Now: Nineteen Ninety-Seven                                                          

 

A Romantic Evening Illustrated short story, published 1992                  Doctor: 7

featuring Lethbridge-Stewart, with Sarah Jane (informative mention)

Written by Alex Fowles.

informed guess Takes place in the UK, the winter after Battlefield.

 

Lost Highway (1997) is arguably a film about tangled biodata, its protagonist physically changing into another individual and back again, and apparently flicking back in time at the film’s conclusion. The sinister Mystery Man played by Robert Blake, who can be in two places at once, might be an agent of either side in the Second War in Heaven.

 

Time Out   Charity short story, published 2001                                           Doctor: 7

Written by David McIntee.

informed guess Takes place in Hong Kong, probably shortly before Bullet Time.


Bullet Time Novel, published 2001                                                     Doctor: 7

featuring UNIT, Sarah Jane, the Tzun, in all probability, with Iris Wildthyme (informative mention)

Written by David A McIntee.

Takes place in Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Moscow and in the Persian Gulf; ending self-datedly in April 1997 CE.

Bangkok was the capital of Thailand, a monarchy on the southeast coast of Asia, lying west and northwest of Cambodia.

Singapore was republic occupying an island off the southeast of Asia.

The Persian Gulf was an arm of the Arabian Sea, to the east of the Arabian Peninsula.


Channel 666   Short story, published 2009                                                Doctor: 0

Featuring Iris Wildthyme

Written by Mark Clapham.

Informed guess Takes place on a university campus in the UK; self-dated Easter “a decade and change”ago, and published in 2009 CE.


Wintervention   Comic story, published 2014                                           Doctor: 11

Featuring Clara

Written by Rik Hoskin.

Takes place in London; self-dated spring, 1997 CE.


Slow Chocolate Autopsy, an illustrated novel of 1997 by Iain Sinclair and Dave McKean, tells of a man named Norton who is trapped in the boundaries of London but who is free to move through time, two qualities that bring him into proximity to Doctor Who narrative. He later appears as a character in Moore and O.Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century.


The Rapture Audio Drama, released 2002                                  Doctor: 7                  

featuring Ace

Written by Joseph Lidster.

Takes place on Ibiza, a Spanish island in the Mediterranean; self-dated May 1997 CE.


A Matter of Perception   Short story, published 2021                            Doctor: 0


featuring Lethbridge-Stewart, Anne Travers


Written by Alan Darlington.


Takes place in Sussex. Lethbridge-Stewart is married to Doris, but still teaching.


The Stranger   Novel, published 1997                       Doctor: 8, it may be assumed

Written by Portia Da Costa.

Contemporary to publication Takes place in Oxfordshire. The author is on record as intending the character Dr Paul Bowman, the object of the protagonist’s erotic fixation, to be Paul McGann playing the Doctor’s eighth incarnation, although there are suggestions of McGann playing “I” in Withnail and I as well. The Doctor actually remembers someone called Claudia, the name of our heroine, in Father Time, believing them to have spent time together in the 1970s. I suggest this story actually take place after an earlier amnesiac episode for the Doctor, before Storm Warning perhaps, and a fragmented memory of this priapic idyll emerges during his century of exile, which he rationalises as having taken place ten years earlier. We know from The Turing Test and Endgame that the Doctor was not in the best of mental health in the decades following The Ancestor Cell, understandably.


Sympathy for the Devil   Audio Drama, released 2003      Doctor: Unbound 3 featuring an Unbound Master, Unbound Lethbridge-Stewart, Unbound UNIT                  

Written by Jonathan Clements.

Takes place in Hong Kong; ending self-datedly in July 1997 CE in an alternative timeline. Although this incarnation of the Doctor arose from his second regeneration, following his trial in The War Games, his appearance and nature are radically different to the Doctor’s third incarnation in his dominant timeline.


Does It Show?   Novel, published 1997                                             Doctor: 0

Featuring Iris Wildthyme

Written by Paul Magrs.

Contemporary to publication Takes place in Northern England, possibly in the Obverse, after July.

 

Predator 2 (1990) is the film in which a Predator is shown displaying the head of a Xenomorph from the Alien franchise. This surely marks the point at which The Enemy, one of whose manifestations parallels the narrative of the Xenomorphs, begins to colonise the history of the Predators, as mentioned in The Annotation Autopsy of Agent A. The film is set in a heatwave in Los Angeles in 1997.

 

The Eight Doctors   Novel, published 1997     

                                                                             Doctors: 8, with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, Unbound 6 (glimpse)

featuring the Time Lords, the Master, with Susan, the Vampires, Coal Hill School, Barbara, Ian, Jamie, Lethbridge-Stewart, Zoe, UNIT, Jo, Olive Hawthorne, the Sontarans, the Giant Spiders, K9 II, Romana, Adric, Tegan, Turlogh, a Raston Warrior Robot, Mel, Sam (glimpse)

Written by Terrance Dicks.

Informed guess The framing action takes place in Shoreditch; self-dated 1997 CE. An earlier section takes in the English south coast and Devil’s End. Sam leaves linear time for the first time that she is aware of, but being a version of herself engineered by Faction Paradox, it is arguable that she never existed in linear time to begin with.


Bounty   Audio short story, published 1998                                                Doctor: 8

featuring Sam

Written by Peter Anghelides.

Takes place in the Seychelles, immediately after The Eight Doctors.

The Seychelles was a republic occupying an archipelago, separated from the east coast of Africa by the Somali Sea.


Auton   Video Drama, released 1997                                                        Doctor: 0

featuring UNIT, the Nestene Consciousness

Written by Nicholas Briggs.

contemporary to release Takes place in the UK, self-dated “thirty years” after Spearhead From Space, which I take to be a round figure.


Vampire Science   Novel, published 1997   Doctor: 8, with 7 (informative mention)

featuring the Vampires, UNIT, Sam, with the Time Lords, Ace (informative mention)

Written by Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum.

Informed guess Takes place in San Francisco, CA; self-dated 1997 CE.


The Dying Days   Novel, published 1997                  Doctors: 8, with 4 (glimpse)

featuring the Ice Warriors, Lethbridge-Stewart, UNIT, Allen Road, Benny, with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, the Worldsphere (glimpse)

Takes place in Kent and London, ending self-datedly in November 1997 CE.

Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart was a Tellurian conceived, gestated and engineered in a laboratory in the late twenty-first century CE, subsequently being adopted by a descendent of Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart.


The Little Things   Short story, published 2004               Doctors: 4, with 1 (glimpse)

featuring K9 II, Romana, with Susan (glimpse)

Written by Paul Beardsley.

Takes place in St Albans, a city of Hertfordshire; the latest section self-dated Christmas Day, 1997 CE.

 

 

 

Total Stories Considered               837  

Proportion Written By Women   8%                                          

 

Top Docs

3                 205 stories

4                 99 stories  

7                 78 stories  

2                 57 stories  

5                 49 stories  

6                 46 stories

1                 36 stories

8                 36 stories   Climber!             

11               24 stories  

10               15 stories  

12               15 stories            

Unbound   15 stories   Climber!

9                 5 stories    

13               4 stories    

         

         

 

Top Twenty Recurring Elements

 

Alastair, Kate and the Lethbridge-Stewart family                                                                                                                                                                                               251 stories

London                                                                211 stories

UNIT                                                                    207 stories

Regional England                                               206 stories          

North America                                                   100 stories

Benton                                                                90 stories

Jo                                                                         89 stories  

Sarah Jane                                                          69 stories           

Yates                                                                   65 stories  

The Master, including Missy                            65 stories  

Liz                                                                        60 stories  

The Time Lords                                                  57 stories  

The Travers family                                            56 stories

Continental Europe                                           54 stories  

At sea                                                                  54 stories   Climber!    

Ace                                                                      53 stories  

Christmas                                                            44 stories  

Scotland                                                              41 stories

The K9s                                                               41 stories

The Intrusion Counter-Measures Group        39 stories

 

 

         

Top Decades

 

The Teens                                                           308 stories

The Noughties                                                    150 stories

The Nineties                                                       132 stories         

The Seventies                                                    120 stories

The Eighties                                                        53 stories  

The Sixties                                                          32 stories  

The Twenties                                                     42 stories  

 

 

 

And Top Twenty Years

 

2016                                                          48 stories

2019                                                          40 stories  

2018                                                          37 stories  

2017                                                          35 stories            

2015                                                          34 stories

2013                                                          31 stories  

2001                                                          32 stories   Climber!    

1993                                                          29 stories  

2012                                                          29 stories           

2011                                                          28 stories            

1970                                                          24 stories

2021                                                          22 stories

1973                                                          20 stories  

2020                                                          20 stories  

2008                                                          19 stories

1972                                                           18 stories

1992                                                          18 stories   Climber!             

1999                                                          15 stories  

2005                                                          15 stories  

2009                                                          15 stories   Climber!

         

 

         

 

Total Writers (including showrunners, script editors, anthology linking material writers)                                                349

Proportion of Female Writers                         13%      

 

Top Twenty Writers

 

Terrance Dicks                                          32 stories  

? John Canning                                         30 stories  

Paul Magrs                                                23 stories  

Eric Saward                                               16 stories  

Anonymous Polystyle Writers               15 stories  

Andy Frankham-Allen                             16 stories  

Eddie Robson                                            15 stories            

John Dorney                                             13 stories  

Andrew Cartmel                                      12 stories  

Paul Cornell                                              11 stories  

Simon Guerrier                                        11 stories

Robert Holmes                                         11 stories  

Malcolm Hulke                                         10 stories  

David A McIntee                                      10 stories   Climber!

Jonathan Morris                                      10 stories  

Justin Richards                                         10 stories  

Gary Russell                                              10 stories  

Mark Wright                                             10 stories  

Roger Noel Cook                                      9 stories    

Steve Lyons                                               9 stories    

 

 

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