Admittedly A Week Late

How that conversation in the TARDIS should have ended.

Donna: Hang about, why would people still be reading books in the year five billion? Shouldn't this be on a computer pad, or beamed into my brain, or something? At the very least the cover should be, like, a magic eye picture, surely.
Doctor: Well, if you assume constant technological progress, maybe. But there's been plenty of set-backs along the way. Ice ages. Dalek invasions. Uprisings of vicious yet firmly-toned homosexuals.
Donna: Oh, you're kidding!
Doctor: Well, about the last one, yeah. Be good, though, wouldn't it?
Donna: You've been referencing gay culture a lot recently.
Doctor: Doesn't male a lot of sense, does it?
Donna: Not really, no. Leastways, not with your faintly suspicious obsession with nubile young women.
Doctor: I picked you up, didn't I?
Donna: I don't count; I'm famous. As I was saying: why do you have a book from a year in which by rights we should all be faintly unconvincing and ludicrously overused wibbly-wobbly special effects? Wouldn't all those disasters make it a bit tricky to keep Waterstones ticking over.
Doctor: Well, I like to think I play my part. Useful things, time machines. A book here, a book there, eventually you get all the classics back into circulation.
Donna: Classic? It's not even one of her better books. It just happens to have a wasp on the cover, which now I think about it is a hell of a coincidence.
Doctor: You don't think I should be seeding the ruins of post-apocalyptic Earth with mediocre offerings from fairly well-known writers?
Donna: Oh, no; I'm sure they'd definitely prefer that to fridges and penicillin. Did you make sure they got ahold of Digital Fortress, too?
Doctor: Digital what?
Donna: Thank you; my point exactly.

Pause.

Doctor: Ah, Sycorax and Shadow Proclamation, I remember when the one-dimensional, bolshy, middle-class-vision-of-what-the-working-class-are-like were actually attractive. Rather than just picked arbitrarily from a pool of one-trick ponies who are temporary household names?
Donna: Am I bovvered?
Doctor: Thank you; my point exactly.

Finis.