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Interference is a two-part Doctor Who novel written by Lawrence Miles and published by BBC Books. It features the Eighth Doctor, Fitz Kreiner, and Samantha Jones alongside the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith. Its two volumes, subtitled Book One (Shock Tactic) and Book Two (The Hour of the Geek), were both released on 2 August 1999.

Overview
As a multi-Doctor story, Interference's two volumes comprised the output of both BBC Books' Eighth Doctor Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures lines for August 1999. Since then, the two books have usually been counted as the 25th and 26th Eighth Doctor Adventures. , Interference is the only two-part novel ever published as part of a Doctor Who range.

The novel features one of the only prose-based regenerations of the Doctor. It is the final story for companion Samantha Jones and introduces Compassion, whose character arc would last until The Shadows of Avalon in February 2000.

Interference builds on the concepts of Faction Paradox and the War in Heaven, both of which were introduced in author Lawrence Miles' previous Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Alien Bodies. It introduces several elements, such as the Eleven-Day Empire and the Remote, which would later play important roles in the Faction Paradox series.

While most multi-part stories with a single name, such as Big Finish's Human Resources and BBC Wales' The End of Time, are combined onto one page on the Tardis Data Core Wiki, Interference's sheer size necessitates a different treatment. For this reason, while a pieced-together, linearised summary of Interference as a whole is given below, publisher's summaries, "References" and "Continuity" lists, and external links for each individual volume can be found on their respective pages, Interference - Book One and Interference - Book Two.

Structure
Each book is split into two distinct but linked stories, "What Happened on Earth" and "What Happened on Dust", the former of which occurs during the Eighth Doctor's life, the latter occurring during the Third Doctor's. "What Happened on Earth" is the majority of the narrative, while "What Happened on Dust" encompasses just ten chapters and a coda. Sarah Jane Smith and Fitz Kreiner are the only characters that appear in both.

"What Happened on Earth" encompasses twenty-four chapters, one coda, and twelve brief vignettes called "Travels with Fitz" after every second chapter. Part One of "What Happened on Earth" includes Chapters 1-13, while Part Two is Chapters 14-24 and the coda; the twelve "Travels with Fitz" scenes are split evenly between the two volumes. "What Happened on Dust" encompasses ten chapters, split evenly between Parts One and Two, and one ending coda.

The stories are joined by a six-part linking narrative called "Foreman's World", which features just the Eighth Doctor and I.M. Foreman. The three sections in each book are named after the time of day they take place: in Book One, "Morning", "Afternoon", and "Evening on the First Day"; in Book Two, "Morning", "Afternoon", and "Evening on the Second Day". The two parts of "What Happened on Earth" are told between "Morning" and "Afternoon" on their respective days, while "What Happened on Dust" is between "Afternoon" and "Evening".

Part One
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Part Two
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Travels with Fitz
After the Doctor leaves Fitz in Geneva, UNISYC locks him in a building for his "own protection". His only entertainment for a week is annoying the guards, watching the television, and reading the miscellaneous paperback books. Suddenly, the guards are attacked by two humans, clad in black plastic respirators and smooth body armour, who had appeared through a rectangular window. One of the people sprays him with the Cold, and Fitz sees it growing eyes, opening its mouths, and eating him. He spends centuries drifting in and out of consciousness in the Cold before being rescued by Faction Paradox in 2593 on the planet Ordifica. There he is exposed to continuous Faction propaganda, and in 2594 he sceptically lets Mother Mathara initiate him into the lowest orders of the Faction and give a receiver. In 2596, Fitz is evacuated with Guest, Laura Tobin, and two thousand others in the Justinian just before the Time Lords destroy the planet.

In Part Two, the group of refugees is rehomed by Faction Paradox. While Fitz hopes they're going back to 20th century Earth so he can reunite with the Doctor, they actually travel to the year 1799, where they settle on Anathema on its two-century journey to Earth. Fitz is determined to return to the Doctor in 1996, but his exposure to the media through his receiver begins to transform him, changing his DNA so he becomes sterile. He knows his only options are to stay on the ship or join Faction Paradox when Mathara returns, but he rejects both of them; after examining the Remembrance Tanks the colonists are using to reproduce and checking how Tobin will remember him (as a "code-boy" who at least likes to spend time with his friends), Fitz becomes determined to commit suicide so that a remembered copy of himself can take his place while himself escapes in death before he can become too much like the other colonists. The penultimate vignette leaves him in 1801 standing on the edge of a building asking himself if he can really bring himself to jump.

Finally, on Anathema in 1996, Kode is in a Remembrance Tank which the Doctor has modified with a connection to the TARDIS. The Doctor reasurres Kode that the Tank will return him to how Fitz was, but that will mean wiping centuries of his memories and changing his physical features. Despite the Doctor's reassurances that Kode doesn't need to go through with the process, Kode insists, and Fitz's old memories start returning to him, including the initiation into Faction Paradox where, among the loa, a one-armed shadow – or rather, a shadow with a shriveled arm – showed Fitz his true destiny: "laying screaming in the dirt of a faraway planet as something huge and ancient started to eat him alive." But that memory vanishes, and Fitz wakes up.

Part One
On the distant planet Dust in the 38th century, town defender Magdelana Bishop confronts two Remote riders that were sent to execute her and seize the town. The Remote have been taking over various settlements on Dust, and they crucify Bishop just as they did the two strange aliens that previously tried to stop them. However, before the execution, they are interrupted by the arrival of a strange man wearing a blindfold, whose presence puzzles the Remote. The man tries to frighten them by predicting an imminent eclipse, but the Remote know about astronomy and are therefore unimpressed; the man then explains that he is a Time Lord and he caused the eclipse with a stellar manipulator in orbit. The Remote verify his species and retreat, even as the man, I.M. Foreman, tells Magdelena that he was bluffing about the stellar manipulator.

Following the events of the prologue of Alien Bodies, the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith are on their way back to Earth in the TARDIS when the Doctor discovers a door that didn't used to exist. He opens it and walks down a new passageway that ends in a grey concrete wall smeared in a time equation, though it takes him a moment to realize there is a man laying in the centre of it, as if pinned to the wall. This man is his future self, the Eighth Doctor, who first apologises for the mistake in his equation before deducing that "some force" is tying together their time zones. He speculates that it might be Faction Paradox, then makes his past self promise not to let himself "get diverted" on his way to Earth. He then falls back asleep.

Returning to the console room, the Third Doctor finds it seeping with blood, with Sarah looking on horrified. The TARDIS abrubtly lands on Dust, and the Doctor steps out to read a poster for "I.M. Foreman's One-Species Nongenetically-Engineered Travelling Show". He quickly ducks away from Sarah, who waits for him at the TARDIS before giving up and going to find him at the show, which had been set up right outside the town wall.

The town residents are more excited than they'd ever been, and Magdelana, fearing a trap, is on high alert, so when the Doctor comes to her for help finding Sarah, she holds him in her office at gunpoint. Despite herself, she finds herself giving him more information about the town and the Remote; the Doctor theorises, based on his future self's warning, that some force has brought the show, the Remote, the two other offworlders, and himself to Dust. She makes him coffee, but when the Doctor tried gently psychoanalysing her based on her description of her childhood, she threw it in his face, scalding him and telling him not to make guesses about her. She reminds him that she is protecting the town, and she will protect it brutally, especially from any offworlders.

Meanwhile, the two Remote riders return to their town of Anathema II, built where their spaceship had crashed and named for the famous Remote city that disappeared two thousand years prior. The oldest Remote, the town's informal leader, launches probes that detect no fewer than thirteen Gallifreyan life forms just outside the town. He announces to the Remote that he has found a way for them to escape the planet, and they begin preparing for battle. He reflects on his collection of heads of all the Time Lords he's killed, noting that he wants to add the Doctor's head one day, but he knows that is never likely.

The show begins with I.M. Foreman's brief introduction for each of the acts and a demonstration of his own stigmata. Sarah visits a few of the acts and has a particularly disorienting visit with the If, who gives her some brief visions of her future: first a glimpse of a pub in 1999, where she sat with her husband and her best friend wondering if someone would join them; then a snippet of her best friend's speech at Sarah's funeral.

A sandstorm begins, and the Doctor and Magdelana arrive at the show just as the Remote ship emerges from the clouds and the Remote begin invading the show. Even though one soldier shoots I.M. Foreman in the head, the Doctor, Sarah, and Foreman safely escape into a wagon. Part One ends with the Mothers and Fathers of the Eleven-Day Empire agreeing to send a Faction Paradox warship to Dust.

Part Two
The Faction warship arrives at a planet a few light-years from Dust. It had been colonized by humanity and infiltrated by the Faction before Earth fell and the colony was abandoned. To prevent the Time Lords from noticing the Faction's other activities during their inevitable investigation of Dust, the warship destroys every settlement on the planet.

In I.M. Foreman's wagon, he spits out the Remote bullet that he had been holding in his mouth since he caught it in his teeth, a trick he taught himself based on the common Earth show-stopper; Sarah informs him that when humans do it, it's just an illusion, which surprises him. The Doctor observes that the wagon is a "complex event" similar to his TARDIS, which Sarah summarises as "like a TARDIS, only not in a box." Foreman explains that he was a Gallifreyan priest before the High Council dissolved the monasteries, and that for millions of years his Traveling Show has been moving outwards along the spiral of the galaxy visiting civilised planets and showing the inhabitants the impossible to remind them of their potential. It was for a visit to London in 1964 that, over several years, the Traveling Show grew itself an urban junkyard to inhabit, a temporal anomaly that drew in the Doctor's TARDIS prior to the events of An Unearthly Child just as it had drawn the Remote and the Doctor's TARDIS to Dust.

Outside the wagon, the Remote invasion of the town is underway. Though Remote armour has changed in appearance since the 20th century, most of the Remote are still mostly human underneath. The only exception is the oldest member, who is so old and frayed that his armour is the only thing keeping him together: his flesh has grown into the cracks of the plating, and his receiver's wiring has fused into his spinal column. The receiver has been mostly dormant for centuries, but when it activates – for instance, upon detecting a nearby Time Lord - it fills him with adrenaline. He thinks back to his earliest memories: his first meeting with the Doctor; his first trip on the TARDIS; his first encounter with the Faction; and more importantly, his failure to commit suicide on Anathema, his decision to join Mother Mathara while a copy of his biodata stayed behind in the Remembrance Tanks, his rise to the rank of Father in the Eleven-Day Empire, after which he was put in charge of one of the last Remote communities. Father Kreiner promises his soldiers that with the technology in Foreman's wagons, they will leave the planet that night.

Magdelana is hiding between two of the wagons, doing her best to avoid being noticed by the Remote soldiers. With her shotgun she briefly aims at the Remote leader before he moves out of the way; then she focuses on the Doctor, who has stepped out of I.M. Foreman's wagon and is strolling toward the soldiers. Magdelana has the overwhelming urge to pull the trigger, but she was distracted by Mohandas the Geek, who at that moment stepped out of his wagon next to her.

Although the Doctor's plan is to introduce himself with a simple hello, Father Kreiner's receiver floods his body with adrenaline and he punches the Doctor in the face. Sarah listens as Kreiner apologises and the two start a conversation. When the Doctor comments that this visit to Dust is "wrong", Kreiner bitterly alludes to how the Doctor abandoned him and left him to wait for two thousand years, though rather than explaining it all, he would rather just kill him, even though he is a younger incarnation than the one he knew. The Doctor threatens to leave with the Traveling Show, but Kreiner reveals that the Remote are using their biosphere technology to lock it in place. High above them all, the Faction Paradox warship arrives in orbit to watch the events.

Frantic, Sarah consults I.M. Foreman, but he shushes her: through meditation, he is coordinating a plan with the other performers in the show (except for unstable Number Thirteen). The Doctor approaches his wagon with the Father's ultimatum, that they surrender the Traveling Show and the Doctor's life in exchange for the lives of the townsfolk; at the same time, he is distracted and disturbed by the revelation that the two crucified aliens were Ogron Lords, as the idea of the Time Lords using Ogron slaves is inconceivable to him. Despite not having a plan, I.M. Foreman proposes a solution.

Ten minutes later, the Doctor, Sarah, and I.M. Foreman exit the wagon as all the other freak show members (save Number Thirteen) emerge from theirs. In a long line they process to the town square, where Father Kreiner is waiting with the Remote and the hostage townspeople. I.M. Foreman dramatically reveals that the other members of his Traveling Show are actually his twelve future incarnations, all of whom he found in the wastelands of Gallifrey shortly after the Time Lords abolished the priesthood. Therefore, if Kreiner kills them all on Dust, it will create a formidable paradox.

While this doesn't frighten Kreiner, who has plenty of experience with paradox, I.M. Foreman further explains that Number Thirteen has the form of raw life energy, and it's been locked up in the wagon, growing and consuming biodata, since the very beginning. At that moment, on the outskirts of town, the Traveling Show unleashes Number Thirteen, who immediately forces itself onto the Remote ship and absorbs all its crew. It then crumples the ship in midair and decides to fall onto the square, absorbing all the people standing in it.

The Doctor and Sarah run away before Number Thirteen engulfed the square, and Father Kreiner tries to follow them but pauses at the screams of his Remote soldiers. A single tendril lashes out and catches his arm by accident; the armour pumps sedatives into his body to dull the pain, but his arm and its armour look shrink-wrapped, tiny, and weak, as if the monster sucked his biodata from the limb.

Meanwhile, the Doctor flies the TARDIS over the square to where I.M. Foreman and his other eleven non-final incarnations are surrounded by Number Thirteen, who is leaving them for last. The Doctor quickly links the TARDIS to the Traveling Show, which adopts the TARDIS's form and function and rescues the incarnations of Foreman. Father Kreiner, believing this second TARDIS to be the Eighth Doctor's, uses the last of the armour's power to cut through Number Thirteen and latch onto the TARDIS as it enters the Vortex, but he is roughly half a second too late. As the Traveling Show is unburdened by the restrictions usually placed on TARDISes, the Doctor sends it to Gallifrey's ancient past, where it explodes, leaving its passengers to regenerate together in a fashion so traumatic that their memories are all lost. Hours later, the original I.M. Foreman wanders over a nearby crag and goes to help them.

As a final errand, the Doctor returns the TARDIS to Dust and confronts Number Thirteen, reminding it about I.M. Foreman's goals and the Remote biosphere-manipulation machinery it now contains. At the Doctor's suggestion, it merges with Dust, flowing into every plant and animal on the planet.

As the Doctor walks back to the TARDIS, he is confronted by Magdelana Bishop and her shotgun. He confirms her logic that where one time traveller visits, others tend to appear, and such an event happened on Dust that day; he then reassures her that the Remote and I.M. Foreman have been "buried" and that he is on his way to leave. Magdelana stops him, however, and reiterates her duty to protect the town: she can't take the chance of more time travellers arriving, so she needs to make sure every trace of the Doctor is gone and buried. With that, she shoots him in the chest and leaves him in the street to die.

In the ending Coda, Sarah finds the Doctor and cradles his head as he slowly dies and regeneration begins. His intended final words are, "A tear, Sarah Jane?" but before he slips away he adds, "This is wrong."

Mother Mathara watches from the Faction warship in orbit. Cousin Llewis ruminates that they have failed their mission of infecting I.M. Foreman with a biodata virus during regeneration so Foreman's World could become a new Faction homeworld. Instead, the virus latched onto the Third Doctor, beginning a process in his biodata that would, by his eighth incarnation, convert him to the Faction's perspective. An early symptom of this will be the disappearance of his shadow (which occurred for the Eighth Doctor in Unnatural History), though Mathara notes that the Faction can fit him with a fake one.

Her job complete, Magdelana Bishop discards her "first assigned defender" badge.

Foreman's World
The Eighth Doctor, suspicious that his adventure on Earth was connected in some important way with his visit to Dust, arrives one morning on Foreman's World to consult with I.M. Foreman, in the hopes that she can refresh his memory and notice something he hasn't. The Doctor is fascinated with her universe-in-a-bottle, finding a little version of his prior self inside it, but they leave it on a hill so he can tell her what happened on Earth.

He doesn't tire of talking until the sun has almost set, at which point Foreman asks him some questions about his shadow, which has apparently reappeared but seems sickly, vague, and thin. She then decides it is her turn to tell her story about what happened on Dust. After night has fallen, Foreman stops talking so the two can finish their dinner, and she tells the Doctor her theory about why the Time Lords are the way they are. Shock Tactic ends as she asks him if he wants to spend the night there with her.


 * Lawrence Miles' Faction Paradox short story Toy Story is set during in the Doctor's TARDIS during the night, while the Doctor is "going through the motions".

At the start of The Hour of the Geek, I.M. Foreman and the Doctor wake up from where they slept on the hillside. After the two watch the clouds together for a while, the Doctor presents a theory that the TARDIS was behaving so erratically during Sam's last few adventures because it wanted to prepare for what was about to happen. He then finishes telling Foreman what happened on Earth, concluding by reiterating his suspicions that something had changed, and that it was somehow connected to him, the Remote, and his time spent in the prison.

Foreman presents the Doctor a riddle about a goose in a bottle, then finishes her story about what happened on Dust. The Doctor ruminates on the identity of the Remote's leader, saying he seems familiar in hindsight and that he feels as if the answer is obvious but his mind doesn't want him to work it out. This has been bothering him since his adventure on Earth, and he asks Foreman if, since she swallowed up the leader, she has access to the memories. She recognises this as his true motive for the visit. However, she reveals to the Doctor that she did not consume the leader: he had actually been sucked into the Time Vortex, and while she was making her bottle universe, she trapped him inside its Time Vortex.

The Doctor, disappointed, asks Foreman some questions about her World, then has a brief conversation with Magdelana Bishop, whose body Foreman has been consensually possessing. Foreman finally reveals the answer to the goose riddle and kisses him goodbye as he leaves in his TARDIS. I.M. Foreman returns to the hill to discover that her bottle universe has been stolen, likely by the High Council. This does not bother her much.


 * This leads into the events of Lawrence Miles' New Adventures novel Dead Romance, while the Eighth Doctor's adventures with Fitz and Compassion continue in The Blue Angel.

What Happened on Earth

 * Eighth Doctor
 * Samantha Jones
 * Fitz Kreiner
 * Sarah Jane Smith
 * K9
 * Guest
 * Compassion
 * Kode
 * Badar
 * I.M. Foreman
 * Alan Llewis
 * Coldicott
 * Lost Boy
 * Mathara
 * Nathaniel Guest
 * Laura Tobin

What Happened on Dust

 * Third Doctor
 * Sarah Jane Smith
 * Magdelana Bishop
 * I.M. Foreman
 * Father Kreiner

Cover gallery
The covers were designed so that, when placed next to each other in different orders, they would show the complete faces of the Third Doctor or the Eighth Doctor.