Attwood is unsure about the nature of time and actually adopts two positions: the first is time travel, and the second is differing timestreams, in some of which some things happen, in other streams other things happen. While the idea of time travel is possibly acceptable in the light of historical materialism, the second is not. And given that currently we experience neither time travel nor division into alternate time streams , to be scientific one ought not adopt a scheme incompatible with one's general logic. Dialectical Materialism says that a series of human experiences and actions in absolute chronological sequence cause physical, economic and social change. These changes are benefits to some (lie the factory owners of the Industrial Revolution) but hell to others. Thus we have a thesis (the limited benefit to the rich) and an antithesis (the suffering poor who don't want to suffer), which can be resolved (by revolution, say) and synthesis is achieved. This analysis is scientific and works by explaining cause and result. To a certain extent it can allow for and overcome the subjectivity which any social life imposes on even its scientists, but it is only true if we agree that certain axioms and conditions are true. For instance, an effect always follows a cause, it never precedes it. It would be meaningless to say that an effect occurs before its cause but that is the possibility of Attwood's system. He would also deny that the same events have the same consequence. The idea of any number of different results simultaneously from one cause acting on the same subject, which is what he says in accepting time-streams diverging from one moment, is equally unscientific.

Those broken down wretches who enjoyed Peter Davison's role playing, or the emphasis placed on the Time Lords in the last decade, may like this book. They are the sort who yearn for the return of writers like Bob Baker and Dave Martin. They have false consciousness.

What has happened to Doctor Who that books like TURLOUGH AND THE EARTHLINK DILEMMA can be written is a matter for deeper analysis. Clearly some of the scientific reasoning that originally underpinned it has disappeared. For instance, the Doctor was always being asked why he did not go back to before some disaster in which the Tardis manifested itself and stop the disaster happening, and the scriptwriters (principally Terry Nation, I suppose) took care that this was not available by having the time control unit not work for the first ten years or so. Now that is not an answer to the cause and effect problem listed above, but within the logic of the scriptwriting it stops it being raised as a problem. That sort of intelligence has disappeared.

And I haven't got around to criticising the political analysis yet. But I won't. Not here.