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.
[113] The Waters of Mars
[114] K9: The Last Oak Tree
[115] K9: The Korven
[116] K9: Aeolian and K9: The Sirens of Ceres. The Great Cataclysm presumably happens before Gryffen becomes an agoraphobic. The Waters of Mars establishes that “unprecedented storms” happen in 2040, and that’s a perfect fit. It’s much more of a stretch to say this was one of the “disastrous decisions” caused by Travel-Mat alluded to in The Indestructible Man, but it’s certainly possible that the atmospheric disturbances, flooding and hurricanes caused by the Great Cataclysm might have been what crippled the T-Mat system.
[117] Gryffen has “not been out of the house for ten years”, according to Darius in K9: The Korven; this was “a few years” before K9: The Fall of the House of Gryffen. K9: The Last Precinct claims Gryffen’s house was a police station used by human officers until the introduction of robot CCPCs, and as that development only happened two years before that story, Gryffen must have lived in different places since becoming agoraphobic. The mystery of his family’s disappearance was never solved in the series.
[118] K9: Dream-Eaters
[119] The Waters of Mars
[120] Dating Singularity (BF #76) - The Doctor reads a Somnus Foundation brochure that claims the groups’ brightest minds will terraform Mars “by 2090”, so the story cannot occur after that date.
[121] The Waters of Mars
[122] Dating The Great Space Elevator (BF CC #3.2) - The back cover blurb only tells us it’s “the future”. Although the link isn’t made in either story, we’re told in The Waters of Mars that Ed Gold successfully lobbied to have a space elevator built “off the coast of Western Australia”. Sumatra just about qualifies, and the weather control technology is consistent with that seen in the Seeds of Death.
[123] Dating The Architects of History (BF #132) - The year is repeatedly given.
[124] The Well-Mannered War (p204).
[125] Alien Bodies (p9).
[126] Christmas on a Rational Planet. “Nearly a millennium” before Roz is born (p31).
[127] Dating Hothouse (BF BBC7 #3.2) - No year is given, but the story can be comfortably dated to the middle of the twenty-first century. It’s said that white rhinos became extinct in “the wild” in “the last five years” - some are presumably still around in captivity, but all rhinos on Earth are extinct by 2051 according to The Last Dodo. The environment is in a bad way, and clearly headed for the sort of ecological carnage that occurs circa 2060 according to Loups-Garoux. Krynoids and the World Ecology Bureau were first seen in The Seeds of Doom. One curiosity is that an undercover Lucie Miller appears on the TV of the future as a raving member of the League of Nature while using her real name. As she was born in 1988, that should give any historian tracking her life something to think about.
[128] Dating Forty-Five: “The Word Lord” (BF #115d) - The year is given. The “Second Cold War” is presumably a lead-up to the state of affairs seen in Warriors of the Deep.
[129] The Waters of Mars
[130] CCPCs were introduced “two years” before K9: The Last Precinct.
[131] Alien Bodies, pgs 263-264. This is the origin of the titular characters from The Krotons, the obvious implication being that the Krotons were pattered on the servo-robots from The Wheel in Space. (They do look roughly similar, as it happens.) The placement of the Krotons’ creation in the twentieth century is nonetheless tricky - Lawrence Miles, as outlined in About Time 2, envisioned an earlier dating for The Wheel in Space (circa 2030) than this chronology, but the central question is when humans and their servo-robots could have feasibly arrived on Krosi-Apsai-Core. Mankind doesn’t venture beyond the Sol system much in the twentieth century, so the Kroton homeworld should be comparatively closer to Earth than not. Either way, the Krotons undergo a startling evolution in just a few decades - by 2068, according to Alien Bodies, their war capabilities are fairly formidable.
[132] Dating K9 Series 1 - The stories of the K9 TV series follow on from each other in relatively short order. No date is ever given on screen, but the prepublicity stated that the year is 2050, and that works as well as any other date. Pre-publicity also stated that the titular character was K9 Mark 1, but the on-screen evidence isn’t nearly so certain about this...
The Four K9s
Four models of K9 appear on television, with all of them making an appearance in at least one tie-in property.
Mark 1 K9: First appears in The Invisible Enemy, leaves the TARDIS to stay on Gallifrey with Leela in The Invasion of Time, goes on missions for the Time Lords in The Adventures of K9 book series, loyally serves Leela on Gallifrey in the Gallifrey audios and is destroyed in Gallifrey: Imperiatrix.
Mark 2 K9: First appears (in a box) at the end of The Invasion of Time, and is first seen (out of box) in The Ribos Operation. He remains in E-Space with Romana in Warriors’ Gate, then returns with her to Gallifrey (as seen in Lungbarrow), and so becomes embroiled in the planet’s ambiguous fate. He secretly survives the first destruction of Gallifrey (in The Ancestor Cell) and rejoins the eighth Doctor (as revealed in The Gallifrey Chronicles), but he’s also present on the Gallifrey seen in the Big Finish audios. At the end of Gallifrey Series 4, he’s left stranded in the Axis.
These two K9s first meet in Lungbarrow. There is some uncertainty as to which of these two K9s ends up starring in the K9 TV series. The prepublicity for the show stated that it was the Mark 1 model. But in the first episode, K9: Regeneration, when an old model K9 is destroyed and regenerates into a new form, his reboot menu gives him the options “Mark 1” and “Mark 2”... and he clearly selects “Mark 2”. So, either this is (as stated) the Mark 2 version, or it might be the Mark1 K9 taking an opportunity to upgrade his software. In either event, and somewhat unhelpfully, this K9 has lost its memory. As K9 Mark 1 is apparently destroyed in Imperiatrix, and without any other evidence to go on, the K9 TV series would seem to feature the Mark 2 model - a survivor of the Last Great Time War.
Mark 3 K9: First appears in K9 and Company: A Girl’s Best Friend (the 1981 pilot for a K9 show that didn’t get made). This K9 belongs to Sarah Jane Smith, and they subsequently h
ave a series of adventures as outlined in the K9 Annual (not covered in this chronology); he briefly appears in The Five Doctors; he’s seen in the comic strip “City of Devils” (DWM Holiday Special 1992); in 1996 he’s still working with Sarah Jane (Interference), but after this time he falls into disrepair (loosely in accord with the short story “Moving On” from Decalog 3); his non-functional form is stolen by Hilda Winters (SJS: Mirror, Signal. Manoeuvre) in 2002, but possibly recovered following her death in 2005; he’s repaired by the Doctor and is apparently destroyed in School Reunion. For those who wish to count such things as canon, it’s possible that he regenerates and appears again in the Make Your Own Adventure book The Search for the Doctor.
Mark 4 K9: First appears at the end of School Reunion, is sidelined shortly afterwards to tend to a black hole (SJA: Invasion of the Bane) and is then released from that duty, joining Sarah Jane on Earth (SJA: The Mad Woman in the Attic). In his last appearance to date, SJA: Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith, he’s living with Luke Smith while Luke studies at Oxford.
[133] The general background to the K9 television series, as given in K9: Regeneration.
[134] K9: The Korven
[135] It’s pounds in K9: The Bounty Hunter, the cred in K9: Oroborus, K9: Black Hunger, K9: The Custodians and K9: Mutant Copper.
[136] K9: Oroborus, K9: Robot Gladiators.
[137] K9: Black Hunger
[138] K9: Mutant Copper
[139] The Mark II CCPCs have been in operation “six months” before K9: The Last Precinct.
[140] K9: Hound of the Korven
[141] K9: Aeolian establishes that Earth’s population in the K9 series is “six billion”, which is lower than it is in 2010 (in both real life and the Doctor Who universe), and this might suggest there has been a catastrophic lost of life - possibly owing to the “Great Catastrophe” described in the K9 show or some other event.
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