Then Again: The Third Aeon

 

 

Pop-Up   Audio short story, released 2011                                                   Doctor: 3

Featuring Jo

Written by Dave Curan.

Arbitrary placement Takes place on Epsilon Gamma.


Syntax   Short story, published 2004                                                          Doctor: 8

Featuring Izzy, with Fey (informative mention)

Written by David Bailey.

Arbitrary placement  Takes place on Jorn.

 

The Matrix quartet of films (1999-2021) is set at a time when the Earth has been ruled for an indeterminate length of time by Artificial Intelligence and the population kept unconscious in pods. How they reproduce is not obvious but no doubt the problem is not insurmountable. Morpheus believes that the Matrix dates from the twenty-first century, but the Matrix will control all the historical information he receives, so I don’t feel constrained by that. My reason for placing the trilogy here is that the gradual absorbtion of the characters of In Viriconium into twentieth century Earth might well be the subjective experience of Tellurians in the second aeon being absorbed into the Matrix.

 

The Doctor’s Coat   Audio short story, released 2011                               Doctor: 6

Written by John Bromley.

Arbitrary placement Takes place on Sonti.

 

Mark S Geston’s 1967 novel Lords of the Starship is set on a ravaged and declining future Earth. I think this could be a plausible scenario following the presumable eventual failure of the Matrix and the return of its captive Tellurians to the outside world.

 

On the Haunted Planet   Comic story, released 1966                             Doctor: 1

featuring Gillian, John

Written by Roger Noel Cook.

Arbitrary placement Takes place on the Haunted Planet.

 

There is no internal reason to suppose that Michael Shea’s 1982 novel Nifft the Lean and its sequels are set on a far future Earth rather than somewhere else, except that Shea was a big fan of Jack Vances’s The Dying Earth, and indeed wrote a sequel to it. These stories are a more personal riff on the same themes, and I choose to place them in the ages between Lords of the Starship and Frontios.

 

Perfect Day   Illustrated short story, published 1993                                 Doctor: 5

featuring Tegan

Written by Mark Gatiss.

Informed guess Takes place on Earth, some years before Frontios.

The Fate Of The Earth

Earth is once again rendered uninhabitable.


Keeping it Real   Short story, published 2007                                         Doctor: 5

featuring Tegan

Written by Joseph Lidster.

Informed guess Takes place on Salient Point; self-dated around the same time as Frontios. As the Tellurian ship has only recently crashed on the planet, I’m guessing shortly before.


Frontios   TV story, broadcast 1984                                                        Doctor: 5

featuring Tegan, Turlough

Written by Christopher H Bidmead, script edited by Eric Saward.

Informed guess Takes place on Frontios, some time before The End of the World.

Why I Respectfully Disagree With Lance Parkin’s Dating

Mr.Parkin dates this contempraneously with The Ark in Ahistory, as he did in A History of the Universe; but when that earler work was written, he had no reason to suppose that Earth survived until the sixth aeon. I’m supposing that in that enormous length of time, the Tellurians could have been overpessimistic at least twice, abandoning the Earth in The Ark and much later, here. It is, in any case, a few generations before Where Were You.


Where Were You   Charity short story, published 2001                            Doctor: 1

featuring the Daleks, the Cybermen (informative mention)

Written by Tom Beck.

Informed guess Takes place on Frontios. The Doctor says that the Daleks and Cybermen have been extinct for “aeons”.

 

This is approximately as far in the future as the Great Oxidation Event, in which the Oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere surged, ironically causing a mass extinction among the primitive organisms existing at the time, was, in the past.

 

The Terrestrial city of Diaspar in Arthur C Clarke’s 1956 novel The City and the Stars was founded in 106 CE and Mutter’s Spiral has rotated on its axis ten time since. Each rotation of the galaxy is presently estimated to take about a quarter of an Aeon. Fitting this novel into Doctor Who narrative requires it to have been invulnerable to some very violent events, like the City of New Union in The Canopy of Time, including the global extinction seen in The Ark, but that is what its founders intended. I am consequently positioning it as a survival of the events referred to in Frontios.

 

Waste   Charity short story, published 2001                                                 Doctor: 2

featuring Jamie, Zoe

Written by Daniel Blythe.

Arbitrary placement Takes place on two unnamed planets.


All Change!   Comic story, released 2013                                                    Doctor: 11

Featuring Decky Flamboon

Written by Simon Guerrier.

Arbitrary placement Takes place partly in an extraplanetary hospital.


The Autonomy Bug   Comic story, released 2000                                   Doctor: 8

Featuring Izzy

Written by Scott Gray.

Informed guess Takes place in Tellurian space, not obviously near any other known history.


Wings of the Predator   Comic story, released 2017                                Doctor: 12

Featuring Jata

Written by Andrew Cartmel.

Arbitrary placement Takes place on Zangger.


Lizardworld   Comic story, released 1965                                                  Doctor: 1

featuring Gillian, John

Illustrated ?and written by Neville Main.

Arbitrary placement Takes place on an unnamed planet.


The Parliament of Rats   Short story, published 1998                            Doctor: 5

featuring Nyssa

Written by Daniel O’Mahony.

Arbitrary placement Takes place on Lethe.


Conundrum   Illustrated short story, published 1981                               Doctor: 4

featuring K9 II, Adric

Written by the World Distributors Annual 1982 crew.

Arbitrary placement Takes place in E-space. One must assume Romana is in another part of the TARDIS, although the Doctor is sufficiently unconcerned about her wellbeing not to mention her.

 

  

 

Total Stories Considered             6382

Proportion Written By Women 10%                                       

 

Top Docs

4                 567 stories                   

7                 535 stories 

10               469 stories 

11               468 stories 

8                 434 stories 

6                 396 stories

3                 391 stories 

5                 384 stories         

1                 379 stories 

2                 349 stories         

12               200 stories

Unbound  140 stories

9                 95 stories  

13               90 stories           

War           48 stories                     

 

 

Top Twenty Recurring Elements

 

London                                                              1173 stories                

Regional England                                            832 stories

The Time Lords                                               557 stories

The Daleks and Davros                                  505 stories 

UNIT                                                                 471 stories  

Alastair, Kate, Kadiatu, Lucy Weston and the Lethbridge-Stewart family                                                                            468 stories  

Continental Europe                                         443 stories 

North America                                                 436 stories  

Benny                                                                 322 stories

The Master, including Missy                         306 stories

Sarah Jane                                                        295 stories 

Ace                                                                      293 stories

Amy and Rory                                                  282 stories 

The K9s                                                              281 stories 

Wales                                                                  261 stories

Torchwood                                                        257 stories  

At Sea                                                                 234 stories

Peri                                                                     227 stories 

Jamie                                                                  222 stories 

Romana                                                             219 stories

 

 

Top Decades

 

The Teens                                                          2563 stories

The Noughties                                                  1704 stories       

The Nineties                                                      649 stories  

The Twenties                                                     523 stories   

The Eighties                                                      346 stories   

The Seventies                                                    303 stories         

The Sixties                                                         224 stories

(Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde and William Hope Hodgson)                                                                                       70 stories  

 

 

And Top Twenty Years

 

2018                                                          323 stories

2016                                                          321 stories 

2020                                                          307 stories  

2015                                                          285 stories 

2008                                                          281 stories  

2017                                                           260 stories       

2011                                                          249 stories   Climber! 

2009                                                          248 stories

2010                                                          245 stories 

2013                                                          245 stories   Climber! 

2019                                                          240 stories 

2007                                                          228 stories 

2021                                                          218 stories 

2014                                                          211 stories 

2001                                                          190 stories   Climber! 

2012                                                          189 stories 

2006                                                          171 stories

2004                                                          158 stories

2005                                                          145 stories

2003                                                          126 stories  

                            

     

 

Total Writers (including showrunners, script editors, anthology linking material writers)                                     1193

Proportion of Female Writers               17%      

 

Top Twenty Writers

 

Justin Richards                                       167 stories

James Goss                                              155 stories 

Terrance Dicks                                       148 stories

Russell T Davies                                     125 stories  

Jonathan Morris                                    121 stories 

Eddie Robson                                          108 stories 

Steven Moffat                                         105 stories

Paul Magrs                                              97 stories  

Matt Fitton                                              91 stories  

Terry Nation                                           90 stories  

Simon Guerrier                                       89 stories  

Nicholas Briggs                                       88 stories 

John Dorney                                            87 stories 

David Whitaker                                      85 stories           

Steve Lyons                                             80 stories 

Trevor Baxendale                                  77 stories  

Guy Adams                                              70 stories           

Alan Barnes                                             70 stories  

Gareth Roberts                                       69 stories  

Eric Saward                                            67 stories

 

 

 

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog