BASIC PLOT
Welcome to the near-future, where the American and European Zones are all powerful, where war is just a videogame away and where a mysterious time traveller offers a deal to the highest bidder.

DOCTOR
Eighth.

COMPANIONS
Fitz and Anji.

MATERIALISATION CIRCUIT
A beach on an island in the Mediterranean (page 18).

An airport in California (page 42).

A car park at Heathrow (page 44).

Baskerville's base, the Russian Steppes (page 191).

PREPARATORY READING
Nothing essential, but this follows up a number of elements from Eater of Wasps and The Adventuress of Henrietta Street.

CONTINUITY REFERENCES
Pg 1 A number of the chapter titles refer to various Bond titles and Doctor Who story titles. The first is titled The Banquo Legacy.

Pg 8 "The intruder looked at him thoughtfully, slipping some sort of tool from his pocket." The sonic screwdriver.

Pg 9 "Before when they'd landed in the future, it had almost always been the far future - on space colonies with flying cars and cyborgs." Hope.

"Centuries less advanced that the library she'd sen on Hitchemus, which was positively neanderthal compared with the technology Silver had operated in Hope." The Year of Intelligent Tigers, Hope.

Pg 10 "The tanks were chrome, the shapes of tortoiseshells." This might be a reference to the chrome tanks mentioned in the flash-forward in Father Time, although the phrase from that book doesn't appear here.

Pg 11 "Look, the last couple of places we've been, the coffee wasn't up to much" The caffy in Hope was particularly bad.

Pg 18 "The Doctor had spent a little while insisting that this was merely a simulcram of earth, like EarthWorld had been." EarthWorld.

Pg 19 "He'd heard something scratching against the other side of this wall once, like a wild animal trying to get out." This is very similar to the effect of the silver cat described in Timewyrm: Revelation and Time's Crucible. It's likely a reference to a similar phenomenon, since there's something very wrong with the TARDIS here as well. We discover the answer in The Galifrey Chronicles

Pg 20 "The Doctor's people? I... think I remember what happened to them." Fitz's memory of events prior to The Burning is disappearing, perhaps as a result of the effect of Gallifrey having been erased from history, despite Fitz having witnessed its destruction. It's been doing this, on and off, since Escape Velocity and will be resolved in Halflife and explained in The Gallifrey Chronicles

Pg 21 "Teddy boys wore suits, the mods wore suits." We saw mods in The Space Age, although this isn't really a reference to that.

Pg 22 "This registers disturbances on the Bocca scale." The Two Doctors.

Pg 25 "Fitz could speak Chinese - long story" Revolution Man.

Pg 29 "When you finished with the paper, you put the share pages in your bag." Anji will do something similar in Timeless and The Gallifrey Chronicles.

Pg 35 "Never Say Neverland Again" Possibly a reference to the Big Finish audio Neverland (as well as a Bond reference, obviously).

Pg 43 "She's only flown First Class once before" Possibly the trip mentioned on page 23 of The Slow Empire, depending on whether she conflates first and business classes, as some people do.

Pg 45 "It had even occured to her that the police might think she'd been murdered - or murdered Dave and gone on the run." Escape Velocity.

Pgs 48-49 "We have to identify the transduction point

Pg 56 "When she'd met the Doctor he'd been fighting some monsters called the Kulan" Escape Velocity.

Pgs 58-62 Anji apparently travels in time to Brussel's, February 2001, seeing herself and Dave holidaying there (Escape Velocity).

Pg 61 "Think about real, solid things, things that really existed like men with clocks for faces and giant cyborgs at the end of time and tigers that talked and poodles with hands" Anachrophobia, Hope, The Year of Intelligent Tigers, Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

"But then he'd died and it had been her fault, and she cloned him" Hope

Pg 67 "The control box indicates that the Doctor has one heart" The Adventuress of Henrietta Street.

Pg 70 "On Endpoint, I -" Hope.

Pg 84 "Now they wore billowing heliotrope robes [...] They had ceremonial collars - really badly cracked and damaged ones." The Onhirs want to become the new lords of time, so they dress like the Time Lords.

Pg 102 "We know of Chronodev from the fifty-first century. We know the identities of the four surviving elementals." Uncertain reference, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street.

"In the thirties we met Kala." Eater of Wasps.

"Noel Coward had some big shears that cut through the Very fabric of..." Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

"There was that experiment at Station Forty." Anachrophobia.

"Then in the eighteenth century we met Sabbath" The Adventuress of Henrietta Street.

Pg 107 "He survived the Martians" The Dying Days.

Pg 109 "Loose change, mostly from the late eighteenth century, but some twentieth century American coins too" The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

Pg 113 "Yes, England in the nineteen thirties, a place called Little Marpling." Eater of Wasps. Roja and Jaxa are from the same time period as Kala was, where humans in the forty ninth century have time travel. But see Continuity Cock-Ups.

Pg 118 "My job is to return to the primitive times, and go back and recover all the films and television programmes that were withdrawn, deaccessioned and junked." This last phrase was used in Doctor Who Bulletin to describe the missing episodes.

Pg 133 "Particularly in the case of elementals, who didn't have a native time." The Adventuress of Henrietta Street.

Pg 134 "Have you ever had a bar of music in your head, one that you can't place, and however hard you try you can't hum the next bit?" The music in the Doctor's head is Fitz's song, from The Year of Intelligent Tigers.

Pg 143 "1989. I stole your space shuttle." Father Time.

Pg 163 This chapter is titled Time-Flight.

Pg 164 "Did he see his daughter again, do you know?" Father Time.

"I bet he never mentioned hijacking the space shuttle either?" Father Time.

Pg 180 "Onhirs are immortal, barring attacks" The Doctor says that Time Lords are immortal, barring accidents in The War Games.

Pg 184 "He'd been Secretary of State during the Canisian invasion" Death Comes to Time.

Pg 224 "But, frankly, running away from dinosaurs, talking to tigers and protecting the President of the United States from alien rhinoceroses seemed unlikely." EarthWorld, The Year of Intelligent Tigers.

Pg 235 This chapter title is Endgame (Endgame).

OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
Control appeared in The Devil Goblins from Neptune, The King of Terror and Escape Velocity.

Sabbath appears in flashback on page 118 and is known to the Onhirs (pg 102).

Felix Mather appeared in Father Time.

NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
Dee Gordon, Malady Chang, Baskerville, the Onhirs.

CONTINUITY COCK-UPS

1. Pg 8 "Before she had met the Doctor [...] she was twenty-seven" And then, on page 125: "I'm twenty-seven." Except that she spent at least a year in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, to say nothing of the various other adventures (discounting the foour years she doesn't remember in Fear Itself).
2. Pg 28 "I mean - my parents were German." Except only his dad was. Fitz's mum was English in The Taint.
3. Pg 41 "and discerned that he have more chance of getting a shag at a Cliff Richards concert." Huh?
4. Pg 103 The point of view wanders from the Onhirs to Fitz and back again. The Onhirs think Fitz is the Doctor, so he's called that earlier in the scene, then he's Fitz briefly at the top of page 103 and then back to the Doctor for the remainder of the scene.
5. Pg 113 "Yes, England in the nineteen-thirties, a place called Little Marpling." Except that it was called Marpling, not Little Marpling.
6. Pg 191 "An odd five-sided writing desk" Except that the console has six sides, not five.
7. Pg 243 Cosgrove become Baskerville for a moment and then goes back to being Cosgrove again.

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

1. Anji's lost count so, like setting her watch for 6:30 every time she wakes up (pg 39), she continually thinks of herself as the same age she was when she joined the Doctor, regardless of how much time passes.
2. Fitz uses this description as a shorthand to explain his German surname and it's easier than going into specifics.
3. Fitz is so upset that he won't be getting a shag that he's mixing up his words.
4. The Onhirs have guessed Fitz's secret but aren't letting on, for reasons they don't explain.
5. Olde Englande often has pairs of villages Little Something and Greater Something, known collectively as Something, so perhaps that's it.
6. For some reason, the TARDIS occasionally reconfigures its main console to have five sides. This also happens in Ten Little Aliens.
7. Cosgrove is having delusions of grandeur.

FEATURED ALIEN RACES
The Onhirs, rhinocerous-like aliens who want to become the new Lords of Time.

FEATURED LOCATIONS
A hydrofoil in the Mediterranean c 2040.

An island in the Mediterranean.

London.

Neverland amusement park, California.

Athens.

A yacht in the Mediterranean.

The Ohnir spacecraft.

Istanbul.

Toronto.

The Royal airliner.

Baskerville's plane.

Baskerville's base, the Russian Steppes.

IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith?
From the magnificent 'pre credits teaser' onwards, Trading Futures is a great action adventure thriller. It successfully blends Doctor Who with James Bond and makes it funny. There are some great set pieces, like all Bond films, the locations are suitably widespread and there's a sense of building momentum with all the time travellers we've seen recently. Some of the ancilliary characters seem a bit useless, including no less than two sets of villains (out of four or so) and the ending doesn't live up to the rest of the book, but that doesn't spoil a really fun read.