BBC Cult - Printer Friendly Version

Human Nature

Author's Notes - Paul Cornell's guide to Human Nature

Prelude
  

This first appeared in issue 226 of Doctor Who Magazine. It appears here by kind permission of Clayton Hickman, having been found for me by Stephen Graves, to whom many thanks are due.

In those days, Doctor Who Magazine had a little bit of fiction for every Who novel, and I tended to write plots with that in mind. This just introduces many of the supporting cast, and lets Alexander display his full Simon Callowness.

Prologue
  

I wrote about five thousand words of a much more standard opening for Human Nature, and then just stopped, because it all felt very blah and I wasn't interested in it. I needed something that would give me a kick and make it all roar along, so I scrapped what I'd done and did this instead.

The book sort of stutters into life like the quick opening scenes of a movie, mostly to reflect Bernice's messed-up inner life.

The first two quotes (from issue 48 of the fanzine Paisley Pattern, an article by David Darlington, and from Melody Maker 27/7/94, Paul Mathur's review of The Prodigy in concert) are flung in, inside the narrative like that, almost as challenges to myself, to live up to that heart on the sleeve open-ness that Darlington had commented on in that fanzine article about the New Adventures (and, as a sort of joke, to address him directly), and to add some\x85 noise, really.

I don't know why, as an author, I do a lot of things. I'm running on instinct a lot of the time. Sorry.

Clive is an old friend of Bernice's from Love and War. The Doctor has that Little Johnny Piper thought from the song Puff The Magic Dragon a couple more times in my books. Gareth Roberts' Sylvester impression used to include the line about clay models. After the book was published, a very talented fan was kind enough to send me a clay model of a Zygon as a result.

Bernice's 'recent acquaintance' is Sherlock Holmes, who she meets in All-Consuming Fire. Opeks and Grotzis are currencies from the TV series, and I get the first appearance of my signature owl in early this time. They play quite a big role in this one. John Smith is an alias adopted by the Doctor in the TV series from as early as The Wheel in Space, and more often during the Pertwee years.

Don't Forget to Catch Me
  

The title, Don't Forget To Catch Me is a line from Saint Etienne's Hobart Paving. This was before I knew the band, but it's references like this, which made Gerard Johnson - who plays keyboards for them - get in touch with me.

I was privileged to write sleeve notes for their Places to Visit E.P., and even more privileged recently when Gerard accompanied the Saint Etienne vocalist, Sarah Cracknell, on Hobart Paving itself at my wedding.

This is me doing a movie again, introducing everyone during the bike ride, and throwing research at you quite fast so that from now on you tend to believe me whether or not I've made the details up. Doctor Smith displays the Seventh Doctor's early tendency to mix up proverbs. The Galactic geography displayed here is all implied in the series, as elaborated on in the Discontinuity Guide.

My friend Caroline Minall owned a cat called Wolsey, who was utterly disdainful of humans and everything about them. There are indeed, as various references from the TV series indicate, cats on Gallifrey.

Maius Intra Qua Extra
  

Maius Intra Qua Extra means 'bigger on the inside than the outside' in Latin. As does Rocastle's other version. One was suggested by Jac Rayner, the other by one of the many Aussie fans who contributed stuff. Jac had quite a big influence on this book, way before she ever had anything to do with BBC Books.

Little bits of Gallifreyan stuff keep turning up in Smith's memories, as well as thoughts belonging to the Doctor and to his companions. I'll leave you to spot them, unless a story is attached to them. More fun that way.

I'm particularly proud of Bernice's diary entry in this chapter. It starts, by the way, with a reference to Dr. John Watson, who was rather taken with Bernice, in an unrequited way, in the aforementioned Holmes adventure.

In Love and War, Bernice's introduction, we learn that she spent part of her childhood hiding out in the woods near a military academy which she was supposed to be attending.

Dr. Smith's stories are plotted by Steven Moffat, who these days is best known as the writer of the BBC2 sitcom Coupling. We became friends after he read a review I'd written of his previous show, Press Gang, in The Guinness Book of Classic British Television. More recently he was my Best Man. He's always had some radical thoughts about Who, and it was good to be able to give expression to some of them.

Artron energy: as mentioned in many TV stories.

Cruk: the swearword of choice in the New Adventures, its derivation here made clear.

It occurs to me that, so far, I haven't told you exactly what's going on, or who Dr. Smith is. If this is all new to you, please bear with me: all will be revealed, and quite soon.

Boudiccan Destruction Layer
  

Jac Rayner, now with BBC Books, and I were touring a museum, and she dared me to use Boudiccan Destruction Layer as a chapter title, so I did. I like to think I justified it too. Little limits like that can really help shape a piece of work, as long as the scaffolding isn't visible.

But now I've shown you where it is. Oh dear. But I'm really proud of the opening of this chapter. I think it sums up what my Who work was about.

I should mention that Alton's middle name may become important. But probably not here. One criticism that's sometimes made of Human Nature is that we never get spelled out to us exactly why the Doctor has decided to embark upon this adventure. It never occurred to me that the question wasn't answered. It is, just in a rather oblique way. And here we have Bernice asking that question.

ESB is one of my favourite sorts of beer, of which I drank a lot while living in Lancaster.

The Doctor's list of things not to let him do includes a reference to his vegetarianism, continuing from his decision at the end of The Two Doctors.

Good and Bad at Games
  

Just in case: the team Smith puts up on the notice board is of course the Hulton side, in which Dean and Hutchinson would of course be together. In the practice match shown here, they're not. I do keep track of stuff like that, honest!

The bunny hug, etc., are, of course, dances.

Wyndham Lewis and his vortices (Joan is just the kind of woman to use a playful plural) are from the field of art.

The end of the chapter is a take on the end of a Press Gang episode that I particularly liked.

Hurt/Comfort
  

Hurt/Comfort is a style of fan fiction where one character tends to another's physical and emotional wounds. There are a few references in this chapter to Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey and his courtship of Harriet Vane, one of the greatest romances in literature. Harriet is a major influence on Benny, incidentally. She keeps it all in.

The landscape around the school is very much the landscape of where I grew up in Wiltshire. There was a similar statue, to a similar woman, on a hill that we used to pass on the road. And the school is quite like mine, though just a touch more brutal.

I'm surprised to find, reading this now, that the book contains quite a few touchstones to my current religious point of view, which I try not to call anything, but which boils down to a passionate correspondence between Anglicanism and Paganism. Tim's thoughts on going out of the window are exactly where this stuff connects to Who for me.

I think both traditions are there in the series big time, often hidden, often operating behind enemy lines. But that's an essay for another time.

H.G. Wells believed in 'free love', and smelt like honey. I wish he'd stayed on after Timelash.

Hurt/Comfort (continued)
  

Constance quotes from Hamlet, using one of the alternative takes on 'solid'.

I love owls, and I try and include them where I can. They've been audible outside the windows of my last two houses. This one is here for a purpose which will be revealed towards the end, in the subplot that keeps its head down throughout.

The picture of Aberdeen I paint is accurate to my own memories of the city. I spent a lot of time on that beach, with the lighthouse and golf course. The lighthouse may not have been there in 1914, but of course that doesn't matter! And: lighthouses, Aberdeen, Horror of Fang Rock\x85 I haven't been telling you where Smith's memories come from in general, but I'm too pleased with that one not to point it out.

'Again?' tells its own story by the time of Lungbarrow. The authors on the New Adventures line were aware of Andrew Cartmel's plans for the series to varying degrees, but Peter Darvill-Evans had the whole picture, and would fill us in on what we needed to know. The intention of the book line was always to complete that plan, and we did! It incidentally clicked with my own mystical concerns.

A Deal with God
  

The title is from Kate Bush's Running up that Hill. Bernice's knight is, of course, Guy de Carnac [from Sanctuary].

In this chapter, in a dream, appears one of the Gods of Gallifrey, which were gradually developed during the New Adventures. The opinion I eventually came to, as we evolved them amongst the authors, was that they're Eternals, as in Enlightenment, who have left human prey for the much richer material offered by Time Lords. Here, one appears in a much more floaty form, but not one incompatible with that view.

I'm a great believer in villains that are as clever as our heroes, and I think the villains here go about their plan with great skill. They act like trained intelligence officers would, and stay focussed on what they're after. I find people like that, who don't mind killing when it's necessary, very frightening.

I also did my best to give them kinship and love for each other, something else one doesn't often see in Who monsters. It's the central New Adventures thought of adding a couple of levels of reality to the TV show. Once they've sealed off the village, overconfidence thankfully overtakes my villains.

The line that Smith quotes to Fiona in the bakery was originally the physicist Richard Feynman's.

I've always taken extreme reassurance from the chorus of Voice of the Beehive's I Say Nothing, which seems to me to be about the fan experience, and connects with the quotes at the start of the book. Smith slows down some of that chorus to Joan, semi-quoting it. Quotes weave their way in and out of a lot of my work without usually being announced as such, and sometimes without my knowledge.

The battle of Spion Kop happened during the Second Boer War, in January 1900, a recent historical event for the local characters.

Friends and Other Lovers
  

In this chapter in the original novel, I have Joan use a racially-abusive word. It's there to show the gap between the era depicted and the here and now, an echo of Smith's lecture about how complicated the assigning of good and bad can be. Joan is a good person, but in 1914, this language was in the mouths of some good people.

It also makes Smith realise that, in finding the language objectionable, he has a set of ethics which come from nowhere, that he's not quite a product of his own time, a feeling with which many on the fringes of mainstream opinion, (those of the left, when the book was written) could sympathise. Ultimately, it's there to make an anti-racist point.

I've never worried about its presence in the book, but now it's on the net, which can be trawled through by search engines, BBCi were worried about the sort of attention it might attract, and I must say I agree completely. We've replaced it with 'N-'. I think it still makes its point.

Tim's thoughts in the tree echo the Cad Goddeu, a Welsh poem attributed to Merlin. Post Battlefield, I really took up the theme of the Doctor as Merlin, and followed the parallels as far as they went. For instance, the wink in the title sequence echoes Merlin's (and many other mythological heroes') loss of an eye to gain wisdom.

That Doctor Who Magazine poster of the Seventh Doctor hanging from some wreckage looks like the Hanged Man tarot card. I went so far as to propose a Who tarot pack to Peter Darvill-Evans. He looked at me sagely and went on his way.

Friends and Other Lovers (continued)
  

Interventionists, as Greeneye calls them, are agents of the Gallifreyan Celestial Intervention Agency (as mentioned in The Deadly Assassin), to which he assumes the Doctor and Bernice belong. The Time Lord they encountered on Apertsu almost certainly was one.

The Time Lords meddling in the natural history of Earth is a thread that surfaces often in the New Adventures, one of those team narrative things we were vaguely putting together between us. I link it here to the race's sterility, as established by the Cartmel writers.

And 'periodic' here could only be used over a vast timescale. Time Loops are first mentioned as a Time Lord weapon in Image of the Fendahl, and Greeneye stumbles on the same way to get out of them that the Doctor uses in Meglos. A Time Space Visualizer is first seen in The Space Museum, and it seems an apt description for what the Time Lords are seen using to watch the affairs of other worlds in various stories.

The ring Dr. Smith produces is, of course, the ring that the First Doctor sometimes wore, and the tune he brings to mind is the Isley Brothers' This Old Heart of Mine. The Isleys are a shared interest between Bernice, the Doctor and me, and actually appear in Happy Endings. I recently discovered, to my shock, that their mother's middle name was Bernice.

The cat that Smith sees in his vision was the Doctor's previous cat, Chick, a reference to Andrew Cartmel's War trilogy of New Adventures.

Everything Changes
  

The Martians Benny's referring to are, of course, her favourites, the Ice Warriors. Her Dad, Isaac, was lost during a battle against the Daleks, when she was very young. Bernice's quest to find him was resolved, in a manner you can probably guess at, in Kate Orman's book Return of the Living Dad.

Timothy has acquired some of the Doctor's Venusian Aikido, as demonstrated in Battlefield, and some of the Eighth Doctor's precognition. We didn't know that at the time, of course.

Rebecca Levene asked me, since this book was set in 1914 and was going to have soldiers in it, to create a soldier who could go on to appear in another book in the range. I think it might have been Toy Soldiers. But the book's author decided not to follow up on that decision, I think, for reasons I never learnt.

Wrightson encounters something in his vision that may be the Timewyrm, still imprisoned, but existing eternally. Or it may be something entirely different. I don't think anyone ever caught this particular 'open continuity' ball I threw into the air. If any authors are reading this, only in these later days has it become necessary to state clearly that they're welcome to run with it. During the time of the New Adventures, that would have been taken for granted.