so vile a sin
authors: ben aaronovitch and kate orman
isbn: 0 426 204840
confusion quotient:
In an unusual move, I'd like to dedicate this page to Mzwakhe Mbuli. He's informally known as the People's Poet of South Africa, was persecuted during the Apartheid era and was an occasional critic of the police there. He was framed by the police for doing a bank robbery several years ago,and is serving a 13-year sentence. Crime is a big problem in South Africa, but so is law enforcement.
Also, more African history is available in connection with a new BBC series narrated by Hugh Quarshie: The Story of Africa
In her research, Kate Orman started a couple of threads on the newsgroup sci.astro. Here they are: Author need Tethys help ... How big would Callisto look from Io? p.139
Dedication page
For Karifa Sam Aaronovitch: His daughter, presumably.
The baby's arrival was one of the delaying factors in 'So Vile A Sin's production. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Karifa Aaronovitch is mentioned again in the Acknowledgements, where *he* is thanked "for not eating *his* father's telephone" (emphasis added). Not Ben's daughter, then. Oops.
Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting. -William
Shakespeare, Henry V II.4: In that scene the King of France is
conferring with his princes about his English policy. He'd rather be
cautious and take steps toward his defence; the Dauphin, who delivers this
line, favours a more offensive posture.
p.1
The body on page one: In murder mysteries, it's common to be
presented with the murder victim on the first page. I think Ben wrote
this bit.
CinC Thangese liKhosi Oxhobileyo: CinC stands for Commander-in-Chief.
I don't understand the IsiXhosa language.
Valhalla, Callisto: Callisto is the third-largest moon in the
Solar System: a bit over 4800 km in diameter, almost as large as the planet
Mercury. It orbits Jupiter at a radius of about 1.9 million km, farther
than the other three major Jovian moons: Io, Europa and Ganymede.
It has a heavily cratered surface and shows no signs of tectonic or geothermal
activity. It has the oldest cratered surface in the solar system.
The largest crater system on it is called Valhalla. In this book the
innermost 600 kilometres of Valhalla is covered with an atmospheric dome.
Here is an excellent
link to lots of information about Callisto. 
p.2
1 September 2982: I think Kate wrote this bit.
Umtata Reclamation Zone: Umtata is a town in Transkei, between Lesotho
and the Indian Ocean. Nelson Mandela, one of the most famous of the
!Xhosa people, was born there. Mandela usually goes for the Western
look and the silk shirt over more "traditional" lifestyle. I put the word in quotation marks because tradition, even for Africans, can be extremely subjective. Africans developed habits no more inefficient than other people, and were only seen to be backwards by Europeans who didn't know what African life was like. Africans may keep their ceremonial dress as part of their heritage or as a reaction to cultural imperialism, but European interference has had a strong influence on how Africans see themselves.
High-tech versions of the kopje, great stones piled on stones:
overcities: Skyscraper cities where people live in the last couple
of centuries of the Third Millennium. They hover over the Earth's surface
with repulsorlifts. Most wildlife is dead and the surface levels are
the crime- and poverty-ridden Undertown. There's a lot about the Overcities
in 'Original Sin'.
p.3
Behind him, a group of Ogrons moved: There's a lot of Ogrons in this
book. And they get more characterization than just being the Daleks'
dumb brutes.
Behind them, a group of Earth Reptiles: Silurians and Sea Devils.
Some of the New Adventures advanced more accurate and PC names for Indigenous
Terrans.
Colour Sergeant Muller: The colour sergeant is responsible for the
flags.
flags: I ought to mention here that the flag on the cover looks a lot
like one I first saw about fifteen years ago, agreed to be the new international
Flag of Earth. Set on a black field, to the flagpole side there was
a large yellow circular section representing the Sun. Partially inset
into the Sun was a blue circle representing the Earth, and partially inset
into that was a grey disk to stand for the Moon. It's clarified in p.27 that
the azure-and blood red circles are the sigil of the Inyathi Forresters.
buffalo soldiers: Reference to a Bob Marley song about African slaves
turned into soldiers in the American Civil War. And possibly a part
of African-American heritage. And Roz's clan name means "buffalo".
DPM fatigues:
Inyathi clan: Inyathi is Roz's family name. The Doctor first
mentions it at the beginning of 'Sky Pirates!' to her considerable irritation:
she doesn't know how he discovered it, and is actually trying to avoid her
family ties at the time.
Zulu costumes: The Zulus are another powerful nation in the South African region.
In the early 19th century the Zulus became rather expansionist,and may have
had considerable conflict with the !Xhosa - however, due to a concurrent European
invasion and propaganda from the Afrikaans people and the Zulus themselves,
the details are uncertain.
Knights of Io: The Inyathi Forresters own Io, Jupiter's innermost
major moon. Here
is an excellent info page about Io. I should mention
that Io orbits Jupiter in a zone of intense radiation that would prove fatal
to human explorers without a great lot of shielding that would be too heavy
to lift into space. Sorry to disappoint you readers of 2010: Odyssey
2. As well it is the most volcanically active planetary body in
the solar system,and its bedrock rises and falls more than 100 metres in tides produced
by Jupiter and its other moons. 
POVs: Play on words for points of view.
p.6
All the King's Horses: I think Ben wrote this bit.
OLM regulars: Ogron Light Marines.
PG ordnance:
AP Seekers: I guess they're adreno-pheromone seekers, if they home
in on the smell of human fear.
Purgatory: Planetary training ground for the Imperial Landsknechte.
(translation: Land Knights?) Purgatory is terraformed in multitudes
of compartments to simulate the environments of lots of different possible
battlegrounds.
Landsknechte: One of the Earth Empire's armies.(Text submitted by Mick Gair)The German 'landsknechte' translates as 'land farmhands'.
p.7
each one a few parsecs closer to Earth: Parsec is a conjunction of
Parallax Arcsecond. When you're travelling out of the Solar System,
the distance at which the angle between the Sun and the Earth, 150 million
km, appears to be only 1/360th of a degree, is one parsec. It's equal
to about 3.26 light years.
dishonourable discharge: They tear off your badges, rank pips and buttons,
break your sword, take away your gun and kick you in the pants.
last bottle of juke:
halfway up the remains of the Ching Ma bridge:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) A bridge in Hong Kong, but that much is obvious from the context
anyway. A suitably futuristic reference, as the bridge had not yet been completed when 'So Vile A Sin' was published.
spaceport at Chek Lak Lok:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) At present, the site of the Hong Kong International Airport. A suitably futuristic reference, as the airport had not yet been completed when 'So Vile A Sin' was published.
Wars of Acquisition: Expansionist period of the early-to mid-Thirtieth
Century. Eventually collapsed, as you can read in 'Original Sin'.
The crisis on Solos in 'The Mutants' is retconned to fit into this time period.
p.8
The Falardi:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Alien race mentioned in 'Original Sin'. Roz believed for a time that it was a Falardi who killed her partner Fenn Martle.
The Qink:
stabsfeldwebel:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) German; rank equivalent to warrant officer. This is the rank Vincenzi held before he was booted out of the Landsknechte (confirmed p.10). Fluellen is subtly hinting that he knows who Vincenzi is.
Centillion sake from the Asumi habitat in Procorus: Sake is a potent
Japanese wine, served hot.
p.9
Fluellen: Sounds like a character name Isaac Asimov might have thought
of. Or maybe Arthur C Clarke in Childhood's End. Fluellen
was a Welsh officer in King Henry's army in Shakespeare's Henry V
.
Captain Fluellen is a valiant but slightly ridiculous figure with a hot temper
and a thick Welsh accent. His quarrel with Macmorris and Pistol provides much-needed
comic relief, especially when he forces Pistol to eat the
leek he wears in honour of St. David.
'A few hundred
years back a compiler was a smart system that wrote specified network code.
That was before computers and information systems became autonomously referential.
You told the compiler what you wanted to do and it translated it into operating
code. Back then they still had languages for computers. I collect
them.': Kind of like this WYSIWYG HTML editor I'm using now.
'I've got SARTRE, micro-nietzsche, FLENSE and even a fragment of the original
DALEK source code.':
p.10
unteromzier:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Looks like a really bad typo for "unteroffizier", which rank is equivalent to corporal.
the Aspenal Campaign:
Three tours on Orestes: The Ogron homeworld. In 'Mission: Impractical'
the Ogron homeworld is called Braah, but that takes place a couple of million
years in the future. The planet could have been renamed or replaced
by then. (Text submitted by Mick Gair)The Ogron homeworld is first referred to as Braah in 'The Romance of
Crime'.
As for Orestes, a lot of the Greek placenames in this book
are taken from plays written by the Greek Aeschylus in the Fifth Century BC.
Look them up, they seem plenty violent. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) As an aside, the middle play of Aeschylus' Orestes trilogy gets a mention in the NA 'Theatre of War', on p.272.
Centcomp: The Earth Empire's equivalent of the Matrix on Gallifrey.
p.11
The Broken Paradigm:
I think Kate wrote this bit from an outline by Ben. Imaginary pub in a reality
bubble somewhere in Puterspace - the e-Dimension where reside the consciousnesses
of Artificial Intelligences and mundane life-forms that can jack into it.
Check out 'Love and War' and 'Transit'.
FLORANCE: Artificial Intelligence (AI) that was originally the security
software at the Stone Mountain datastore on the Moon in 'Transit'. The Doctor
broke in to destroy all trace of his existence sometime around 2100 and suggested
the AI get a name. FLORANCE avoided responsibility forthe security breach
by hiring a lawyer and suing its employers for civil rights violations.
It then invested heavily in real estate on Pluto,and hired a brace of laid-off
Solar Transit System security guards as custodians. FLORANCE turned
up again in 'SLEEPY' and 'Seeing I'.
Yemaya 4: The location for 'SLEEPY'. Namedropped several times
in this book, because the co-author wrote it.
p.12
DKC: The Dione-Kisumu Corporation. Evil African interplanetary
conglomerate based on one of the moons of Saturn in the 23rd Century.
Engaged in psychic experiments with AIs. Part of the Psi-Powers conspiracy
that leads into this book. Dione is 1120 km in diameter. It's
the fourth largest moon in the Saturnian system. It was discovered by
Cassini in 1684.
Billy Gibson's little boy all grown up and out to party:William
Gibson - invented the phrase "cyberpunk". Canadian science fiction author
of books like Neuromancer and Virtual Light, and short stories
like the original "Johnny Mnemonic".
Exxilon caches like palaces of crystal: The Exxilons had an ancient
empire that disappeared. Check 'Death to the Daleks'. They visited
Central American civilizations, apparently.
BAR B, one of the Yemaya veterans: (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) We first met BAR B in 'SLEEPY', where it was one of the AIs that assisted the Doctor.
p.13
"Commercial VR doesn't use much more than a terabyte,": 1 terabyte
is about 1028 gigabytes. Right now 256 megabytes is considered pretty
good. That's about 1/3900th of what FLORANCE means.
Stellagraphic database on Oberon: Oberon is the outermost major moon of
Uranus. It's the headquarters of the League of Adjudicators first mentioned
in 'Lucifer Rising'. It is retconned to explain the Investigators from
Earth in 'Colony in Space', 'The Mutants' and 'Terror of the Vervoids', as
well as the conveniently-named assassin's guild, the Grand Knights of Oberon
from 'Revelation of the Daleks'.
p.14
"Rumour had it that it was developed by species of intelligent fungus and
propagated through the Church of the Vacuum.":(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) There's a scene in 'Love and War' where the Hoothi unexpectedly attack the heroes inside Puterspace, which seems at least vaguely relevant.
"Whatever happed to them?" "Something Terrible." "What could
be worse than the Hoothi?": I'll give you one guess.
p.15
Gravitas: a quality that could reshape the spaces of the
datascape: And a quality the Doctor possesses. This is a protocol
representing the Red-Headed Doctor from the Flying Dutchman TARDIS in 'Transit'and
King Arthur's Merlyn from the novelization of 'Battlefield'.
p.16
FLORANCE told the Dutchman about the special psychiatric complex on Dis,
about the half a dozen patients who met his criteria. Men and women
who officially didn't exist any more: Read about Dis on p.21 or in 'Original
Sin'.
p.17
"I notice you didn't tell him about the Bitch Queen of the Universe,":
Probably referring to the N-form on Aegisthus. The N-form
is a secret weapon of the Time Lords in their ancient war against the Vampires.
The N-form manifests itself as a molecular window into a pocket dimension
that looks for psychic activity. When it finds psychically active vampires,
the pocket dimension explodes into the real world and goes berserk until the
vampire's whole planet is dead. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) On the other hand, "the Bitch Queen of the Universe" sounds like an epithet that might be applied to the Empress, and BAR B might be referring to the fact that Centcomp is malfunctioning because the Empress' mind is going.Read on.
Spaceport 20 Overcity: I think Ben wrote this bit. The
numbered Overcities correspond roughly to major 21st-Century cities on Earth.
I wonder where this one is.
Sibongile: That's the girl's name. How's it pronounced?
her heavy rhino-skin jacket riding up her bhunti and framing the outline of
her beelies: Ben. Pure Ben. There are so many dead-end
references in this bit, I'm not going to try with most of them.
Hiths With Attitude singing "Male at Last":The Hith are a race of large slugs in 'Original Sin', like the Gastropods from 'The Twin Dilemma'. They're hermaphrodites, so they acn change genders. The Empire invaded Hithis in the Wars of Acquisition, and kicked the Hith off the planet. The Hith formed a strong diaspora culture and they all started changing their names to things like 'Completely Bereft and Doomed to Exile' to make humans feel bad for what they'd done. Started making music about it, too.(Text submitted by John Anderson) They got their name from NWA, a Hip Hop group from around 1990 that started Dr Dre's career.
p.20
IMC WANTS YOU TO DIE FOR ITS PROFIT MARGIN: IMC is the Interplanetary
Mining Corporation, the first of the nasty space conglomerates created by
Malcolm Hulke for 'Colony in Space'. Read the novelization, 'Doctor
Who and the Doomsday Weapon'. The characterization of the IMC men is
so much more clear-cut and two-dimensional. IMC popped up again in 'Love
and War'.
ElleryCorp: My money's on it being either a subtle dig at Jason Haigh-Ellery
(although for 1997 that's a bit early) or a comment on the crime fiction magazine
Ellery Queen. I think Bernice works for ElleryCorp a some point, either before 'Love and War' or during 'Another Girl, Another Planet' perhaps. (Text submitted by Mick Gair)ElleryCorp were also mentioned in 'Human Nature' and 'Original Sin'.
shampooing: Appears to be some kind of expletive. Check p.31.
the DMZ facing the Sontarans: Evidently the Sontarans ('The Time Warrior',
'The Two Doctors') have contact with the Earth Empire but cannot be persuaded
to take a break from their war with the Rutans and fight us instead.
propping up the governments of Castus, Eridani and Asume: Epsilon and Omicron(2)
Eridani are both stars less than 20 light-years from the Sun, which are rather
like the Sun. So maybe good places for colonies.
p.21
shampooed up the pondorossa: Fu... no, I'll leave that to your
imagination. The Ponderosa was the setting of the well-known cowboy
TV show Bonanza with Lorne Greene.
"We're looking at ways to oppose the levee. Do you want to come?":
A levee is like a dike constructed to prevent floods. A levy is more
like a draft.
Dis: I think Kate wrote this bit.. Dis was introduced in 'Original
Sin' as the Earth Empire's prison planet. Dis is what remains of the
homeworld of the Greld from 'Empire of Glass'. When the Greld resisted
the Empire during the Wars of Acquisition, the Empire used a quark bomb to
turn the Greld sun from a white dwarf star into a red giant, killing them all.
Credit Lars Pearson, I, Who. By the Year 4000 in 'The Daleks' Masterplan'
the Galactic Federation's prison planet is Desperus. The location of
Desperus remains unclear, largely due to cack-handed awful scripting of the
episodes of 'The Daleks' Masterplan'.
p.23
"The landing on Iphigenia?": Iphigenia was the daughter of Agamemnon
in Homer's legends of the Trojan War. Prevented from sailing to Troy
for a very long period of time, Agamemnon was forced to sacrifice his daughter
to brighten up the weather. Years later, when he returned home to Mycenae
after burning Troy to the ground, he was himself murdered by his wife Clytemnestra
for being a psychotic old bastard. Orestes is the name of another planet
in Iphigenia's solar system, where the Ogrons live.
p.24
"The other doctor?":The Doctor's found out the location of this woman
and her crewmates in the Hospital for the Criminally Insane on Dis from FLORANCE.
Her ship had attempted a landing on Iphigenia and had come into contact with a
Nexus that gave them access to different quantum-dimensional timestreams.
The shock drove them mad. Some of them ended up dead, and one got a powerful
psi-weapon planted on her brain.
Kibero Patera, Io: Kibero is a mythical toad that lives in the Underworld,
giving mankind fire. You can download a map of Io with placenames including
Kibero Patera in .PDF format from
http://wwwflag.wr.usgs.gov/USGSFlag/Space/nomen/index_images.html
And I think Ben wrote this bit.
the House of Scheherazade: Fashion house named after the narrator of
The Thousand and One Nights. Scheherazade was newly married to a prince
who happened to be a notorious matricide. To play for time and stop him
having her head cut off, she told him lots of stories until he fell in love with
her.
p.26
the rise of the Liberal Reconstructionists on Tara: As in 'The Androids
of Tara'.
p.28
Terran species from before the Dalek invasion: The Daleks conquer Earth in the
22nd Century ('The Dalek Invasion of Earth', 'GodEngine') They invaded again in
the mid-26th Century ('Beige Planet Mars', 'The Sword of Forever'). But
they were driven off before establishing a bridgehead on Earth and instead
left behind a bunch of metagenic weapons that played merry hell with Earth's
genepool for decades.
lucite dust covers: Do we use them now?
p.29
Part of the heritage of the Gwalchmai family:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) This is Genevieve's family being referred to here. (Gwalchmai, whose name meant "hawk", was a hero of Welsh legend, sometimes identified with Gawain of Arthurian legend.)
mostly poetry: Sassoon, Naruda, Baldrick's Listen to the Song I Sing.
A Penguin copy of Achebe's Things Fall Apart: Siegfried Sasson
was British, one of the Great War poets. Naruda - ? (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Pablo Naruda, a Chilean poet, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1971.Baldrick's
war poetry is unique to the Curtis-Elton Rowan Atkinson comedy Blackadder
Goes Forth: "Listen to the song I sing/War's a horrid thing./So I sing,
sing sing/Dingalingaling." Chinua Achebe was an influential author in postcolonial
Africa. Ben Aaronovitch named the President of Earth at the time of the
Thousand-Day War with the Ice Warriors after him.
A set of sleeve notes were propped up against the antique fiche viewer
embedded in the table top - for colored girls who have considered suicide
/ when the rainbow is enuf:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) A play (or, perhaps more accurately, a poem with stage directions) by Ntozake Shange, first performed in the mid-1970s. And yes, that is its actual title.
Greed Incorporated: The Rise of the Space Corporations by M. Ashe:
Mary Ashe was one of the colonists on Exarius who stood up against IMC
in 'Colony in Space'. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) In addition, passages attributed to Greed Incorporated: The Rise of the Space Corporations appear in several places in Lance Parkin's A History of the Universe.
the Cyber Wars: Referred to in 'Revenge of the Cybermen'.
Imperium Draco: The Draconian Empire from 'Frontier in Space'.
It's never established whether they're called Draconians because of their
strict social structure, their reptilian appearance, or if their homeworld
is in the direction of the Earth constellation Draco.
The Fitzgerald translation of The Lament of the Non-Operational
: Dalek poetry. Probably something beautiful and evocative like
"UNDER ATTACK! MY VISION IS IMPAIRED! I CANNOT SEE!! MY
VISION IS IMPAIRED!! I CANNOT SEEEEEEE!!!! ...NESD."(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Roz, in 'The Also People', tells FeLixi about her father(?) making her
memorise these poems.
She felt a twinge of envy; she would have loved to spend her school days
among such history: Roz hated it - she ran away and mananged to escape
history for a while travelling in time. This book is how she re-entered
history in a big way.
A portrait in soluble polymers. Two teenage girls against an impossible
sweep of Ionian landscape: The cover portrait. Leabie and Roz when
they were younger and hadn't fallen out with each other.
p.30
"I'm his concubine. Do you know what that means?" Mr Fiction
did a sudden back flip and yelled, "Look at me, look at me!": Cute.
A concubine is part of a powerful man's harem.
p.32
Someone had done an incomparable job of erasing all trace of the younger
Forrester sister. Duke Walid, for reasons best known to himself, wanted
to find out why: Okay, here's the lowdown on Duke Walid. He has
ulterior motives I won't spoil for now, but he's basically the Baroness Leabie's
main competitor in the Imperial Court. They have a cordially cold war
going on at the moment, and Fluellen rescued Vincenzi from an unlucky suicide
attempt to recruit him into a secret army fighting for Leabie, Walid, Duke
Armand of Earth or another faction. All parties are preparing for war.
p.33
"I'd like to introduce you to the latest microreclamation project of House
Forrester. Extinct for almost two millennia.": African elephants
aren't yet extinct in 2001, although they're not as well-protected or domesticated
as in India. Indlovu is probably Swahili rather than IsiXhosa-
it describes elephants in the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as South Africa. The first !Xhosa
peoples were the southernmost vector of the Bantu Migration, which started
out from Nigeria as much as 5000 years ago and spread out and changed different
parts of sub-Saharan Africa as it went. Zaire as well as the Transkei.
The elephant habitat reaches into South Africa.
p.37
Piazza Tereshkova: Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova was the first
woman to orbit the Earth, in Vostok 6 between June 16th and June 21st,
1963. Her current whereabouts are uncertain, but she is probably still
living in Russia.
p.37
Fury: Erinyes, also called the Furies in Greek mythology. They
were the three avenging deities Tisiphone (the avenger of murder), Megaera (the jealous one), and Alecto (unceasing in anger). (The Tisiphone was Bernice's father's warship in 'Return of the Living Dad) In most
accounts the Erinyes are the daughters of Gaea and Uranus; sometimes they are called the daughters of Night. They
lived in the world below, from which they ascended to earth to pursue the wicked. They
were just but merciless and without regard for mitigating circumstances. They
punished all offenses against human society such as perjury, violation of the rites of hospitality, and, above all, the murder
of blood relatives.
These terrible goddesses were hideous to behold; they had writhing snakes
for hair and blood dripped from their eyes. They tormented wrongdoers, pursuing
them from place to place across the earth, driving them mad. One of the most
famous legends about the Erinyes concerns their relentless pursuit of the
Theban prince Orestes
for the murder of his mother, Queen Clytemnestra. Orestes had been commanded by the god Apollo to avenge the death of his father, King Agamemnon, whom Clytemnestra had murdered. The Erinyes, however, heedless
of his motives,pursued and tormented him. Orestes finally appealed to the
goddess Athena, who
persuaded the avenging goddesses to accept Orestes' plea that he had been
cleansed of his guilt. When they were thus able to show mercy, they became changed
themselves. From the Furies of frightful appearance, they were transformed into
the Eumenides, protectors
of the suppliant. The Fury Megaera is the model for the Megara Justice Machines in 'The Stones of Blood'.
Aegisthus: In Greek mythology, the son of Thyestes and his daughter Pelopia. Desiring to avenge himself upon his
brother Atreus and acting on the advice of the Oracle at Delphi, Thyestes consummated an incestuous union with Pelopia. Shortly
afterward, Atreus married Pelopia, not knowing she was his niece. When Aegisthus was born, Atreus accepted him as his own son. Aegisthus later learned his true identity and, urged by Thyestes, killed Atreus. While Agamemnon, king of Mycenae,
was away fighting in the Trojan Wars, Aegisthus became the lover of Queen Clytemnestra. He helped Clytemnestra kill her husband upon his return from Troy. Together with the queen, Aegisthus then ruled Mycenae for seven years; he was murdered by Agamemnon's son Orestes. Oy, nobody gets out of this legend
with their innocence intact.
The city crouched under its dome on the airless Zhongjian Plateau:
Sunrise came when the moon orbited out of the shadow of its primary and into
the warmth of her father's smile: This is unclear. Sunrise on Io comes
when the sun rises above the horizon, except when Jupiter gets in the way.
And consider that Io is tidally locked, one hemisphere always facing Jupiter
and the other facing out into interplanetary space. So half of Io never sees
Jupiter at all, let alone see it eclipse the Sun. And Jupiter only covers
a diameter of about 20 degrees from the surface of Io, according to the fabulous
planetarium application Starry Night
. So sunrise on Io usually happens when the Sun comes over the horizon.
Oh, and this passage is the first-ever appearance of Roz's father.
Electra: Electra, in Greek
mythology, was Agamemnon's other daughter
. After Clytemnestra and Aegisthus killed Agamemnon Electra sent her brother,
Orestes, to safety at the court of an uncle. She stayed behind in Mycenae,
living in poverty
under constant surveillance while Clytemnestra and Aegisthus ruled the kingdom.
Electra sent frequent reminders to Orestes that he must return to avenge the
death of their father. At the end of seven years, Orestes and his friend Pylades
went secretly to Agamemnon's
tomb. There they met Electra, who had come to pour libations and offer prayers
for vengeance. Orestes revealed his identity to his sister, then proceeded
at once to the palace, where he killed Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Electra
later married Pylades. At this point, the saga ended... until
Electra's children hit puberty.
In 'Death and Diplomacy' Jason's pet alien Shug pipes up and accuses Bernice
of holding an Electra complex: Idolizing her father, who disappeared in battle
with the Daleks and was accused of desertion, she holds such high standards
for male companionship that she is bound to lose at loving. Credit Lars
Pearson from I, Who.
Kirlian sensor:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) A device for detecting and recognising the unique energy field generated by each living thing. (Such a device doesn't exist in our world, but might in the Doctor's.) Named after Semyon Kirlian, who thought he'd invented such a device in 1939. (Note that, even if it worked as claimed, Kirlian's specific technique would be no good for covert surveillance, as it requires the subject to be in prolonged physical contact with a photographic film.)
"I don' sell gun, I sell frock only.": I'm not sure who started the
"Guns vs. Frocks" debate, but once it was out in the open the dichotomy between
effeminate whimsy and calculated violence in the New Adventures was extremely
visible.Gareth Roberts has said that he came up with these terms.
Boulevard Gagarin: Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was the first man to orbit the
Earth, in Vostok 1. His flight was on April 12, 1961. He
was killed in a MiG-15 crash on March 27, 1968.
an AG jack: (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Judging by the other appearances the abbreviation (e.g. on p.47), AG is short for "anti-gravity".
p.39
like a portcullis: The portcullis is a heavy gate in the threshold of a castle.
a pair of matching PVC mules and a gauss microwire pistol: Mules are a
kind of shoes. A gauss gun accelerates its projectiles electromagnetically,
it doesn't use gunpowder or other chemicals. And it fires microwires
instead of bullets. Microwires are like the flechettes Ace used in her
Space Fleet days. Flechettes are used today: their advantage is that
because they're very thin they slip between the fabric of bulletproof vests.
Nasty, but they tend to go right through rather than slow down and knock targets
backwards.
hydrogen-xenon battery pack: Randomly-chosen elements, or do we have
fuel cells like that today?
It was designed to fire wire-thin flechettes of depleted uranium.
Not a lot of stopping power, but on full auto it could empty the clip of sixty in less
than a second: Depleted uranium is in dispute these days over allegations
that although it's purged of high-radiation isotopes it's caused cancers in
Serbia and Iraq, two theatres of war in which it's been used. Depleted uranium
is very heavy and there's not much point using it if you don't plan to take
advantage of its stopping power.
p.40
Via Grissom: Virgil Ivan "Gus" Grissom was the second American in
space. On July 21, 1961 he made a suborbital flight to the altitude
of 190 km in the Mercury spacecraft Liberty Bell 7. After splashing
down his capsule sank in circumstances which are not fully understood. He flew
again (both Gagarin and Tereshkova flew only once) making three orbits of
the Earth with John Young in Gemini 3 on March 23, 1963. He was designated
part of the primary crew for the shakedown flight of the Apollo spacecraft
designed to orbit the Moon, but a short circuit that sparked while the spacecraft
was sealed with a 100% oxygen atmosphere caused a sequence of events that led
to a fire that killed Grissom and his two crewmates on January 27, 1967.
the Quadrant: 'Damaged Goods'.
...her pupils the size of pinheads. The woman was narced on something:
Drugged. Okay?
p.41
"We just got back from pitch over Van Neygen's armpit.":
The rest of the block was leased out on a floor-by-floor basis to light
industry, commercial service companies and something that advertised itself
as a Memory Boutique. WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU - DISCOUNT! A long time
ago, in a previous life, Roz would have paid a place like that a quick visit
with a search warrant and a psyche forensic team: Roz herself has
been brainwashed once or twice before. Most notably, she had her own
memories adjusted after discovering her partner in the Adjudicators (and
her lover), Fenn Martle, was on the take. So she had to kill him. Then she
erased all her memories of how the relationship ended. The story was
told in 'Original Sin' - at the end of the book she remembered what she'd
done and decided she could live with the emotional scars after all. A later
novel,'Oblivion', involves Roz being kidnapped from the point in time she and
Fenn Martle were just starting to work together. She freaks out most of the
time,and when she gets put back she doesn't remember much. A more descriptive
term is "Mary-Sue". In 'The Mary-Sue Extrusion' Bernice Summerfield had a Mary-Sue installed in her mind. It's like a sleeper program that can erase memories and invent a new personality. Bernice got it so that she could hide herself from
detection by the Gods of Dellah, powerful alien psychics she expected would find
her when she went back to the planet they had recently devastated, to fetch her
cat. I digress. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) The slogan is a reference to the Philip K. Dick story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" (which inspired the Schwarzenegger movie Total
Recall).
p.43
On this page I have to flag a little soliloquy in which Roz contemplates time
paradoxes. I've already explained the Yemaya 4 connection with 'SLEEPY'.
Roz is smoking cigarettes produced at the colony on Yemaya 4. When the
Doctor first took her there, in the 23rd Century, he said that the colony was
about to be destroyed. And yet by their actions the destruction of the
colony by the Dione-Kisumu Corporation was prevented, and now Roz can remember
Yemayan cigarettes from her youth.
p.44
PINK FLOWER, TORPEDO LOUNGE, LADY GREY, DK'S: DKs are Dalek Killers
- introduced in the Doctor Who Weekly coomic strip. Abslom Daak, a 25th-Century
convicted murderer, is sentenced to be transmatted into Dalek space and to
kill as many Daleks as he can before he is himself killed.
p.45
The Ogron matrons chanted sadly for their poor lost boys, the sons and
sister sons that vanished long ago with the metal gods: The metal gods
are the Daleks - who used the Ogrons as a mercenary army in 'Day of the Daleks'
and 'Frontier in Space'.
Born on Spaceport Six Overcity, graduate in geophysics at SP5 University:
Not sure where Spaceport Six Overcity is. SP5 University could be an
obscure reference to the very first Doctor Who comic strip, published in
TV Comic. Doctor Who's two grandchildren, John and Gillian, eventually left
him to study at Zebedee University. At some point in the 1990s this was retconned
to become ZBD University. Of course, in the UK, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand and Africa the English letter "Z" is pronounced"Zed". It sounds a
lot more like the French and other romance-languages pronounciations of the letter.
Oh, and SP5 could also stand for Spaceport Five. (Text submitted by Mick Gair)In 'Original Sin', Central City (formerly London) was renamed
Spaceport Five Overcity. Spaceport Five Undertown's landmarks
included Trafflegarr Square and Sintjaimsys, according to 'Just War'.
<
Tethys deep-space school: Tethys is another of Saturn's moons.
Here's a good page about it.
p.46
On 4 June 2980 the cutter dedocked from the ISN carrier Catherine the
Great and set off for Iphigenia at ten gees: Catherine the Great was
a German princess who inherited the Russian Empire. There are varying
opinions of the Catherine Zeta-Jones TV Movie about her, but at least Paul
McGann and one of his brothers were in it. To set off for Iphigenia
at ten gees seems a little extreme. That's an acceleration of 100 metres
per second every second; pretty effective for getting out of a planetary atmosphere
or a deep gravity well, not a spacecraft carrier.
Riban boys with hormone-retarded bodies: As in Ribos from 'The Ribos
Operation'.
Elegant Argolins and bad-tempered girls from Segonax: 'The Leisure
Hive' is set on Argolis. Segonax is the setting for 'The Greatest Show
in the Galaxy'.
it was time for the ten-cent tour:
molybdenum: Metallic element found in large quantities on the Sense-Sphere
('The Sensorites'). The natives there were reclusive and didn't appreciate
human surveyors lusting after their planet. 'The Sensorites', according
to a couple of dating estimates, also takes place near the end of the Third
Millennium.
p.47
dwarf-star alloy: Introduced in 'Warrior's Gate'. White dwarf
stars are the compacted cores of dead stars. To visualize this, imagine
the Sun's mass of extremely hot and pressurized gases burning for 8 billion
years. And imagine the state of whatever it's been sitting on for all
that time. As the star runs out of efficient fuel and burns hotter,
its outer layers boil off into space leaving the core behind. Dwarf
star matter is especially dense so the author of 'Warrior's Gate' used it
in starship hulls as shielding against micrometeoroids, radiation, time flux
and the escape of the enslaved Tharils, the navigators.
"Its total mass is one million tons and it is assisted, as you can see,
by four AG-assisted columns at a height of a hundred metres.": By my calculations,
just standing underneath that weight would make you 0.04 grams lighter by its
own gravitation, assuming your planetary surface had Earth-normal gravity. But one million tons of dwarf star alloy doesn't take up much space; its density is ten metric tons per cubic centimetre. A million metric tons of dwarf star matter would make a metre-thick sheet about 2 metres wide and 4 metres long.
"McShane," said Roz, "Sarah McShane. I'm a correspondent for Inawo
media feed." Ace's real name is Dorothy McShane. Or as she later
styles it, Dorothée McShane (Alt+Num0232 for anyone else out there getting the hang of Microsoft keyboards). Anyways, the name is good
cover for other companions - in 'Cold Fusion', Chris Cwej used the alias Bruce Jovanka.
In 'Matrix' it's implied that Ace's surname is Gale, but that's a bit crap and
a tired reference to The Wizard of Oz as well.
p.48
Young Agronomists' Club: Agronomists are business-minded biologists.
In 'Terror of the Vervoids' Professor Laskey was an agronomist. She was
transporting enslaved plant-life she'd engineered to Earth as servants.
But she somehow forgot that she had given them deadly stings, until they broke
free and started killing people. She claimed to be a "thremmatologist"
rather than a plain agronomist, but there's no such thing. Arthur Stengos
in 'Revelation of the Daleks' was also an agronomist.
Mei Feng had startling grey-blue eyes with epicanthic folds: (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) An epicanthic fold is "a fold of skin of the upper eyelid that partially covers the inner corner of the eye". (American Heritage Dictionary) Epicanthic folds are, I believe, a feature typical of oriental eyelids.
p.51
Piazza Jemison: Probable but obscure. Dr Mae Carol Jemison flew
on the Space Shuttle on STS-47 between September 12th and 20th, 1992.
It was a life sciences mission using the Endeavour orbiter with a Spacelab
module that made 127 orbits. Dr Jemison is an African-American woman.
p.53
The single hair she'd stuck across the bottom was still intact: An
old trick for spies like James Bond - in Dr. No he checked his room
against snoopers by using spittle to fix one of his own hairs across the lip
of his dresser drawer. When the room gets a going-over, whoever checks
the dresser doesn't notice the hair's been displaced.
p.55
Mother of Nobody: Ogron women seem to be taking names rather like the Hith
from 'Original Sin'. Mostly because their boys are mostly dead in other
peoples' wars.
p.56
N-gram: The N-form's gateway to the real universe is a little scar
tissue on the brain. N-gram is a play on words for "engram", a theoretical
explanation for how memories work. Used to be more popular in the Sixties
- you may find some episodes of the original Star Trek that mention
it. I think L. Ron Hubbard worked it into his Scientology crap - some
people will believe anything.
the Goddess of Justice and Mercy:
p.57
Her engagement ring: At the end of 'Just War' Roz got engaged to Captain
George Reed, a British intelligence officer in the Second World War.
But she left with the Doctor anyways. She also had a relationship with
feLixi, one of the incredibly powerful People from the Worldsphere in 'The
Also People'. But he turned out to be a bad guy.
p.58
"Human kill all orange monster things - Ogrons have nothing to fear and
worship.": We briefly visited the surface of Orestes in 'Frontier
in Space', although it wasn't called by name. When confronted by an
impractical orange amoeba, they got scared and buggered off. One or
two of them may in fact have been so scared that they let down their guard
and got eaten, I don't know.
p.59
"We not fight to win yet. Fight only to cause trouble, to bring many human
soldier here. If they here then they not where they needed later."
"You are working for someone," said Roz. "Who is it this time, the Sontarans?
Or have you gone back to your old masters again?" "Not masters,"
said Mother of Nobody. "Not all-the-sames or metal gods. We have
friend now, human friend to help us fight humans." She slammed her palm down
on the bar and grinned at Roz. "Who is truly stupid race now?":
The implication here is that one or the other of the factions of the
Imperial Court is prolonging the insurrection on Orestes to keep armed forces
away from Earth and make a coup d'etat easier to pull off.
p.60
What couldn't be outsmarted had to be outrun. The Rift Valley Rap:
An allusion to the reflexive fight-or-flight response to danger.
All animal life does it. And running away from danger is a recurring
theme in Doctor Who. The Great Rift Valley runs through East Africa, most of the oldest fossil finds of our hominid ancestors have been found there.
p.62
The thing about hyperwave, the thing that made the whole ecology of the
human datascape possible, was that it was always switched on. Once a
transmission station was in resonance with another station, a continuous signal
had to be broadcast in order to maintain the link: This may have been brought
up in another novel; 'Deceit', perhaps? And is this at all like
the way Internet servers communicate? (Text submitted by John Anderson) No it's not. Internet computers recontact each other every time they talk, they don't maintain a continuous signal (usually).
p.64
She made the guard lie down in the recovery position and then shot her
too: Recovery position is taught in first aid. The posture is supposedly
the safest way of recovering from semiconsciousness. Lie on your side
with your lower leg bent to cradle the upper one, which you keep straight.
Your lower arm cushions your head, and the upper arm goes straight out.
You're lying down to avoid dizziness, and you're also less likely to hurt
yourself if you have a seizure. And you're on your side with an unobstructed
airway so you won't choke on your own vomit.
p.67
"Everything I learnt is here in this palmtop.": Since Palm Pilots came
out I instinctively call them palmtops. Nobody understands me.
p.68
The tall, curly-headed stranger just raised his hands. "It's me,'
he said: It's the Doctor. It may not be the Sixth Doctor or the Red-Headed
Doctor. In fact, later in the book we learn about more Doctors than
the mind can comprehend with ease. This is one of them.
"I'm on Iphigenia, Roz. I need your help. Desperately.
Come at once. Aulis. You won't miss it.": Aulis is a big crater
on Iphigenia, as we will soon read. Not sure about its derivation,but
www.aulis.com is a website about the Face on Mars, crop circles and ancient
alien architecture. Which seems satisfyingly appropriate.
p.70
"I just this minute got a report that on its last trip this hopper visited
Mictlan.": Not the Domain of the Celestis from 'Alien Bodies'. Just
another colony planet. Mictlan is the Underworld in Aztec mythology.
Hence the punchline, "Mictlan's a nice planet, if you like dead people."
"There's just been an outbreak of Breckenridge's Scourge reported on Mictlan.":
It's made up.
p.71
In his time he'd flown everything from an Adjudicator flitter to an experimental
Nazi plane: He crashed the flitter and sustained severe burns over most
of his body. He made an emergency landing in Hyde Park with the Nazi
plane, blew it up, and got arrested as a German spy. 'Original Sin'
and 'Just War'.
Professor Martinique:
Emil Zatopek: Named after a championship runner from Czechoslovakia
in the 1950s.
Here's a page about him.
Iaomnet Wszola:
p.73
The mountain of Artemis, the Greek goddess whom no man could see unclothed
on pain of death: If you say so. And that's a rather heavy metaphor.
"The largest crater anywhere in human space,": This may belabour the
point. The largest crater in our Solar System, Olympus Mons, is 550
km across although it happens to be volcanic. Aulis Crater has, we observe,
the aspect of an impact crater. Like the 400-km Odysseus Crater on
Tethys,or the 130-km Herschel Crater on Mimas.
p.74
"It looks as though a meteorite strike took a bite out of the mountain,"
said the Doctor. "That's right," said Martinique, a little surprised.
"Revealing a complex substratum.": Aulis Crater is as natural as the mountains at
Disneyland.
p.75
The Ogron eyed him for a moment. "Good food," he said. His
voice was deep and throaty. He made a sound like coughing, deep in his chest,
and the other Ogron joined him:The idea is that the Ogrons' native method
of communication is subsonic and comes from vibrations deep in the torso.
We get more details in 'Interference'.
p.77
hyperspace did strange things to your eyes as they tried to focus, and
it always made his head ache: The idea comes from some old Star Trek
novels, trying to describe in detail the new warp speed effects from
Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Although the effects would likely
be a bit odd. And why are they taking at least 24 hours to make a hyperspace
trip from one of Clytemnestra's moons to another? The moons probably
aren't more than 6 million km apart. There's also a loophole sometimes
used that you can't go into hyperspace near a large planet because of side-effects
of its gravity well.
p.78
After lunch, Chris crawled out through the airlock and spent an hour welding
things together on the hull: In hyperspace? I thought that wasn't
very safe. In 'Frontier in Space' the Doctor only did it in normal space.
Chris had heard of a ship on the Earth-Titan run which had got so nervous
about one of its retros that it changed course for the nearest repair station,
and the crew didn't even realize until they were halfway to Mars: Titan
is Saturn's largest moon. The Doctor destroyed a colony there to kill
off the Swarm in 'The Invisible Enemy'. Actually the script editors
implied that he set fire to the methane atmosphere and blew up the whole moon,
although that's impossible: fire requires oxygen, and there isn't any on Titan.
That was about the Year 5000. And Mars isn't always conveniently between
Earth and Saturn, quite often it's on the far side of the Sun. 
"The Communards,": Some band or other?
p.79
"It reminds me of someone I used to know," said Chris. "They used
to play this at the clubs we went to.": David Daniels from 'Damaged Goods'.
"Hey," she said, holding up the cassette case. "I know this one-
Sting. Didn't he go on to found a religion?" "That was
Prince," said Chris. "Sting went into politics. I think he was
assassinated in the early twenty-first.": Sting's more stuck to acting.
p.80
"They're decelerating at irregular intervals, the maximum deceleration
being thirty gees.": Decelerating by 300 metres per second every second.
At that running at that delta-V (change in velocity) for 100 minutes would
move them 5.5 million km and change their velocity by 1800 km/s.
p.81
"I think you should stop broadcasting Jimmy Somerville now.":
"This is the interceptor Albert Edward, out of the ISN Victoria
: Albert Edward was Queen Victoria's first son, and grew up to be Edward
VII.
p.82
Ident X181/481: Any meaning to the number?
The gas giant was a massive, faintly glowing ball, cutting off the sunlight,
filling the bridge with reddish shadows: I'm willing to go out and state
that Clytemnestra is a brown dwarf star. Brown dwarfs sit on the fence
between very large planets and very small stars. They're not quite massive
enough to sustain fusion in their cores, but they produce a certain amount
of heat and light.
Using strict orbital dynamics, it's a bit hard to imagine Iphigenia orbiting
less than a certain distance from Clytemnestra. There's something called
the Roche Limit, which is manifested in dynamic gravitational forces pulling
insecure objects like small moons apart. When a really massive planet
is so close as to be covering a large part of the sky, its moon is attracted
to it with differing amounts of force and orbital velocity on different parts of its surface.
When the attraction is spread out over too much sky and the moon is particularly
loosely formed, it breaks apart. Think of it like making a sudden turn
in your car. Apart from the acceleration that pushes you towards the
outside of the turn, the car has a turn radius that you can't make any smaller.
Fortunately your front axle is solid enough not to fall off when you tryto
decrease your turn radius. Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the fragmented comet
that collided with Jupiter in 1994, had been broken into at least 24 large
pieces when it flew underneath Jupiter's Roche Limit. Artificial satellites
aren't vulnerable to the Roche Limit because they are too small, light and
solidly built to be pulled in different directions by the planets they orbit.
p.83
Kim Wilde vanished in a puff of silence:
screaming in Czech:
"I'm burning! Sailing in the lake of fire! Planets emerging
born out of the red sear in the lake, crawling above!": I only really
included this because I heard Kate Orman listens to Rush, and this sounds
a bit like Geddy Lee lyrics in pain.
The Doctor shrugged as though something was irritating him, and a tiny
drop of blood ran out of his nose: It's a psychic attack from Aulis Crater.
p.84
He was murmuring about tacking across the wave of oblivion, hot chaos licking
at the hull of his boat, and yelling at his neighbour to turn the noise down:
"Not 'Don't Leave Me This Way?"
The Doctor shook his head. "It's a powerful source and we're still very
close. I'm afraid I had to take drastic measure: Frankie Goes To Hollywood."
"'Relax' or 'Two Tribes'?"
"'Relax'," said the Doctor. "The psycho buffer remix.": You probably
understood this bit, it's a little obvious. Eighties pop music.
p.85
"Either he left his institute ident at home, or he's a Wild Card.":
In the Thirtieth Century there are a fairly large number of telepaths, compared
to the Twentieth. To keep them safe and manage their talents there's
an Institute for the Gifted for their registration.
p.86
"I'm qualified in everything except HTML markup and dentistry.": I
am now writing unlicenced HTML markup.
"What are our Ogron friends up to?"
"They're in their quarters, as always," said Chris. "Probably playing
ludo.": (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) When pondering why Chris thinks the Ogrons might be playing a probably long-extinct board game, it might be worth noting that Ludo is also the name of a large, ape-like creature with orange hair that appears in the film 'Labyrinth'.
p.87
psychokinetic: Able to move objects with your mind. Not necessarily
able to read peoples' minds to start with.
p.90
"Thanks. I've already worked out that Iaomnet's not a student.
Or not just a student, anyway. She's probably a double-eye.": II:
Imperial Intelligence. Not sure if they first appeared in 'Original
Sin' or not.
He felt the dream come down like a terrible weight on his chest, like a
tornado blowing through the tiny cabin: This is a nod to the fact
that Chris is a latent telepath himself, as we read in 'SLEEPY'. He's
reacting to the psychic signals as well.
p.91
A voice came slithering out of the dream's scaly face: Is Chris dreaming
about the Silurians that seemed destined to inherit the Earth in 'Blood Heat'?
All those skins, torn loose and blown away in the wind, all those different
faces, sailing past him, glimpses of faces smiling or serious, but all of
them the Doctor. Shedding his skin, his skins, shattered like a dropped
cup: We're getting a POV on the Sid Sutton title sequence that used to
have the Doctor's face whizzing by. It symbolises that the Doctor's
possible lives have been fractured.
p.92
"Someone must have disabled the safeties. I'll bet you anything
the other suits are the same.": So the backup space suits were sabotaged.
p.93
"Cassandra," breathed the Doctor: Cassandra was one of the daughters
of King Priam of Troy. The God Apollo was in love with her and offered
her powers of prophecy. She refused him, and so he cursed her so that
her prophecies would always be ignored. She warned the Trojans not to
bring the Horse inside the city - they brought it in anyways. When Troy
fell to Agamemnon, she became his slave. She warned him that he would
be murdered when he got home - he went home anyways, and the two of them were
killed together. And Cassandra's the outermost planet inthe system.
"Bad rock," said Son of My Father: The Ogron's on the right track.
p.94
counterpane:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) A quilted bedspread.
p.95
"Double, double, toil and trouble," said Thandiwe, "Fire
burn and cauldron bubble.": Macbeth, Act 4 Scene 1. The
chorus of the Three Witches.
p.96
displayed a menu made up of half a dozen mikons:
p.98
"Unlimited rice pudding," said the Doctor: The Seventh Doctor sent
up one of Davros' rants in 'Remembrance of the Daleks' with these words.
"'Boney,' I said, 'an army marches on its stomach.'": Quote attributed
to Napoleon Bonaparte for which the Third Doctor shamelessly took credit.
The Doctor was beginning to get heavy, even with Iphigenia's 0.09 gravity:
Earth's Moon has 0.17 Earth-normal gravity. In 0.09 gravity, when
you drop a stone it accelerates at 90 cm/s2. When you drop
a stone on Earth it accelerates at 10 m/s2.
p.99
Her instructors at Loki had been big on statistics:
Whatever it was that resided in the central chamber, it was truly alien
and powerful in a way that she couldn't understand. And if Martinique
was right, there were thousands just like it, scattered throughout the Empire
and beyond: Just to clarify, if there are two thousand of these *things*
in our galaxy, the possibility of any one particular star hosting one is 0.000002%.
The possibility that any one star hosts more than one is pretty small.
"Balderdash, my dear Professor Blinovitch," said the Doctor. "I've
met myself dozens of times and I haven't exploded yet.": If I've got it
straight,the Blinovitch Limitation Effect prevents you from crossing your
own time-stream. Ian McIntire wrote probably the clearest explanation
of Blinovitch in PerfectTiming 2, titled 'Unlimited'. It dovetails
with something Stephen Hawking said about when identical particles occupy the
same point in space/time they annihilate each other. McIntire also claims
that only the oldest Doctor in any reunion carries the memory of that reunion,
in accord with some kind of unity between the structure of the Universe and
the minds within it. Aaron Yeoman Blinovitch was born April 1st,1890,
died May 9th, 1937, and was reborn June 17th, 1984. In his first life
he published his Temporal Mechanics based on studies in the Reading
Room of the British Museum (like Karl Marx.) Out of print on Earth, the
text is required reading on Gallifrey. Afterwards, Blinovitch derived
and solved the Agathon Equations, which give mathematical expressions for why
the Universe is entropic. As a result,he reverse-aged to death and began a
cycle of reincarnation as people named Bellin Vosh, Patient 19, the Vegan temporal physicist 923GUI, Arenblovit, William Novice, Research Unit BNOVZ, Buckminster Fuller and others. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Not "reborn". "Unborn" would be a better word. Anyway, this sentence, and the four sentences following, are probably unnecessary detail, not to mention 95% made up out of whole cloth by Ian McIntire. Is just a thought.I did it because I owe Ian a beer. Nootch.
In 'Mawdryn Undead' the Brigadier from 1979 met the Brigadier from 1983.
There was a big bang. In 'Happy Endings' four versions of the Seventh
Doctor were in the same room at the same time, and Muldwych from 'Birthright'
was there too (whoever he is.) When the Doctor handed something to Muldwych, they
made sure not to touch each others' hands. And if you've seen Jon Blum's
fan video 'Time-Rift', you'll know about the ray guns that are in fact the same
ray-gun, that cause power brown-outs whenever they're put close to each other.
And if I was to count up the number of times the Doctor has met himself to this
point, I would count six times in 'The Three Doctors', twelve times in 'The Five
Doctors', twice more in 'The Two Doctors', twelve or sixteen more times in 'Happy
Endings', twice more in 'Cold Fusion' and six more times in 'The Sirens of Time'.
Not counting any fan fiction or comic strip encounters,or the mental encounters
in 'Timewyrm: Revelation'. A grand total of at least 30 times.
"Beware the memories of the compassionate tent," said the Doctor.
"I'll have your eyes for that.":(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) In 'Original Sin', the Doctor finds himself locked in a room with a homicidal psychopath who threatens to remove the Doctor's eyes if the Doctor can't explain why what he does is different to what the psychopath does.
"Is it time already?" said the Doctor. "No, go back to sleep - it's
nowhere near time yet.": This is a flashback to 'Timewyrm: Revelation'.
Check out my page
on that marvelous book: p.55.
"Just because you're paranoid," said the Doctor, 'doesn't mean they're
not out to get you.":
"Aspidistra baby!":
"I also distinctly remember his being torn to bits by an N-form in Northern
England.":an alternate 'Damaged Goods'.
"I need you to pretend that you're my friend. That we have a history
together."
"Doctor, you're not making any sense," said Iaomnet. "What the hell
is going on?": Exactly the way the Doctor's companions are stereotyped
as speaking.
p.101
"Didn't we have fun a Bernice's wedding? I thought Da Vinci's cake
was the high point of the reception, didn't you?": Read 'Happy Endings'.
p.102
ISN Wilfred Owen, Sassoon Class: Both of them Great War poets.(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) And it was meeting Sassoon that prompted Owen to become a poet, so the Wilfred Owen being a Sassoon Class starcraft is sort of appropriate.
p.103
But whatever was in there had screwed up reality to the point where there
were Goddess knew how many extra Doctors walking about, appearing like sad
ghosts in a Chinese fairy tale: This sounds like a bit more than Roz should
be sure of at this point, although she has received visits since the first.
And I don't know much about the use of ghosts in Chinese theatre.
Another one had appeared to her in her cabin en route, furiously scribbling
coordinates on the wall with a stick of crayon. A short guy in an oversized
suit. "Don't tell the Time Lords I was here," he insisted. "I
keep to myself, one step ahead of them. But only one step.": Any
idea if this one is anyone in particular?
But I thought you were living in Hampstead."
"What?"
"With George.": Reference to the possibility of Roz staying on with George
Reed after 'Just War'.
p.105
"Or that you were killed by yourself in Woodwicke.": In 'Christmas
on a Rational Planet' there was a problem with an Amaranth, a Gallifreyan
tool that rebuilds reality. One of its side-effects was that it rebuilt
a whole new version of Roz from the bio-print she carried in her arm - a version
based on Roz's personality when she was younger, angrier and more xenophobic.
The replicant almost killed her.
p.106
ISN Doran: The Michael John Doran. A friend of
mine. Mike Doran is one of the best-known Canadian Doctor Who
fans. He's contributed and helped edit several fanzines and chaired at
least three successful Doctor Who conventions. And he also had
a character named after him in 'Oh No It Isn't!'
p.107
The surviving screen was running a continuous sweep of the comet's surface:
If Cassandra was in our Solar System, it would be a Trans-Neptunian Object.
Like Pluto. There's an ongoing debate about whether Pluto is a planet
or a comet. I frankly don't care what we call it though. One thing: Cassandra's
been given a name, but it's a very small planet orbiting at great distance
from its sun. Unless it already has special importance,it's not likely
to be noted as deserving a name, and not a catalog number.
p.111
The creature's bat wings were spread out, collapsed beneath the weight
of its body. The fine bones of the wingtips were as thick as a human
arm: It's one of the Great Vampires ('State of Decay'). Dead for
ten million years. Somehow I thought the early Time Lords' war with
the vampires might have been a few hundred times farther back in history than
that, but there might just have been a protrusion from ancient time into the
age of ten million years ago for a campaign in our galaxy.
"Imagine the power of this thing when it was freshly dead.": The Doctor's
corpse in 'Alien Bodies' was psychically active, so no wonder the same happens
with the Great Vampires.
"The Real World Interface of these early models was rather unstable.":
He might mean the Cassandran TARDIS or the Great Vampires. Great
Vampires, like Time Lords, are bigger on the inside than on the outside.
p.112
they must have travelled fifty kilometres through the angular white corridors:
Take a long time to walk that far.
p.113
bowships: What the Time Lords used to stake the Great Vampires.
After it was damaged and its crew killed, it was captured by Agamemnon's
gravity and has been following its erratic orbit ever since. Sending
out an equally erratic call for help in a tight beam. The beam is probably
supposed to be aimed at a particular base or planet or what-have-you, but
Cassandra's wandering orbit means that the beam is constantly twisting and
turning all over the heavens. When that beam passes within range of
a surviving N-form, that N-form automatically switches to full combat mode.":
Which is supposed to explain Mei Feng's sudden explosion as well as
the 1987 London N-form. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) And the N-form attack that triggered the Quoth migration in 'The Death of Art'.Extremely unlikely, even though the beam is being broadcast through time. But more likely to explain Mei Feng - Cassandra's only a few billion km from Aegisthus rather than a few thousand light years from Earth.
p.114
Lieutenant Kidjo:
p.115
The fleet supply lighter Claremont:
shut down the biode in his left eye: Biological diode. Probably
a light-emitting diode (LED) screen.
p.116
putting the Claremont on the Petri dish: Jellied medium for
breeding colonies of bacteria for closer study. Or metaphoricals of
same.
Sokolovsky was tall and muscular, straight-spined, beppled to look like
an albino: Body-beppling was introduced in 'Original Sin' as a Thirtieth
Century cosmetic procedure. It tweaks your genes and makes you look
interestingly different. When we first met Chris Cwej he'd been beppled
to look a bit like a humanoid lion (He sustained severe burns over most of
his body during the course of the book, and looked human when he healed apart
from his large frame and pointed teeth). There was another character
who looked like a humanoid elephant.
Caxtarid: One of the alien races Kate Orman is fond of using in her
books. There's Caxtarids in 'Return of the Living Dad'.
He remembered the year of the disaster: 2975, when half the Earth went
mad: In 'Original Sin' the INITEC Interstellar Corporation parked a stolen
Hith warship, Skel' Ske, in hyperspace on Earth. The ship was
powered by icarons, particles native to hyperspace; in this way the ship was designed
to use less power in hyperspace than other designs. The icarons manifested
themselves in real space by randomly turning humans living on Earth into
homicidal maniacs.
Corruption in the Order of Adjudicators: At the end of 'Original Sin',
as Roz came to terms with killing Fenn Martle, and as INITEC ceased to be
a going concern, she and Chris were framed by their boss. The Adjudicator
Secular Rashid, like Martle, had also been in on INITEC's scheme to secretly
exploit Hith military technology (I think) but probably hadn't anticipated
the mass disturbances caused by icaron particles. Rashid may have been
exposed as corrupt by the Forresters, seeing as how Roz' name is cleared by the
end of this book.
p.117
The Empire no longer serves the interests of humanity, Sokolovsky told
himself. It was almost a catchphrase in the resistance: Was this
originally something about General Motors?
p.120
"Security teams iota, epsilon, scramble immediate!": Iota is the ninth
letter of the Ancient Greek alphabet. Epsilon is the fifth.
Cappiello:
"Flechette gun," said the young man, "ideal for shipboard combat.":
On Babylon 5 the logic was that plasma guns wouldn't breach the hull
like bullets. I suppose flechettes can be engineered to shatter against
hard surfaces rather than poke pinholes in them.
p.123
"Yes, sir," said Vincenzi. "Was this part of the plan?": Vincenzi
parachutes back into the story here. The mysterious pirates from the
Claremont are in fact units from one of the secret armies House Forrester
and House Walid are building up.
p.127
"Justice," said Chris.
"Fairness," said Roz. They traded a high-five: Cool.
"The Pequot.": The Pequot were a Seventeenth-Century Nation
of Native Americans in Connecticut. A couple of new nations (including
the Mohegans and their leader Uncas, who were fictionalized in James Fenimore
Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans) split off from the Pequot due to
internal politics and disruptive influences from Dutch and English colonists.
The remaining Pequot were all killed by smallpox and a war with the English
colonists in 1637. The Pequod, Captain Ahab's doomed whaling
ship in Moby Dick is named after the Pequot. Chris identifies
the ISN Pequot as an "Indigenous Class" warship.
p.129
"Iphiko class fighters - eight Wings of them": Iphiko is IsiXhosa for
Wing.
"But they're Ogrons," said the Doctor. "Ogrons don't do this.":
The Ogrons in this book are everything the Ogrons in Pertwee-Era Doctor
Who weren't. Kind, endearing, insightful and heroic. It's
wonderful.
p.130
It took him all the way back to Black Body 27 and the remembrance of real
fear: Black bodies are nonluminescent elements of Dark Matter.
Usually just planets that've been ejected from their native solar systems,
or maybe made out of stranger stuff.
Ident said that one of the bogies was a Magritte-class heavy cruiser,probably
the Giacometti, the other two were a Dog-class and a Jaguar-class destroyer
- Dingo and Cougar:
René François-Ghislain Magritte (1898-1967) was a French surrealist
painter. He did the onewith the bowler-hatted man with an apple in
front of his head. Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was a Swiss abstract
sculptor. Perhaps the most outstanding of his surrealist pieces is
The Palace at 4 AM (1932-33,Museum of Modern Art, New York City),
an architectonic skeleton holding suspended figures and objects that expresses
the subjectivity andthe fragility of the human sense of time and space.
The dingo is an Australian feral dog. The cougar is a big cat native
to the Americas, just as the jaguar is a South American big cat.
The Magritte-class carried soldinosc, really big, high-V missiles
with a thirty-six megaton warhead: Not sure what soldinosc means.
Polish for "soldier" maybe? 36 megatons is quite big; the bombs dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were about 1/4000th as powerful. More powerful
devices than 36Mt have been set off in atomic test programs, and on Earth
one would give you a pretty hard time if it went off at a range of anything
less than 100 kilometres. Not to mention fall-out and electromagnetic
disturbances, which are conditional on the altitude of the blast. In
space, I'm not sure how effective a weapon like that would be. Electromagnetic
effects might be pretty severe, although they might depend on the strength
of ambient electromagnetic fields. Blast would be pretty minor, but
dependent on what the bomb was covered in. Blast and heat isn't slowed
down by atmosphere in space, and just keeps expanding out and dropping in
strength by pi x R3 per unit distance. Radiation is no more
or less a problem, depending on how the bomb was tweaked for blast and radiation
yields. But there wouldn't be any fall-out.
p.132
Dhaulagiri, Nepal: Very high mountain in the Himalayas.
Thandiwe had gone for a walk through the seminary: This seminary is
a special place. Read on.
p.133
It showed a soldier from the old days, a woman in very heavy armour:
She had coppery hair and wore the same simple green clothes as everyone else
here: This is a hint.
"It's a saying of the first Brigadier," said Joanna. "One of the nineteen
calls to action."
"I can't read it."
"I'm not surprised, it's in British, a sub-dialect of Ancient American."
"What does it say?"
"'Shoot the winged man with five quick bullets.'"
"What does it mean?"
"Ah," said Joanna, "I'm afraid that it rather depends on which school of
interpretationyou follow.": The seminary is a fortress of the Unitatus, the
Thirtieth Century descendents of UNIT. It's an extension of the Zen Buddhist
ideas the Brigadier picked up in 'No Future' and were mentioned in passing
in Ben Aaronovitch's novelization of 'Remembrance of the Daleks' and Marc Platt's
novelization of 'Battlefield', as well as 'Transit'. We first met the
Unitatus in the 26th Century in 'Cold Fusion'. Not sure where UNISYC from
'Alien Bodies' and 'Interference' fit in, but they're even more desparate to
protect Earth from alien invasions than UNIT. Also not sure about the Knights
of Jeneve from 'Dragon's Wrath': UNIT is based in Geneva,and their leader's
voice in the audio version of 'Dragon's Wrath' was provided by former UNIT actor
Richard Franklin. So UNIT survives in some form from its inception sometime
around 1970 until at least the Thirtieth Century. I'm not sure what the other
eighteen calls to action are, but this mangled translation goesback to 'The
Daemons', when the Brigadier uttered the order: "Jenkins,the chap with wings
there. Five rounds rapid." DoctorWho fandom is already
divided into schools of interpretation.
p.134
"This is no miracle. The reclamation projects I've funded have the
potential to restore this whole planet to its former state.": Leabie is
at the forefront of a new environmentalist movement. This, combined
with the fact that her sister is the Doctor's best friend, is meant to show
her to be a great and just leader although she is commanding a secret and
unlawful army to overthow rival factions with their own armies in the corrupt
Imperial Court. She's by far the lesser of two evils, despite the obvious
fallacy: what exactly was the former state of the Earth's environment, and
how important is it to get it just right?
I suppose that by giving the Unitatus their snow back, she's got them on her
side.
p.135
Simon: The university student from Spaceport 20 Overcity
has let a bunch of financed terrorists, possibly allied with House
Forrester, persuade him to go research the Doctor's past.
Ulmus procera:
Here.
p.136
It took him almost a minute to pick out the shape of the house. The
lines of roof and wall suggested by the squiggle of vines and moss andshrubs:
It's the House at Allen Road. Chronologically, last seen circa 2109 in 'Transit'.
Novelogically, last seen circa 2030 in 'Warchild'. Its most recent appearence
was in 'The Dying Days'.
Holstek Firefly:
p.137
Simon spent just half a second lying in the mud with silverfish crawling
over him: Silverfish are little bugs. They look a little like potato
bugs only more shiny and thin. Fishy, in fact. When I worked as
a dishwasher I found they liked hiding in stacks of warm, fresh-from-the-machine
dishes.
p.138
Genevieve: Walid's concubine from the prologue on Io has been sent
to investigate Allen Road. She ends up falling in with Simon.
lapsang souchong: From the Fujian province of China comes this very
distinctive tea with its exotic smoky flavor. After plucking, the leaves
are withered over cypress or pine wood fires. After the rolling process,
they are placed into wooden barrels until they begin to emit their own pleasant
aroma. As a final step they are placed in bamboo baskets and hung on
racks over smoky pine fires where they dry and absorb the essence of the smoke.
The finished tea leaves are thick and black and when steeped in hot water produce
a bright reddish-orange cup of tea. The flavor is very assertive and
appeals to those looking for a bold cup of tea.
p.141
an Earth Reptile version of a Tisanesmade: Herbal tea-maker.
p.142
"There must be a drudgebot around somewhere,": To do drudgery and chores.
Some of the old Audio-Visual fan audios had evil robot minions called Drudges
or Drudgers, but that's probably not implied here.
p.144
"Some of me are killed in a prison cell by the Earth Reptiles and left
to rot.": Reference to 'Blood Heat', an alternative timeline in which
the Doctor was killed before he could produce an antidote to the Silurians'
plague - the Earth was taken over by the Silurians although some pockets of
human resistance held out.
"Some of me have gone on to destroy whole worlds - always in a good cause,
of course.": Reference to 'Remembrance of the Daleks', in which the Doctor
tricked Davros into destroying the Dalek homeworld, Skaro. Also 'The
Pit', in which the Doctor is responsible for destroying an entire solar system
in order to prevent the Yssgaroth (Great Vampires) from breaking through into
our universe again. And also his recent destruction of Cassandra.
"At least one of me is a ruthless dictator with my picture up everywhere.":
The idea that the Leader from the alternate universe in 'Inferno' is an
alternate Doctor exiled by the Time Lords who dominates Earth society rather
than helping it in little ways. Paul Cornell, and maybe a couple of his
friends, picked up from the notion that the picture of the Orwellian Leader
looks a bit like one of the pencil-drawings the Second Doctor refused to choose
for his next face at his trial in 'The War Games'. Also,a deleted sequence
from 'Inferno' that was included in the BBC video was a radio broadcast from
the Leader's news service about the volcanic activity breaking out; the
radio voice was Pertwee himself doing an impression of Lord Haw-Haw, the British
Fascist and traitor who broadcast propaganda from Germany during the Second
World War.
"The original Doctor?": Yes, and who knows if this implies the Other,
or the faces from 'The Brain of Morbius'.
p.145
The fact that he looked so ordinary was a definite plus for a terrorist.
Worked for Mr Jamey:
p.147
A routine autopsy performed by machines that ticked and murmured as they
peeled back the layers of Sibongile's body and invaded its secrets. Killed
stone dead by a non-lethal crowd-control weapon. Something sonic:
So there's been a certain amount of missed ground in the saga of Simon and Sibongile.
I really don't think it was a bad thing that the actual riot was cut from the
final draft. The effect is heightened by just seeing the aftermath here.
p.149
the metaship Joseph Conrad: Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski
was a Polish-born author and world traveller. He wrote a lot about the
darker aspects of the human psyche. His most remembered work isHeart
of Darkness, about a riverboat journey up the Zaire River in the Belgian
Congo. It was a shambles of a colony, with massive human rights abuses
that went totally unpunished. A good story, but not a realistic appraisal
of the state of affairs in Africa today. The Rwandan Genocide was a pretty
fucking awful situation, but that was planned and was done by responsible people.
Even more insane.
p.150
"Its route takes it from the Listeners' original home, Viam, forty-eight
light years from Earth, all the way out to the rim of the Empire and back
again, in a continual two-year journey.": It's explained that the Empire
never came in contact with the Listeners, whoever they were. They heard
us coming from our communications traffic, and abandoned their solar system.
p.151
"So it's sunny all the time," the bagbot said, "The tourists seem to like it. Except the Lacaillans.
Apparently on their homeworld it rains all the time.": Abbe Nicholas Louis
de la Caille (1713-1762) was an astronomer who catalogued early lists of nebulous
objects in the night sky. Most of his observations were carried out in
South Africa in 1751 and 1752. There's also a Lacaille star catalog,
but I'm not sure if that was written by him or one of his descendents.
Lacaille 9352 is one of the nearer stars to the Sun. It's 10.74 light-years
away in the southern constellation Sculptor. It is 30% as bright as
the Sun and has about half its mass, but its diameter is 1.5 times larger.
It's a main sequence, class M2 star. I'm guessing, but I would say it's substantially
older than the Sun. My data suggests that its spectrum shows only 10%
of the heavy elements present in the Sun's atmosphere, so any planets it may
have may be too short on key elements to have produced life.
Lacaille 8760 is also a nearby star. It's 12.5 light years away and
is about 50% as bright as the Sun. It's also a variable star with the
designation AX Microscopii. Although its brightness variation isn't
very big, it might stop the development of stable life forms.
"I flunked the Turing - no human talks about luggage all the time.":
The Turing test, which may or may not have been mentioned in 'The Turing Test',
is a thought experiment. The point at which computers can be regarded
as intelligent and conscious is the point at which talking to one is no different
than talking to another human. At that point, the computer's passed the
Turing test. Alan Turing was an English mathematician who worked for the
code-cracking establishment at Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire.
He designed some of the world's first computers. He was also homosexual,
and was eventually ostracized and driven to suicide despite possessing one
of the two best brains Britain has produced in the last hundred years (the
other belongs to Stephen Hawking.)
the Lord Jim shopping centre: Lord Jim was another book Conrad
wrote. It's about cowardice and the futility of bravery. Rather
good, made into a film with Peter O'Toole and Jack Hawkins.
p.152
"It's taken us a month to get here.": Just a time-check.
p.153
Roy Liechtenstein: (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Pop artist.
p.154
It was like finding the missing part of a jigsaw puzzle under the bed.
"Emil?" she hissed: The duplicate Doctor is in fact Emil Zatopek, disguised
as the Doctor as a side-effect of the Nexus, the thing which is causing all
these weird timeline effects.(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) The effect is probably related to the bit at the bottom of p.21, where the same thing nearly happens to Chris.
"Almayer's Storage reopens at eight thirty tomorrow morning.":(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) 'Almayer's Folly' is another Joseph Conrad novel.
p.155
Dargolian Jus de Claymore '56: A claymore is a traditional Scottish
sword. Also an anti-personnel mine.
p.156
Retro-Objectivist philosophy:
The lounge was empty, except for a Ybarraculan curled under one of the plastic
seats, homeless or hopelessly delayed:
p.161
Janus: One of the moons of Saturn. Quite small, only 190 kmin
diameter. It was only discovered in 1966, and until the Voyager
spacecraft visited Saturn in 1980 it was the innermost moon we knew about.
In 2986 Empress runs Centcomp from Janus.
Janus @ the Nine Planets Website
p.162
"I'm particularly fond of the Mogarian sculptures. It's shame they
have to be kept in those gas containers.": Mogarians appeared in 'Terror
of the Vervoids'. Mogar has a methane atmosphere. 'Terror of the Vervoids'
takes place in 2986.
THE DOCTOR: I saw a museum like this in Paris.
WSZOLA: Where's that?
DOCTOR: Europe. Once upon a time. The spoils of conquest, treasures
from Egypt and Europe. Very impressive, while it lasted.
WSZOLA: Why? What happened to the museum?
DOCTOR: The English came and took most of it away. The spoils of conquest:
I'd have to guess this means the Louvre - but the English have never sacked that.
The Rosetta Stone (with which Egyptian hieroglyphics were decoded)was discovered
by the French in Egypt, and the Stone is now displayed in the British Museum
because the British defeated the French while they were still in Egypt. The
Rosetta Stone was never in Paris. Iaomnet doesn't know what Paris is
becauseit was destroyed in 2086 by the Ice Warriors. It had been rebuilt and
fell into ruin again by 2595 in 'The Sword of Forever', and I guess one of
the Overcities was moored on top of it.
p.164
He was like something from a horror sim. The cold-blooded and insane
killer who looks entirely harmless, even comic. The sims about the year
of the disaster were full of characters like him: The Seventh Doctor is being
compared to a Hannibal Lector character. The year of the disaster was
caused by the icaron crisis in 'Original Sin'. The chief psychotic in
'Original Sin' was Dr Zebulon Pryce, who is a Hannibal Lector-like character.
But from his name and appearence he seemed more likely to be played by Jonathan
Pryce, who can play a pretty convincing nutter.
the Empress Gloriana: I believe we first met the Empress
in 'Orginal Sin'. We get a biog of her on p.244. Her real name
was Helen Kristiansen and she was crowned almost 150 years earlier.
p.165
Genevieve ap Gwalchmai: This surname style is Welsh.
The corrupt Adjudicator Bronwen ap Bryn was a character in 'Lucifer Rising',in
2156.
the Pontifex Saecularis: Adjudicator Secular.
p.166
Japetus: Iapetus is the outermost major moon of Saturn.
It's spelt 'Japetus' in Arthur C Clarke's book 2001: A Space Odyssey
. It's unusual because of its large orbit, which takes 79 days to run
and is slightly inclined. It's tidally locked with one side facing Saturn
all the time. The leading hemisphere is covered in dark dust, and the
trailing hemisphere is covered in cleaner ice; the effect of this is that when
we look at Iapetus from Earth,it is much brighter when it's east of Saturn
than when it's west of the planet. 
The Androzanies: Androzani Major and Androzani Minor,
from 'The Caves of Androzani'.
p.169
"The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes": Julius
Caesar, Act 2, Scene 2. "When beggars die there are no comets seen;
the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes." Calpurnia,
Caesar's wife, warns him that the bad weather is an omen that things will
not go well if he goes to the Senate in the morning. Although Caesar's
wife is above suspicion, he disagrees with her. In 'Transit' the Doctor delivers
Caesar's reply to this line, "Cowards die many times before their deaths;
the valiant never taste of death but once." Just before jumping into
the Domain of Fred.
p.172
the Bohemian teaspoon: The Doctor's a bit of a Bohemian, and he plays
the spoons.
The monsters arrived: All of a sudden everybody in the courtroom with
psi potential turns into a variety of amusing and dangerous abominations that
try to kill the Doctor. He survives and escapes with Genevieve and Duke Walid.
p.176
"I thought you needed Quoth to do that," mused the Doctor: The Quoth
were sub-dimensional life-forms in 'The Death of Art'. They had a universe
in a doll's house in Paris. Exposure to them activated psi-powers and
attracted the attention of elements of the psi-powers conspiracy. The Doctor
eventually rescued the doll's house and dropped it off on the surface of a
neutron star, where the Quoth could feed peacefully on quark particles.
p.177
"Sometimes my life is like a series of repeats.": Fnur fnur.
p.178
humming 'I Heard a Rumour':(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Song by Bananarama, on their 1987 album 'Wow!'
p.179
"Ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly be passing over Odysseus Crater
on our way to Ithaca City. For a excellent view of the Crater and the
Temple of the Goddess, please take a seat in the port-side viewing chamber.":
Odysseus is a real crater, you can see it in the pictures of Tethys.
It looks a lot like Aulis Crater on Iphigenia. In the Troy legends Odysseus
was the King of Ithaca. He was one of Agamemnon's allies. He's
also known as Ulysses, and was the main character in Homer's Odyssey
.
p.181
The Gulf of Tonkin: Part of the South China Sea beside Viet
Nam. A bit of a flashpoint for American involvement in the Viet Nam
war.
Lonely Galaxy Guide to Tethys: Today's Lonely Planet
guides are popular travel handbooks.
p.182
"He stopped the Jeopards from invading their neighbouring planet," said
Roz. "A year later the Empire swept in and conquered both worlds.":
This might have been covered in another Kate Orman book. The other planet
was inhabited by the Jithrai.(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Nope, first mentioned here.
p.183
First chance she got she picked up a heat ray. It was a smaller version
of the standard Martian weapon: Martians used heat waves in HGWells'
The War of the Worlds - the Ice Warriors use sonic cannon. But those
rifles from 'The Curse of Peladon' looked like they used heat.
p.184
"An honest officer of the law will quickly be detected and eliminated.":
So the corruption in the Guild of Adjudicators is still there.
p.186
"I was a cook aboard the Renoir.":(Text submitted by Paul Andinach)Auguste Renoir, famous French painter.
p.188
"Six wars have broken out in twenty-four hours," she said. "Like
brushfires. Only one of them in the solar system - the Antarctic Alliance
lobbed a missile at the Horne Collective.": As in Cape Horn in South America?
p.193
Roz looked at her suddenly. "FLORANCE!': Roz met FLORANCE on
Dione in the 23rd Century in 'SLEEPY'. She freed the AI from the Dione-Kisumu
Corporation. Now Roz and Chris are about to be arrested and interrogated
by unregistered psis working for the Conspiracy. FLORANCE gives their
minds a link into Puterspace so they can act faster than the thugs and escape.
p.194
"I've always wondered," said Chris, as the shuttle headed for the great
black yonder, "why it was a bat out of hell.": As in the Meat Loaf
album. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) As in the old expression the Meat Loaf album was named after - meaning very fast.
p.195
James Llewellyn, House of Forrester, Internal Security: Llewellyn is
Fluellen, the man who recruited Vincenzi to the Forresters' Secret Armyback
in the prologue. Fluellen sounds rather like Llewellyn pronounced with
a Welsh accent. And he's been trailing Roz to keep an eye on herfor
Leabie. Now he's come forward.
p.196
Black Sea Aquaculture Centre: The Black Sea is an inland, freshwater
sea in Eurasia. It borders on Ukraine, the Caucasus, Turkey and the
northern Balkan states. It's rather near the ruins of Troy.
futomaki:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) A type of sushi.
Joanna Morceli and Simon Frederson: Any use of the names elsewhere?
"I never thought I'd see the Children of the Sea and the Seventeenth Third
of the Benevolent Triad having a conversation. Or the Monkey Boys in
the same room as anybody.": The Seventeenth Triad are Earth Reptiles,
but I don't quite get this.(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) The aim of the meeting is to get various insurrectionist groups to co-operate (on [spoiler deleted]'s plan) instead of competing to achieve their various usual goals. The Children of the Sea are an aquatic Earth Reptile group, the Seventeenth Third of the Benevolent Triad are a Silurian group, and "Monkey Boys" is probably just an insulting Earth Reptile name for humans.
p.197
"Tanj, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that to sound as awful as it did.":
Tanj is a very silly fake cuss word. Even less tolerable than "cruk"
- harder to tell what it could possibly mean. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Tanj originates (I think) in the works of Robert A Heinlein. It's an acronym for "There ain't no justice."
p.198
Port Elizabeth, Skag: The original Port Elizabeth is a town on the
coast of the Eastern Cape of Good Hope, in South Africa. It's not far
from the Transkei area.
He was remembering when the world had been much smaller, a single corridor,
on Level 113 of Sir Guilliam Habibi's stack, Spaceport Six Overcity:
There's a bit of 'Colony in Space' where the Doctor argues against IMC's factory
colonization program, claiming that people on Earth are already living like
battery hens. This is a reference to that.
she shrugged and said that everyone had always cleaned the corridor on
Saturday morning: There's been a civic ordinance in Haiti for years that
on Saturday mornings everyone is to participate in cleaning away garbage and
things like that. I'm not sure how the tradition has held since Haiti
achieved basic democracy.
p.199
Janinski Galleria:
ersatz Chianti: fake wine. Chianti is made in Italian Tuscany,
near Florence.
p.202
He was determined to walk the whole of the outer hallway, a thirty-kilometre
stretch of carpet and windows circling the building at its base: The Forresters'
palace on Io is an upright cylinder or cone about ten kilometres thick at the
base and three kilometres tall. Chris is a big guy, and earlier he was
jogging with Ogrons; he ought to be able to jog thirty kilometres in not much
more than three hours.
p.204
It was like an arcology:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) A meeting between architecture and ecology. And that's about all I can remember offhand. There's a bit about arcologies in 'The Dark Path'.
p.208
I was up to my arse in Sloathes at the time: The Sloathes were the
obligatory monsters in 'Sky Pirates!'. They raided other planets for
treasure, and then just sat on the stuff. They were shapeshifters.
They eventually turned out to be misunderstood.
It reminded her, perversely, not of the legendary forests of West Africa
as it was supposed to, but of Little Chalfont, England: I can't find Little
Chalfont. It may be an early name for Little Caldwell from 'Return of
the Living Dad'. The book was provisionally titled, and the first part of the book was finally subtitled, 'Big Trouble
in Little Chalfont', or Caldwell.
p.209
"Do you remember the time I broke Twolumps?": Twolumps was a bot that
looked after Roz and Leabie when they were gorowing up. It may be a
reference to the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch from Monty Python's Flying
Circus - the Ministry's tea lady is Mrs Twolumps, and she refers to the
gentleman in the office as Mr Teabag.
p.210
On this page it is revealed that Thandiwe is a clone of Roz.
"I imagine a time when there are no Forresters, when everything we've built
up is washed away in some catastrophe. Or worse, just trickles away to
nothing. The line must continue, as it has continued for a millennium.":
Snippets of the Forrester family history were anthologized in Decalog
4: Re-Generations. It's in chronological order but tells stories
of independent people, Forresters all, having adventures in mystery, science-fiction
and other things leading up to the downfall of the Earth Empire around the
year 3000 and the chaos that followed it. At the end of the anthology,
in a story called 'Dependence Day', Thandiwe escapes the coming Dark Age to
save the Forresters.
p.211
modern makossa:
p.213
He smiled. "Once upon a time...that's a good way to
start the story. Once upon a time, there were unicorns and bread-and-butterflies,
planets like giant apples and suns like red balloons. But since no sentient
life had yet evolved, there was no one to notice theywere impossible, so no
one minded. And then along came the Time Lords."
"The Time Lords were the first sentient beings?"
"The first to evolve in this universe, yes," said the Doctor.
He finished his tea and poured another cup. "Back then we were the Shadow
people, caught between the warm dark of magick and the cold light of science.
Magick predominated for a long, long time. And then Rassilon made his
decision."
Roz had forgotten her tomato soup, listening. Don't think
of it like a sitrep, she thought, think of it as a fairy story.
"The world solidified around us, like water turning to ice.
Squeezing out the magick. But, like an ice cube, there were little cracks
and bubbles. Psi was the last magick to survive, perhaps because it was
the least impossible, the closest to science. The residue of psi became
a network of ley lines, stretching through the universe in improbable directions.
"It's still there."
Roz said, "And Iphigenia is ...on one of the ley lines?"
The Doctor nodded. "The Time Lords were aware of the
ley lines before the Wars began. We'd chosen to make the universe rational.
Its irrational citizens objected. So we turned the psi lines into weapons.
A Distant Early Warning line that stretched through the galaxy, studded with
receivers the size of mountains or even small moons, parabolic dishes disguised
as craters. Listening for eruptions of psi power beyond Gallifrey."
"Iphigenia," said Roz.
"Yes. A quarter of the moon is jammed with Time Lord
technology, riddled with access tunnels. They just built a fake crater
over the top, so the Vampires wouldn't notice, and left it there."
"They must have realized someone would notice. There
must have been hundreds of Martiniques through the millennia."
"Remember," said the Doctor, "back then there were no other
intelligent races. None that mattered, anyway, as far as we were concerned.
Just the Time Lords, and our enemies. The residual horrors of the universe
before this one, and the Great Vampires, sucking dry every planet they could
reach."
"So the expedition came into contact with the ley line," said
Roz.
"A primary source of unimaginable psi power. A well of
magick," said the Doctor. "Where everything that's possible is boiling
under the surface of the universe. Zatopek is working for the Brotherhood."
"Ah."
"When I realized what we were faced with, I insisted we leave
right away. Zatopek and Iaomnet were very, very insistent. I warned
them about the fate of the previous expedition. Close contact with the
Nexus simply drove most of them mad, left one of them sliding through different
realities, and left an N-gram burning inside Mei Feng's brain. They already
knew what had happened. I should really have just let them wave their
guns about and make threats, but I was curious... I should never have got so
close to the thing."
"Chris's dream aboard the Hopper," said Roz. "He said
it was as though a great wave of psi power washed out from the centre of the
planet."
"When I came into contact with the Nexus, it released every
potential possibility of my existence. Well, almost all of them.
If I dust off some of the mathematical manuals in the TARDIS library, I can
probably do the calculations. In any case, all those probabilities were
thrown loose, spraying loose into the galaxy. Some of them found places
to settle. Zatopek was very close. As I recall, he was holding
a needler to my ear at the time."
"So he turned into you," said Roz.
"Not quite," said the Doctor. "Me, with some tiny difference.
Some decision I didn't make, some road I didn't travel... maybe that Doctor
just had something else for breakfast for that morning. In any case,
Zatopek's own psi talents allowed him to gradually emerge."
It was all starting to make sense, in a nonsensical kind of
way. "That explains the you that contacted me on Fury," said Roz.
The Doctor nodded. "The distribution of possibilities
is chaotic, but broadly, the further you get away from the Nexus, the more
bizarre they become."
"One thing I didn't get - why blow up Cassandra, but not Iphigenia?"
"All TARDISes have a self-destruct device," said the Doctor,
"but the cosmic ley lines don't have such a convenient facility. Blowing
up the planet would leave the Nexus quite unharmed."
"And the N-forms?" prompted Roz.
"Mines," said the Doctor. They didn't just detect psi. They actively
attacked it. Anything that wasn't Gallifreyan. But the Time Lords
didn't pick up their toys when they were finished with them. There are
still a small number of N-forms, usually damaged and insane, left lying about
the galaxy. The ones which didn't want to stop killing were the hardest
to find." He stirred his tea agressively. "Typical Time Lord blunder.
Create something ludicrously powerful and then forget all about it. Decide
you're going to be entirely rational, and then have a psychic war which lasts
for millennia and decimates half the galaxy."
p.216
A dozen murders happened in the space of ten minutes: Some psis of
the Forrester household staff turn into monsters. They break into the
Forresters' private rooms and kill Leabie's children Somezi and Mantsebo,
and ten other family members and staff. Thandiwe's Fat Monster Eater
bot immobilizes the monster sent to kill her.
p.221
Mont Blanc: The tallest mountain in France, 4810 metres high.
It lies on the border with Italy.
He had walked five kilometres across the valley floor, beside a crisp and
freezing stream: This is Duke Armand, the ruler of Europe. Note that
this takes place in July, but that we're in the mountains explains the cold.
Although there's no snow up there any more.
some of the mountains had needed repairs after a local war in 2547:
The Second Dalek Invasion happened in 2545, according to several different
sources that pinpoint that date at least roughly: 'Frontier in Space', 'The
Planet of the Daleks', 'Love and War', 'The Sword of Forever' and 'Beige Planet
Mars'. 'The Sword of Forever' suggested that a lot of Europe was laid
waste by the Daleks' metagenic weapons, which introduced mutations like the
ones from 'The Daleks' Masterplan' into the ecosystem.
p.222
Maybe they'd show him a little respect. Soon. When his plans
came to fruition: Duke Armand, not Walid, is a traitor serving the Brotherhood.
This is a plot twist.
"I speak for the Brotherhood," said the woman. He could hear one
voice - twelve voices - a hundred voices - echoes at the edge of his consciousness.
"For the Grandmaster," he said:The Grandmaster is the group mind that
masterminds the Brotherhood.
p.226
"Would you believe that robot had never heven heard of Jimmy Stewart?":
Actor from a few decades back. Often wore fedoras, like the Seventh
Doctor. And the Doctor's just been arguing about synthetic felt; Stewart
once starred in a film called Harvey, about a man who can see a six-foot-tall
imaginary rabbit.
"The only way to get genuine leather shoes is to have them sent over from
the Crow Nation: In their own language, the Crow tribe of southeastern
Montana call themselves Absaroka, or the "bird people". To the early French
explorers and voyageurs, the Crow were called the "handsome men" because
of their beautifully worked garments and the long flowing black hair that sometimes
reached all the way to the ground. The name "Crow" came from crudely
translating the term "Absaroka" into "Crow people" instead of "bird people."
Crow Nation link
Groenewegen's department store: Sarah Groenewegen is a friend of Kate
Orman's, and a fellow fan. She used to write for the fanzine Bog
Off!, and gets referenced in a number of novels by Kate Orman and Paul
Cornell. She may have a brother.(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) There is also a Stephen Groenewegen active in Australian fandom, but I don't know what relationship exists between him and Sarah.
frangipani:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) The frangipani plant, Plumeria rubra, is noted for its fragrant pink, white or yellow flowers.
Doc Dantalion: The Birastrop psychotherapist who wiped Roz's memories
in 'Original Sin'. Birastrops are very long-lived. Dantalion first
appeared around 1973 in the Pertwee-era Decalog 2: Lost Property piece
'Where the Heart Is'. At that time he was euthanizing depressed civil
servants and experimenting on their bodies. The Doctor persuaded Dantalion
to stop, and to donate his extensive property to become the new UNIT headquarters seen in 'The Three Doctors'. In 'The Brain of Morbius',Morbius claimed his new body had the lungs of a Birastrop.(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) And Dantalion said he'd be back when mankind's idea of ethics more closely resembled his own.
p.228
"A shutterfly. I appropriated it from a couple of JayJaxians who
were trying to extract a psi embryo from me.":
p.233
Zanzibar: Island off the coast of Tanzania, in East Africa. Used
to be independent, when Tanzania was called Tanganyika. An important
trading post. There's a divisive ethnic problem there between descendents
of Arab traders and Swahilis, although to anyone raceblind or non-Tanzanian
there's no physical difference between them. So it seemed in Professor
Gates' TV series Wonders of the African
World. The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama arrived there in 1499,
as the Doctor well remembers. Da Gama was following up from Bartolomeo
Dias, who had charted the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa soon before.
He sailed with four ships.
Da Gama found Arabs and unfriendly waters along much of the East African
coast. He went on to found a colony at Goa, in India. The Portuguese,
though they didn't know it, missed the Chinese trader Zheng He (also known
as Cheng Ho) by more than fifty years. Zheng He had fleets of hundreds
of trading ships ten times as large as da Gama's boats, and sailed as far
as Mogadishu, 1500 km up the coast from Zanzibar.
Here's a link to a page about Zheng He.
p.237
Had he found a way to stop Kopyion destroying the Seven Planets?:Kopyion
was the villain in 'The Pit'. He was actually a refugee from Ancient
Gallifrey, the one-armed Hero Liall a Mahajetsu. He and the Doctor had
to destroy the Seven Planets to stop the Yssgaroth escaping into our universe,
yadda yadda yadda. When 'The Pit' was written, the plan was that he was
the Other. However, 'The Pit' was rather badly written and got brushed
under the carpet. The one-armed thing also put him in the running for being Grandfather Paradox ('Christmas on a Rational Planet', 'Alien Bodies').
p.238
nanites racing to tear up the dead tissue, build fresh muscle in its place:
If you want to say the Doctor maintains his body with nanites, that's okay.
But it shouldn't be that simple. He does dose his companions with nanites
to keep them healthy but give them twisted ankles at opportune moments.
('Deceit')
p.241
The cobra was five feet long andimpossibly heavy. He had never seen one
this close before. He found himself admiring the detail of its face, each
of the scales lovingly hand-crafted into a sleek, black, close-fitting garment,
the lidless eyes behind the protecting spectacle, never closing, always watching.
Greeneyes, watching.
For a moment he wondered if the shuttle door had been left
open - one of the pets from Leabie's garden had escaped into the cool interior
of the ship. For a moment he thought that someone else would come in
and lift the weight of the snake off his chest. But only for a moment.
"Ah," he said, "the Eternal Verity."
The snake shifted her position. His heart clenched
in protest, making him struggle for breath.
"All right," he gasped. "You win. I give up."
"This isn't a game," said the snake.
"The race, then. The hare loses to the turtle.
Don't you understand? You win."
Her tongue lapped the air near his face. "It's our bargain."
"Then I'm ending it," he said. "Enough. I won't
fight any more. Do what you want. Death. Regeneration.
I don't care."
"Not this time."
"What do you mean? Not this time?"
"You haven't learnt your lesson." She slithered forward,
her tongue flickering near his ear. "Without warning," she hissed.
"Without purpose. Alone and afraid."
"I know all about that," he said. "This situation meets
those criteria, wouldn't you say?" He shut his eyes. "Quickly.
Before they come back in and that medic starts doing goodness knows what with
his Feinbergers."
The snake chuckled, sliding along his right shoulder onto the
bed. "You haven't learnt anything," she said.
He tried to move, to bring her back to him before she could
seek out another of his friends. But his heart stuttered and clenched
again, and he found himself sliding, sliding down into the dark.
Well, that was interesting. The snake is Death, with whom the Seventh
Doctor has conferred a number of times. In 'Timewyrm:Revelation', 'Love
and War', 'Human Nature' and 'SLEEPY' for example. The snake is also
the Eternal Verity. The Eternals appeared in 'Enlightenment',and Verity
Lambert was Doctor Who's first producer. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) It's simpler than that - "The Eternal Verity" is Death's posh name. (The word "verity" means "fundamental truth".)
Another note is that this conversation also refers back to the parable on Tsuro the Hare and Danhamakatu the Snake at the end of 'The Also People' - also by Ben Aaronovitch - which we can now see was foreshadowing Roz's death.
The snake is also a
nod to the Soulsnake from the TV Movie, to highlight the Seventh Doctor's
death and preserve the Master's life force to trouble him again another day.
The Seventh Doctor will die, without warning or purpose, after stepping out
of the TARDIS into a hail of bullets in San Francisco; surgery causes complications
with his alien biology, and the last thing that goes through his mind is an
aria from Puccini. Later, he regenerates.
Valhalla: Part of Asgard, the warriors' afterlife in Norse mythology.
Valhalla is also a large impact crater on Callisto.
p.243
"Here you are, sir," said the life-saver bot. The spindly android
crouched down by the side of the pool and handed Chris the magazine, which
it had carefully dried and pressed before reading several of the more interesting
articles: I just found this bit quite amusing, thought I'd share it.
p.244
"Citizens will make merry on pain of death?": Reference to the 1980s
remake of Flash Gordon. It's a bit awkward, it's meant to indicate
that making merry is what one's supposed to do.
The Doctor counted thirty-eight of them, all set to news channels, from
TopTenPercent to the Jovian Intranets: Seems like Internet references...
I think TopTenPercent is one of those quality HTML awards sites.
Just endless processions through the gardens of Callisto, special G roadways
laid down to prevent the participants from floating away: Callisto is
actually one and a half times more massive than the Earth's Moon. The
force of gravity on its surface is reasonably strong, but likely awkward for
anyone from a higher-gravity environment. There's some logic in installing
gravitic webs ('GodEngine') on planets with less gravity than Earth.
In a galaxy-spanning empire, extensive transportation leads to people born
on a planet with a certain force of gravity may spend most of their lives
on a planet or asteroid with very different gravity. Or none at all.
Arthur C Clarke usually writes about people born in zero- or micro-gravity
choosing not to return to Earth either because it would be impossible for
them to function there, or it would be at least very difficult. These
days, the space program puts a lot of emphasis on returning their astronauts
and cosmonauts to the Earth's surface, even after extended periods in zero-G.
They'd save billions of dollars if they stopped building heavy heat shielding
and wings and landing gear and tackled the problems of permament presence
in space. Instead of risking hip injuries when they returned to Earth gravity the astronauts would be cut
off from most human contact, which is sort of like the original pioneering
spirit.
p.247
"As usual, we drop in, and history coalesces around us.": I think that's
in Virgin's New Adventures Writers' Guide as to how the playing-with-history
thing works.
p.250
Mr Cwej was staring up at the palace. It was a massive, inverted
cone, more cones shooting up from its black, glassy surface, like a vast,
sparkling artificial mountain: Like the Forrester palace, only black.
p.253
He reached out and cupped one of the roses in his hand. It uncurled,
slowly, a silky movement across his skin. He watched, half expecting
the thing to bite him, but it just opened and opened until it filled his palm.
"See," said Genevieve. "It only does that with people
who've got some latent psi ability.":This is last-minute foreshadowing.
Duke Walid has some toys made for psis. He's also an agent of the Brotherhood,
and he's about to kidnap Chris and the Doctor.
"Won't you come with us, Mr Cwej?" said Iaomnet. Her voice was like
an angel choir, dozens of voices coming out of her mouth: Iaomnet is speaking
for the Grandmaster of the Brotherhood, like Armand's minder earlier.
Also a bit like the Empress used to speak like a gestalt (group mind).
It's dichotomy; the Doctor's already met and killed the Empire's gestalt leader;
he's about to meet the Brotherhood's gestalt leader.
"It's almost time for the conjunction.": A conjunction is an astronomical
description of one or more planets and stars passing each other in the sky.
The Moon usually has a conjunction with a few of the brighter planets and
stars every month. Planets move slower and take weeks to pass by stationary
stars. There's usually a nice planetary conjunction every year or so.
Every year or so there's a marvellous spring conjunction between Venus, the
crescent Moon, and Jupiter or Saturn or Mars. Conjunctions are a big
factor in astrological readings, bbut I hasten to add that astrology has no
practical purpose and is just a bit of fun - I explained why in my guide to
Alien Bodies. During the Year 2000 a bunch of speculative thinkers wrote about the
possibility that a conjunction of most of the planets on May 5th, 2000 would
cause tidal disasters that would wreck civilization and pull the Earth out
of its orbit. They were totally wrong. This conjunction
Iaomnet's talking about is some kind of focussing event that will allow a
Nexus somewhere in the Solar System access to the minds of most human psis.
The Brotherhood doesn't really control the Nexus, but they figure that turning
on the Nexus will maximize humanity's psi potential.
p.255
The Brotherhood said, "Incorrect. You have immense potential with
the necessary treatment.": The Brotherhood's referring to Chris's latent
psi-powers. Chris is later retrofitted with some Time Lord biology and
regenerates a couple of times ('Dead Romance', 'Tears of the Oracle'.) So there
may be something to this. Then, at the end of 'Twilight of the Gods',
Chris gets reverse-aged back into puberty. He has an interesting timeline.
p.256
He was tall and imposing and blond, but he wore black, and a brightly coloured
waistcoat with a golden badge in the shape of a cat. "This is who I
would have been if I hadn't regenerated,' he said. "Or one of them.
He seems a very serious fellow. His experience with Fenric changed him
a great deal.": The Sixth Doctor was vulnerable to becoming the Valeyard
'(Millennial Rites'.) In 'Head Games' suspicion is raised about how
apparently pointless was the Sixth Doctor's death. (He fell down and
banged his head on the TARDIS console in 'Time and the Rani'. Ergo,
"head games".) Hidden in his own mind, the Sixth Doctor very much resents
the Seventh Doctor's manifestation, especially because he fears the Seventh
Doctor is more like the Valeyard than he ever was.
p.259
"My name is Huitzilin,": Aztec king-cum-god who took over the Doctor's
body for a while in 'The Left-Handed Hummingbird'.
"In this alternative, your throat was torn out by a werewolf.": (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) 'The Greatest Show in the Galaxy'?
p.260
"You died of shock while being interrogated by a military telepath.":
'SLEEPY'?
a secret chateau on Triton hidden under one of the cryovulcanism research
bases, deep in a crater that spat out liquid nitrogen at odd intervals:
One of Genevieve's wedding presents. Triton is Neptune's largest moon.
Triton@The Nine Planets The Waro from 'The Devil Goblins from Neptune'
made their home, at least temporarily, on Triton. The British Rocket
Group sent a space probe to Triton sometime around 1970. 
p.261
The Turtle was here. The one who eats everyone: Kate Orman wrote
about turtles being part of Youkalian mythology and symbolism in 'SLEEPY'.
Youkali was one of those huge, ancient empires that completely disappeared
but left behind huge monuments that nobody understands. You know the
deal. There was a bit more Youkali research in 'Walking to Babylon',
with implications of Youkali influence in Babylon and Ancient Egypt.
Pyramids, and worlds being carried on the backs of turtles. This bit
here implies Youkalian influence on the Jeopards' homeworld. Youkali
was originally the name of a song by Kurt Weill. It's lounge music,
Ute Lemper might sing it. It's about a fantastic island that doesn't
exist.
p.264
"How'd you make Pontifex?": (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Never mind that - how did he get back to his own time if the Doctor was killed on Yemaya 4?
p.266
"Jack White killed her,": Killed Roz in an alternate timeline.
Who is he? (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) White was the leader of the Company forces on Yemaya 4 in 'SLEEPY'. But perhaps I'm thinking of the wrong chap; in a reality where Roz became Lady Forrester, would she have gone travelling with the Doctor?
"We'll be in Ionian space in ten minutes," Roz shouted: Light takes
about six and a half seconds to travel between Callisto and Io.
p.267
The comet had been mostly ice. It had melted as it struck the atmosphere,
chunks of rock exploding out of its core. They had rained down all over
the training world: The comet strike on Purgatory, the Landsknechte training
planet. This is a pretty inelegant description of a comet strike.
A comet hitting a planet starts to act like a liquid when the atmosphere slows
it down, like a wet wad of toilet paper hitting a wall. It doesn't melt
right away - ice is too great an insulator for that. And in two seconds
it's hit the planetary surface in a big plastic glob and released a large
amount of heat and kinetic energy, which makes craters, secondary impacts
and nuclear winters.
p.268
"How long have you been planning this?"
"Forever," said Leabie. "Forever.":Leabie was building up her army
before the beginning of this book with Llewellyn and Vincenzi and so on.
She got away with the Victoria after the Cassandra incident, and she
started the riots on Earth to distract the Landsknechte. She may also
be responsible for bombing Purgatory. She may have been financing the
Ogron resistance on Orestes, also to distract the Landsknechte and the Interstellar
Navy.
p.270
"Can you believe this, they're fighting in Achebe Gorge. There hasn't
been fighting on Mars for centuries. Not since the Ice Warriors.":
Reference to the Thousand-Day War in 'Transit'. There's been a bit
of fighting on Mars since 2086 - the Daleks invaded there in 2157, but a virus
damaged their wiring systems so they cordoned off the planet until the Solar
System was won back. According to 'Beige Planet Mars' in the Second
Dalek Invasion in the mid-26th Century a Dalek fleet bombed the Martian missile
bases, military spaceports and took over the planet. The humans there
formed a resistance led by General Keele, and managed to defeat the Daleks
with a little help from a certain somebody...
p.272
A pair of battleships colliding near Phobos: Phobos is the innermost
Martian moon.
Phobos@The Nine Planets Its name means "fear" in ancient Greek.
the Valles Marianes: Misspelt; it's actually the Valles Marineris,
a big canyon system on Mars. Achebe Gorge is part of it. The Valles
Marineris was named after the Mariner space probe that discovered it.
p.273
Mimas, 26 August 2982:
Mimas@The Nine Planets Mimas is the seventh of Saturn's roughly thirty
known satellites. It has a big crater on it called Herschel, and looks
like the Death Star. 
On August 29th, 2982 Io, which is near Jupiter, and Mimas near Saturn will
be about 2.1 billion kilometres apart. Light would take almost two hours
to travel between Io and Mimas, so this could be a hyperspace trip.
"Tethys is tidally locked," he said. Chris glanced across to the
screen. "Its great crater always points in the same direction, thirty
degrees above the ecliptic. A signal from there would drift out into
space, well clear of the other moons and planets. But Mimas' crater
is locked only two degrees about the ecliptic. Shoot a beam from the
centre of Herschel, and it would pass through the entire solar system, slightly
more often than once a day.": Sort of right. Odysseus, the crater
on Tethys, isn't right on the moon's equator. Herschel Crater on Mimas
straddles the Mimian equator. However, the plane of the ecliptic is
the path around the sky in which the planets orbit. The whole Saturnian
system is inclined by 25 1/2 degrees to the ecliptic, so that the angle at
which we see Saturn's rings and moons changes from year to year changes during
its 26-year orbit. Neither crater has a continuous angle to the ecliptic
plane. And the Saturnian system is inclined at almost right angles to
the plane of the Galaxy, so signals couldn't be broadcast to very many other
stars.
Both Tethys and Mimas are tidally locked with one hemisphere facing Saturn.
And every day, a beam from either crater would sweep out the same area of
sky.
p.274
Distantly, flashes of light reached them from a pair of warships locked
in close combat in the Cassini Division: The Division is a space in between
Saturn's rings. An amateur telescope that can resolve the Cassini Division
on a good night is a good telescope. There's some info on the rings
of Saturn at
Saturn@The Nine Planets.
p.275
Malinowski:
p.276
NOCTIS LABYRINTHUS: Part of the Valles Marineris.
Balotnikov, Colonel Ncube:
p.286
"Are you trying to tell me that Centcomp Node Number One, the centre of
the Empire's computer control, has just been inhabited by an artificial intelligence?
Who the hell are you, anyway?"
"You may have heard of me," said the computer. "My name is FLORANCE.":
This is about as far up in the Universe as FLORANCE can get.
p.287
ElleryCorp ('We have the technology'): Catchphrase from The Six-Million
Dollar Man.
p.288
('This unit must never damage a human or by inaction allow a human to be
damaged'): Isaac Asimov's First Rule for robots.
p.289
The Nexus was the centrepiece of a ... cocktail party?: It's just a
cheap special effect.
p.292
"This can't be how the story ended!":(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) This ties in with the Doctor telling the alternate Chris on p.264 that "the story had a different ending", and the conversation between the Doctor and Kadiatu starting on p.309. Also it's probably a reference to the climax of the TV Movie when the Doctor shouts, "This can't be how it ends... STOP!!!"
p.294
the T'ai Tsung:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Famous Chinese ruler, the Second Emperor of the T'ang Dynasty.
p.295
the Ojibwa: A North American First Nations group. Ojibwa
is a distinct language as well.
The Ojibway Story
p.296
X-ray lasers: Modern-day x-ray lasers are very powerful and primitive
- if one's ever been built it was only for weapons testing purposes.
An x-ray laser is a variety of atomic bomb sheathed in long bars of metal (tungsten, I think)
which point in the direction of fire. When the bomb goes off, a substantial
amount of the x-radiation is funnelled into a pulse along the axis of the rods. Then
it disintegrates. X-ray lasers were considered for use in destroying
missiles in flight, part of the 1980s Strategic Defense Initiative (Star
Wars Program.) There's a handheld x-ray laser in 'The Tomb of the Cybermen'.
p.297
reticular vector gauge: From any story in particular? (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) The implication of the full sentence is that it's a reference to 'The Caves of Androzani', but I can't bring any actual evidence to mind.
One had stuck to his principles and had his throat cut by a hungry alien:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) 'The Two Doctors'.
One had had his brain fried by a computer, substituting for a dead synch-op:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) 'Warriors of the Deep'.
One had been beheaded by an Ice Warrior:'Legacy'.
One lived in another dimension and visited Earth from time to time, sparking
rumours that King Arthur was about to return: 'Battlefield'.
the Eocene era: The Silurian Era was between 440 million years ago
and 410 million years ago, between the Ordovician and Devonian Eras.
It's further subdivided into the Llandoverian, Wenlockian, Ludlovian and
Pridolian Subdivisions. The Silurians were obviously meant to have
evolved during that era, but life at that time was still pretty simple: coral
reefs started to grow, fishes started to grow jaws, and plants and insects
started living on land. The whole Silurian thing was a bit dodgy: The
Doctor starts calling the Earth Reptiles Silurians in 'Doctor Who and the
Silurians' just because Doctor Quinn keeps a lot of books about the Silurian
Era in his cottage. Malcolm Hulke, who wrote the serial, didn't really
read up on what actually happened in the Silurian Era. (The Earth didn't
capture the Moon during it either, but I digress.) Hulke later wrote
a retread of 'Silurians', called 'The Sea Devils'. In it he gave the
Doctor a line explaining that Silurians was a misnomer: they were in fact
from the Eocene Period. The Eocene Period was from about 54 to 38 million
years ago. The Eocene Period was part of the Paleogene Era, between
the Cretaceous and Neogene Eras. It's broken down into the Ypresian,
Lutetian, Bartonian and Priabonian Subdivisions. But since it took
place millions of years after the dinosaurs were rendered extinct, it still
doesn't ring true. Gary Russell complicated matters in 'The Scales
of Injustice', which is still not too bad for a book by Gary Russell.
One was alive and well and living in San Francisco with his wife:
This is an alternate Eigth Doctor from the TV Movie who settled down with
Grace afterwards. But it could be Professor Daniel Joyce and his wife
Anne, from 'Unnatural History'. Who knows who he is.(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Except that the TV movie hasn't happened to the Doctor yet, so it
would have to be an alternate Doctor who received the Master's call
several years earlier than our Doctor did. The Nexus is changing his timeline at different points in his past - and his future.
p.300
when they saw a man throw a ditz off a walkway: A ditz is a pet with
vestigial wings. This story is elaborated upon in 'Original Sin'.
p.301
a rental academic house on Youkali: Bernice studies Youkali for years,
off-and-on.
the Tent of Ill Repute, run by a bunch of Lalandian pirates from the Rim:
Rim of the Galaxy. Lalande 21185 is the fifth-closest star to the
Sun. It's 8.3 light years away in Ursa Major. It's a class M6
red dwarf. Almost bright enough to see with the naked eye.
p.303
Maybe he's thinking about the time he and Roz huddled together next to
the fire, beside a Berkshire lake on a freezing winter night: At one
point in 'Return of the Living Dad' the Doctor got thrown out of a spacecraft
in midair over the lake. He was in trouble with shock and hypothermia
for a bit, but body heat and a fire helped put some colour back in him.
p.304
a Caprisian dealer: Bernice was born on the Beta Caprisis colony.
Capris is a fictional constellation, or one not visible from Earth.
p.305
an expensive Shaker chair: Perhaps a relic from 1799 New York, 'Christmas
on a Rational Planet'. The flintlock rifle could be the one with which she
tried to kill Abraham Lincoln's grandfather.
p.306
"It's a wedding dress, isn't it?": Roz held a wedding dress after
leaving George Reed with just an engagement ring in 'Just War'.
p.307
Jane's Ostentatious Aerial Combat Vehicles: Jane's
produces a number of respectable trade publications for people interested
in military vehicles and commercial aircraft. Chris recognizes Kadiatu's
current timeship as a souped-up Triangulum Swift 400 series.
p.308
"Wake up, you old bastard!" she yelled: This is a bit of an OTT portrayal
of Kadiatu. Although, she had been genetically engineered to be a superior
soldier, independently discovered time travel, was tortured by mechanical
ants that lived in dimensional rifts and is humanity's answer to the Pythia's
Curse on Ancient Gallifrey. So she's special. It doesn't matter
if her characterization is inconsistent.
"I'm not ready to be the Ka Faraq Gatri yet.": What the Daleks call
the Doctor, or the Seventh one at least.
p.309
"The one who was quick enough to snatch Adric from the freighter.
The one who arrived thirty seconds before Oscar Botcherby was stabbed to
death, instead of thirty seconds afterwards. The one who saved Jan
as well as everyone else.": 'Earthshock'. 'The Two Doctors'.
'Love and War'.
p.311
She had thought it was pretty funny when they slaughtered the bull, and
Beni had walked out of the kraal, looking an interesting shade of green:
The !Xhosa and the Zulus were pastoralists, some of them still are.
Their lives were anchored by the lives of their cattle. A man with
many cattle was a rich man. Cattle were an important part of dowries
owed by men to their fathers-in-law. You couldn't get married until
you had enough cattle to spare. The Zulus may have become expansionistic
in the early 19th Century to maintain their lifestyle in a drought by stealing
other peoples' cattle. A kraal is a ranch house compound, basically.
Bernice is a vegetarian, as verified in 'Ship of Fools'.
