There’s no indication that these Daleks are time travellers. At first the Doctor assumes the Emperor is Davros, but the Dalek Emperor replies “Davros? Who is Davros?”. Terror Firma has Davros losing his mind and mutating into an Emperor Dalek, but ultimately it seems as if he and this Emperor are not one and the same. The Daleks also (apparently) probe the seventh Doctor’s mind, identify him and see images of the Doctor’s previous six incarnations.
[768] Dating “Emperor of the Daleks” (DWM #197-202) - This takes place shortly after “Nemesis of the Daleks”. It’s specified that Daak is “lured across space and time” - the sequence on Skaro takes place between Revelation of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks (4625, according to this chronology), and accounts for Davros’ (physical, not mental) transformation into the Emperor Dalek, as seen in Remembrance.
[769] According to Deceit, which was published between “Nemesis of the Daleks” (where Daak died) and “Emperor of the Daleks” (where it turned out he hadn’t). Presumably, either Daak evades the authorities, or they hush up his activities.
[770] “Five years” before Catastrophea.
[771] “Four decades” before Cold Fusion.
[772] Dating Catastrophea (PDA #11) - It is “five or six hundred years” after Jo’s time (p79).
[773] Benny: Beige Planet Mars
[774] Love and War
[775] Love and War, Return of the Living Dad
[776] Benny: Old Friends
[777] Dating Prisoner of the Daleks (NSA #33) - This is stated to be in the middle of the first Earth Empire’s war with the Daleks, at a point where “the Daleks are advancing, their empire constantly expanding into Earth’s space” and young men can’t remember a time they weren’t at war. Bowman is a veteran of the Draconian conflicts. The Osterhagen Principle (almost certainly derived from the Osterhagen Key from Journey’s End) was invented on Earth “over five hundred years ago”. Gauda Prime is the planet in the Blake’s 7 series finale, where Avon and his crew make their last stand. Conflicting all of this evidence, however, one of the Wayfarer crew says that Morse Code (developed in 1836 by Samuel F.B. Morse) came about “thousands of years ago”. The Daleks are bronze, like the new series Daleks (Dalek X is black and gold).
[778] War of the Daleks. No date is given, but it’s while the Draconian Empire is at war with the Daleks. Female officers are anathema again by The Dark Path.
[779] “Thirty years” before The Also People. Benny: Down and Benny: Walking to Babylon have further details.
[780] Love and War (p5, p64).
[781] This was “during the wars” (Independence Day, p22).
[782] Deceit
[783] Dating Enemy of the Daleks (BF #121) - The story occurs during the Dalek Wars, after the Daleks - according to Lt. Beth Stokes - have spent “years” overrunning colony planets, either killing or enslaving the populaces. Ace has a familiarity with the weaponry and military practices of this era (so much so, she knows the make-up of a Valkyrie unit when asked), perhaps owing to the Spacefleet training she gained 2570-2573 (see Love and War and Deceit). As the conflict with the Daleks goes into decline in the late 2560s but is here running strong, it’s probably earlier than Ace’s Spacefleet tenure. Bliss is referred to both as a planet and a planetoid.
[784] Dating Benny: Genius Loci (Benny BF novel #8) - Benny spends most of 2561 on Jaiwan - some months at the very least pass before her birthday, which is 21st June - and she leaves the planet on 1st January, 2562 (p205). Cray might be the world seen in The Game.
[785] Dating Benny: Old Friends: “The Ship of Painted Shadows” (Benny collection #9b) - The blurb says that it’s “late 2562” and that Benny is 22. In Benny’s lifetime, these events are specified as taking place after Benny: Genius Loci.
[786] Dating Benny: The Sword of Forever (Benny NA #14) - The year is given on page 10; Benny is said to be 22 (p13). Page 19 cites that Daniel died in 2560, but this appears to be a typo. Deceit (p103) says that Benny didn’t visit Earth for fifteen years before meeting the Doctor, but that claim contradicts Benny: The Sword of Forever and Lucifer Rising (p171).
[787] Just War (p137)
[788] Benny: Beige Planet Mars, following the lead of Lucifer Rising (p171).
[789] The Dying Days, again elaborating on Lucifer Rising (p171).
[790] The Also People
[791] Return of the Living Dad (p51).
[792] Dating Benny: The Vampire Curse: “The Badblood Diaries” (Benny collection #12a) - The year is cited at the top of every chapter.
[793] Dating Benny: The Vampire Curse: “Possum Kingdom” (Benny collection #12b) - The year is given.
[794] Deceit
[795] Dating Love and War (NA #9) - The dating of this novel causes a number of problems as it features the debut of Bernice Summerfield. It is the “twenty-fifth century” (p46), and “five centuries” since Ace’s time (p26). The novel clearly takes place after Frontier in Space (see p10-11 of Love and War or p252 of The Programme Guide, fourth edition) as it refers to events of that story. Heaven is established “three decades” before the events of the novel (p92), and Frontier in Space is set in 2540, so the novel can’t take place before about 2570. Latterly, the decision was made that Benny is from the twenty-sixth century, so this is the date that has been adopted for this story. It is late June, as Benny celebrates her birthday just before the book starts, although it is autumn on Heaven.
[796] Deceit. Many of the subsequent New Adventures contain references to Ace’s exploits in Spacefleet.
[797] Lucifer Rising
[798] First Frontier, Theatre of War, Shadowmind, Lungbarrow and The Shadow of the Scourge.
[799] “Final Genesis”
[800] Death to the Daleks
[801] Thirty years before Benny: The Gods of the Underworld.
[802] Benny: Down
[803] Benny: Beyond the Sun
[804] Dating Deceit - (NA #13) The novel is set “two, probably three Earth years” after Love and War (p85), and as such the dating of the story is problematic (q.v. Benny’s Birthday). Both the blurb and the history section in the Appendix of the novel state that Deceit is set in “the middle of the twenty-fifth century”, just after what The Terrestrial Index calls the Second Dalek War (p62-63). This is restated at various other points (e.g.: p69, p216), but contradicted by other evidence in the same book: Arcadia was colonised three hundred seventy-nine years before Deceit (p115), but not before the EB Corporation’s first warpship was operational in 2112 (p27), so the book must be set after 2491 AD. The book also refers to the Cyber Wars, and “Nemesis of the Daleks” was “years ago”. In the Marvel strips, Abslom Daak comes from the mid-twenty-sixth century.
Pool - while not named there - briefly reappears in Benny: Dead Romance. Arcadia may or may not be the same planet that was the destination of the Mayflower in “Profits of Doom”, or that was on the front line of the Last Great Time War according to the Doctor in Doomsday.
[805] Dating The Dark Flame (BF #42) - The dating clues within The Dark Flame are so ambiguous, previous editions of Ahistory consigned it to “None of the Above”. What few dating clues we’re given pertain to the Cult of the Dark Flame’s own timeline - the back-cover blurb claims that the Cult was active “a thousand years” ago, and it’s variously said that the Cult died out “centuries” or “thousands of years” ago. Vilus Krull, the Cult’s founder, is twice said to have lived “thousands of years” ago.
However, the sequel to this story - Benny: The Draconian Rage, also written by Trevor Baxendale - not only makes references to Krull’s defeat in The Dark Flame, it specifies that Krull was born on the human colony planet Tranagus. Given that The Draconian Rage occurs in 2602, and given the established timeline of human expansion into space, Krull could at most have lived a few centuries before events in The Dark Flame - meaning that all talk about Krull and the Cult going back “a thousand” or “thousands” of years must either be propaganda, or a case of those involved making guesses as t
o the Cult’s shady past. With that in mind, there’s only a window of some decades for The Dark Flame to occur before The Draconian Rage.
[806] Dating Shakedown (NA #45) - There is no date given in the book, the story synopsis or the video version of this story. The novel is set after Lords of the Storm (set in 2371). The Rutans assert that the spy disguised as Karne “died long ago” (p66), but there’s some sense that he is still a recent memory.
Benny: Mean Streets - set in 2594, and also written by Terrance Dicks - is something of a Shakedown sequel. It contains a flashback to Roz and Chris’ visit to Megacity, in which they learn about an undertaking named The Project. Mean Streets p235 indicates that the Project has been running for no more than two generations.
Some general details about Mean Streets suggest that events in Shakedown were at most a few decades ago - the augmented Ogron Garshak appears in both books (although it’s possible that he possesses an extended lifespan). According to Mean Streets p122, the bar manager Sara is the dancer that Chris ogles on Shakedown p78. She’s admittedly a long-lived alien, but isn’t surprised to see Chris again in Mean Streets, only that he should look a bit older. The account in Mean Streets of a former miner, “old Sam”, also suggests that The Project was initiated within a human lifetime.
It’s said that Chris Cwej - who’s capable of time travel by the time Mean Streets occurs - wants to settle “unfinished business” in Megacity, and placing Shakedown shortly after Lords of the Storm would strangely have him doing so more than two hundred years after the fact. (Then again, it’s also odd that he’d return a couple of decades later.)
[807] Benny: Oh No It Isn’t!
[808] Twenty years before Benny: The Medusa Effect.
[809] Cold Fusion (p247).
[810] Benny: Beige Planet Mars. The 2575 dating concurs with the war winding down in 2573 (Deceit).
[811] Dating Benny: The Sword of Forever (Benny NA #14) - The year is given.
[812] Dating Arrangements for War (BF #57) - This epilogue occurs five years before the main story.
[813] Dating Human Nature (NA #38) - No date is given, but Ellerycorp and the Travellers are mentioned, suggesting this is around Benny’s native time.
[814] Dating Rain of Terror (BBC children’s 2-in-1 #8, released in Alien Adventures) - The evidence sits at odds with itself. Professor Willard flew shuttlecraft “during the Cyber War” (p319); he’s now older, indicating that it’s a generation, or two at most, beyond that event. However, humanity’s advancement - particularly the affordability, reliability and speed of space travel - seems well beyond that, more akin to the sort of thing one would expect from the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire (The Long Game). Along those lines, the Doctor thinks that the Xirrinda colony was established “in the last year or two” (p226), and yet the colony already has “eight million” colonists (p261). The “Cyber War” reference is very hard to shake, though, and space travel is very common in Bernice Summerfield’s era. Perhaps it’s a really nice planet.
No mention is made of either the Earth-Draconian conflict or the Dalek Wars, so the placement here, as much as anything, reflects the likelihood that the story occurs during a (relatively) peaceful period for Earth.
[815] Dating Benny: The Sword of Forever (Benny NA #14) - The year is given.
[816] “Forty years” before Benny: The Judas Gift
[817] “Decades” before Benny: Resurrecting the Past. The Dalek Wars might well account for the drop in the moon’s population. The dark side of the moon, at least in our time, never faces the Earth, but is not in permanent darkness.
[818] Dating Benny: The Vampire Curse: “Possum Kingdom” (Benny collection #12b) - The year is given.
[819] Dating Arrangements for War (BF #57) - No dating clues exist in this story or its sequel, Thicker Than Water, but placement is possible by extrapolating from the Bernice Summerfield range. Benny: Parallel Lives: “Hiding Places”, set in 2606, establishes that Adrian Wall fought in the invasion of Vilag, suggesting that - once allowances are made that a Killoran lifespan might differ from that of humans - Arrangements for War and Thicker Than Water must occur closer to the start of the twenty-seventh century than not.
A recurring theory in fandom holds that the unnamed bodyguards to the Gallifreyan Imperiatrix Pandora (Gallifrey: Lies) were Killorans, and that historical intervention on the part of the Time Lords - who “time-looped” the bodyguards’ homeworld - is responsible for the Killorans transitioning from the primal brutes who attacked Vilag to the more civilised builders seen in the Benny range. A “time loop” would not in itself account for such historical revision, though; moreover, Adrian vividly remembers the Vilag invasion in Parallel Lives, so it’s not as if the event was erased from history entirely.
[820] Benny: Parallel Lives: “Hiding Places”
[821] Dating Thicker Than Water (BF #73) - A year has passed since the Killoran invasion.
[822] Benny: The Judas Gift
[823] Dating Thicker Than Water (BF #73) - The blurb says that it’s “Three years after Vilag was all but laid waste by the Killorans.” The Doctor here takes Mel to meet Evelyn for “the first time”, which disputes the claim in Instruments of Darkness that they’ve not only met but travelled together for a time, although the contradiction is literally limited to a few lines of dialogue between the Doctor and Mel in an opening scene. Nonetheless, it is there.
[824] A Death in the Family. Evelyn resides on Pelican for seven years, and remarks at the end of her life that Rossiter died “ten years ago” - so she must live on Vilag for three years after his passing, and an indeterminate amount of time with him after Thicker Than Water.
[825] “Seven years, three months and eleven days” before Demontage.
[826] Cold Fusion. The year of the revolution is given (p230), the science fair was “ten years ago” (p200).
[827] Dating Deimos/The Resurrection of Mars (BF BBC7 #4.5-4.6) - It’s “centuries” after the destruction of the Martian warfleet in The Seeds of Death. Mention is made of the “hippy holiday camp” seen in Phobos, set in 2589, suggesting that this story occurs in the same period.
Mars here gains a human-compatible atmosphere (curiously, no mention is made of how the three hundred thousand people living on Mars are currently surviving without one). Mars was terraformed and given a breathable atmosphere in the early twenty-second century - however, the Daleks released a virus during the Dalek Invasion that ate all of the Martian atmosphere’s oxygen and took “years” (according to Fear Itself, PDA, p63) if not decades to reverse. It’s entirely possible - although it’s not expressly said - that the same fate befell the planet when the Daleks overran Mars during the Dalek Wars (in 2545, according Benny: Beige Planet Mars), which both greatly reduced the number of people living on Mars (cited as three million in 2545 in Beige Planet Mars, but only three hundred thousand in The Resurrection of Mars) and prompted the Mars Terraforming Project seen here. Either way, Mars has a breathable atmosphere in Beige Planet Mars, set in 2595, further encouraging a placement prior to that.
The Earth public thinks that the Ice Warriors are extinct, suggesting that The Resurrection of Mars occurs prior to the Federation’s diplomatic contacts with them (The Curse of Peladon, etc.), and neatly ties in with the claim in Legacy that the “extinct” Martians became of interest during the twenty-sixth century. The re-ionizer technology used on Mars is, clearly, a precursor to the ionizer seen in The Ice Warriors (even if the re-ionizer on Mars, if anything, seems more powerful that the model used at Britannicus Base).
[828] Dating The Also People (NA #44) - The remains of “a sub gas giant that had broken up sixty-two billion years previously” is referred to (p168) and the Doctor said his “diary’s pretty much clear” until “the heat death of the universe” (p186). This led the Virgin edition of this book to conclude that the story was set many billions of years in the future. However, the Bernice Summerfield New Adventures made clear that the story takes place around Benny’s native
time.
[829] Happy Endings
[830] Dating TimeH: Child of Time (TimeH #11) - The year is given. Sodality in 2586 appears to be operating from a “potential” timeline - which is very fortunate, as the late twenty-sixth century is the native era of Bernice Summerfield, and it’s impossible to reconcile the heavy amount known about this period with the total lack of a mention concerning the devastated Earth that Sodality has brought about. Sodality is expressly said to hail from a “possible” future in the Time Hunter-related film Daemons: Daemos Rising, and in Child of Time (co-written by David J. Howe, publisher of Time Hunter and the writer of Daemos Rising), and Honoré innately senses that Sodality’s Earth isn’t part of established history. By extension, this would seem to mean that Emily Blandish herself originates from a potential reality, but then crosses over and takes up residence in the universe’s “main” timeline (similar to Elizabeth Klein; see Colditz). Whether or not this means that the Doctor who appears in The Cabinet of Light and TimeH: Child of Time is from the “proper” timeline or Sodality’s altered history is an open-ended question. The “child of time” that Mastho here covets isn’t to be confused with Chiyoko, the “child of time” seen in the DWM comics.
[831] A decade before Benny: Return to the Fractured Planet.
[832] Dating Return of the Living Dad (NA #53) - It’s “2587” (p5).
[833] So Vile a Sin
[834] Dating Phobos (BF BBC7 #1.5) - “Apparently the year is 2589”, the Doctor says.
[835] “Three centuries” after The Leisure Hive.
[836] “Ten years” before Prime Time.
[837] Dating Demontage (EDA #20) - No date is given, but the art forger Newark Rappare appears in both this and Benny: Dragon’s Wrath (set in 2593), and he is “middle aged” in both.
[838] Dating Cold Fusion (MA #29) - The novel was originally set at the same time as So Vile a Sin and tied in quite closely to that book, but it became clear So Vile a Sin wouldn’t be released as scheduled. Following that, Cold Fusion was reworked to occur just before the Benny New Adventures, and included the first mention of Dellah, the planet Benny was based on for that series. A copyright notice on a wardroid states that this is 2692, but that was a typographical error, and should have read “2592”. It’s “four hundred years” before Chris and Roz’s time (p165). It’s stated that the Adjudicators have been around for “half a millennium” (p247).
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