pg 271 Reference to Anji.

Pg 273 "She wasn't going soft, she told herself. Yeah, OK - there had been Anji and the lottery ticket." Timeless. But see Continuity Cock-Ups.

OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
None.

NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
Calamee Fischer, Nessus the mokey, Tain, Imperator Tannalis, Princess Sensimi.

CONTINUITY COCK-UPS

1. Pg 62 "Miranda, falling to her knees, at his feet, her whole life racing across her features as the Time Winds tore through her." Except that Miranda specifically avoided being destroyed by the Time Winds. Sometime never..., pages 238-239: Octan is threatening her with the Vortex gun, which will cause the Time Winds to rip through her, but instead she breaks her hourglasses and the moments of her life simply run out.
2. Pg 167 "Alinti went straight to her room and called up the weather-sat bureau. They were none to pleased to be disturbed" I wonder if they were none too pleased, as well?
3. Pg 199 "But as they progressed, the bark on the stems opened up and swallowed them, healing itself over as nothing had happened." Surely, this should be "as though nothing had happened"?
4. Pg 273 "She wasn't going soft, she told herself. Yeah, OK - there had been Anji and the lottery ticket." Except that Trix's present to Anji in Timeless (pg 272) was a birth certificate and adoption papers for Chloe, whereas she gave the winning lottery ticket to Guy (pg 275).

PLUGGING THE HOLES [Fan-wank theorizing of how to fix continuity cock-ups]

1. Miranda's death affected the Doctor so intensely that he's conflated it with her possible fate just moments before. It's post-traumatic stress syndrome.
2. Some of the weather-sat bureau members were quite pleased to be called to duty, others not so much. So there was a range, from none, to pleased.
3. Calamee's sixteen, so she's trying to be cool in the face of pretty much everything. Thus, she's pretending that nothing happened.
4. Trix threw a winning lottery ticket into Anji's envelope as well. She really is going soft.

FEATURED ALIEN RACES
Pg 1 Insects.

Pg 8 Centaur-like aliens, with the body of a thin man and the lower half of a horse, but with legs that splay outwards.

Pg 14 Mokeys, creatures similar to small monkeys.

Pg 78 Flycams, robot surveillance devices disguised as flies.

Pg 92 Night beasts, seven foot tall with huge, muscly arms, a slim waist, sinewy thighs, broad feet, a low head sloping down to its shoulders with no neck, a tiny mouth, piggy wet eyes and covered in a bluish-black substance like fine wire.

Pg 186 The Oon, literal aliens who aren't seen (there's a suggestion they may be cities), but their voices are heard here.

Pg 198 Maggots and voracious plants that eat them (shown on the cover).

Pg 206 A sentient bioship.

Pgs 111/114/239 The Makers, Y-shaped things that hang around someone's neck and possess them, eating their personality from inside. (No relation to the aliens of the same name in The Space Age.)

FEATURED LOCATIONS
Pg 1 The planet Espero.

IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith?
There are some worthy attempts to deal with the amnesia albatross the EDAs have slung around ther collective neck. And it does finally revive the brain-dead arc of Fitz's missing memories. The Doctor and Fitz merging personalities is carried off with some style and the hints about Madame Xing and Trix's past are well laid. So it's odd that it all feels so inconsequential. Espero is singularly uninteresting, except when it's being heavy-handed in playing its race card. Which starts out as a reasonable premise and becomes downright offensive by the novel's conclusion. (Are any of the planet's inhabitants not described by way of their skin colour at some point or other? Funny how the TARDIS crew don't get the same treatment...) Trix's motivation for accepting the Maker is laughably stupid. And the villains conveniently kill each other off at the end, thus saving our heroes the trouble. Which was quite considerate of the author, really. Not the worst novel ever written, but nothing you can't skip in favour of a 500 word plot summary.