Lars Pearson

For 23 years now, Lance Parkin (latterly with the assistance of Lars Pearson) has been trying to put the Doctor Who universe into some kind of order; working out how all those TV episodes, audio dramas, books, comics and spin-offs look from the linear perspective of history. When were the Daleks created? Did Amy Pond die the same year she was born? And was the Third Doctor exiled to Earth in the 1970s, 80s or 90s?

It's a mammoth undertaking and one that will only hold an appeal for a particular hardcore. As a member of that particular hardcore, this is crack to me.

Even with the hundreds of stories Parkin and Pearson have managed to fit into their chronology, there are still some too difficult, too outré, too... well, silly to be hammered in. This project is nothing if not the work of completists, however, so with this supplement the pair set about working out exactly when and where those stories they excluded from their main timeline take place.

That's the TV Comic strips of the 1960s (in which Dr Who and his bloodthirsty grandchildren deal with a host of menaces through the expedients of laser guns and carpet bombings), the infamous World Distributors annuals (in which the Doctor and his companions Sarah-Jane and Miss Jones embark on a succession of LSD trips), and other stories that make even those look mainstream (Parkin and Pearson find room to work in Jon Pertwee's in-character appearance at the 1991 Vodafone Exhibition).

Doctor Who isn't Star Trek; it's a franchise that'd be difficult to love without a healthy appreciation of the ridiculous. So many of the stories here are throwaway bits of fluff that none of their creators can have imagined would be picked over in such detail 50 years later. The Doctor Who universe covers all of time and space, and Unhistory has reminded me how much fun there is to be had in its maddest corners.… (meer)

This book and I disagreed on some *major* points, and it was tempting at times to just chuck it against the wall and walk away.

That aside, it's a decent episode guide, with fairly in-depth analysis and critique of each episode, and it provided some character analysis I hadn't thought of before, as well as some gossip I'd never heard.

It definitely could have used a better editor and proofreader. There's a ton of typos, a generous sprinkling of missing words, and annoyingly, it often cross-references the wrong episodes, pointing the reader to "Reprise" instead of "Redefinition" at one point, and referencing the Buffy episode "Becoming" instead of the Angel episode "Belonging" at another, just for starters.… (meer)