Reading it now, the effect is like watching a home movie of myself whizzing down Everest on a tea tray, screaming as I fall from rock to rock, but always miraculously bouncing onto the next one. I don’t know how I did that. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else. But it seemed to work at the time.

If you’ve enjoyed Human Nature, may I humbly suggest that you take a look at my two mainstream SF novels, published by Victor Gollancz, Something More and British Summertime, which explore many of the same themes.

Thank you for coming along on this ride with me. Revisiting the book has made me realise how much I still love it, and how much I’m still in love with prose. I hope you enjoyed it too.

Adapting the Novel for the Screen

I remember having a great deal of trouble starting the original novel of Human Nature. I made several false starts and wasted several thousand words, until I decided to begin with the weird kick off of the quotations from fanzines and music and crash right into the middle of Benny’s grief.

Similarly, in adapting the book for television, the beginning was the hardest part. The first thing I did, after Russell told me he wanted a two-part adaptation, was to re-read the book, making notes as I went about which bits of plot were vital and which weren’t. The not vital stuff included, immediately, the trick ‘Tenth Doctor’ that Benny meets, and the plotline involving the suffragette. Also, the subplot of Benny’s landlord’s secret was a second string there wasn’t room for, though the sort of dialogue involved in his examining of Bernice’s history device did pop up in several versions of Smith working out the sonic screwdriver.

Also, I knew we were going to have to begin very much in the middle of things happening, so we couldn’t spend money visiting planets to get hold of what was still at that point a cricket ball to put the Doctor’s personality in.

I wrote, initially, a very straightforward plot adaptation, featuring only the storylines of the Doctor being human at a 1914 school, falling in love, and the aliens hunting him. I placed the cliffhanger at the moment the Doctor has to decide whether or not to let the school boys open fire on the aliens. This plot featured Martha’s family visiting her, because at that point she was meant to originally come from 1914.

But then I had second thoughts, and second guessed myself. I started to think that what I’d written was way too traditional, and that wasn’t how the series did things anymore. So I wrote a new plot, this one starting with the Doctor married to Joan, and them waking up in bed together on a typical morning, with, as always, Martha as their maid.