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Template:Doctorwhobook Cold Fusion is an original novel written by Lance Parkin and based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It features the Fifth Doctor, with Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan, immediately after Castrovalva. Also appearing is the Seventh Doctor, with Chris and Roz, from between the Virgin New Adventures novels Return of the Living Dad and The Death of Art. It was the only one of the Virgin Doctor Who novels to feature more than one Doctor.

Synopsis

The Fifth Doctor, Tegan, Adric and Nyssa arrive on an unnamed ice planet (which goes unnamed throughout the novel), which has settlements at the equator and not anywhere else. The planet is run by the Scientifica, a technocratic society allied with the Earth Empire, but there is a more than usual presence of Adjudicators on the planet. Tegan and Nyssa get a hotel room where they run into a man who claims to be "Bruce Jovanka" with a bad Australian accent, while the Doctor and Adric enter the Scientifica's complex and encounter three very diverse characters: Whitfield, the woman who runs the Scientifica; Tertullian Medford, the primary Adjudicator on the planet; and a badly decaying woman who the Doctor subsequently learns is Gallifreyan when she regenerates and nicknames "Patience" (she was previously known as only the Patient).

While things turn sticky for the Doctor and Adric (they're ambushed by a beautiful black woman on the skitrain tracks, then arrested for being alien spies), Tegan and Nyssa run into their own troubles with the husky blond "Bruce". And all the meanwhile, a little man is elsewhere on the planet, investigating a strange machine found buried in the subterranean soil.

Notes

The story deliberately contrasts the fifth Doctors and the characterisation of the seventh Doctors in the Virgin New Adventures.

The book was originally meant to be published in the same month as the New Adventure So Vile a Sin, but the latter's delay meant that did not happen. In an interview for the BBC, in discussing Cold Fusion, Parkin described the character of Adric as "hopeless with Davison".

The Ferutu would appear again in the final Virgin New Adventures novel Twilight of the Gods. Their appearance resembles the Time Lord who appears at the beginning of the serial Genesis of the Daleks.

Cold Fusion includes many references to the Cartmel Masterplan which would be more fully explored in Lungbarrow. More is learned about the character of Patience in the BBC Past Doctor Adventures novel The Infinity Doctors, also by Lance Parkin. It is suggested that she is the Doctor's (or possibly The Other's) wife, but how she fits into normal continuity is deliberately not revealed.

Names in the book are very similar to those of the main characters (and the actors) in the BBC comedy Terry and June, so the book includes a Medford, a Whitfield, a Scott, and a Terry and June.

Reception

Readers of Doctor Who Magazine gave the novel a rating of 76.69% (from 845 votes).

References

1. "Shelf Life" (review) by Dave Owen, Doctor Who Magazine, #246
2. FTN interviews Doctor Who writer Lance Parkin, 13 January 2013
3. Interview (Lance Parkin), BBC, January 2004 (Wayback Machine archive)
4. Parkin, Lance (2007). AHistory: An Unauthorized History of the Doctor Who universe (2nd ed.). Des Moines, Iowa: Mad Norwegian Press. ISBN 978-0-9759446-6-0. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
5. FTN interviews Doctor Who writer Lance Parkin, 13 January 2013
6. "The best (and worst) of Virgin", by Dave Owen, Doctor Who Magazine, #265 (May 1998)

External links

• Author's webpage about the book
• Template:Doctor Who RG
• The Cloister Library - Cold Fusion
• Template:TardisLibrary

Reviews

• Template:OG review
• Template:DWRG

• Virgin Missing Adventures
• Fifth Doctor novels
• Seventh Doctor novels
• Doctor Who multi-Doctor stories
• 1996 novels
• Novels by Lance Parkin
• British novels