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Author Notes - Lance Parkin's guide to The Dying Days

Chapter 1
  What We Saw From the Ruined House

Benny. The Dying Days wasn\x92t just the first eighth Doctor book, it marked the point where Benny spun off into her own series (technically, she stayed where she was, in the New Adventures, and the Doctor spun off, but you know what I mean). Bernice Summerfield had been introduced in Love and War, by Paul Cornell, and her adventures continue to this day in Big Finish audios. She was hugely popular, both with the writers and the readers. Up until this point, she\x92d been the sarky human counterpoint to a rather dark and distant seventh Doctor. She was the voice of his conscience, as well as being the sort of person he was making the galaxy safe for.

While she quickly developed a life of her own, Paul originally based her, in part, on Emma Thompson\x92s character in the film The Tall Guy, and that\x92s still the best place to look if you want to see Benny Summerfield walking and talking right there on your telly. I mention this now only because there\x92s an in-joke in chapter three which no-one will get otherwise.

The Doctor\x92s house was introduced by Andrew Cartmel in his novel Warhead and his DWM comic strip Fellow Travellers. Over the course of the books, the Doctor popped back to it from time to time. This is the first time we saw it in the \x91present day\x92.

I never got round to explaining how Benny got the letter, by the way. The book originally ended with her dropping it off for herself. But I came up with a much better ending than that...

The book contains a number of New Adventures cliches, most of them put there deliberately, some by force of habit. The first of these is the gratuitous nudity. At the time, we\x92d heard that the BBC Books were going to cut down on the \x91adult\x92 stuff (laughable as that seems, now that recent EDAs have featured tantric sex and a man in a romantic relationship with a poodle). So Benny gets her kit off here, for no reason whatsoever. Anime fans call this \x91fifteening\x92.

Chapter 1 (continued)
  What We Saw From the Ruined House

The Doctor. It was very weird writing for a character who was exactly the same but completely different. All the time, I was very conscious that everyone reading would be directly comparing my version with the one in the TV Movie. I cheated, really \x96 we see the Doctor\x92s early scenes from Benny\x92s point of view, and she spends her time going \x91gosh, he\x92s exactly the same but completely different\x92. But that\x92s exactly what the audience do with a new Doctor. The Doctor refers back to Love and War, his first meeting with Benny. Again, it\x92s a dual purpose \x96 reminding people that this was a book with a heritage, but making something new out of that.

As Benny notes in chapter one, I couldn\x92t pin down the name of the President of the United States or the Prime Minister, because there was going to be an election in both countries between me finishing the book and its publication. The Tories should have bribed me to say the PM was Tony Blair, simply because sod\x92s law would almost certainly have guaranteed a landslide for John Major. But they didn\x92t, and the rest is history. One of the amusing things, though, was that Staines could comfortably be either a Conservative or a New Labour Home Secretary.

Chapter 2
  Foreign Soil

Lex Christian is the first character who\x92s an homage to an existing one. This time, it\x92s Dan Dare, who hopefully British readers will have heard of. For the others, Dan was the hero of The Eagle, the 50s (and 80s!) comic, a square-jawed, stiff upper-lipped space pilot, and absolutely one of the forerunners of Doctor Who \x96 the influence it had, particularly on Terry Nation\x92s stuff, was immense. The reason he\x92s in The Dying Days is a vaguely obscure one \x96 the first Dan Dare story in The Eagle is set in 1996 and 1997, so it \x91took place\x92 at the same time as the book. Reality had caught up with fiction. The irony now, of course, in this age of digital cameras, mobile phones and cloned sheep is that we\x92re beyond Dan Dare technology \x96 except they have better space travel. The name was Dan Dare\x92s original name when the strip was being developed.

Everyone reading knew the \x91real\x92 reason this was the last Virgin book, and all the way through, I play with that. One of the themes of the book is the interplay between \x91real life\x92 stuff and fiction. I hesitate to say this, but the book has two levels \x96 the narrative, about the Doctor and Benny fighting monsters and also a knowing commentary on the situation. One of the more blatant examples is the Who Killed Kennedy sequence, where a fictional reason is given for Virgin losing their licence.

Veronica Halliwell first appeared (and died) in the Missing Adventure System Shock.

Staines is an idiot. Anyone who\x92d actually read Who Killed Kennedy couldn\x92t possibly think it was called I Killed Kennedy. The title is a statement, not a question.

Benny, an expert on Mars, finally gets to use her knowledge. She\x92d visited Mars in Transit, but been possessed at the time. Legacy had Ice Warriors, but was set on Peladon, and she left the Doctor the book before he visited Mars again in GodEngine.

Patrick Moore, a real astronomer, and Bernard Quatermass, from the 50s serials (or, more correctly, the John Mills version from the last serial \x96 the one set around 1997) argue about Martians. In our universe, Patrick Moore would be right. But this is the Who universe, and Bernard\x92s fears are proved correct.

Chapter 3
  Return to Mars

The Brigadier. I wasn\x92t sure about using the Brigadier at first, it felt a bit like tokenism (\x91he\x92s worked alongside every Doctor!\x92), but Bex pointed out that, perhaps more than any other character, the Brigadier had developed over the course of the New Adventures. We found out about Kadiatu, his descendant, but more importantly, we saw him in action in books like Blood Heat, No Future and Happy Endings, and he had come on to be... well, the Doctor\x92s oldest friend. And as I wrote the book, the Brig became more and more central to it. Without giving anything away, he gets the last word of the book, which is usually a sign of someone\x92s importance to the story.

The astronaut\x92s survival kit is straight out of a nineteen seventies Doctor Who annual \x96 every year, breaking up the stories about people who sometimes vaguely looked like the Doctor and Sarah, there would be a feature about real astronauts.

The Party. Oh boy. Allan Bednar, the illustrator of the BBCi version of this book, has hidden in a cupboard and won\x92t come out until I assure him he doesn\x92t have to draw the party. This, of course, is a theme party, and the theme is \x91lame in-jokes\x92. Where to start? Well... the guest list includes Emma Peel from The Avengers and Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds. Lalla Ward makes the first of two appearances in the book. The rest... well, I\x92ll let you work them out. Once you spot the Old Woman from the Saturday Night Armistice, then you\x92ll be heading for a high score. Apparently, if you write a Star Wars novel (which I\x92d love to do, by the way, if any Star Wars novel people are reading this), then you have to supply footnotes explaining all the references to existing Star Wars characters, for copyright reasons \x96 so you have to say \x91he first appeared in the comics\x92, or \x91he\x92s from such and such a novel\x92. If I\x92d done that for TDD, or was doing it for this annotated version, then the footnotes would be longer than the book.

Chapter 3 (continued)
  Return to Mars

Greyhaven is my Ian Richardson character. There\x92s always someone in my books \x91played\x92 by Ian Richardson. I\x92m sure there was a very good reason for that at one point, but if there is, I\x92ve forgotten it.Anyway, this is the only \x91Ian Richardson\x92 specifically based on a character Richardson played \x96 you might very well think that he\x92s based on Francis Urquhart from House of Cards, but I couldn\x92t possibly comment. The character was originally named Lord Winchester, but the Virgin legal people thought that the Marquis of Winchester would sue, so it got changed.

"Afro-Saxon" was a bizarre proofreading change, one that makes no sense at all. So I let it stay in, on the grounds it would give me an amusing anecdote if the book ever appeared online in annotated form.

Another New Adventure clich\xE9 was a token gay character, usually a young man who smiles winsomely, then dies a horrible, gory death two chapters later. Not that I want to give away what happens. I also out Ralph Cornish from The Ambassadors of Death, for no other reason than that\x92s the sort of thing we used to do in the Virgin books.

The reference to IIF building a nuclear waste dump on the Moon is me, very cheekily, linking perhaps the best television series of all time, Edge of Darkness, with perhaps the worst television series of all time, Space:1999.

The reference to Donnebys must rank as one of the more obscure in the book, but it harks back to the very first Who novel \x96 it\x92s the rocket company that Ian has applied to work for.

Chapter 4
  Gratuitous Violets

One of my better chapter titles.

I like the stuff on Mars, with the human astronauts. It\x92s something I perhaps should have developed more. On the other hand, it isn\x92t their story. They\x92re there as a pretext.

Chesterton Road is real, it\x92s by Ladbroke Grove tube station, and you went past it to get to the Virgin offices. Again, it\x92s an in-joke. Because, even if I\x92m the only one who admits it, every single Who author thought about Ian Chesterton when they saw the sign.

Note that Benny really fancies this new Doctor, but won\x92t admit it.

The John Smith and the Common Men album. They\x92re the pop combo that Susan\x92s listening to in the first ever episode on TV. I loved the idea that they were still going. The Who universe probably has tribute bands to them, and Britpop there was very subtly different because of their influence. Again, I\x92m bringing Doctor Who full circle \x96 or at least referring back to its beginnings.

Storms Over Avallion (or some minor variation of it) was the provisional title of Battlefield, a TV story that is set a few months before The Dying Days. The joke (first introduced in Kate Orman\x92s books, shamelessly ripped off by me here and in Father Time) is that in the Doctor Who universe, there are just as many Doctor Who fanzines, novels and internet discussion groups, but they\x92re all discussing real alien invasions that the government wants covering up.

Chapter 5
  The World at One

Deflowering
Lex Christian upholds another New Adventures tradition \x96 retconning a sex life for a television companion. I think, in the course of sixty books, that we managed to deflower every regular character from the TV series. Apart from K9 \x96 and I once proposed a book where K9 got a robot dog girlfriend. Ironic for a company called Virgin, I know, but their \x91erotic fiction\x92 line was edited in the same room, and something clearly rubbed off. So to speak. Bizarrely, there were plenty of Who references in the mucky books, too... or so I\x92m told.

Rubbish monsters
The Drahvins and Bandrils were among the more rubbish of the Doctor Who monsters. The joke here, not that the Brigadier realises, is that some alien invasions were beneath the Doctor\x92s dignity to deal with.

Old clothes
Benny changes into the outfit she was wearing on the cover of her first novel, Love and War.

Monkey business
The description of Twelve Monkeys could equally well apply to the TV Movie.

Boldly going
Ha! I was right. I was right about Star Trek X. Five years before it was written, I guessed right! The line \x91they knew it was the last one, so they could get away with all sorts of stuff\x92 could be the tagline for The Dying Days.

Chapter 6
  Close Encounters

The Roof
It\x92s unclear what the men are doing putting that thing on the roof , because I never explain it. They are setting up a homing beacon for the Martian ship, the same sort of beacon that the Martians need in The Seeds of Death. It\x92s why the ship ends up over Trafalgar Square. But I never explain that properly. Sorry.

Bessie
Note that Bessie\x92s registration number has changed.

Life on Mars
Until Mariner, most scientists thought Mars had primitive life, and none doubted that it could support life, at least in the sense that the top of Everest or Antarctica could \x91support life\x92. Even as late as Viking, some people still held out hope. By then, it had been clearly established that Mars in the Who universe had a breathable atmosphere. So here, they\x92re only discovering what anyone who\x92d seen Pyramids of Mars already knew.

The UN
One prediction I got wrong \x96 I thought Mary Robinson would be the new Secretary General of the UN, but Kofi Annan got the job.

The X Files
I love the end of this chapter \x96 there\x92s a real sense of pace. It breaks the rules, too, of course. This was the era of the X-Files. Bex was a huge fan, and joked that she really wanted to see an episode which ended with Mulder and Scully saying all that usual guff about how there probably were aliens, but they\x92d never have any concrete evidence... just as one of the flying saucers from Independence Day flew overhead and the caption \x91to be continued\x92 comes up.

That scene doesn\x92t quite make it into The Dying Days, but the sentiment behind it \x96 that Doctor Who could do the \x91foreplay\x92 that the X-files does (conspiracies, government cover-ups, aliens) but, unlike the X-files it could then go onto the \x91orgasm\x92 of full scale alien invasion \x96 informs the whole book. But TDD still breaks the rules \x96 alien invasions aren\x92t allowed to be public. I only got away with it because it was the last book.

Chapter 6 (continued)
  Close Encounters

Independence Day
Hmmmm... Independence Day. The film hadn\x92t come out in May 1996 when I was commissioned, although I\x92d seen the trailer. The book was finished by the time I heard Independence Day UK, the radio story that\x92s even more like The Dying Days. There was something in the air, that year \x96 Mars Attacks! also came out.

Back to television
I know how I\x92d like to bring Doctor Who back to television. I\x92ve had the scene perfectly mapped out in my mind for years. No adverts, no pre-publicity, just an plain, ordinary night of television \x96 there\x92s a new medical drama on BBC1 at eight that looks OK. Eight o\x92clock, the announcer solemnly tells the audience that they\x92re going to the newsroom for a newsflash.

Then a real BBC newsreader tells us that there\x92s an alien spacecraft over London. We cut to a confused OB reporter \x96 what\x92s going on. Then a electronic voice from the ship \x96 \x91Surrender humans, or we will exterminate you\x92. Then the reporter panics, and starts to run away, and bumps into a very famous actor in a frock coat, with a gorgeous young woman just behind him.

\x91Don\x92t worry,\x92 the stranger says, \x91You\x92re safe. I\x92ll see to that\x92. The reporter goes \x91Who are you?\x92. And the Doctor turns to camera and smiles and goes. \x91Me? I\x92m back!" Cue opening credits, cue that theme tune, cue the phone network melting down as everyone in the country is either phoning each other to tell them to watch BBC1 or shouting that they know, they\x92re trying to damn well watch it.

I just love the idea of some ordinary piece of television suddenly becoming Doctor Who, because... well, it\x92s either that or just plain, ordinary television.

Chapter 7
  Work, Rest and Play
Title
Another good chapter title, if a little lateral.

Homages
Originally, the scene with the President and his aide featured a flat-voiced FBI agent and his winsome ginger partner. Even though they weren\x92t named, this was dropped because the legal people got nervous. Bizarrely, I thought, given the number of \x91homages\x92 in the book. I have to note that this was the only book I ever got legal advice from Virgin on, and I got a lot. Perhaps, as it was the last Who book, the lawyers hadn\x92t got any other books to read that month.

Queen and country
I did wonder about the Queen evacuating the country. I suspect, in the unlikely event of alien invasion, that she\x92d want to stand her ground, in the same way the royal family stayed in the country during WW2. That would clash with what happens later in the book, though. This year, I\x92ve read a book called The Secret State, by Peter Hennessy, which says that in the event of nuclear war, the plan in the sixties was to get the Queen onto the royal yacht and off to Canada (\x91if it still exists\x92 \x96 not the yacht, Canada).

Keeping it real
I was also really nervous about involving \x91real people\x92 in the invasion section. You\x92ll note that, after six chapters chock full of real people, from now on it\x92s just fictional characters. As well as legal nervousness (not wanting to paint real people as collaborators or as accepting Martian rule) there would have been something irredeemably camp about having Gazza or Scary Spice joining the fight. Watching LA destroyed in Independence Day, though, I did find myself wondering how many movie stars survived.

The Ice Warriors
With the Ice Warrior, I wanted to get across that it wasn\x92t just some tall extra in a costume with a head that didn\x92t fit properly. This was a monster, and it looked like a monster. The idea was that it was an Ice Warrior done on a Hollywood budget. Another little touch \x96 the reason the TV Movie people gave for not using monsters was that they were too expensive \x96 Phillip Segal said something like \x91the budget would run to about two monster costumes, and you can\x92t tell a story about the invasion of Earth with two monsters\x92. As a bifurcated handed salute to that sentiment, and sentiments like it, in The Dying Days there are never more than two Martians in the same scene. You could make this story for television on about the same budget as a couple of episodes of Born and Bred.

Chapter 8
  Death and Diplomacy

The plot thickens
Finally, someone explains the plot! All this exposition, of course, is just a way of getting all that \x91plot\x92 stuff out of the way so we can get down to having monsters chasing our heroes and going "grrrr" a lot.

The plan
Greyhaven\x92s plan, while basically undemocratic, isn\x92t actually an evil one. He wants to reopen all the closed factories, shipyards and mines. I\x92m sure someone, somewhere could write an essay on how The Dying Days \x96 the first Who story set in the Blair era, as Tim Collins could tell you - was a metaphor for how New Labour courted big business and encouraged globalisation to get unemployment down.

Unanswered questions
Fans have often asked how The Dying Days \x91fits\x92, given that everyone on Earth should know about the Martians afterwards. Here, Benny asks the same question. The Doctor doesn\x92t answer.

I am he and he is me
Note that the eighth Doctor speaks of the seventh Doctor in the third person.

The Brigadier
The Brigadier knows that only the Doctor can get them out of this situation \x96 he doesn\x92t know what\x92s about to happen to his old friend.

Chapter 9
  Our Friends From Mars

So clich\xE9d
New Adventures clich\xE9 piles on New Adventures clich\xE9 as a prostitute eats in a greasy caf\xE9, smokes, quotes from Round the Horne, then makes a reference to a recent film. In my defence, she at no point drops a lyric from a pop song into the conversation, inverts the \x91end my life\x92 scene from The Happiness Patrol by shooting the Doctor, turns out to be related to a character from the UNIT era, notes that there was a lot less air pollution before the invention of the motor car or quotes from The Second Coming.

Such a bind
I like the fact the baddy keeps his evil plan in a Wallace and Gromit ringbinder.

Chapter 10
  An Englishman's Home

Alone at last
We see the Martians alone for the first time, and \x96 surprise, surprise \x96 they\x92ve got an evil plan that Greyhaven doesn\x92t know about.

Code of honour
The original idea of the book was that it would be the human characters who ascribed nobility and culture to the Ice Warriors, but the Martians would really be just nasty, snarling, spitting slabs of hate. Monsters, in other words.

So the humans would keep going on about how they came from a noble culture, and had a code of honour, but everything the Martians actually did was just sadistic and nasty. After the book was finished, I saw Mars Attacks! where the Pierce Brosnan scientist character does that joke. But by then, the Martians, particularly Xznaal, had developed into pretty rounded characters. This chapter contrasts Xznaal and the Brigadier \x96 both warriors, both having seen better days, both full of regrets, both thirsting for one last battle.

Grant Morrison
While, over the years, the odd \x91influence\x92 from Grant Morrison\x92s work has been felt in my books, the coronation of an alien as king of England predates the same scene in The Invisibles by a couple of years. It is, as Greyhaven is at pains to note, a fairly accurate depiction of a real coronation ceremony.

Queen continuity
Christmas on a Rational Planet, Lawrence Miles\x92s 1996 debut novel, had a throwaway reference to the \x91recoronation\x92 of Queen Elizabeth II. I thought I was being very clever by tying up a loose end by showing why she needed a second coronation. But Lawrence was tying up a loose end himself \x96 how there could be a \x91King\x92 in Battlefield (set in the mid to late nineties, and a couple of months before TDD) but the Queen could celebrate her Golden Jubilee in Head Games (a sequence of which was set in 2001). As is often the way, two people trying to solve a continuity error have left a much bigger one in its place.

Top Secret
The Brigadier and Eve joke about UNIT being a top secret organisation. In the TV series, while UNIT\x92s meant to be one of the most covert organisations on the planet, they also drive around in big lorries marked \x91UNIT\x92, and the (local!) reporters in Spearhead from Space know who the Brigadier is, which organisation he runs and that he investigates \x91little green men\x92. It\x92s clearly one of the worst-kept secrets in the world.

Chapter 11
  That Which Does Not Kill Us...

Titles
The chapter title was the provisional title of the novel The Also People. The provisional title of this chapter was \x91The Yeti on the Loo\x92, and you all know why, so I don\x92t need to explain.

The Tripods
We never see the Martian hang-gliders in action, which is a bit of a shame. Note that the Martians also have \x91tripods\x92 (as the Martians in The War of the Worlds did), and machines that look like the Martian war machines in the fifties film version of War of the Worlds.

Morrotov cocktail
Benny comes into her own here. This was inspired by something Mark Clapham told me \x96 Morrisons supermarket\x92s own brand vodka was, and maybe still is, called Morrotov. Well, Mark was a university student at the time, he\x92d know. Benny said in Love and War that there\x92s not a problem in the world that can\x92t be solved with vodka. Here she demonstrates this by making a Morrotov cocktail.

The dying Doc
And the Doctor dies. SFX had already reported that the Doctor died halfway through the book, so everyone knew it was coming. It was the last book, I could do it. Every other book, you know for a fact that he\x92s going to come bouncing back. Not here. Some people objected that BBC were doing Eighth Doctor books, so he couldn\x92t die.

Look again \x96 the Doctor says he\x92s twelve hundred years old. This book clearly happens after the BBC Eighth Doctor books (and still, even after the Earth arc, in the future of the current EDAs \x96 although the Doctor remembers The Dying Days in The Scarlet Empress). You can have your EDAs, but it\x92ll end like this.

I realised afterwards that this is exactly what happens in the last episode of Star Cops, where Nathan dies. The title of that episode? Little Green Men \x96 there\x92s this discovery on Mars, you see, and it\x92s uncovered this conspiracy to keep the existence of Martians secret...

Chapter 12
  The No Doctors

Seven up
...and it was all a horrible dream, and the Doctor was alive after all. The seventh Doctor had dominated the New Adventures, and it would have been odd for him not to show up in the last book.

Dear diary
The narrative switches so that Benny is the main character, and we switch to diary entries \x96 technically, extracts from her memoirs. We knew Benny was going to survive this book, because Virgin had announced she was spinning off. Her memoirs are, it seems, written when she\x92s an old woman. Phyllida Law, perhaps, instead of Emma Thompson.

Half-human shield
One theory I\x92ve always had, one you see in all my Who books, is that the Doctor emits a sort of shield that protects his companions when he\x92s around. Not a real shield, but the narrative rules twist around him to his advantage. In Just War, for example, when a squad of Nazis fire machine guns at him and Chris, they all miss.

But Benny, separated from the Doctor, is easily captured and tortured. The Doctor can just get away with things that ordinary people can\x92t. But with the Doctor dead, we\x92re back in the realm of ordinary things \x96 people have to eat and wash. They need to look out for themselves.

Staines
Staines is a loyal servant of the crown, even if a Martian is wearing it.

Benny's lecture
Bernice\x92s lecture refers to what we know about the Martians from the books and TV episodes featuring the Ice Warriors. By the time of Transit, the human race is as technically advanced as the Martians, and wins a ruthless, genocidal war against them on Mars.

In a change to our scheduled programme...
The BBC often cancel programmes that have a vague passing resemblance to contemporary tragic news stories. The Fugitive, for example, always gets postponed when there\x92s a train crash, because there\x92s a train crash in it. So they\x92ve cancelled the X Files the week of the Martian invasion.

Lex
Lex resurfaces after vanishing from UNIT HQ shortly after the Martian invasion. See? I hadn\x92t forgotten him.

Chapter 13
  Earth Attacks!

Going for a Burton
The chapter title, obviously, is a reference to Mars Attacks!

Tape
The fact the tape is NTSC is a clue to its origin.

Uruk
\x91From the streets of ancient Uruk to the common room of a twenty-sixth century university\x92 is another meta reference \x96 the very first New Adventure, Timewyrm:Genesys was set in ancient Uruk, the last one ends... well, we\x92re not there yet, so I\x92d better not say.

A ripe old age
The history book with the scary eye is, of course, A History of the Universe, another one of my books, which was written before The Dying Days, so doesn\x92t refer to it. I seem to set the date of my death here \x96 but we don\x92t know what year Benny is writing from. As the current Big Finish audios are set in 2601, and Benny\x92s not written her memoirs yet, it looks like I\x92m going to make it to at least ninety-nine years old.

Secret silos
I quite like the idea that the book starts with humans talking about terraforming Mars, and ends with the Martians attempting to Aresform (A NASA term referring to the god Ares) Earth. This section, in retrospect, draws from Quatermass II, with its secret silos full of alien nasty stuff.

Retroactive continuity
The \x91perhaps I\x92ll just be retconned\x92 line proved to be a firm favourite in internet discussion of the book. It\x92s another meta reference \x96 \x91retconning\x92 is short for \x91retroactive continuity\x92, briefly \x91going back and changing things so they all fit together better or make more sense\x92. It\x92s a term originally used in comics fandom, and Doctor Who fans retcon, for example, how the Brigadier retires from UNIT in 1976 according to one story, but was only made head of UNIT in 1979 according to another. Benny muses (not for the first time in the book) how The Dying Days fits into Doctor Who continuity.

Chapter 13 (continued)
  The No Doctors

Social chaos
One of the running themes of the book is how thin the line between a functioning society and social chaos is. I\x92m not sure I entirely agree with that, but there are a number of reminders throughout the book that what we think of as a stable, secure society relies a lot on goodwill and the trust in the people that lead us.

Since the book was written we\x92ve had the death of Princess Diana and the fuel protests, both of which, very briefly, really seemed to destabilise British society. In this scene, the bulletproof glass has become a symbol of Greyhaven\x92s weakness, not his strength.

Benny
Note the contrast between the Doctor and Benny when dealing with the Ice Warriors \x96 earlier, the Doctor just strolled into the mothership and Xznaal didn\x92t kill him. Here, Benny\x92s sneaking around a shuttlecraft, and despite her cunning plan, she\x92s caught.

When the plans for the Benny books were drawn up, Virgin gathered about half a dozen writers together to come up with ideas \x96 one thing we were all adamant shouldn\x92t happen (but weren\x92t quite sure how to do it) was that Benny couldn\x92t be \x91a Doctor substitute\x92. The dynamic of the books had to be different \x96 here we start to see a hint of the difference. Benny can\x92t just say \x91take me to your leader\x92, she has to worry about basic things like money and speaking the native language.

Chapter 14
  Look! Up In The Sky!

Implausibility
Ogilvy notes how scientifically implausible the Ice Warriors are.

The crown
The crown falls off Xznaal\x92s head \x96 symbolic, but also a way of making sure the crown isn\x92t on the mothership in the last chapter.

Constable
The Hay Wain has appeared a few times throughout the book \x96 the first time as a design on a tray owned by the Doctor. Here Xznaal uses the real thing as a tray.

Benny banter
Benny is giving as good as she gets here, but note that all her banter isn\x92t actually changing anything. She\x92s not talking Xznaal out of his plan, as the Doctor might, just making him more resolute.

War of the Worlds
\x91It\x92s bows and arrows against the lightning\x92 is a quote from War of the Worlds \x96 a soldier commenting on the futility of fighting the Martians. The line about only two Martians and one human being left is a paraphrase of an American general in the sixties discussing the Cold War and Communists. The image of the Ice Warrior Benny has was a description of the cover of the original Virgin edition of the book.

The Holo-man
The reason for the giant hologram is a convoluted one. Originally, I asked for the cover to be a mirror image of the first New Adventure, Genesys. That had four elements \x96 a monster in the foreground, a full-length image of a man, with a temple wall in the background... and a ghostly floating face of the Doctor. The book covers had moved towards a literal depiction of a scene from the book since then.

So I had to have a specific scene with a monster confronting a full length Benny in front of a castle wall, with a giant floating ghostly Doctor head in at some point! In the end, the idea of mirroring the original cover was dropped, because it didn\x92t fit the new cover format. But the version that was used still has echoes of the Genesys cover.

Famous last words
Benny\x92s \x91last words\x92 are actually taken from an unpublished fan story I wrote with Mark Clapham, where they were given to the Doctor\x92s companion there, Iffy.

Chapter 14 (continued)
  Look! Up In The Sky!

Divided loyalties
The last scene of this chapter has divided people. Grown men have admitted to crying, others think it\x92s bombastic and utterly out of character. Remember that at the time, most people reading the book knew the Doctor died in it. The guy\x92s just come back from the dead, so I think he\x92s allowed a big entrance. If it had been a TV story, it\x92s the bit that would get the biggest cheer at conventions.

I am the Doctor
The Doctor\x92s descriptions of himself come from various books including, for the first time, the forthcoming BBC ones. \x91The man that gives monsters nightmares\x92 was coined by Paul Cornell; the \x91Bringer of Darkness\x92 is from the Remembrance of the Daleks novelisation by Ben Aaronovitch, more than any other book the harbinger of the New Adventures era; \x91Eighth Man Bound\x92 is from Christmas on a Rational Planet; the Doctor had been \x91Time\x92s Champion\x92 throughout the NAs, and became \x91Life\x92s Champion\x92 in Vampire Science; \x91the guy with two hearts\x92 is from the TV Movie and \x91I make history better\x92 is from the short story \x91Continuity Errors\x92 by Steven Moffat. \x91I... am... the Doctor!\x92 was from the TV Movie \x96 more specifically, the adverts for the TV Movie.

Handover
I had really wanted to have a symbolic handover from the Virgin books to the BBC books \x96 the Doctor literally having something in his hand at the end of this book that he still had in his hand at the beginning of the first EDA. But my book was finished before The Eight Doctors was commissioned, so that proved impossible. The short lead times for to the BBC books meant that a number of things I wish I could have done couldn\x92t happen.

The original plan for the EDAs was that Grace would be the companion \x96 that changed very late in the day, so late that Kate and Jon wrote sections of Vampire Science with Grace. The Dying Days would have had Grace in if I\x92d have known the BBC books couldn\x92t. I\x92d have mentioned Sam, the new BBC companion, if I\x92d had the chance.

Agendas
My favourite line in the book is probably \x91And it was\x92. Virgin were constantly being accused from some quarters of \x91betraying Doctor Who\x92, \x91pursuing their own agenda\x92, \x91change for change\x92s sake\x92 and having \x91an ego that wants to see Doctor Who destroyed\x92. As, of course, have the EDAs, Dan Freedman, Big Finish, Phillip Segal, \x91Curse of Fatal Death\x92, JNT, Robert Holmes, Patrick Troughton and, if you go back far enough, Nigel Kneale, HG Wells, and the first caveman to daub paint on a wall. Anyone making Doctor Who that doesn\x92t get that reaction is almost certainly doing something monumentally wrong. The Doctor\x92s not back, he never went away and he never will.

Chapter 15
  Going Down in History

Turning the tables
He\x92s back and it\x92s about time... in the space of three words, the Doctor\x92s alive, and the tables have completely turned.

Survival
I wasn\x92t going to explain how the Doctor survived at first \x96 who cares, now he\x92s back? But everyone that read the first draft wanted an explanation, so I put one in. Re-reading the book, you\x92ll see that the Doctor\x92s been very busy, working with Lex Christian and Eve (which is why we\x92ve not seen them, either).

Scary monsters
When the Doctor confronts Xznaal, the description of him is an inversion of the first description of Xznaal back in chapter seven. He won\x92t admit it, but Xznaal\x92s scared.

Into the abyss
The \x91gazing into the abyss\x92 quote is, of course, an inversion of the Nietzsche quote. Along with quoting from Things Fall Apart, it was the favourite quote of the New Adventures, popping up all over the place to encapsulate how the \x91dark\x92 seventh Doctor was becoming as much of a monster as his adversaries. The eighth Doctor is different \x96 and he\x92s conquered the Red Death once, so it\x92s not going to frighten him now.

Dying again
I wanted people to think that I\x92d brought the Doctor back to kill him, and that he would die falling out of the ship. It\x92s meant to evoke a Reichenbach Falls / Logopolis moment... but I don\x92t think it works \x96 he\x92s such an irresistible force in this last chapter, that you don\x92t wonder if he\x92ll survive, you only wonder how he\x92ll manage to. In the end, I wanted to end the book with a memorable image \x96 and, in those terms, it works. By quoting from Logopolis, I perhaps fooled people for ten seconds into thinking he was going to regenerate.

Epilogue
  Kisses to the Future

Kisses to the past
The chapter title is a play on Phillip Segal\x92s comment that the TV Movie has \x91kisses to the past\x92, like the Doctor finding a long woollen scarf.

Self-criticism
I\x92m biased, I know, but I love this last chapter, I think absolutely every word falls in the right place and has exactly the right weight. I\x92m very self-critical \x96 there\x92s one whole Who book of mine that I wouldn\x92t have published, if I\x92d had the choice. But I think this chapter\x92s the best thing I\x92ve ever written.

Pastiche
The first section of the book is meant to be a pastiche of Paul Cornell\x92s writing style, as a lead in to the next New Adventure, written by him, Oh No It Isn\x92t. It\x92s meant to quickly sketch in the set up of the Benny books for people, so, hopefully, they\x92d buy next month\x92s book, not just leave with the Doctor. In the end, though, if I could write like Paul Cornell, I\x92d write like Paul Cornell, and saying \x91wonderful\x92 a lot isn\x92t the same thing.

Robarman
I\x92d first used the \x91robarman\x92 joke in Cold Fusion.

Bicyles
Benny\x92s bicycle was, at one point, meant to be something she used in all her books \x96 possibly a nod to Emma Thompson\x92s character in the Arnie film Junior, a professor who got around campus on a bike. In the event, I think it was only mentioned in Oh No It Isn\x92t.

Swearing
\x91She used the F-word because she could\x92. The BBC wouldn\x92t let the New Adventures use swear words, as there had been complaints after a few early books had done so (most memorably Iceberg, which began with the memorable phrase \x91 "F- you, mate! Just f- you you f-ing w-ker". There was no doubting the strength of feeling in the biker. He was angry.\x92, the sheer gratuitous nature and psychological insight of which caused much merriment among the NA writers). I had, of course, wanted Benny to use the F-word, not merely allude to it, but even three pages from the end, no swearing was allowed.

Epilogue (continued)
  Kisses to the Future

No hanky panky in the TARDIS
In the TV Movie, the Doctor had kissed Grace, and some of the fanboys weren\x92t happy about that at all. The Doctor doesn\x92t kiss girls. Note that he doesn\x92t in this scene, either. Exactly what Benny and the Doctor do or don\x92t get up to must remain a mystery (and BBCi have decided against letting Allan Bednar draw a picture of it!).

Alternative endings
There was originally a middle section to this chapter, that went through four versions, three of which are available elsewhere online, if you look hard enough, the fourth of which was so awful I deleted it, and I don\x92t have a copy of. The basic plot was \x91the last Dalek story\x92 \x96 a future Doctor giving a eulogy for the Daleks, who he\x92d just utterly defeated. The idea was to produce a real capstone for the Doctor Who legend \x96 once the Daleks were beaten, the Doctor announced his retirement.

Two versions had a Doctor played by Ian Richardson, a third had an ancient, wizened Paul McGann, the fourth had Chris Cwej doing the honours. Rebecca Levene didn\x92t like any of the versions, and insisted the scene got cut, leading to the only real argument we ever had in the five books and two years on Emmerdale we\x92ve worked together. Five years on, the most annoying thing is admitting that Bex was right.

General comments
And so it ends... fully aware that people would be flicking to the end to see if the Doctor was alive, the last section is a memorial service in Westminster Abbey with no Doctor to be seen. Lethbridge-Stewart\x92s musings on his career are the last meta reference of the book, representing the thoughts of the people at Virgin. The last line\x92s nicely understated, I think \x96 you have to re-read it before you spot that a piece of the Doctor Who universe has changed.