Mentor (unproduced novel)

✅ Mentor was a planned Kate Orman and Jon Blum novel that would have been published alongside a Lance Parkin novel in 1998 to celebrate Doctor Who's 35th anniversary.

The novel was about an old Time Lord who had gone insane and was accidentally using the Time Lords' "observer effect" power to create a universe that was "as mad as he was".

"The idea was that there would be a war criminal type in both our books, and depending on which one you read first, you'd get a completely different appreciation of the situation. If you read the book in which he was an old librarian who just wanted to be left alone first, you'd think the Doctor was a bully. If you read the book where you saw him in his prime, massacring innocents, you'd want the Doctor to murder him in cold blood."

- Lance Parkin

In the end, Orman and Blum were too busy writing Seeing I to write Mentor, so the idea was scrapped, and Parkin's The Infinity Doctors was released by itself in 1998. However, The Infinity Doctors and Seeing I nonetheless shared a significant narrative connection with their use of the Time Lord Savar. The proposed plot of Mentor is alluded to in one passage of The Infinity Doctors concerning Savar: "Time Lords felt time flow around them, but more than that, they helped to shape and refine time and space around them. ... Would a mad Time Lord have the opposite effect? Would his insanity become contagious, affecting the past and future like a virus?"

Orman and Blum would reuse many of the ideas for Mentor in their 1999 Eighth Doctor novel Unnatural History, which indeed shared noticeably many themes with Parkin's The Infinity Doctors. Parkin himself later recycled part of the "depending on which one you read first" premise in Beige Planet Mars. Elements of the "observer effect" concept appeared Parkin's The Gallifrey Chronicles, specifically recontextualizing the Time Lords' non-interference policy, while the effect itself was later mentioned in his novel The Eyeless.