by John Peel
- UK
- Paperback
- Doctor Who Books
- September 1994
Back Cover Blurb
'SOMEONE IS TAMPERING WITH THE FABRIC OF THE HUMAN CELL,' THE DOCTOR SAID DARKLY, 'PERVERTING ITS SECRETS TO HIS OWN 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 materializes 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.
Regular Characters
Fourth Doctor / Sarah Jane Smith
Notes
- Evolution takes place between the television stories Brain of Morbius and The Seeds of Doom.
- John Peel had previously written Timewyrm: Genesys, the opening book in the New Adventures series as well as a handful of novelisations based on 1960s Dalek stories. He would go on to novelise the two Second Doctor stories, The Power of the Daleks and Evil of the Daleks, as well as the Eighth Doctor novels War of the Daleks and Legacy of the Daleks.
- Unusually, Evolution actually features real people from history, in contrast to the television series which often saw names being dropped but rarely let viewers see them in the flesh — in this case it is two famous literary figures: Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Arthur Conan Doyle would also feature in Terrance Dicks' 2008 book Revenge of the Judoon, which featured the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones.
- Observant readers may have spotted the reference to a large hound on the moors, which is an obvious allusion to Conan Doyle's famous Sherlock Holmes tale The Hound of the Baskervilles. And on the subject of Sherlock Holmes, the 1994 New Adventure All-Consuming Fire had actually featured the Great Detective in a Lovecraftian tale which revealed that Holmes and Watson were real people, but Conan Doyle had changed their names for his stories. In reality, it is believed that the real inspiration for Holmes was actually Dr Joseph Bell, a lecturer of Doyle's at university in Edinburgh.