B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

by Parkin, Lance

  Either way, the aforementioned conquests didn’t directly involve Earth: in Earthshock, Scott, a member of the Earth military, hasn’t heard of the Cybermen (even though his planet is hosting a conference that the Cyber Leader says will unite many planets in a “war against the Cyber Race”). The Doctor observes that it is a war that the Cybermen “can’t win”. When the Cybermen’s plan to blow up the conference is defeated (Earthshock), there is nothing to stop Earth from fighting this genocidal war against the Cybermen - and this is surely the “Cyber War” referred to in Revenge of the Cybermen. We might presume that the events of Attack of the Cybermen occur at the end of the War, when the Cybermen face defeat and are planning to evacuate Telos. The Cybermen are not mentioned in Frontier in Space (set in 2540), which could be inferred as meaning that the Cyber War has long been over by that time.

  Before Earthshock was broadcast, The Programme Guide placed the Cyber “Wars” (note the plural) as “c.2300” (first edition) and “c.2400” (second edition). “A History of the Cybermen” (DWM #83) first suggested that the Cyber War took place immediately after Earthshock, post-2526. David Banks’ Cybermen suggested that the Cyber Wars took place without any involvement with Earth around “2150 AD”. The Terrestrial Index came to a messy compromise: The “First Cyber Wars” take place “as the twenty-third century began”, when Voga is devastated. Revenge of the Cybermen takes place at the “tail end of the twenty-fifth century”, then Voga’s gold is again used after Earthshock to defeat the Cybermen in “the Second Cyber War”.

  Novels such as Killing Ground make it clear that the Cybermen menaced some early human colony worlds.

  [713] Dating Earthshock (19.6) - The Doctor states that it is “the twenty-sixth century”, Adric calculates that it is “2526 in the time scale you call Anno Domini”. The TARDIS Logs set the story in “2500”.

  How the Cyber-scanner in Earthshock can show a clip from Revenge of the Cybermen remains a mystery, and causes problems with the dating of that story. The “real” reason is that the production team wanted to show the Cybermen facing as many previous Doctors as they could and didn’t worry too much about continuity (in the same way that the Brigadier’s flashback in Mawdryn Undead had the Brigadier “remembering” scenes he didn’t witness). Equally, the Cyber-scanner doesn’t show clips from Attack of the Cybermen or Silver Nemesis, the latter of which at least should appear.

  “A History of the Cybermen” in DWM #83 suggested that the Scope tunes into the TARDIS telepathic circuits, which seems a little implausible. One fan, Michael Evans, has suggested that as there is no indication how long before Attack of the Cybermen the time machine crashed on Telos, it is perfectly possible that the Cybermen have had it since before Earthshock and used it to research their future before using it to alter history. This would certainly be a logical course of action. About Time suggests that the Cybermen themselves have travelled from the future. For other possible explanations, see David Banks’ Cybermen (p72, p79-80).

  [714] Revenge of the Cybermen

  [715] Original Sin (p287).

  [716] Revenge of the Cybermen. Stevenson claims that “the Cybermen died out centuries ago”, the Doctor replies that “they disappeared after their attack on Voga at the end of the Cyber War”.

  [717] Real Time

  [718] Benny: Where Angels Fear

  [719] Benny: Down

  [720] Dating The Colony of Lies (PDA #61) - The book’s internal dating is very confused. The back cover says it’s 2539, and there’s a tombstone (p23) which says that 2535 was “four years ago”. Despite this, a native of this timezone says the date is 2534 (p147). Transmats are seen a number of times after this (in, for example, The Ark in Space) so it is clear that humanity readopts the technology.

  [721] Demontage. The fourth Doctor visited “soon after the place opened” (p6).

  [722] About sixty years before Benny: Down.

  [723] Dating Mindgame and Mindgame Trilogy (Reeltime Pictures films #4-5) - Date unknown, but it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to suggest that the continuity-minded Terrance Dicks was thinking of the era of Frontier in Space when he wrote Mindgame - in which the Draconian Empire is mentioned, and the Draconian says that “the humans are not our allies”. Also, twentieth century culture is topical enough for the mercenary (in Mindgame Trilogy) to mention James Dean and River Phoenix.

  [724] Benny: Down, and presumably a reference to the president seen in Frontier in Space.

  [725] Benny: Down

  [726] Benny: A Life in Pieces. Perfugium is the setting of Master.

  [727] Benny; Beyond the Sun. This is said to occur “before the Galactic War”, i.e. the Dalek Wars.

  [728] Twenty years before Prisoner of the Daleks.

  [729] Dating Frontier in Space (10.3) - The story takes place “somewhere in the twenty-sixth century” according to the Doctor. In the first scene, the freighter enters hyperspace at “22.09 72 2540 EST”. This is probably nine minutes past ten at night on the 72nd day of 2540, although the President is later seen cancelling a meeting on “the tenth of January”. The novelisation (also by Malcolm Hulke) gives the year as “2540”, which The Terrestrial Index concurred with, although it misunderstood the relationship between Earth and Draconia at this time, suggesting that they are part of “the Alliance” [q.v.]. It isn’t made clear whether the human military know of the Daleks before this story.

  [730] Dating Planet of the Daleks (10.4) - The story is set at the same time as Frontier in Space. Nevertheless, the American Doctor Who comic dated this story as 1300 AD. It is “generations” after The Daleks.

  [731] Shadowmind (p61).

  [732] Love and War (p10-11).

  [733] Benny: The Summer of Love

  [734] Benny: Down

  [735] According to the Doctor in Death to the Daleks.

  [736] “Cold-Blooded War!” The novelisation of Frontier in Space was called The Space War, and this is occasionally used by fans to refer to the events of both Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks. Presumably this battle is “the First Great Space War”, not the conflict between Earth and Draconia twenty years earlier.

  [737] “Fugitive”

  [738] Return of the Daleks

  [739] Benny’s Birthday

  It is stated in Love and War (p46), in many later books and in the New Adventures Writers’ Guide that Benny comes from “the twenty-fifth century”. For a while, the writers worked on the assumption that she was from 2450 (e.g.: The Highest Science p34, The Pit p9). In Falls the Shadow, we learn that Benny was born in “2422” (p148). However, Paul Cornell’s initial Character Guide had specified that she was born in “2472”, which, as Love and War is set the day after Benny’s thirtieth birthday, would make it 2502 (in the twenty-sixth century).

  Causing further complications, Love and War is definitely set after Frontier in Space [2540]. In subsequent books there was confusion, with some novels claiming that Benny does indeed come from the “twenty-sixth century” (e.g. Transit p186; Blood Heat p3).

  Latterly, so as not to contradict the television series, it has been decided that Benny is definitely from the twenty-sixth century. Benny explained that there are a number of calendars in use in the cosmopolitan galaxy of her time, and in our terms she is “from the late-twenty-sixth century” (Just War, p136) - this is intended to explain away some of the contradictions. Paul Cornell and Jim Sangster have astrologically determined Benny’s birthday as 21st June, a date that first appeared in Just War (p135) and now appears on the Big Finish official biography on their website. Even so, she celebrates on 20th November in The Dimension Riders.

  The few Benny solo adventures that reference her birth year tend to work from a dating of 2540, or reasonably close to it. She’s 22 in Benny: Old Friends: “The Ship of Painted Shadows” (set in 2562), and the 2562 component of Benny: The Sword of Forever. In Benny: The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel, Benny says that she was born “six hundred forty-seven years” after 1893 - so, again, she was born in
2540. Benny: The Vampire Curse: “Predating the Predators”, which ends on “Saturday 24 June 2609”, goes out of its way to reiterate Benny’s birth as 21st June, 2540. (Benny, page 215: “If we go by the calendar and ignore the time-travel, I should be 68. Actually, hell - Wednesday would have been my 69th birthday. I must have been too wrapped up in trivialities like not getting myself killed to notice.”) Benny: Genius Loci seems to make an honest mistake - the story occurs in 2561, but Benny has a birthday in the midst of it, so she should be 20 when she arrives on Jaiwan, and yet she’s already 21 (p6). A bigger disparity is that Benny: The Wake (which ends in early 2608) has Benny telling Peter that she was born “seventy-one years ago” - which, even if she’s not counting her upcoming birthday, at best adds up to 2538.

  [740] The ceasefire was declared “fifty years” before Demontage (p4).

  [741] The Well-Mannered War (p272). Stokes is from the 2400s, so the official records must have been altered to due to his relocation to the twenty-sixth century.

  [742] Conundrum

  [743] Benny: Another Girl, Another Planet

  [744] Dating “Fugitive” (IDW Vol. 1 #3-6) - It is “many centuries” since the time of the 15th Draconian Emperor, and the Draconians and Ogrons in this story date from relatively soon after Frontier in Space.

  [745] A generation or so before The Also People.

  [746] “Two hundred years” after Valhalla.

  [747] So Vile a Sin (p211).

  [748] “Three hundred years” before Dark Progeny. They are in use in Frontier in Space.

  [749] “Six or seven years” before “Dreamers of Death”.

  [750] Death and Diplomacy (p124). We might infer from other stories that the first wave was in the mid-twenty-second century (seen in The Dalek Invasion of Earth) which was targeted on Earth’s solar system, and the second led to the Dalek War mentioned in The Crystal Bucephalus and The Colony of Lies.

  The Dalek Wars

  In Death to the Daleks, Hamilton states “My father was killed in the last Dalek War”, implying there was more than one. We know from other Dalek stories that humanity and the Daleks come into conflict throughout history, starting with The Dalek Invasion of Earth [around 2157]. However, there are almost certainly no Dalek Wars affecting Earth directly between To the Death and The Rescue [c 2190-2493], as Vicki has only heard of the Daleks from history books discussing the Invasion (she doesn’t even know what they look like). According to Cory in Mission to the Unknown, the Daleks have been inactive as a military force in Earth’s sphere of influence for a millennium before The Daleks’ Master Plan [between 3000-4000 AD]. In Planet of the Daleks, the Doctor uses the term “Dalek War” to describe the events of The Daleks, which did not involve humanity.

  According to The Terrestrial Index, there are a string of Human/Dalek conflicts, the First to Fourth Dalek Wars. The First was the Dalek Invasion of Earth; the Second was fought by “the Alliance” of Humans, Draconians and Thals in the twenty-fifth century; the Third was again fought by the Alliance after the events of Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks; the Fourth was The Daleks’ Master Plan.

  This is a numbering system that is never used on television, and some of the details of Lofficier’s account actively contradict what we’re told in the stories - at the time he proposes a “Second Dalek War” involving the Thals and Draconians, the Thals don’t have advanced space travel and a century later, they think that humans are a myth (Planet of the Daleks). The first contact between humanity and the Draconians was in 2520 (in the twenty-sixth century), leading to a short war, followed by twenty years of hostility and mutual mistrust (Frontier in Space).

  The books have established that Dalek Wars took place in Benny’s native time. She’s born the same year Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks are set [q.v. Benny’s birthday]. her father fights in the Dalek wars and her mother is killed in a Dalek attack. What’s more, Ace spends three years fighting Daleks in this time period between Love and War and Deceit. As such, there is a mass of information about the Wars in many of the novels. There’s no mention of a lull in the fighting - war presumably breaks out soon after Frontier in Space, it carries on into Benny’s childhood and apparently into her early adulthood. Humanity is still fighting the Daleks when Benny hits thirty (Love and War), but they’ve defeated the Daleks within three years of that (Deceit). Nevertheless, according to Lucifer Rising, there are two distinct Dalek Wars at this time - Benny’s father fought in the Second Dalek War (p65), whereas Ace fought in the Third (p309), so there must be a short-lived cessation of hostilities (which would seem to be at some point in the 2560s, when Benny is in her twenties).

  A lengthy essay at the end of Deceit has the Dalek War starting after Frontier in Space and Ace fighting in the Second Dalek War.

  Some stories (for example, The Crystal Bucephalus) stick to Lofficier’s scheme.

  So... the term “Second Dalek War” is used to refer to two or possibly even three different conflicts in both the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth centuries (and this is further complicated because of the early confusion over which century Benny was born in). For the sake of clarity, references to the numbering of the Dalek Wars have been left out of the timeline itself; where they are given in a story, it’s been footnoted.

  Within the fiction, it’s fairly easy to rationalise the discrepancy: these are the naming conventions of historians, and different historians will have different perspectives on the various conflicts and labels for them.

  [751] Deceit

  [752] Benny: Beige Planet Mars. The “offworlders” are the apocryphal forty-second Doctor (as “played” by Ian Richardson) and his companion, Iphigenia “Iffy” Birmingham. Both feature in 90s fan-fic stories by Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham.

  [753] Benny: The Sword of Forever

  [754] Benny: Nobody’s Children

  [755] Benny: The Diet of Worms

  [756] Dating Benny: Buried Treasures: “Closure” (Benny audio #1.5b) - It’s “fifty years” before the “modern-day” component of “Closure”. It’s not said whether Benny’s actions actually change history or not.

  [757] Dating Return of the Living Dad (NA #53) - This happens “forty” years before 2587 (p7), Benny would have been “seven” at the time (p12). Although the date is given as “2543” (p29), there is some confusion over Benny’s birthday in the NAs, and this is a victim of that. This is “the height of the Second Dalek War” (q.v. The Dalek Wars).

  [758] A number of references to Benny Summerfield’s early life appeared in the New Adventures, and these were not always consistent. In Love and War (p75), Benny’s birthplace is identified as “Beta Caprisis. Earth colony” - supporting that, in Benny: The Wake, Benny points at a star and tells Peter, “That’s Beta Caprisis... that’s where your mummy was born.” But, in Sanctuary, Benny recalls that her mother was killed on a raid on “Vandor Prime, in the Gamma Delphinus system” (p185). We might speculate that she was born on the former and moved to the latter. As pointed out in Set Piece (p132), there is some confusion about the exact sequence of events during the raid that killed Benny’s mother. Accounts also vary as to whether Benny’s father disappeared before or after her mother’s death. Benny was only seven when all this happened, so she is almost certainly misremembering some details or blocking out some of her unpleasant memories.

  [759] “Emperor of the Daleks”

  [760] Dating “Pureblood” (DWM #193-196) - It’s “the twenty-sixth century” in part one, but “the twenty-fifth” in part two. It seems to be around Benny’s native time, as she’s heard of the Lauren Corporation. The Second Dalek War is mentioned, but that’s not as helpful a reference as one might think (q.v. “The Dalek Wars”). The Doctor says the Sontarans will not be a threat to Earth again until The Sontaran Experiment (which, as far as we know, they aren’t). Sontarans: Conduct Unbecoming names Sontar as the Sontaran homeworld (perhaps it was founded after Sontara’s destruction).

  [761] Dating “Dreamers of Death” (DWM #47-
48) - The year isn’t specified in the story, but there’s a reference to Unicepter dream machines being “recently banned” in the Abslom Daak - Dalek Killer collected edition, placing the story around then. The settlers on Unicepter IV are “human”. Their technology is not terribly advanced - they have hover cars and energy weapons, thinking projectile weapons are “old fashioned”.

  [762] “Star Beast II”

  [763] Abslom Daak first appeared in Marvel’s Doctor Who Weekly #17, and has returned a number of times since. He was mentioned in Love and War (p46-47 - we also meet Maire, another DK, in that novel), before appearing in the (cloned) flesh in Deceit.

  [764] Before “Abslom Daak... Dalek Killer”. Details are given in “Star Tigers”.

  [765] Dating “Abslom Daak... Dalek Killer” (DWW #17-20) - It’s “the twenty-sixth century”; humanity is at war with the Daleks. The sequel, “Star Tigers”, establishes that it is shortly after a “frontier war” between the Draconians and Earth, a clear reference to Frontier in Space.

  The matter transmitter between star systems is something humanity is still trying to perfect by the year 4000 and The Daleks’ Master Plan. We learn about Vol Mercurius in “Star Tigers”.

  [766] Dating “Star Tigers” (DWW #27-30, DWM #44-46) - It’s within three months of “Abslom Daak... Dalek Killer”; Salander says Mazam was conquered “within the last three months”. “The Emperor does not want another war... not so soon after fighting the humans.”

  [767] Dating “Nemesis of the Daleks” (DWM #152-155) - It’s “the twenty-sixth century”. Clearly, this takes place after “Star Tigers”, but there’s no indication of how much time has passed. The Emperor resembles the one from the comic strips (see The Dalek Emperors sidebar), and may well be killed in Daak’s final attack because he’s on the Death Wheel when it explodes. If so, it’s tempting to imagine that the Emperor’s death was the turning point in the war referred to as “years ago” in Deceit (which also says Daak’s death here was “years ago”).