THE DEATH OF ART

AN ORIGINAL DOCTOR WHO NOVEL

He did not know if his powers could save him until the horses' hooves had crushed his ribs and his heart had stopped beating. After that, it was obvious.

1880s France: the corrupt world of the Third Republic. A clandestine brotherhood is engaged in a desperate internal power struggle; a race of beings seeks to free itself from perpetual oppression; and a rip in time threatens an entire city. The future of Europe is at stake, in a war fought with minds and bodies altered to the limits of human evolution.

Chris finds himself working undercover with a suspicious French gendarme; Roz follows a psychic artist whose talents are attracting the attention of mysterious forces; and the Doctor befriends a shape-shifting member of a terrifying family. And, at the heart of it all, a dark and disturbing injustice is being perpetrated. Only an end to the secret war, and the salvation of an entire race, can prevent Paris from being utterly destroyed.

DOCTOR WHO

SIMON BUCHER-JONES is yet another civil servant woth a long-standing love of SF, Fantasy and DOCTOR WHO.  He currently pretends to know about computers for the Home Office, but would rather you all bought his book.

The Great Houses:
Immovable. Implacable. Unchanging. Old enough to pass themselves off as immortal, arrogant enough to claim ultimate authority over the Spiral Politic.

The Enemy:
Not so much an army as a hostile new kind of history. So ambitious it can re-write worlds, so complex that even calling it by its name seems to underestimate it.

Faction Paradox:
Renegades, ritualiists, saboteurs and subterfugers, the criminal-cult to end all criminal-cults, happy to be caught in the crossfire and ready to take whatever's needed from the wreckage... assuming the other powers leave behind a universe that's habitable.

The War:
A fifty-year-old dispute over the two most valuable territories in existence: "cause" and "effect".

Marking the first five decades of the conflict, The Book of the War is an A to Z of a self-contained continuum and a complete guide to the Spiral Politic, from the beginning of recordable time to the fall of humanity. Part story, part history and part puzzle-box, this is a chronicle of protocol and paranoia in a War where the historians win as many battles as the soldiers and the greatest victory of all is to hold on to your own past…

In the evening, when the sky was the colour of burnt umber, the factories crawled down the continental shelf to drink.

The Spire is an inhuman artefact, a construction almost three hundred miles high. But it is more than just a big dumb object. Those close to it can look into the future - a future which is going to be arriving sooner than they think, and which is as bad as can be.

In the here and now, Professor Bernice Summerfield, doyenne of twenty-sixth century archaeology and seedy space-port bars, is used to seeing strange thing in her rooms. So it takes the unexpected arrival of an angel to get her away from increasingly desperate professional deadlines and off to investigate one of the seven hundred and seventy-six wonders of the galaxy.

However, Benny is not the only one interested in the Spire. A mysterious race of weaponsmiths, a mutogenic assassin and a sect of fanatically anti-religious reptiles all have their reason for learning - or concealing - the structure's secrets. And, as she struggles to unlock this ancient mystery, it soon become clear that the life of an eccentric professor is of very little consequence indeed.

There is a world where wishes can come true.  Where any simpleton can become a king and any scullery maid might be a princess in disguise.  Kindness and virtue  are rewarded, and the wicked are made to dance in red-hot shoes until they die.  But a witches oven will cook both the virtuous and the wicked alike, and many a frog-prince is crushed beneath the wheels of a cart before he gets that magic kiss.

This world has its own rules and it doesn't care that a certain Doctor Know-All and his friends don't know them.

Now other outsiders have come to the world - traders from the stars seeking the treasures that fell from the rip in the sky.  There are riddles to be solved, contests to win, flax to spin.  The world to survive.

But the World of Wishes is itself in danger from a race of beings with only one wish.  And there is a Princess asleep, and a beast awake - and Giants.

Twelve million years ago, a war touched the Earth briefly.  Now, in Antarctica, an archeological team has discovered the detritus of the conflict.  And it's alive.

Twelve million years ago, a creature evolved that was capable of consuming all life in the universe.  Now someone, or something, is desperate enough to want to revive it.

Outside the ordered universe, things move.  They're hungry.  And something has given them the scent of our space/time.

In the far future, the Doctor has learnt of the war and feels he must intervene - but it's more than just a local conflict of interest.  One of the groups of combatants is from his own future, and the other has never, ever, existed.