The Left-Handed Hummingbird

Doctor Who book
The Left-Handed Hummingbird
Series	Virgin New Adventures
Release number	21
Featuring	Seventh Doctor Ace, Bernice
Writer	Kate Orman
Publisher	Virgin Books
ISBN	ISBN 0-426-20404-2
Release date	December 1993
Preceded by	The Dimension Riders
Followed by	Conundrum

The Left-Handed Hummingbird is an original novel written by Kate Orman and based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It features the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Bernice. A prelude to the novel, also written by Orman, appeared in Doctor Who Magazine #207. This novel is the third novel in the "Alternate Universe cycle" which continues until No Future.

This book was Kate Orman's first sale. It was also the first New Adventure written by a woman, and the first written by an Antipodean.

As with all Doctor Who spin-off media, its relationship to the televised serials is open to interpretation.

Publisher's Summary

He took up a firing stance, holding the thirty-eight out in front of him. 'Mr Lennon?' he said.

1968: Cristian Alvarez meets the Doctor in London. 1978: The great temple of the Aztecs is discovered in Mexico. 1980: John Lennon is murdered in New York. 1994: A gunman runs amok in Mexico City.

Each time, Christian is there. Each time, he experiences the Blue, a traumatic psychic shock. Only the Doctor can help him - but the Doctor has problems of his own. Following the events of Blood Heat and The Dimension Riders, the Doctor knows that someone or something has been tinkering with time. Now he finds that events in his own past have been altered - and a lethal force from South America's prehistory has been released.

The Doctor, Ace and Bernice travel to the Aztec Empire in 1487, to London in the Swinging Sixties, and to the sinking of the RMS Titanic as they attempt to rectify the temporal faults - and survive the attacks of the living god Huitzilin.

Continuity

There are several references to the serial The Aztecs.

The scene in which an apparently dead Doctor is wheeled into a hospital in a bodybag, labelled John Doe, prefigures the Seventh Doctor's death in the 1996 telemovie, which was three years away when the book was written. Bernice also worries at one point that twentieth century medicine could kill him; which is ultimately proved to be correct, when the Doctor is killed by Grace Holloway operating on him without realising he has two hearts.

Reviews

• The Left-Handed Hummingbird reviews at Outpost Gallifrey
• The Left-Handed Hummingbird reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide

External links

• The Left-Handed Hummingbird Prelude
• The Left-Handed Hummingbird at the Doctor Who Reference Guide
• The Cloister Library - The Left-Handed Hummingbird
• The Left-Handed Hummingbird at The TARDIS Library