Deceit
Page 32
Phew. I hope that’s dealt with that one.
Next, I’d like to explain some of the basic premises of the New Adventures. In particular, there are two cosmological foundations that underpin all the stories.
The first premise is that there is only one main Universe – which is, capitalized to differentiate it from the, various smaller universes which have been created from time to time, such as E-space and TARDISes.
Secondly, time travels in one direction, and the Past is immutable (except in very exceptional circumstances). The Present is Gallifrey’s present, and that is the same as the Doctor’s: he is a contemporary Time Lord, in Gallifreyan terms. However, the Present – Gallifrey’s present – is eons ago, from the perspective of Earth, from our perspective. We, and the whole of mankind, are in the Doctor’s future. Earth, thanks largely to the Doctor’s frequent visits, is a strip of near-certainty stretching futurewards in an otherwise largely undecided mass of future probabilities.
I would be the first to admit that neither of these two principles is explicitly stated in the Doctor Who TV series, and that there are a few stories that expressly contradict them. On the other hand, they fit well with the majority of the stories – and in any case they are essential to the creation of a coherent series of novels.
Novels are more subject to close examination than are stories on TV or film. Until the invention of video players, you could only sit and watch a television story, and you had to watch at a pace determined by the programme’s maker. Even in the video age, it’s easier to gloss over inconsistencies on TV than in a book.
Although there are exceptions, Doctor Who TV stories appear to be set almost exclusively in one universe. There are very few stories in which it turns out that ‘time has branched’ or ‘we’re in another possible universe, Jo.’ Whether this was policy or accident on the part of successive script editors, the effect is dramatically powerful: all the events take place in our Universe, and therefore they matter to us. Who cares what goes on in someone else’s universe? Therefore, from Doctor Who precedent and as an essential measure to build drama, there is only one Universe in the New Adventures.
Another thing that the Doctor rarely does in the TV stories: get into the TARDIS, pop back in time an hour or so, and nip in the bud the present looming disaster. Why doesn’t he do that? From the point of view of an editor or writer, the answer’s obvious; if the Doctor can use time travel to sort out every problem, there are no adventures to write about. But what’s the fictional reason?
I like Occam’s Razor: if there’s, a simple, elegant theory that fits the bill, use it. And the obvious reason why the Doctor doesn’t attempt to alter events that have already occurred is: he can’t. The Past – Gallifrey’s past, the Doctor’s personal past – is immutable anyway. And the islands of certainty that time-travellers such as the Doctor have created in the future are equally unchangeable. Having found himself in a sticky situation, the Doctor has no easy options – and that makes for highly dramatic stories.
Those, then, are the two main cosmological planks of the New Adventures. Like all rules, they exist to be twisted.
Before I leave cosmology, here are a few basic facts. The Universe is at most 20,000,000,000 years old, and will exist for another 60,000,000,000 years. Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in which Gallifrey is also supposed to be, is at least 10,000,000,000 years old. Our sun was a late developer, and Earth has existed for a mere 5,000,000,000 years at most. For nine-tenths of that time the planet was barren: multicellular life came into existence about 500,000,000 years ago, or to put it another way, the most recent 2.5% of, the Universe’s life so far.
The mass extinction of the dinosaurs and other species took place 65,000,000 years ago; the earliest primate progenitors of mankind existed less than 20,000,000 years ago; and modern man evolved only 40,000 years ago – that’s less than 0.01% of the history of life on the planet, and, for what it’s worth, a statistically negligible 0.00002% of the history of the Universe,
Having established our species as the merest blip in the history of our own planet, let alone the history of the Universe, I have more bad news: we’re negligible in terms of space as well as time.
There are at least 100,000,000,000 stars in our Galaxy alone; our Galaxy is part of a cluster of about twenty galaxies, all within a radius of a piffling 2,500,000 light years. But there are thousands of other galactic clusters, some of them containing thousands of galaxies. The Universe isn’t infinite, but it might as well be.
The relevance of all this to Doctor Who is simply that it provides a context: it reminds us just how much scope the Doctor has for his travels. Is it surprising that the Time Lords degenerated into introspective inaction, faced with the prospect of monitoring the next 70,000,000,000 years of 100,000,000,000 star systems – and that’s just in their own Galaxy.
One question above all others intrigues me: why are the Time Lords, and the Doctor in particular, so interested in the fate of one species on one planet? The writer’s and editor’s answer is, of course, that the stories are designed to appeal to twentieth century humans, so it makes sense to set them on Earth and round about that time. But no-one’s yet come up with the fictional reason why the Doctor (and the Master and the Rani) can’t seem to leave Earth alone.
The New Adventures cosmology offers a hint of an answer: having become accidentally embroiled in humanity’s affairs in his earlier incarnations, the Doctor now finds that he has created a time-line that he has to protect – particularly as it is an obvious target for his enemies – and so he’s on a tread-mill.
I suspect that there needs to be a more fundamental answer: one that addresses the remarkable similarity in appearance between Time Lords and humans. But I’m not sure that the world is ready for it yet.
Finally, I’d like to expand on a point I mentioned above. The main reason for confining the Doctor to the immediate area of Earth and its colonies, and to the few millennia on each side of our own time, is that other settings would be too alien. A novel has to engage the interest of its readers; and therefore the novel’s central characters, their problems, and the places in which the events occur have to be at least recognizable.
This is, in itself, a severe limitation, akin to showing Michaelangelo the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and telling him to paint a miniature on it, and I’m sure that not all New Adventures authors will want to stay within it. But there are problems, even within these boundaries, and they are to do with the pace of technological change.
Astute readers will already have spotted that the puter-space technology featured in Love and War differs hardly at all from that in Warhead and Transit, both of which are set three to four hundred years earlier in Earth’s future history. Andrew Cartmel and Ben Aaronovitch can’t be faulted: they are right to indicate that the lives of our immediate descendents will be transformed by new technology – artificial intelligences, man-machine interfaces, virtual realities, genetic engineering, smart viruses, sub-atomic circuitry. All of these are developments from present-day research.
The problem is that if we continue to extrapolate future developments at the same rate the world(s) man lives on, his work, leisure, and even his appearance and his mental processes all become completely alien to us within the space of a few generations. Therefore, for the purposes of providing a few more centuries of believable settings for novels, I’ve decided to slow down the rate of technological change. The New Adventures rationale for this is that the breakout to the stars will soak up mankind’s innovative energies – and so in the twenty-fifth century it is still possible for characters to fight-skirmishes with handguns.
This process – flurries of technological change followed by centuries of interstellar expansion – can be extended indefinitely into the future history. And as mankind expands across the Galaxy, it becomes possible to envisage backwater worlds on which newer technologies have been lost or abandoned, thus creating far future settings which nonetheless contain elements that are familiar to
us.
That’s more than enough afterwords. I hope that, wearing my editor’s hat, I’ve been able to explain some of the basic premises of Deceit and of the rest of the New Adventures.
It only, remains to say thank you for your continuing support of the series: thanks to the demand, we have now increased the rate of publishing to one new novel every month. We intend to maintain the New Adventures; perhaps not for the 60,000,000,000 years to the end of the Universe, but certainly for the foreseeable future.