B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (27 page)

The Virgin edition of
Ahistory
suggested that Mondas was subject to time dilation, explaining why the Cybermen weren’t more advanced.
Timelink
and
The Death of Art
reached the same conclusion. However, the continents on Mondas are exactly like those on Earth, so this theory doesn’t account for the identical continental drift, assuming such a thing affected the ancient Earth in the
Doctor Who
universe.

[
205
] “Ten thousand years” before the novel
Iceberg
, which uses the same dating system as David Banks’ book
Cybermen
. This schism is the given explanation for the difference in appearance - and apparent lack of contact - between the Cybermen from
The Tenth Planet
and
The Invasion
.

[
206
] Dating
Spare Parts
(BF #34) - There is no dating evidence in the story itself. It takes place when Mondas is at its farthest point from Earth and the implication is that the return journey will be much faster than the outward one, as it will be powered.
Spare Parts
could, then, take place a matter of decades before
The Tenth Planet
(and further evidence for this might be the Mondasian society of
Spare Parts
resembles Earth’s in the mid-twentieth century).

That said, while it’s never quite stated, Mondas seems to have left the solar system within the lifetimes of the older characters, not the “millions of years” the Doctor spoke of in
The Tenth Planet
. There’s no indication that Mondas immediately set course for a return to the solar system. We know that the Cybermen didn’t attend the Armageddon Convention (
Revenge of the Cybermen
) and that the Convention was signed in 1609 (
The Empire of Glass
), so that they were a force to be reckoned with by the seventeenth century.

It therefore seems fair to speculate that the Cybermen piloted Mondas around the galaxy for a long time (certainly millennia) before finally returning to their native solar system.

[
207
]
The Underwater Menace

[
208
] The presence of blue grass in
The Hungry Earth
tips the Doctor off to the presence of Silurians.

[
209
]
Forty-Five:
“False Gods”. The terminology is a bit off here; creodonts were an entire order of mammals whose members included the Megistotherium, said to be the largest mammalian predator.

[
210
] When asked in
Autumn Mist
when humanity evolved, the Doctor says “the accepted figure’s about half a million years, though its really nearer six”. It’s only one suggestion that human origins in the
Doctor Who
universe stretch further than conventional scientific wisdom would have you think. According to
Image of the Fendahl
, the Fendahl skull arrived on Earth twelve million years ago, just as the first humanoid bipeds evolved - this is eight million years before Dr. Fendelman had believed.

[
211
] “Millions of years” before
FP: Ozymandias
. Presumably, these are the Martians wiped out by the Fendahl. It may also be a
Quatermass
in-joke, as
Quatermass and the Pit
depicted insectoid Martians who had become extinct millions of years before.

[
212
]
Image of the Fendahl

[
213
]
The Creed of the Kromon
, which we might retroactively think is referring to
The Judgement of Isskar.

Life on Mars

The Fendahl couldn’t have wiped out all life on Mars, as the Ice Warriors come from Mars and lived there at least from the time of the Ice Age on Earth (
The Ice Warriors
) until the twenty-first century (
The Seeds of Death
) and apparently far further into the future (
The Curse of Peladon
). It should be noted that in
Image of the Fendahl
, the Doctor only speculates that the Fendahl attacked Mars.

As it happens,
Image of the Fendahl
is not the only occasion that the show seemingly ignores the existence of the Ice Warrior civilisation on the Red Planet.
The Ambassadors of Death
has manned missions to Mars that don’t encounter the Ice Warriors (yet they
do
meet another alien race there - one that’s not from Mars itself).
Pyramids of Mars
, as the name suggests, has the Doctor and Sarah visiting a pyramid on Mars and never mentioning the Ice Warriors. We never see UNIT encounter the Ice Warriors, although
Castrovalva
has the fifth Doctor mimic his previous selves, and seems (unless, in his post-regeneration confusion, he’s just marrying together two unrelated elements) to refer to an adventure with the Brigadier and the Ice Warriors. In
The Christmas Invasion
, UNIT knows that there are Martians, and that they don’t look like the Sycorax.

Humanity hasn’t got as far as Mars by
The Seeds of Death
, explaining why they don’t know about the Martians. It’s harder to explain why Zoe, who is from a time when the solar system has been explored, is unaware of them.

Some fans (as well as sources like the FASA roleplaying game) have concluded that the Ice Warrior civilisation was subterranean - a view that’s practically taken for granted in the books and audios, even though there’s no evidence for it on screen. The books and audios have made further attempts to explain why the Ice Warriors are not well-known to future humanity. In particular,
Transit
featured a genocidal war fought in the late twenty-first century between Earth and Mars. Its vision of most Martians leaving the planet - with a few left behind as an underclass to the human colonists - is depicted in later stories such as
GodEngine
and
Fear Itself
(EDA).

Benny Summerfield is an expert on Martian history, but most accounts have her believing that the Martian civilisation is a dead one (or at the very least, that there are no Ice Warriors on Mars itself).

The Dying Days
attempted to reconcile some of the UNIT-era accounts by depicting a Martian culture influenced by the Osirians, who are disturbed by a British space mission (and there’s a fleeting reference to the aliens from
The Ambassadors of Death
). As it’s set in 1997, it would explain why UNIT know what Martians look like in
The Christmas Invasion
, and some fans have interpreted the line in the TV episode as a reference to the book.

[
214
] Dating
The Taking of Planet 5
(EDA #28) - It is “about 12 million years ago” (p71). The Elder Things aren’t the same as the Great Old Ones seen in Lovecraft’s work, so there’s no direct clash with this story and the Great Old Ones seen elsewhere in the
Doctor Who
novels.

Delphon was mentioned in
Spearhead from Space
, Tersurus got a mention in
The Deadly Assassin
but didn’t appear until the Comic Relief sketch
The Curse of Fatal Death.
According to
Alien Bodies
, the Raston robots (
The Five Doctors
) are built on Tersurus.

[
215
]
The Shadow of the Scourge

[
216
]
Blue Forgotten Planet

[
217
]
Just War

[
218
]
So Vile a Sin

[
219
] 9.25 million years before
Benny: Ghost Devices.

[
220
]
Lurkers at Sunlight’s Edge

[
221
]
Frontios.
Date unknown, but it’s long enough before the twentieth century that Turlough has the race memory, but doesn’t otherwise seem to know the Tractators by name.

[
222
]
The Seeds of Doom

[
223
]
St. Anthony’s Fire

[
224
]
The Quantum Archangel

[
225
]
The
Janus
Conjunction

[
226
]
The Dying Days

[
227
] Dating
Genocide
(EDA #4) - It’s 1.07 million years before 2,569,868 BC.

[
228
]
The Dark Path

[
229
] Millions of years before
Benny: Down
.

[
230
] Dating
Genocide
(EDA #4) - The precise date is given (p260).

[
231
] Dating
Frozen Time
(BF #98) - The Doctor, upon his revival, says he was frozen “millions of years” ago. There is no evidence that Arakssor’s imprisonment bears any relation to Varga’s mission (
The Ice Warriors
), and it could substantially pre-date it.

[
232
]
FP: The Eleven-Day Empire

[
233
] “Millions of years” before
The Slow Empire
. The Empire lasts “two million years” once it has been set up.

[
234
]
Nocturne

[
235
]
Slipback

[
236
]
Love and War

[
237
]
A Device of Death

[
238
] “A million years” before “Invaders from Gantac”.

[
239
] Viridios claims to have slept for “a million years” before
The Eternal Summer
. In real life, Viridios is a Celtic deity whose name means “Green Man” in the Celtic languages and Latin. Altar stones to Viridios have been recovered from Roman Britain; in
Doctor Who
terms, though, there’s no evidence that Viridios-worship went any further than the Stockbridge area, with the Doctor describing it as “highly localized”.

[
240
]
The Dying Days
. They would send an expedition to Earth, as seen in
The Ice Warriors
. Its loss presumably convinced them to use their scarce resources another way, and put them off conquering our planet.

[
241
]
Synthespians™

[
242
]
City of Death
. The earliest known use of fire was around 700,000 BC. Supporting this, the “second splinter” of Scaroth seen on screen is presented (somewhat confusingly) as a Neanderthal.

[
243
] Measured from
The Daleks
, in which the Doctor says that the Thal records “must go back nearly a half a million years”.