B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (270 page)

The City had a single access point: the Uptime Gate, a powerful time corridor connected to the far future of the universe, at a point beyond which most of the temporal powers travelled. The Rump Parliament unofficially represented Faction Paradox’s interests within the City.
 [1782]

Marcus Americanus Scriptor visited the City of the Saved in search of the reincarnated Adolf Hitler. Upon learning that Hitler had been sentenced to imprisonment for six million lifetimes, Scriptor vowed to be waiting when he was released.
 [1783]

w - FP: Of the City of the Saved...
 [1784]

The first of Compassion’s timeship offspring, the unstable Antipathy, escaped from the Homeworld of the Great Houses and smuggled himself into the City. Antipathy’s presence disrupted the codes governing the City and caused political unrest; to rectify the problem, Godfather Avatar of Faction Paradox - a
loa
who took human hosts - destroyed himself and Antipathy’s mind with an annihilation bomb.

Compassion’s original iteration, Laura Tobin, worked as a private investigator in the City. Her investigation into the advent of “potent” weapons, i.e. weapons that could kill residents of the City, brought her into contact with the timeship Compassion (a.k.a. Compassion V) - who wanted Tobin to become her living avatar, and help restore order within the City. Tobin refused to become a spokesperson for a would-be goddess, and departed onto the City streets.

Antipathy’s actions had pushed various factions within the City toward civil war. As a safeguard against the City’s destruction, UniMac helped to secretly establish an enclave of humans within Antipathy’s interior dimensions.

Just as a universe existed before ours, so will another universe be formed from the ashes of ours, and the physical laws there will be very different. This will be the domain of Saraquazel.
 [1785]
The monstrous Zytragupten will exist in the universe to come. A Zytragupten child, the Lokhus, will be born malformed and culled. It will be cast into the infernal abyss, but survive, fall into our universe and arrive in the village of Stockbridge.
 [1786]

Future History Section Sidebars

Fixed Points in Time

The new
Doctor Who
has introduced the concept of “fixed points in time” as a shorthand, of sorts, to address a problem with time travel that classic
Doctor Who
always had, but was hesitant to discuss. Namely, why does the Doctor treat the past of modern-day Earth as if it’s sacrosanct, but happily intervene in events set in Earth’s future? To a time traveller, most if not all of history should be the past from
some
vantage point, meaning that the nexus points of both Earth’s “past” and “future” history should be treated with equal weight.

Even David Whitaker (
Doctor Who
’s first script editor, and the show’s biggest proponent of the “You cannot change history, not one line” approach to time travel) is somewhat hypocritical about this. On Whitaker’s watch, it’s literally impossible for Barbara to alter Aztec history (
The Aztecs
), and efforts to change Napoleon’s timeline are doomed to failure (the final scene of
The Reign of Terror
). However, given the chance to overthrow the Daleks who have conquered Earth (conventionally, without benefit of time travel) circa 2167, the Doctor and his friends without hesitation do so (
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
). Whitaker’s successors favoured the view that altering history
was
possible, but the dichotomy of leaving Earth’s past alone while mucking about with its future remained. The slaughter of the Huguenots in Paris, 1572, must be allowed to play itself out (
The Massacre
), but stopping Mavic Chen and the Daleks from building a Time Destructor in the year 4000 is fair game (
The Daleks’ Master Plan
).

In the early Silurian stories (
Doctor Who and the Silurians
,
The Sea Devils
), the third Doctor further complicates matters by advocating an accord between humanity and the Silurians that he must know - as a matter of established history - didn’t happen. It’s fairly evident that Malcolm Hulke, Terrance Dicks, et al, were more concerned with the stories’ morality play than the temporal implications of the Doctor’s viewpoint, but the lack of any explanation has been conspicuous by its absence.

In the new series, moments/events that must, at all cost, happen to preserve the integrity of history are called “fixed points in time”. The phrase has become fairly common currency, despite the tenth Doctor stressing to Adelaide Brooke in
The Waters of Mars
that it’s all conjecture, not established fact. (“I mean, it’s only a theory... but I think certain moments in time are fixed. Tiny, precious moments. Everything else is in flux, anything can happen, but those certain moments, they have to stand. This base, on Mars, with you, Adelaide Brooke, this is one vital moment. What happens here must always happen.”) Whatever his uncertainty about the topic, though, the Doctor so strongly believes that the devastation of Pompeii (
The Fires of Pompeii
) is a “fixed point in history” that he and Donna kill twenty thousand people to make it happen.

In
Cold Blood
, and in an echo of past Silurian stories, the eleventh Doctor says that human and Silurian representatives in 2020 can craft an accord between their races because “There are fixed points through time, where things must always stay the way they are. This is not one of them. This is an opportunity, a temporal tipping point. Whatever happens today, will change future events, create its own timeline, its own reality.” That isn’t a very satisfactory explanation, though... wouldn’t the successful brokering of such a deal in 2020 overwrite all of the fixed points in time
after
that? Would the timetable of Adelaide Brooke’s mission to Mars still hold true if humanity had gained access to Silurian technology about three decades beforehand? It’s fair to say that
Cold Blood
doesn’t actually answer the problems inherent in the Pertwee Silurian stories, it just more directly acknowledges that they exist.

The consequence of averting a fixed point in time isn’t consistently rendered... when River Song subverts a fixed point in time by not shooting the eleventh Doctor (
The Wedding of River Song
), it instantly causes all of time and space to occur at the same moment. But when the tenth Doctor prevents Adelaide Brooke from dying in
The Waters of Mars
, nothing appears to happen in the interim before she fulfills upon the fixed point by committing suicide. The Reapers appear when Rose saves her father in
Father’s Day
, but that might owe to her intervening in her personal history, not a fixed point. The comic story “Ripper’s Curse” seems confused about this - the eleventh Doctor (seemingly forgetting everything he learned in
The Waters of Mars
) says that every victim of Jack the Ripper is “a static point in space and time, they can’t be altered”, then he, Amy and Rory
do
intervene anyway, and incur no penalty when one victim is swapped for another. Perhaps a “static point” is different from a “fixed point”, but it isn’t explained how. Further complicating this,
The Wedding of River Song
claims that Lake Silencio, 2011, is a “still point in time” that can be used to create a “fixed point”, but doesn’t actually define what a “still point” is or how one comes about.

The final way that the new series addresses “fixed points in time” is that Captain Jack is named as one following Rose’s resurrecting him in
The Parting of the Ways
. (The Doctor in
Utopia
on Jack’s immortality: “You’re a fixed point in time and space. You’re a fact. That’s never meant to happen.”) This deviates from the established use of “fixed point in time”, but it at least has a certain internal logic: if Jack is, effectively, a mobile set of space-time coordinates that are impervious to being nullified, it might follow that his body could restore itself after being pulped (
TW: Children of Earth
). What effect becoming a “fixed point” had on Jack’s blood is more open to interpretation - in
TW: Miracle Day
, the Blessing recalibrates itself after scanning Jack’s blood, and Rex Matheson becomes similarly immortal owing to an infusion of Jack’s blood and highly unusual circumstances. It remains to be seen if Rex himself is now a “fixed point”, or just someone who can heal mortal injury.

The Dalek Emperors

Over the course of
Doctor Who
we see four different designs for the Dalek Emperor. We can be confident that this isn’t always the same individual and, even allowing for the ability of the Daleks as a species and individually to survive what looks like certain death, can reasonably conclude that there are at least three bearers of the title.

• The “Golden Emperor” -
The Dalek Chronicles
comic strip introduced a gold Emperor with an oversized, spherical head, and he also appeared in the Dalek books of the sixties - he was the central character of the strip and we learn a great deal about him. He’s never referred to as the “Golden Emperor” in the strip, but was in some supporting material, such as the game “The Race to the Golden Emperor” in
Terry Nation’s Dalek Annual 1979
.

The character was introduced to new audiences by reprints in the seventies
Dalek Annuals
and
Doctor Who Weekly
reprints early in the eighties, and
DWM
used the same design in two original comic strips: “Nemesis of the Daleks” (set in the twenty-sixth century) and “Emperor of the Daleks” (set after
Revelation of the Dalek
s). It’s unclear if this is meant to be the same individual, and the Emperor is apparently killed at the end of both stories.

• The “Evil Emperor” - In
The Evil of the Dalek
s, the Dalek Emperor is a vast, immobile Dalek based in a chamber in Dalek City. This design reappears in the stageplay
The Ultimate Adventure
, the
Dalek Empire
stories and
The Dalek Factor
. This Emperor is apparently killed at the end of
The Evil of the Daleks
, although he’s not quite dead the last time we see him in that story (and this chronology places
Dalek Empire
significantly after
The Evil of the Daleks
).

Some commentators (Lofficier and
About Time
included) have speculated that this is Davros, although dialogue in
The Evil of the Daleks
seems to rule that out by stating it’s the first time either the Doctor or the Emperor has met the other.

A more open question is whether this is the same individual as the Golden Emperor. The story “Secret of the Emperor” in
The Dalek Outer Space Book
depicts the Golden Emperor being rebuilt as an immobile Emperor based on Skaro. The design is not the same as seen in
The Evil of the Daleks
, but it’s clearly the same concept.

In John Peel’s books - the novelisations
The Chase
,
The Daleks’ Master Plan
,
The Power of the Daleks
,
The Evil of the Daleks
and his original novels
War of the Daleks
and
Legacy of the Daleks
- the Daleks are led by the Dalek Prime. This is the same individual Dalek who makes the speech about the Daleks becoming the supreme beings of the universe at the end of
Genesis of the Daleks
. In Peel’s version, he becomes the Daleks’ leader, and in
War of the Daleks
, the description of his casing closely matches that of the Golden Emperor.
War of the Daleks
and the novelisation of
The Evil of the Daleks
have the Dalek Prime and Emperor respectively as the last survivor of the original batch of Daleks - the same individual, in other words. This is the Golden Emperor who becomes the Evil Emperor, tweaked to fit the origin of the race seen in
Genesis of the Daleks
, as opposed to the one in
The Dalek Chronicles
. The real-life creator of the Daleks, Terry Nation, is said to have preferred the idea that the Daleks were rule by a Council rather than an Emperor, and the Dalek Prime fits that, too.