Introduction
This book seeks to place every event referred to in Doctor Who into a consistent timeline. Yet this is “a” history of the Doctor Who universe, not the “definitive” or “official” version.
Doctor Who has had hundreds of creators, all pulling in slightly different directions, all with their own vision of what Doctor Who was about. Without that diversity, the Doctor Who universe would no doubt be more internally consistent, but it would also be a much smaller and less interesting place. Nowadays, fans are part of the creative process. Ultimately, we control the heritage of the show that we love. The authors of Ahistory hope people will enjoy this book, and we know that they will challenge it.
A total adherence to continuity has always been rather less important to the successive Doctor Who production teams than the main order of business: writing exciting stories, telling good jokes and scaring small children with big monsters. This, as most people will tell you, is just how it should be.
Doctor Who has always been created using a method known as “making it up as they went along”. The series glories in its invention and throwaway lines. When the TV series was first in production, no-one was keeping the sort of detailed notes that would prevent canonical “mistakes”, and even the same writer could contradict their earlier work. It’s doubtful the writer of The Mysterious Planet had a single passing thought about how the story fit in with The Sun Makers ... even though they were both authored by Robert Holmes.
Now, with dozens of new books, audios, comic strips, short stories and a new TV series, not to mention spin-offs, it is almost certainly impossible to keep track of every new Doctor Who story, let alone put them all in a coherent - never mind consistent - framework. References can contradict other references in the same story, let alone ones in stories written forty years later for a different medium by someone who wasn’t even born the year the original writer died.
It is, in any case, impossible to come up with a consistent view of history according to Doctor Who . Strictly speaking, the Brigadier retires three years before the first UNIT story is set. The Daleks and Atlantis are both utterly destroyed, once and for all, several times that we know about. Characters “remember” scenes, or sometimes entire stories, that they weren’t present to witness, and show remarkable lack of knowledge of real world events or events in Doctor Who that happened after the story first came out.
“Continuity” has always been flexible, even on the fundamentals of the show’s mythology - The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964), The War Games (1969), Genesis of the Daleks (1975) and The Deadly Assassin (1976) all shamelessly threw out the show’s established history in the name of a good story. Their versions of events (the Daleks are galactic conquerors; the Doctor is a Time Lord who stole his TARDIS and fled his home planet; the Daleks were created by the Kaled scientist, Davros; Gallifreyan society is far from perfect and Time Lords are limited to twelve regenerations) are now taken to be the “truth”. The previous versions (the Daleks are confined to one city; the Doctor invented the “ship” and his granddaughter named it before their exile; the Daleks are descendants of the squat humanoid Dals, mutated by radiation; the Time Lords are godlike and immortal barring accidents) have quietly been forgotten.
However, it would be unfortunate to write a book so vague that it becomes useless. Firm decisions have to be made about where stories are placed, so this book contains abundant footnotes that lay out the evidence pertaining to each story, and to explain each story’s placement in this chronology.
In some cases, this is simply a matter of reporting an exact date spoken by one of the characters in the story ( Black Orchid , for example). In others, no firm date is given. In those cases, we
This book seeks to place every event referred to in Doctor Who into a consistent timeline. Yet this is “a” history of the Doctor Who universe, not the “definitive” or “official” version.
Doctor Who has had hundreds of creators, all pulling in slightly different directions, all with their own vision of what Doctor Who was about. Without that diversity, the Doctor Who universe would no doubt be more internally consistent, but it would also be a much smaller and less interesting place. Nowadays, fans are part of the creative process. Ultimately, we control the heritage of the show that we love. The authors of Ahistory hope people will enjoy this book, and we know that they will challenge it.
A total adherence to continuity has always been rather less important to the successive Doctor Who production teams than the main order of business: writing exciting stories, telling good jokes and scaring small children with big monsters. This, as most people will tell you, is just how it should be.
Doctor Who has always been created using a method known as “making it up as they went along”. The series glories in its invention and throwaway lines. When the TV series was first in production, no-one was keeping the sort of detailed notes that would prevent canonical “mistakes”, and even the same writer could contradict their earlier work. It’s doubtful the writer of The Mysterious Planet had a single passing thought about how the story fit in with The Sun Makers ... even though they were both authored by Robert Holmes.
Now, with dozens of new books, audios, comic strips, short stories and a new TV series, not to mention spin-offs, it is almost certainly impossible to keep track of every new Doctor Who story, let alone put them all in a coherent - never mind consistent - framework. References can contradict other references in the same story, let alone ones in stories written forty years later for a different medium by someone who wasn’t even born the year the original writer died.
It is, in any case, impossible to come up with a consistent view of history according to Doctor Who . Strictly speaking, the Brigadier retires three years before the first UNIT story is set. The Daleks and Atlantis are both utterly destroyed, once and for all, several times that we know about. Characters “remember” scenes, or sometimes entire stories, that they weren’t present to witness, and show remarkable lack of knowledge of real world events or events in Doctor Who that happened after the story first came out.
“Continuity” has always been flexible, even on the fundamentals of the show’s mythology - The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964), The War Games (1969), Genesis of the Daleks (1975) and The Deadly Assassin (1976) all shamelessly threw out the show’s established history in the name of a good story. Their versions of events (the Daleks are galactic conquerors; the Doctor is a Time Lord who stole his TARDIS and fled his home planet; the Daleks were created by the Kaled scientist, Davros; Gallifreyan society is far from perfect and Time Lords are limited to twelve regenerations) are now taken to be the “truth”. The previous versions (the Daleks are confined to one city; the Doctor invented the “ship” and his granddaughter named it before their exile; the Daleks are descendants of the squat humanoid Dals, mutated by radiation; the Time Lords are godlike and immortal barring accidents) have quietly been forgotten.
However, it would be unfortunate to write a book so vague that it becomes useless. Firm decisions have to be made about where stories are placed, so this book contains abundant footnotes that lay out the evidence pertaining to each story, and to explain each story’s placement in this chronology.
In some cases, this is simply a matter of reporting an exact date spoken by one of the characters in the story ( Black Orchid , for example). In others, no firm date is given. In those cases, we
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