B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (327 page)

It is perhaps also significant that in stories set after the destruction of Gallifrey, such as
Father Time
,
Hope, Sometime Never
,
The End of the World
and
Utopia
, the Doctor is capable of travelling much further into the future (although he also seems quite capable of doing so in other stories set before Gallifrey’s destruction, such as
Timewyrm: Apocalypse
and
The One Doctor
).

[
1700
] The back cover copy from
FP: Movers
, building on
FP: The Book of the War
. The “supernova” in question would seem to be the one from
The Ark
, rather than the one from
The End of the World
.

[
1701
]
FP: Movers
. Date unknown, but the blurb (in accordance with
FP: The Book of the War
) establishes that the posthumanity era follows Earth’s final demise.

[
1702
]
FP: Newtons Sleep

[
1703
]
FP: Of the City of the Saved

[
1704
] Dating
Infinite Requiem
(NA #36) - Events at the Pridka Dream Centre occur “Beyond Common Era of Earth Calendar” (p83), millennia after the destruction of Earth, and the presence of Morestrans and Monoids emphasises that this is the far future. This date is arbitrary.

[
1705
] Dating
TimeH: Peculiar Lives
(
TimeH
#7) - The era isn’t named, but this strain of humanity is so advanced that one of their number, Sanfiel, has lived for “tens of millennia” purely on the basis of his genetics.

[
1706
]
Evolution
(p40).

[
1707
] Dating
The Well-Mannered War
(MA #33) - This is “right at the end of the Humanian era, after the destruction of Earth” (p25) and “the fifty-eighth segment of time”.

[
1708
]
The Well-Mannered War

Eras

The Humanian Era was first mentioned in
Doctor Who - The Movie
, which also referred to the Rassilon Era. The TARDIS console prop for that story also included references to the Peon, Manussan, Sumaron, Kraaiian and Sensorian eras.
Zagreus
adds the Morestran Era to the list.

The Humanian Era includes Earth in 1999, and is presumably a reference to the human race.
The Well-Mannered War
implies that it’s simply the Era when humans exist. The Rassilon Era applies to Gallifrey (the “present” for the Doctor would seem to be 5725.2 in the Rassilon Era, according to the TV movie).
Neverland
specifies that the period around the Federation and Mavic Chen was the Sensorian. The Manussan and Morestran eras are presumably references to the planets from
Snakedance
and
Planet of Evil
respectively. Taking all this at face value, it would seem that eras can overlap each other - the Sensorian and Morestran eras, at least, fall comfortably within the Humanian Era.

[
1709
]
Return of the Living Dad
, tying in with the date for
Delta and the Bannermen.

[
1710
] Dating
Delta and the Bannermen
(24.3) - An entirely arbitrary date. However, Nostalgia Trips is notorious throughout the “five galaxies”, suggesting that the story is set in a far future period of intergalactic travel. In
Dragonfire
, Svartos serves “the twelve galaxies”, so perhaps it is set later than this story. While only the Daleks had broken the time barrier by 4000 AD (
The Daleks’ Master Plan
), the human ship in
Planet of the Spiders
and the Movellan ship in
Destiny of the Daleks
have “time warp capability”, and we see a couple of races developing rudimentary time travel around now (Magnus Greel in 5000 AD, the Metebelis Spiders a little later). Such secrets are limited, and are lost by the time of
The Ark
. Murray, the bus driver, says “the 1950s nights back on Navaro were never like this”, which implies nostalgia parties rather than that he lived through the 1950s himself.
The Terrestrial Index
set this story “c.15,000”,
Timelink
went for “????’ (sic),
About Time
broadly dated it to “the future, possibly the
far
future”.

[
1711
] “Twenty years” before
Nevermore.

[
1712
] Dating
Nevermore
(BF BBC7 #4.3) - The works of Poe have readily survived, to such an extent that Uglosi and company can correctly recite them. It’s possible this story occurs in the
far
future, as the Doctor upon leaving sets the coordinates for “The Humanian Era” - then again, that doesn’t automatically rule out
Nevermore
taking place there as well. It should also be noted that authorities in Cassiopeia have contact with the Time Lords, which also suggests a later placement. Even so, this dating represents a guess.

[
1713
]
The Quantum Archangel

[
1714
] Dating
The One Doctor
(BF #27) - The Doctor expounds on the subject of the Vulgar End of Time at the beginning of the story.

[
1715
] Dating
Omega
(BF #47) - The dating is arbitrary, but much about this story resembles the Vulgar End of Time: time travel is now deemed unfashionable rather than unattainable; the exploits of the Doctor, Omega and - generally speaking - the Time Lords are widely renowned, if somewhat erroneously; and the period is one of prosperity, leisure and dullness. The Doctor is said to have accidentally wiped out the thought-based Scintillans while combating space pirates who used telepathically-controlled weapons and ships, but a proper dating for this isn’t given.

[
1716
] Dating
100:
“My Own Private Wolfgang” (BF #100b) - This is vaguely said to happen “thousands upon thousands” of years in the future, but it surely must be many magnitudes further along than that - partly because cloning is being used as a consumer gimmick, but mostly because time-travel is now so cheap that even a Mozart-clone fired from his job as a butler can save up enough for a trip. It’s something of a guess, but the overall crassness, decadence and hedonism of this society - plus the fact that the Time Lords haven’t curtailed the commonplace availability of time travel - very much suggests the Vulgar End of Time.

[
1717
]
I am a Dalek

[
1718
] “One hundred million years” before
Doctor Who and the Invasion from Space
.

[
1719
] Dating
Doctor Who and the Invasion from Space
(World Distributors illustrated novella) - No date is given, but humans are legendary to the people of Andromeda, and seem to be the ancestors of the Andromedans (“the humans of the worlds of Andromeda were the patterns”). That galaxy faces (in the long term, at least) extinction.

Using information from other stories, we know from
The Ark in Space
that humanity first arrived in Andromeda after the Solar Flares, and that the events of
The Mysterious Planet
, set two million years in the future, involved Andromedans. The story is set, then, at some point in the distant future. As Glitz comes from Andromeda, the galaxy is clearly not dominated by The One at that time. Yet it’s an interesting coincidence that the enclosed society set up by the Andromedans on “Ravolox” - with an obedient population controlled by an artificial intelligence - is very similar (albeit on an infinitely smaller and less advanced scale) to the Andromedan civilisation seen in
Doctor Who and the Invasion from Space
. It’s also notable that they steal a copy of the Matrix in that story, and the Matrix contains the memories of all the Time Lords in the same way The One contains all the memories of the Andromedans.

On TV, there is no gap in which the first Doctor travelled without companions, although he did so in the
Doctor Who Annuals
in the sixties. This might suggest that this story takes place before the TV series starts - but the TARDIS is a police box, so this isn’t the case - yet there’s no mention of Susan, and the Doctor has no control over the TARDIS navigation. An alternative is that couple of the novelisations (
The Massacre
and
The Five Doctors
) took a cue from the first Doctor’s appearance in
The Three Doctors
to claim that he had a period of semi-retirement and reflection before his regeneration, spent in a beautiful garden. While it is unlikely that the Doctor dropped off a companion, retrieving them later,
The Two Doctors
seems to demonstrate that even as early as his second incarnation, the Doctor was able to drop Victoria off and expect to meet her later (and non-TV stories either suggest or state that he’s routinely done that since at least his fifth incarnation).

[
1720
]
The Savages

[
1721
]
Cold Fusion

[
1722
]
The Suns of Caresh

[
1723
]
The Infinity Doctors

[
1724
] Dating
System Wipe
(BBC children’s 2-in-1 #4) - The least trustworthy piece of dating evidence here, oddly enough, is the year that the Doctor names: “It’s 2222 AD”, he says (p12), without explaining how he’s come to that conclusion. Then, when Amy asks if the devastation of Chicago “Could [owe to] solar flares? It’s about the right era, isn’t it?” (p13), he gives the bizarre answer of “Possibly.” Even if they believe, per
The Beast Below
, that the solar flares occurred in the twenty-ninth century (and there’s reason to doubt this; see the dating notes on that story), it makes no sense that the Doctor would now think that the
twenty-third
century is “about the right era” for the solar flares. It would be like saying that 1340 is “about the right era” for World War II.

To make matters worse, “over one hundred years” (pgs 33, 95) have passed since the cataclysm that drove humanity from Earth - in conjunction with the “2222 AD” figure, this would mean that the solar flares devastated Earth in the early twenty-second century, at the infancy of Earth’s venturing into space and before even the Dalek Invasion of Earth. No matter how cleverly one shuffles
Doctor Who
continuity, this is a non-starter.

The Parallife constructs have no recollection of the year or what prompted humanity to leave Earth, so the only dating evidence that remains is the nature of the reconstruction itself. Presuming for the moment that this
is
Earth (and the only thing to substantiate this claim is that Parallife is programmed as a computer copy of Earth), the story occurs when humanity has left its homeworld in the hands of five hundred robot armies, who by all accounts have the ability to level the entire planet and make it suitable for human occupation once more. Again, this is
well
beyond the time of the solar flares - if humans had such resources and technology when the solar flares struck, it’s doubtful that they would have needed to resort to such desperate measures as venturing away from Sol on top of a space whale (
The Beast Below
), freezing humans aboard Nerva Beacon and hoping for the best, or leaving people behind to perish in thermic shelters (
The Ark in Space
). Rory raises this very question (p97), but never gets an answer.