B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (311 page)

[
1245
] Dating
The Monster of Peladon
(11.4) - Sarah guesses that it is “fifty years” after the Doctor’s first visit, and this is later confirmed by other people, including the Doctor, Thalira and Alpha Centauri.

[
1246
] Dating
The Blue Angel
(EDA #27) - No date is given, but the ship serves the Federation and is en route to Peladon.

[
1247
] Dating “A Cold Day in Hell” (
DWM
#130-133) - According to the Doctor, “you Martians allied yourself to the Federation years ago”, and this is after
The Monster of Peladon
, because Axaxyr and the events of that story are mentioned. These Martians were “born and bred on the frigid wastes of Mars”, and they style A-Lux “New Mars”, so it would seem to be their original planet that’s uninhabitable.

[
1248
] Dating “Redemption” (
DWM
#134) - This is Olla’s native time, so the story is set shortly after “A Cold Day in Hell”.

[
1249
] Dating
Bang-Bang-A-Boom!
(BF #39) - No date is given, but the story is set in the Federation period.

[
1250
]
War of the Daleks

[
1251
]
Legacy
. We learn that the Vogans were “ultimately self-destructive” and that the Cybermen eventually settled on a “New Mondas”, as they wished to do in
Silver Nemesis
. However, this second homeworld has also been destroyed by the time of
Legacy
. The Cybermen survive to appear in
The Crystal Bucephalus
.

[
1252
] In
The Daleks’ Master Plan
, Mavic Chen seems to have been Guardian for a very long time. He says, when accused of stealing the taranium, “Why should I arrange that fifty years be spent secretly mining to acquire this mineral...” - which implies, but does not actually state, that he has been actively involved with the plot for half a century. Against this,
The Guardian of the Solar System
establishes that Chen started mining taranium for reasons entirely unrelated to the Daleks, and only joined the conspiracy after the destruction of the giant clock in 3999 threatens Earth’s security - a time-table that’s in keeping with his being named as the newest member of the conspiracy, its “most recent ally”, in the TV story.
Neverland
cites 3950 as the year that Chen became Guardian of the Solar System.

The non-aggression pact is referred to in
The Daleks’ Master Plan
. This perhaps suggests that planets in the solar system were in conflict before this time, and Chen’s hope that peace will spread throughout the universe implies that much of known space is at war. A short scene in
Legacy
suggests that Chen did not become Guardian until much later.

[
1253
] Dating
Iris: The Sound of Fear
(Iris audio #2.1) - Iris and Gold meet at an Intergalactic Song Contest won by Nicky Newman, who appears in
Bang-Bang-a-Boom!
, so the two stories must occur relatively close to one another. Tom is no longer travelling with Iris and Panda, as he suddenly fell in love with someone he met while they battled giant alien cockroaches.

[
1254
]
Iris: The Two Irises

[
1255
]
Placebo Effect

[
1256
]
The Book of the Still

[
1257
] Probably some decades before
The Only Good Dalek
.

[
1258
] Carmodi was born as one of the Unnoticed’s sensitives thirty years before
The Book of the Still
. At the end of that novel, she paradoxically averts the creation of the Unnoticed, making it debatable whether these events occurred in the proper history or not.

[
1259
] “Twenty years” before
Max Warp.

[
1260
] Dating “Deathworld” (
DWW
#15-16) - The Doctor explains in the framing sequence that the Ice Warriors “came from Mars thousands of years ago, then spread their conquests through the galaxy”. Trisilicate is a mineral that’s only been found on Mars and Peladon by
The Monster of Peladon
, so this story is set after that. The two races don’t recognise each other, and the Cybermen refer to the Cyberman Empire.

Do the Cybermen Ever Have an Empire?

As they are the second best-known monsters to fight the Doctor, it’s easy to assume that the Cybermen are second only to the Daleks when it comes to the power they wield and territory they control. Yet there’s precious little evidence for this in the televised stories.

We see or hear that at various points in history, humanity, Daleks, Sontarans, Rutans, Draconians, Mutts, Osirians, Tharils, Jagaroth, Skonnos, Movellans, Autons and even the Chelonians (according to
Zamper
) all control vast areas of our galaxy. Elsewhere in the universe, races have achieved domination of an entire galaxy - in
The Daleks’ Master Plan
alone, we meet eight delegates who each have total control of one of the Outer Galaxies. The Wirrn (
The Ark in Space
) dominated Andromeda until humanity drove them out. The winners, though, are... the Dominators, the masters of “ten galaxies” according to
The Dominators.
(They also state they control “the whole galaxy” that Dulkis is part of, but while it’s not as impressive a boast, neither is it the contradiction some reference sources seem to think.) Linx’s boast (in
The Time Warrior
) that the Sontarans have subjugated every galaxy in the universe must surely only be rhetoric.

Away from the televised stories, there’s a parallel universe where the Roman Empire has conquered the entire galaxy (“The Iron Legion”), and the Gubbage Cones (
The Crystal Bucephalus
), Cat-People (
Invasion of the Cat-People
) and Foamasi (
Placebo Effect
) are all stated to be or have been major galactic powers.

So what of the Cybermen? For the most part, their effectiveness as would-be galactic conquerors is tepid to say the least. In
Doomsday
, tellingly, an army of parallel-universe Cybermen that’s millions strong is no match for four Daleks, and when Dalek reinforcements arrive, the Cybermen are routed in minutes.

Perhaps surprisingly, in the four decades since the Cybermen debuted, the most territory we ever actually see them control in a television story... is one planet, and it’s their homeworld. In
The Tenth Planet
, they control Mondas, which is destroyed at the end of the adventure. After that, the best they manage is one complex on one planet - in
The Tomb of the Cybermen
and
Attack of the Cybermen
, they control their city on Telos. In every other story, we see only a small force launching a stealthy attack - usually with a larger army being held in reserve - and every story ends with the defeat or destruction of every single member of that army (with the possible exception of
Attack of the Cybermen
, where a base on the moon is mentioned and its fate isn’t accounted for). In a number of stories (
The Tomb of the Cybermen
,
Revenge of the Cybermen
,
Earthshock
,
Attack of the Cybermen
and possibly
Silver Nemesis
) it’s explicitly stated that the Cybermen are on the verge of extinction.

The audios
The Harvest
and
Sword of Orion
follow the same pattern. “A handful” survive in
Real Time
. The Cybermen fare no better in the books - in
Legacy
, the Federation thinks they’re extinct.
Iceberg
and
Illegal Alien
feature a small group of isolated survivors. They’re routed in
Killing Ground
, which ends - to compound their problems - with a group of converted humans setting out to pick off any Cybermen they can find.

In
none
of these stories does anyone claim that the Cybermen have “an empire” or anything like it.

Despite all of this, there’s some evidence in the
DWM
comic strips that the Cybermen
do
have an empire. “Deathworld” directly makes this claim (a Cyberman tells an Ice Warrior, “Why are you intruding on a planet of the Cybermen Empire?”), and “Throwback”, while not making actual mention of an empire, shows the Cybermen at their most powerful. They’re feared, with a futuristic city on Telos, vast space fleets and the military power to conquer whole worlds with ease. “Black Legacy” shows Cybermen of the same vein as those seen in “Throwback”, but is difficult to date.

“Kane’s Story” makes reference of a “Cyber-Emperor” and is set at a time when Davros is the Emperor of the Daleks - so it’s between
Revelation of the Daleks
and
Remembrance of the Daleks
(or after “Emperor of the Daleks” and before
Remembrance of the Daleks
, if we take the other media into account).

The Cybermen are also powerful at the time of
Earthshock
(in 2526), and this chronology links that to their re-emergence from their tomb on Telos (the
Cybermen
audio series appears to do the same). So there may well be a Cyber Empire blossoming in the late twenty-fifth, early twenty-sixth century - although it seems to have fallen by the time of
Frontier in Space
(2540), presumably after their crushing defeat in the Cyber War. The seemingly formidable Twelfth Cyber Legion is seen in
A Good Man Goes to War
(set in the fifty-second century)... but the Doctor deals it an indeterminate amount of damage while learning Amy’s location. Nonetheless, logic suggests that at least eleven other Cyber Legions must exist in this time zone, whatever their effectiveness.

[
1261
] “Fifteen years” before
Placebo Effect.

[
1262
] Dating
Legacy
(NA #25) - The dating of this book is problematic. It has to be set after “3948”, when a couple of the fictional reference texts cited were written (p37). The Doctor says that it is “the thirty-ninth century” (p55) and later narrows this down to the “mid-thirty-ninth century give or take a decade” (p84) [c.3850]. The novel is set “one hundred years” after
The Curse of Peladon
(p106), at a time when “young” Mavic Chen is still a minor official and Amazonia, who first appeared at the end of
The Curse of Peladon
, is the Guardian of the Solar System (p237) [so before 3950]. It is “thirty years” before a Dalek War that might well be
The Daleks’ Master Plan
(p299) [therefore 3970] and “six hundred years” after
The Ice Warriors
(p89) [therefore 3600, favouring the dating of that story as 3000]. The book takes place a couple of months before
Theatre of War
, and as that book is definitely set in 3985, this last date has been adopted.

[
1263
] Dating
Theatre of War
(NA #26) - The book is set soon after
Legacy
in “3985” (p1), a fact confirmed by Benny’s diary (“Date: 3985, or something close”, p21), and the TARDIS’ Time Path indicator (p81).

Benny: The Wake
confirms that Bernice (from her perspective) first visits the Braxiatel Collection and meets Irving Braxiatel “a thousand years” in the future of her native era. This is slightly hard to reconcile against the Benny audios, where events progress in rough symmetry with the
Gallifrey
series - meaning that Braxiatel in 2610 is aware of the oncoming Last Great Time War, and it’s a bit hard to think that he toils away for another thousand years before finally shutting the Collection down and returning home (in
Gallifrey: Mindbomb
). That said, there’s no evidence that the Collection
isn’t
active at the time of
Theatre of War
, even if nothing else is presently known about its status after 2610. In
Tales from the Vault
, the fourth Doctor identifies a painting that was stolen from the Braxiatel Collection “over two centuries ago” - he can’t mean that amount of time before the story (which is set in 2002), and so must mean that long ago in his lifetime, suggesting the Collection is in operation at least that long.