Doctor Who

An Eighth Doctor novel with Fitz and Anji.In France, 1819, two English tourists are befriended and murdered by a mysterious individual. The dead men are identified as Charles Babbage and John Hershel. Together they would have developed ideas for a steam engine that could execute calculations. Babbage would have spent twelve year trying to build the first ancestor of the computer, which he called the Difference Engine...In America, 1890, a judge is bribed at a competition to chose a new scheme to speed up tabulation of the census. A patent binary system involving punch cards is passed over in favour of a less effective manual process. As a result, the patent is never developed into a working business, which would have been called the tabulation machine company. In 1924, that company would have become IBM...In England, 1937, Alan Turing tries to have a revolutionary paper publishing postulating ideas for a universal machine. He is arrested by intelligence agents...The Doctor, Fitz and Anji arrive in a 2003 unlike any they expected. The British Empire is flourishing, terrorism is rife, and, strangest of all, the computer hasn't been invented. This is no accident of time but what has happened to Earth's history?The Doctor has to find out before the excruciating pressure causes time itself to collapse.