David Layton's Reviews > Doctor Who: Time and Relative

The Telos novellas were a publishing venture allowing authors to use Doctor Who elements and take them anywhere they wanted. These were to be deliberately different from the TV series. "Time And Relative" fulfills this brief. Told in the form of pages from Susan's diary and taking place a few months prior to events in "An Unearthly Child," the story focuses on how a teen mind views events that might end up in a Doctor Who adventure. The setting is the great freeze of 1963, which actually did happen, though for unclear reasons Newman offsets the date. In this version, we see the Doctor and Susan as they were in the unaired pilot episode, the Doctor cold and generally unsympathetic, taking a very strict "hands off" policy, and Susan struggling to maintain her superior aloofness, but also highly sympathetic to the human point of view. The limit to one point of view means that we do not get to see all that is happening, and much is guessing and inference.