I thought that David had managed to do something moving in that novel that, through taking the story forward and ignoring the shackles of the past, broke almost every rule of his book line. That in turn made me think that nobody had ever really done mythologist Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’ for the Doctor, the plot that’s most commonly recognised in popular culture as that of Superman II, where the hero gives everything up to discover what normal humanity is like. Fertile ground, I thought.

The central issue of the Doctor becoming human wasn’t a problem. Everything else was. Kate and I hacked the plot back and forth endlessly during my stay in Sydney, and an Adelaide-based fan called Helen Reilly was a major help too, as were a group of wonderful Melbourne fans, notably Sean-Paul Kelly, whose hospitality overwhelmed me. All of Australia had a hand in Human Nature!

First the villains were ecologist terrorists with Krynoid pods, then they were the Hoothi, from Love and War, then all thirteen incarnations of one evil Time Lord, who went about in a big gang.

The last one was a possibility until series editor Rebecca Levene pointed out to us all the problems involved. The setting was going to be Cheldon Bonniface, in modern times, with Rupert Hemmings’ head (both from Revelation) being reinvigorated by Krynoids, Hoothi spores or whatever. (Some of that stuff ended up in Happy Endings.)

Then the setting changed to just before World War Two, but Rebecca and I were both fed up with Nazis, and I wanted the war that was looming on the horizon during the book to be a genuinely meaningless one. Finally, Kate and I made the plot work, and I went home to Britain to do the same with the book.

A lot of the research material was found for me by a friend called Esther Page, a specialist on World War One. Books are always written by a load of people working together, and as can be seen from the above, Human Nature was no exception.

In the accompanying notes, I don’t intend to ‘explain’ the novel. Saying ‘Do you see what I did there?’ and underlining the point of every decision would just take away a lot of the point of reading a book. Either you get what’s happening, or you don’t, and I shouldn’t be there like the elephant/shrimp comedy double act from Muppets Tonight, with a flipchart and diagrams, ready to tell you why the jokes are funny. I have to rely on the original material to get my point across.

What I will be doing is pointing up work issues, why I made some of the decisions a writer makes, making clear any references to the previous New Adventures and the TV series, so newcomers can keep up, and generally telling you about issues arising, and where my head was when I wrote this.

Prelude