It's with a heavy heart that I publish this review, as we have just lost it's author on 15th December 2024.
David A, McIntee wrote multiple Doctor Who novels across all the main ranges for both Virgin and the BBC. He also worked on tie-ins for Star Trek, Space: 1999, Final Destination and Stargate. But he only wrong one novel for the Eighth Doctor...
Autumn Mist by David A. McIntee
Eighth Doctor Adventures number: 24
Originally published: July 1999
Companions: Sam and Fitz
The Ardennes, December 1944: the Nazi forces are making their last offensive in Europe - a campaign which will come to be called the Battle of the Bulge. But there is a third side to this battle: an unknown and ancient force which seems to pay little heed to the laws of nature.
Where do the bodies of the dead disappear to? What is the true nature of the military experiments conducted by both sides?
The Doctor, Sam and Fitz must seek out the truth in a battlefield where no one and nothing is quite what it seems….
So for the podcast I left it to others to discuss the merits (or otherwise) of the plot. Instead I want to briefly talk about three things from the book that all resonated with some of my other interests. Interests that, much like Doctor Who, started when I was a younger man.
Firstly there's the World War II setting. When I was a teenager at school, history quickly became my favourite subject. In fact it’s the only one I got an A grade in when I came to my exams.
Partially this was because I had a *very* good teacher, who had personally lived through many of the major events, so was incredibly good at making the stories come alive. But the other part is because I just found everything so damn interesting.
Although we covered the whole of World War II, it was the time leading up to - and following - D-Day in 1944 that we spent a lot of time on. So when at the start of the novel the Doctor and his companions are dropped into the middle of the Battle of the Bulge - a key conflict near the end of the war - I was on board straight away.
In fact, the title of the book "Autumn Mist" refers to one of the plans for the German offensive in the Belgian region. There is no way of sugar-coating things - it was a dark and desperate time, with a horrific loss of life. The harshness of the battles, the freezing temperatures, the constant shelling, the blurring of German and Allied lines - and the toll it took on the troops on both sides - all these things are well represented in the novel. Much like my history teacher, McIntee manages to bring these events to life.
Secondly, there are the fairies. The Shee and their opposing monarchs Titantia and Oberon. I've talked in a previous review about my teenage love for all things weird and unexplained - and fairies definitely fit into that. But those years were also a period where I first learnt about Shakespeare and saw my first production of one his plays - an amateur performance of, you guessed it , "A Midsummer Night Dream".
I may not have understood half of what was going on, but the setting and the language entranced me. I sought out more and grew to love the bard's plays - something which has only deepened over the intervening decades. Now the fairies in "A Midsummers Night Dream" are not quite the same and may not have implicitly served the forces of Chaos and Order as they do in the book, but there are parallels - and I'm just glad to see these characters appear in Doctor Who.
A quick historical aside - James I's eldest son Prince Henry (who died young and never became king) once appeared in a Ben Johnson play as Oberon. He wanted to arrive on stage on horseback, but his father deemed it too dangerous. They settled on a chariot - pulled by…two baby polar bears! Truth really is stranger than fiction!
Lastly we come to science. Specifically the search for the theory of everything. Yep - I'm a science geek too. In the book it's explained that the Shee can perceive all eleven dimension - not just the four we humans experience.
In the real world, physicists have long been searching for a way to join general relativity (the science of the very large) with quantum mechanics (the science of the very small). One solution to this - known as "M-Theory" - postulates the existence of ten physical dimensions and one time dimension - matching the eleven of the book.
Is it impossible to prove? Probably. I only understand 10% of the theory and that's on a good day. But Supersymmetry, bosons, membranes, the black hole information paradox - this branch of theoretical physics fascinates me.
Though perhaps the thing that stands out the most - and tweaks the SF and Fantasy fan in me - is a quote that parallels a famous line from the legendary Arthur C Clarke. The fact that it also links to the title of the only Star Trek novel written by David A. McIntee makes me think he might have had the same idea. You see a physicist once suggested that in the absence of an understanding of the true meaning and structure of M-theory, perhaps the M could stand for... "magic"...