B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (277 page)

Deep space interstellar missions with crews in suspended animation were launched in the twenty-first century according to
The Sensorites
, which would be after the events of this story. The lack of deep space travel would seem to set the story before
The Power of the Daleks
(whichever year that is).

Evidence in subsequent stories would indicate that it’s not set between 2068 and 2096, as Galactic Salvage and Insurance are covering spacecraft between those dates according to
Nightmare of Eden
(although if the space programme ended, it might explain why they went bust). If it was just Galactic Insurance, we could say it was just a meaningless brand name - we can buy Mars bars, that’s not evidence we’ve built chocolate factories on Mars. It’s Galactic
Salvage
and Insurance. The implication seems to be that whatever else they do, they salvage and insure spacecraft.

The T-Mat network seems to connect up the whole world - it includes both New York and Moscow, for example, which would seem inconsistent with the Cold War world of 2084 seen in
Warriors of the Deep
. Not every city in the world is named, of course, and
About Time
speculates that China might be in a hostile rival bloc, because no Chinese cities are named (although “Asiatic Centres” are). Finally, the story probably isn’t set after 2096, as four years seems too short a period to explore the entire solar system (
The Mutants
) before the interstellar missions mentioned in
The Sensorites
.

Or, to cut a long story short, and assuming a ten-year period before the story when T-Mat has been operating,
The Seeds of Death
has to be set more than ten years after
The Enemy of the World
(so after 2027), but before the Gravitron is installed in 2050.

This contradicts the limited space travel seen in stories (made after
The Seeds of Death
) to Mars in
The Ambassadors of Death
,
The Dying Days
and
Red Dawn
, and to Jupiter in
Memory Lane
and (accidentally)
The Android Invasion
, as well as the most likely date for
The Power of the Daleks
. If Vulcan was a rogue planet in our solar system, perhaps the colonisation mission was launched as it passed relatively close to Earth (although that piles supposition on supposition), or perhaps - more likely - the Vulcan colony had long failed and “doesn’t count”.

The Waters of Mars
, set in 2059, provides us with a lot of new information, mainly in the backstory of characters seen on computer screens. There are no direct or indirect references to the future history established in any other
Doctor Who
story (including
The Seeds of Death
), and it strongly supports an earlier, rather than later, dating for
The Seeds of Death
. It rules out
About Time
’s dating of circa 2090, given that’s after (we know now) Earth’s first lightspeed ship reached Proxima Centauri. Consequently, this edition of
Ahistory
has moved
The Seeds of Death
a few years earlier than previous editions, from ?2044 to c2040.

“Mankind has travelled no further than the moon” in
The Seeds of Death
. As discussed, a number of other stories have astronauts landing on Mars, and we have to fudge that, whenever we set
The Seeds of Death
.
The Waters of Mars
, though, has a full-fledged, historic, long-term colony on the planet in 2058.

It might seem plausible to speculate that Bowie Base One “doesn’t count” because it was destroyed, just as it’s easy enough to see how manned space exploration might be temporarily abandoned (for a few years, at least) in the light of the disaster. As with the issue of when the Silurians ruled (see “A Complete Misnomer”), though,
Ahistory
always tries to look at the spirit of a story, as well as every letter. We might be able to fudge “no further than the moon”, but the whole thrust of
The Waters of Mars
is that Brooke’s sacrifice was the spark that directly inspired further space exploration. We know from
The Moonbase
that space travel was not abandoned in the 2060s.

We face the problem that Brooke doesn’t know about the Ice Warriors, but given that UNIT know about the Martians (
The Christmas Invasion
, even confining ourselves just to television stories), this is a problem whenever we place it. Brooke and Cain were the first and second female Britons to land on the moon... and yet, we saw Gia Kelly on the moon in
The Seeds of Death
. That said, assuming Kelly is British, she didn’t “land on the moon”, she went there by Travel-Mat. The act of piloting the ship to a safe landing is what “counts”, there. For that matter, if we’re counting every Briton who’s been to the moon, then there was a hospital full of them that materialised there in
Smith and Jones
.

Accepting that
The Seeds of Death
is set before
The Waters of Mars
, we now have to find somewhere in the timeline for the former before 2059, where there’s about ten years with no evidence of human space exploration. Only one exists, between 2032 and 2040. We know from
The Waters of Mars
that Peter Bennett gave up space exploration to look after his daughter Mia, who was born in 2032. We are told that Yuri Kerenski started working as a doctor for the Russian space agency in 2032. There’s nothing then until 2040, when
The Waters of Mars
tells us there is a burst of space exploration activity in 2040 to 2042 (as documented in the timeline). This is exactly what we’d like to see, exactly when we’d want to see it. The connection is not made in
The Waters of Mars
, but we can conjecture this: around 2032, Russia and America, at least, had functioning space programmes. These were abandoned when T-Mat came along shortly afterwards - Peter Bennett either got out just in time or saw which way the wind was blowing. Yuri got his job at the wrong time, and either didn’t specialise in treating long term cosmonauts until later in his career, or he treated former cosmonauts or people working on the T-Mat station on the moon. Following the end of T-Mat, there was a burst of recruitment and activity.

The original storyline set the date as “3000 AD”, but later press material suggested the story took place “at the beginning of the twenty-first century”.

As we might expect, no fan consensus exists on the dating of
The Seeds of Death
, and probably - despite
The Waters of Mars
bringing a lot more information to the debate - never will. The first edition of
The Making of Doctor Who
claimed the story is set in “the latter part of the twentieth century”, the second was less specific and simply placed the story in the “twenty-first century”. The first two editions of
The Programme Guide
set the story “c2000”,
The Terrestrial Index
alters this to “c2090”, and the novel
Lucifer Rising
concurs with this date (p171).
DWM
writer Richard Landen suggested “2092”.
Timelink
says “2096, February”, conceding “this is a difficult story to date”.
Encyclopedia of the Worlds of Doctor Who
set the story in “the twenty-second century”. Ben Aaronovitch’s
Transit
follows on from
The Seeds of Death
, with his “Future History Continuity” setting the television story “c2086”;
About Time
conforms to that.

[
110
] Whatever Happened to Travel-Mat?

While we’re told space travel will be readopted at the end of
The Seeds of Death
, no-one says they’ll abandon T-Mat. As T-Mat is an astonishingly useful technology - one that’s quickly been adopted by most countries, if not all - it seems odd that we never see it again. It’s not just absent from the twenty-first century either - it’s missing from every story set on a future Earth (with one exception:
The Year of Intelligent Tigers
, set circa 2185, which suggests that large spaceships use it). Service might be disrupted by the Dalek Invasion, but you’d think they’d have it working again for, say,
Frontier in Space.

The obvious explanation is that Earth can afford a space programme or a T-Mat programme, but not both. This is implicit in
The Seeds of Death
. It might not be simply a case of money so much as expertise - it’s stated that a number of top rocket scientists became T-Mat ones. Logically, if you can instantaneously beam men and materials to the moon, it ought to lead to a mass colonisation of the moon - but it hasn’t. Earth’s priorities have changed, mankind is looking inward.
The Seeds of Death
offers a world where the technology is there for space exploration, but the political will isn’t (as such, it’s the most realistic prediction of the twenty-first century that
Doctor Who
writers made in the sixties).

There are other explanations, all pure speculation, and mainly economic. T-Mat is a network requiring a huge infrastructure, and must be expensive. When real-life people were presented with the choice of seven hours on a normal plane or two hours on Concorde, they ended up picking the normal plane on cost grounds. Presumably using the T-Mat isn’t free, and the technology might not look so attractive if instant travel from London to New York cost ten times more than taking a plane. Alternatively, the analogy might be with trams - a system with many advantages over the cars that replaced them, but which lost out for all sorts of reasons (mainly that it was hard for them to co-exist, and trams required governmental funding but cars made money in taxes). Even if individuals aren’t picking up the T-Mat bills, someone must be. It’s a centralised system, and perhaps it’s an all or nothing proposition - either a worldwide network or it’s useless (like, say, GPS in the present day). Or it might be that space travel starts paying off - perhaps materials from the asteroid belt and cheap energy from space means there’s suddenly an abundance of resources. Perhaps there were disasters. These could either be
Hindenburg
-style serious failures of the T-Mat system itself, or unintended consequences like T-Mat allowing a rapid spread of something undesirable - terrorists, diseases or even just migrant workers or counterfeit/grey market goods.

Transit
tackles these questions, and imagines a solar system radically transformed a generation after T-Mat. Its author, Ben Aaronovitch, dated
The Seeds of Death
to about 2085 and
Transit
to about 2109, with the T-Mat system in continuous use between them - the story is essentially
The Seeds of Death: The Next Generation
, complete with Ice Warriors. But this needn’t have been a continuous process. Perhaps, once the solar system had been explored by rockets for a generation, the political will and funding re-emerged and the T-Mat network was rebuilt and expanded (just as tram networks are now being re-established in many cities).

In the future, we see stories where rockets and transmats
can
co-exist, but mainly as a way to beam from a spacecraft to the surface of a planet - not as mass transit. But even given that, transmats are surprisingly rare in humanity’s future. On television, humans use transmats in
The Mutants, The Ark in Space
,
The Sontaran Experiment
and
Revenge of the Cybermen
(and three of those stories use the same machine!), and transmats are mentioned in
The Twin Dilemma
(but it’s alien technology). So we might not know exactly why T-Mat was abandoned, but it clearly was.

[
111
]
The Indestructible Man
(p78).

[
112
] International Space Command is mentioned in
The Tenth Planet
and
Revenge of the Cybermen
, as well as
The Moonbase
, where it seems to be an agency of the World Zones Authority as seen in
The Enemy of the World
- we hear about “the General Assembly”, “Atlantic Zone 6”, and the head of the ISC is a “Controller” Rinberg. Ion jet rockets are mentioned in
The Seeds of Death.