It's the year 2001. The Doctor has been waiting to meet a man named Fitz for over a century, and the time has finally arrived.
Tropes present in Escape Velocity include:
- Achievements in Ignorance: The Doctor observes that reaching the Kulan fleet was basically this, as he doesn't clearly remember how to pilot the TARDIS even after it's restored, justifying why he can't simply take Anji home.
- Ascended Fanboy: Subverted. The fanboy dies, and his long-suffering girlfriend, who finds all that sci-fi stuff silly and prefers Jane Austen, starts traveling in the TARDIS against her will.
- Convenient Terminal Illness: In the final confrontation with Fray'kon, new ally Arthur Tyler III stays behind to fight him off while the Doctor and Anji escape, revealing that he's already dying of a terminal brain tumour.
- Creator Provincialism: Eight makes the rather convoluted leap of logic that Fitz means to meet him in a London pub called St. Louis that doesn't exist until he's forced to establish it instead of actually traveling to the city in question.
- Expy: Professor X sounds a lot like another long-running British science-fiction television show...
- Just Here for Godzilla: A common comment on an otherwise lacklustre book is that its redeeming features are introducing Anji, and reuniting the Doctor and Fitz.
- Security Cling: Fitz, surprisingly, is the initiator for several throughout the novel. Usually Eight is the more tactile of the two, though in fairness, from Eight's perspective, Fitz is still an enigmatic stranger.
- Title Drop: Several times. Escape velocity refers to the speed necessary for an object to escape Earth's orbit, something the Doctor has been desperate to do for the past six books.
