B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (293 page)

[
706
] “Twenty years” before
Frontier in Space
. General Williams claims that his ship was “damaged and helpless” and well as “unarmed”, but it managed to destroy a Draconian battlecruiser anyway. A scene cut from episode three explained that Williams used his “exhaust rockets” to destroy the other ship.

[
707
]
Head Games
(p165-166).

[
708
]
Love and War
(p10).

[
709
]
Frontier in Space

[
710
] Forty years before
Prisoner of the Daleks
.

[
711
]
Benny: Walking to Babylon
, p173.
Benny: Tears of the Oracle
verifies that publication occurred posthumously, as Watkinson died in 2515.

[
712
] Inferred from
The Tomb of the Cybermen.

The Cyber War

The “Cyber Wars” feature in much fan fiction and are referred to in a number of the books and audios. On television, though, the term “the Cyber War” is only used once, by the Doctor in
Revenge of the Cybermen
- everyone else refers to it simply as “the war”.

We are told that this war took place “centuries” beforehand, and that the human race won when they discovered that Cybermen were vulnerable to gold and invented the “glittergun”. Following their total defeat, the Cybermen launched a revenge attack on Voga, after which the Cybermen completely disappeared.

From the on-screen information, it seems that we can precisely position the date of this “Cyber War”: it can’t be before 2486, because in
The Tomb of the Cybermen
, the Cyber Race is thought to have been extinct for five hundred years after Mondas’ destruction. In that story, the Controller is ready to create a “new race” of Cybermen. We learn in
Attack of the Cybermen
that the Controller wasn’t destroyed at the end of
The Tomb of the Cybermen
, so we might presume that this new race emerged soon afterwards and began its conquests. A new type of Cyberman - possibly the
Earthshock
models - is created in
Cyberman 2
.

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).