Evolution (novel)
- You may be looking for the scientific principle.
Evolution was the second novel in the Virgin Missing Adventures series. It was written by John Peel. It featured the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith.
Publisher's summary
- "Someone is tampering with the fabric of the human cell," the Doctor said darkly, "perverting its secrets to his own dark purposes."
Sarah Jane wants to meet her fellow journalist Rudyard Kipling, and the Doctor sets the co-ordinates for England, Earth, in the Victorian Age. As usual, the TARDIS materialises in not quite the right place, and the time travellers find themselves pursued across Devon moorland by a huge feral hound.
Children have gone missing; at the local boarding school, the young Rudyard Kipling has set up search parties. Lights have been seen beneath the waters of the bay, and fishermen have been pulled from their boats and mutilated. Graves have been robbed of their corpses. Something is going on, and Arthur Conan Doyle, the ship's doctor from a recently berthed arctic whaler, is determined to investigate.
The Doctor and Doyle join forces to uncover a macabre scheme to interfere with human evolution - and both Sarah Jane and Kipling face a terrifying transmogrification.
Plot
to be added
Characters
- The Fourth Doctor
- Sarah Jane Smith
- Rudyard Kipling
- Arthur Conan Doyle
- Sir Edward Fulbright
- Sir Alexander Cromwell
- Josh Anders
- Ben Tolliver
- Edmund Ross
- Abercrombie
- Percival Ross
- Billy
- Tobias Breckinridge
- Captain John Gray
- Roger Bridewell
- Alice Fulbright
- Lucy
- Cherry
- Brogan
- Raintree
- Jen Walker
References
- Sarah compares the moors to Karn and observes the effect that adventure has had on the Doctor's mood.
- Sarah swims in the "tub" in the "bathroom" of the Doctor's TARDIS. The merchildren also stay in the "tub" on the trip to Andromeda.
- Colonel Ross claims to be a special agent working directly under the command and authority of Her Majesty Queen Victoria and it is his job to investigate those matters that lie outside of the conventional.
Notes
- The Doctor is the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes (and, possibly, Professor Challenger, as mentioned in the novel's coda). Specifically referenced are Holmes's choice of dress (the Doctor wears a deerstalker cap and long cloak), his methods of deductive reasoning and close reading of footprints to determine events at a crime scene.
- The relationship between the Doctor and Doyle, himself a ship's surgeon, parallels that of Holmes and Dr Watson.
- There are numerous references to The Hound of the Baskervilles, especially in the early parts of the novel, concerning a great, dog-like beast claiming victims on the moors.
- This novel directly contradicts All-Consuming Fire, published only a few months earlier, by strongly implying that Holmes and Watson are fictional characters, created by Arthur Conan Doyle, based on the Doctor and Doyle himself. Fire, by contrast, treats Holmes and Watson as real people, fictionalised slightly by Doyle. Well after this novel's publication, other stories agreed with Evolution, flatly stating that Holmes was a fictional character whose adventures, written by Arthur Conan Doyle, were published in The Strand. (PROSE: The Bodysnatchers; TV: The Snowmen)
Continuity
- In several scenes told from Sarah's point of view, she refers to the planet Karn and the encounter with Morbius in The Brain of Morbius. Her observations imply this story takes place almost immediately after those events.
- The "bathroom" of the TARDIS in which Sarah swims was first seen on-screen in The Invasion of Time.
- A crashed Rutan ship is key to the back-story. In the personal timeline of the Doctor, Evolution takes place before TV: Horror of Fang Rock, which is also about events set in motion by a Rutan crashing in an isolated part of the English coast.
- The Doctor mentions Metebelis III and Argolis. (TV: Planet of the Spiders, The Leisure Hive)
- Sarah refers to her first trip in the TARDIS to 13th century England and her encounter with Sutekh in 1911. (TV: The Time Warrior, Pyramids of Mars)
- Queen Victoria is said to have secret agents who investigate unusual occurrences. Obviously, this story was written about two decades before TV: Tooth and Claw, so any intentional reference to the Torchwood Institute is impossible. However, it the text does allow one to imagine that Evolution dovetails rather neatly into Tooth and Claw.
