Then: The Chronarchy before the Doctor’s Looming

(approximately two million years)

 

 Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible   Novel, published 1992      Doctor: 7

featuring the Time Lords, Ace, and the Sontarans, the Rutan, Omega (informative mention)

Written by Marc Platt.

Takes place partly on Gallifrey, just before the establishment of the Chronarchy. Also, briefly in Ealing. Marc Platt casually mentions that the Sontarans and the Rutan are already in conflict.

Alarms and Excursions  Comic story, published 1985                             Doctor: 0

featuring the Special Executive

Written by Jamie Delano.

Informed guess Set in a version of Essex and the Inca Empire, but early in the Special Executive’s career, as it is not yet led by Wardog but a humanoid posing as the Despot of Kandahar.

The Special Executive are a group of individuals with exceptional skills and abilities, at one time employed by the Time Lords, and probably assembled by them. A super hero team, essentially, but you wouldn’t expect the Time Lords to call them that.

Jorus and the Voganauts   Illustrated short story, published 2017         Doctor: 0

Featuring the Time Lords, the Vogans, with the Vampires (informative mention)

Written by Richard Dinnick.

Takes place in or near Gallifreyan space, during the Vampire War. A failed attempt to create the Eye of Harmony (possibly using the star Polyphilos) released the Yssgaroth into the universe. The Gallifreyans contained them, and fought a war against their servants, the vampires, or Malakh (The Pit). The suggestion in Zagreus, that the vampires were inoffensive, comes from a vampire and is not especially plausible.

The Vogans are spacefaring near-humanoid bipeds, who seem eventually to have evolved into large craniumed creaturs with atrophied bodies.

The Knight, the Fool and the Dead   Novel, published 2020                                                 Doctors: 10, with 1, 8, 9 (glimpse)

Featuring the Ood, the Kotturuh, with Susan, the Daleks, the Vampires, Barbara, Ian, Rose (glimpse)

Written by Stephen Cole.

Takes place variously during Monstrous Beauty, and therefore the Vampire War.

The Minds of Magnox   Audio story, released 2020            Doctors: 10, with 11

Featuring the Ood, the Kotturuh

Written by Darren Jones.

Informed guess Takes place on Magnox during All Flesh is Grass.

Tales of the Dark Times – Episode 1   Online comic story, published 2020                                                                             Doctor: 10

Featuring the Ood

Written by the Comic Creator crew.

Takes place in an unspecified desert, after The Minds of Magnox and during All Flesh is Grass.

Tales of the Dark Times – Episode 2   Online comic story, released 2020                                                                               Doctor: 0

Featuring the Daleks, with the Kotturuh (informative mention)

Written by the Comic Creator crew.

Informed guess Takes place on Velosia, after The Knight, the Fool and the Dead, and during All Flesh is Grass.

Tales of the Dark Times – Episode 3   Online comic story, released 2020                                                                                Doctor: 8

Featuring the Daleks, with the Kotturuh (informative mention)

Written by the Comic Creator crew.

Informed guess Takes place in space, after Tales of the Dark Times Episode 2 and during All Flesh Is Grass.

Tales of the Dark Times – Episode 4   Online comic story, released 2020                                                                                 Doctor: 9

Featuring the Vampires, with the Kotturuh (informative mention)

Written by the Comic Creator crew.

Informed guess Takes place on Parvanna, during All Flesh is Grass.

Mission to the Known   Illustrated short story, published 2020            Doctor: 0

Featuring the Daleks

Written by James Goss.

Informed guess Takes place in space, during All Flesh is Grass.

Tales of the Dark Times – Episode 5   Online comic story, released 2020                                                                                Doctors: 8, 9

Written by the Comic Creator crew.

Informed guess Takes place on Hoolan, during All Flesh is Grass.

All Flesh Is Grass   Novel, published 2020                        Doctors: 10, with 8, 9

Featuring the Daleks, the Vampires, the Ood, the Kotturuh

Written by Una McCormack.

Takes place on Birinji, after The Knight, the Fool and the Dead and during Monstrous Beauty.

Monstrous Beauty  Comic story, published 2020                                    Doctor: 9

Featuring the Time Lords, the Vampires, Rose, the Kotturuh

Written by Scott Gray.

Takes place in Gallifreyan space, during the Vampire War.

The Multi-Faceted War   Illustrated short story, published 2017            Doctor: 0

Featuring the Time Lords, the Vampires, the Macra, the Saturnyns

Written by Richard Dinnick.

Takes place in Gallifreyan space, during the Vampire War.

The Macra are large spacefaring arthropods.

The Saturnyns are a spacefaring species of aquatic bipeds.

The Evil and the Deep Black Sky   Illustrated short story, published 2017                                                                                Doctor: 0

Featuring the Time Lords, the Chronavores, Omega

Written by Richard Dinnick.

Takes place in the Messina system, not long before Star Death.

Star Death   Comic story, published 1980                                                    Doctor: 4

featuring the Time Lords, Omega (informative mention)

Written by Alan Moore.

The Gallifreyans succesfully create the Eye of Harmony using the star Qqabaa. Omega is lost to an anti-matter universe as a result of sabotage by the Order of the Black Sun, time-travelling enemies from the Time Lords’ future. This also enables Rassilon to plunder their technology, however.

The Other Three Doctors   Charity short story, published 2016  

                             Doctors: Unbound, Unbound 9, Unbound 9, Unbound, with 9 (glimpse)

Featuring Unbound Time Lords, Unbound Master, with Rose (glimpse)

Written by Iain McLaughlin.

Takes place mostly in the Vortex, but pivotally on a version of Gallifrey, just after the creation of the Eye of Harmony.

4-D War   Comic story, published 1981                                                          Doctor: 0

featuring the Time Lords, the Special Executive

Written by Alan Moore.

Takes place on Gallifrey after Star Death. The Order of the Black Sun launch an attack to protect their secrets from 20,000 years in the future.

Black Sun Rising   Comic story, published 1981                                         Doctor: 0

featuring the Time Lords, the Sontarans, the Special Executive

Written by Alan Moore.

Takes place on Desrault after 4-D War. The Sontarans provoke the original hostility between the Time Lords and the Order of the Black Sun.

The Longest Story In The World   Short story, published 2000           Doctor: 0

featuring Susan, the Time Lords

Written by Paul Magrs.

Takes place, I suggest, on Gallifrey, a few years after the Pythia’s Curse. Susan’s family are purged by the High Council.

Executive Action   Charity short story, published 2001                             Doctor: 0

featuring the Time Lords, the Special Executive

Written by Lance Parkin.

Takes place on Gallifrey; self-dated after Black Sun Rising and twelve years after 4-D War.

Come One and All To The Ugly Bug-Eyed Monsters’ Ball  Comic story, published 1991                                                                                                                                                  Doctor: 0

featuring the Special Executive

Written by Alan Davis.

Takes place on a version of Earth, presumably after the Special Executive have fled Gallifrey.

Executive Action   Comic story, published 1983                                       Doctor: 0

featuring the Special Executive

Written by Alan Moore.

Takes place variously; for the Special Executive, after Come One and All To The Ugly Bug-Eyed Monster’s Ball.

Judgement Day   Comic story, published 1983                                          Doctor: 0

featuring the Special Executive

Written by Alan Moore.

Takes place variously; for the Special Executive, after Executive Action.

Rough Justice   Comic story, published 1983                                             Doctor: 0

featuring the Special Executive

Written by Alan Moore.

Takes place variously; for the Special Executive, after Judgement Day.

Arrivals   Comic story, published 1983                                                        Doctor: 0

featuring the Special Executive

Written by Alan Moore.

Takes place variously; for the Special Executive, after Rough Justice.

Waiting for the End of the World   Comic story, published 1983         Doctor: 0

featuring the Special Executive

Written by Alan Moore.

Takes place variously; for the Special Executive, after Arrivals.

The Sound and the Fury   Comic story, published 1983                          Doctor: 0

featuring the Special Executive

Written by Alan Moore.

Takes place variously; for the Special Executive, after Waiting for the End of the World.

But They Never Really Die   Comic story, published 1983                     Doctor: 0

featuring the Special Executive

Written by Alan Moore.

Takes place variously; for the Special Executive, after The Sound and the Fury.

The Scrolls of Rassilon   Fictional Document, published 1991                Doctor: 0

Featuring the Time Lords, Omega, with the Vampires (informative mention)

Written by John Peel.

Takes place on and near Gallifrey, concluding a millennium after Star Death. The Stranger is probably Morbius, acquiring the Stellar Manipulator he uses in Sisterhood of the Flame and The Vengeance of Morbius. The translator’s note prefacing this account urges caution in accepting its accuracy. The star that Omega harnesses is called Polyphilos rather than Qqabaa, and there is no mention of the Other or the Pythia’s curse. I speculate that Polyphilos is the first star that Rassilon and Omega targeted, which resulted in the Yssgaroth and the curse of the Malakh entering the universe.

Rassilon and the Serpent’s Tongue   Charity drabble, published 1993            Doctor: 0

Featuring the Time Lords

Written by Jay Eales.

Takes place on Gallifrey, during the reign of Rassilon; it alludes to the Time Lord gift of telepathic panglottia.

The Lost Dimension   Comic story, published 2017

                                            Doctor: 4, 5. 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, with 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, War (glimpse)      

Featuring the Time Lords, the Cybermen, UNIT, the Earth Reptiles, the Sontarans, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, Romana, River Song, Josie, Rose, Captain Jack, Jenny, Gabby, Cindy, Alice, the Paternoster Gang, Nardole, Bill, with the Krotons (glimpse), and the Daleks, the Ogrons, Mickey (informative mention)

Written by George Mann, Cavan Scott, Katy Rex, Emma Beeby, Gordon Rennie and Nick Abadzis.

Takes place variously but pivotally on Gallifrey during the initial development of TT capsules.

Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday   Illustrated short story, published 2011

                                                                                                                        Doctor: 0

Featuring the Time Lords

Written by Justin Richards.

Takes place on Gallifrey, during the reign of Rassilon.

Dawn of Time   Comic story, published 2012                                             Doctor: 11

Featuring the Time Lords, Amy or an Amy ganger, Rory

Written by Trevor Baxendale.

Takes place in the TARDIS, relating to the reign of Rassilon.

Dharmayuddha   Short story, published 2013                                           Doctor: 0

Featuring the Time Lords

Written by Aditya Bidikar.

Takes place in Magadha, an area now in India, in a version of reality subsequently overwritten. This is an allusive story, but I infer that it describes the Anchoring of the Thread, by which the Time Lords imposed their version of history on the universe. The events described in the Mahabharata are implied to be an aspect of the Time Wars, Which Never Happened, whereby the Time Lords neutralised their potential competition. Evidently this included a version of Tellurians with formidable magic powers.

 

John Brunner’s Traveller in Black stories, collected in The Compleat Traveller in Black (1986) feature a figure moving through an irrational world, taking it, inhabitant by inhabitant, from chaos to order. This sounds like an aspect of the Chronarchy imposing its version of history on the cosmos, as lamented by the Carnival Queen in Christmas On a Rational Planet.

We can imagine the Anchoring of the Thread as a wave front hitting different areas of pre-Chronarchical reality and incorporating them into single cascade of cause and effect. This might be perceived as a disappearance of magic. Lord Dunsany describes this happening to medieval Spain in his 1926 novel The Charwoman’s Shadow. (Presumably there’s nothing to stop people other than Faction Paradox from discovering Shadow technology). Larry Niven’s 1972 short story What Good Is a Glass Dagger? describes this in terms of a natural resource becoming depleted in pre-historic times.

But central to how the Time Lords have shaped our view of the world is, surely, time. In The Prince of Stars in the Cavern of Time by Ian Dennis, published as Baghdad and The Prince of Stars in 1986, the revolutionary Ripe Fruit party seize the palace and bring that which was within, out. It turns out to be a clock. Haroun al Rashid, the legendary wise Sultan of this world’s folklore, becomes a historical personage, as it happens, the protagonist of this book, who presumably reigns as Caliph from 786 CE to his death in 809 CE, the facts of his life in this world overwriting the events of this book. 

In Nights at the Circus (1984), Angela Carter imagines a magical end of the nineteenth century, when, as she says, most people still did not know it was the nineteenth century, “Western time, Yankee time” would expand from covering some of the Earth to covering all of it very rapidly. The novel’s protagonist, Fevvers, is a circus artiste with a pair of functional wings growing from her back; there is some suggestion that she escapes a tight spot simply by living a life of narrative rather than actual events. As the novel ends, the first day of the twentieth century sweeps across Siberia, where Fevvers is at the time. One interpretation of its final words is that now, in the twentieth century, her wings were always a colourful trick: “proper” (Time Lord) history is supplanting the narrative we have just read.  

Finally Mary Gentle in Ash: A Secret History (2000) has contemporary historians discovering evidence of a magical fifteenth century that begins to colonise our past as they read more of it. This uses the physics folklore of human beings calling reality into being out of the quantum foam by perceiving it. Previously existing intelligences move to destroy humanity before this sort of thing fatally undermines the universe, and our safely non-magic world is the compromise reached to avert this.

Pandoric’s Box   Illustrated short story, published 2017           Doctor: War (informative mention)

Featuring the Time Lords, the Nestene Consciousness

Written by Richard Dinnick.

Takes place in the Gallifreyan noosphere. Rassilon is waging a war against the Nestene Consciousness that seems to be distinct from the Time Wars, Which Never Happened.

Constance   Charity short story, published 2001                                        Doctor: Unbound

featuring the Time Lords, the Vampires

Written by Paul Ferry.

An unbound Doctor discovers Rassilon’s widow.

Omega   Audio drama, released 2003                                                       Doctor: 5

featuring the Time Lords, Omega

Written by Nev Fountain.

Takes place in space; self-dated ten thousand years after the disappearance of Omega in Star Death.

Doctor Who and the Underworld  Novelisation, published 1980          Doctor: 4

featuring Leela, K9 I, and the Time Lords (glimpse)

Adapted by Terrance Dicks from a script by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, edited by Anthony Read.

Takes place in space. The catastrophe of Minyos commits the Time Lords to non-intervention.

A Day in the Death of the Land of Fiction   Charity short story in verse and design, published 1999                                                               Doctor: Unbound 4

featuring the Land of Fiction, with an Unbound Master, Unbound Sarah Jane (glimpse)

Written by Jim Mortimore, Tim Keable, Simon Robinson, Huw Griffiths.

The Land of Fiction is inadvertently created by the Time Lords (Happy Endings).

The Stolen TARDIS   Comic story, published 1979                                    Doctor: 4

featuring the Time Lords

Written by Steve Moore.

Takes place on Gallifrey. The Time Lords are still naive about defending Gallifrey. Sillarc, with his invocations of the god Yottle, might be a combatant in the Second War in Heaven (Against Nature) or he might just have read The Circus of Doctor Lao by Charles G Finney (1935)

The Three Little Sontarans   Illustrated short story, published 2015     Doctor: 0

Featuring the Sontarans, the Rutan

Written by Justin Richards.

Informed guess Takes place in the Klovian Cluster, self-datedly during the early centuires of the Sontaran-Rutan conflict. The Doctor says in Night Terrors that this story was told to him as a child, so presumably happened some time previously.

The Three Brothers Gruff   Illustrated short story, published 2015       Doctor: 0

Featuring the Sontarans

Written by Justin Richards.

Takes place on an unnamed planet with humanoid inhabitants, not long after The Three Little Sontarans, assuming the same Starn was involved.

Ghost Devices   Novel, published 1997                                            Doctor: 7(glimpse)

featuring the Time Lords, Benny, the Worldsphere, with the Veltrochni (informative mention)

Written by Simon Bucher-Jones

Takes place variously, but for the Time Lords probably fairly early in the Chronarchy, given the size of the Vo’lach Spire paradox. Also, it is possible that David Foreman in this novel is the I M Foreman of Interference, who left Gallifrey relatively early in the Chronarchy.

The Veltrochni are a species of spacefaring bipeds.

The Voton Terror   Illustrated short story, published 1980                       Doctor: 4

featuring K9 II, Romana, and the Time Lords (informative mention)

Written by the World Distributors Annual 1981 crew.

Takes place on Vandelan in the Doctor’s past, when the Time Lords took a more active role in Galactic society.

Vorton’s Revenge   Illustrated short story, published 1984                       Doctor: 6

featuring Peri, and the Time Lords (informative mention)

Written by the World Distributors Annual 1985 crew.

informed guess Takes place on Exclon. The Exclonans appear to be contemporaries of the Time Lords. The Time Lords’ devastation of Exclon would presumably have been before their adoption of non-intervention, making Vorton exceptionally, though not uniquely, old. I suggest that Vorton knows of the Doctor, who would come from his future, through the interstellar conference detailed in The Voton Terror, which would also explain why he apparently views the Doctor as a straightforward diplomat for the Time Lords.

The Twins in the Wood   Illustrated short story, published 2015           Doctor: 0

Featuring the Time Lords

Written by Justin Richards.

Takes place on Gallifrey, after the introduction of the non-intervention policy.

Minatorius   Comic story, published 1981                                                    Doctor: 0

featuring the Time Lords

Written by Maxwell Stockbridge.

The Time Lords’ rules of non-intervention are beginning to be too inflexibly enforced.  

Listen   TV story, broadcast 2014                                                               Doctor: 12

Featuring the Time Lords, Clara

Written by Steven Moffat.

Informed guess Takes place partly on Gallifrey, during a childhood of the Doctor. The Doctor experiences various memories of his ‘previous’ life, before being loomed in an adult body in the House of Lungbarrow. His physical childhood, shown here, would appear to come from this. Briefly, a Time Lord met a Victorian time-traveller from Earth named Penelope Gate: they married and had a son. (The Time Lord adopted the name Ulysses, in honour of his wife). It would appear that their son regenerated seven times, before breaking the Laws of Time to go back to Gallifrey’s past and meet Rassilon. He then became the figure known to Gallifreyan history as The Other, and, after falling out with Rassilon, threw himself into the gene looms to emerge two million years later as the Doctor’s first incarnation. I am placing the Other’s early life near to the Doctor’s looming, as it would appear that the Time Lord known as Irving Braxiatel is the Doctor’s brother. Braxiatel is still very active during the Doctor’s lifetime. It is entirely typical of Braxiatel that he should know the story of the Doctor’s past life – or rather, that the Doctor is the reincarnation of his lost brother, even though the Doctor is ignorant of it for the first millennium of his life. (If Braxiatel is a Gallifreyan name, it is possible that Ms Gate was a fan of theatrical knight Sir Henry Irving.) Some of it also takes place in Gloucestershire.

 

“Listen”   Poem, webcast 2020                                                                  Doctor: 12

Written by Steven Moffat.

Takes place indeterminately, but for the Doctor, after Listen.

 

 

 

Total Stories Considered               2203

Proportion Written By Women   11%                                        

 

Top Docs

3                 224 stories

10               166 stories

4                 164 stories

7                 157 stories

11               137 stories         

8                 119 stories

5                 107 stories         

6                 103 stories

2                 84 stories  

12               75 stories  

1                 61 stories

Unbound   38 stories  

9                 34 stories   Climber!

13               32 stories

War            4 stories    

 

 

Top Twenty Recurring Elements

 

London                                                                584 stories         

Regional England                                               436 stories

UNIT                                                                    358 stories

Alastair, Kate, Kadiatu, Lucy Weston and the Lethbridge-Stewart family                                                                                       350 stories

Wales                                                                  239 stories

Torchwood                                                         228 stories  

North America                                                   226 stories

Captain Jack                                                       179 stories

Sarah Jane                                                          144 stories

The Time Lords                                                  128 stories    Climber! 

Christmas                                                            121 stories

Continental Europe                                           111 stories

The Master, including Missy                            108 stories

Jo                                                                         101 stories

Iris Wildthyme                                                   101 stories         

Ace                                                                      98 stories

Benton                                                                95 stories  

At sea                                                                  86 stories  

Amy and Rory                                                    82 stories  

The Daleks and Davros                                     78 stories=    Re-entry!

Yates                                                                   78 stories=

 

 

Top Decades

The Teens                                                           950 stories

The Noughties                                                    613 stories                   

The Nineties                                                       206 stories

The Twenties                                                     199 stories

The Seventies                                                    121 stories         

The Eighties                                                        77 stories  

The Sixties                                                          36 stories  

 

 

And Top Twenty Years

 

2016                                                          149 stories

2008                                                          127 stories

2020                                                          122 stories          Climber!

2017                                                           114 stories          Climber!    

2018                                                          113 stories

2011                                                          103 stories

2009                                                          99 stories  

2015                                                          97 stories  

2019                                                          96 stories

2010                                                          86 stories  

2013                                                          79 stories  

2021                                                          76 stories  

2007                                                          74 stories

2001                                                          72 stories  

2006                                                          63 stories  

2012                                                          61 stories           

2014                                                          50 stories  

2005                                                          49 stories            

2004                                                          48 stories  

1999                                                          43 stories  

 

 

Total Writers (including showrunners, script editors, anthology linking material writers)                                                678

Proportion of Female Writers                         16%      

 

Top Twenty Writers

 

Russell T Davies                                       86 stories  

Paul Magrs                                                60 stories  

James Goss                                               55 stories  

Terrance Dicks                                          39 stories  

Steven Moffat                                          38 stories  

Justin Richards                                         37 stories  

Eddie Robson                                            33 stories  

Gareth Roberts                                        31 stories  

? John Canning                                         30 stories  

Joseph Lidster                                          30 stories  

Steve Lyons                                               29 stories  

James Hornby                                           28 stories

Jonathan Morris                                      28 stories            

Matt Fitton                                                26 stories  

Guy Adams                                               23 stories           

Andrew Cartmel                                      23 stories            

John Dorney                                             23 stories                     

Christopher Cooper                                 22 stories

Andy Frankham-Allen                            22 stories

Gary Russell                                              22 stories