Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow - Marc Platt [142]
throwaway line jokes. Yet it's ballooned into the all purpose, undercover, machinating power that lurks behind the pomp of the High Council. It's answerable only to itself and is responsible for all those times when the Doctor starts shouting threats at the empty air.
If the smug, serpentine interrogator of Leela seems familiar, it's because he appeared memorably in one of the tv stories. He's an historian, his statements are al couched in legalese and he seems to have nothing but contempt for anything that rocks the stately circular dance of Gallifrey. For purposes of suspense, his identity wil not be revealed until much later on in the story. Meanwhile President Romana, representing the radical forces of liberal innovation, is already playing the forces of Gallifreyan conservatism at their own game.
Chancel or Theora's hairdo is not a symbol of the labyrinthine plot.
Chapter 12
Cousin Rynde is an unsavoury fel ow. He used to be in catering (that rings bells), but now he's more of a spiv into any sort of dodgy deal. He's always ready to sel you, under the counter, no questions asked, half a pound of tafelshrew and mushroom sausages that he's knocked off from the Drudges' kitchen. Don't touch them, they're well past their Best Before date.
Drat, another of the legion of games from Innocet's compendium, is a card game, probably the Gallifreyan equivalent of the German game Skat.
Wouldn't I much rather write an Earth-bound story? Wel , it certainly hands me a lot of minute detail on a plate. I know, and the readers know the references, rules and social structures for Earth. But I do love fil ing in the detail of alien societies. That's where the colour comes from and I can spend far too long getting myself into the right world for a story. I have to be inside it before I can write it. Even then, it still has to be recognisable for the reader. Real alien life could well be so alien that we wouldn't recognise it as life at al . On tv, we rarely see more than half a dozen woggly creatures to represent an entire race. So most tv alien societies can only be variations on an Earthly theme.
Are the living Houses a complete anathema to everything we've ever seen of Gallifreyan culture? I don't think so.
They are a throwback to the beginning of the Intuitive Revelation, which marked the end of the dark days of the Old Time. Like the Looms they house, they were conceived to protect a species threatened with extinction: the Gallifreyans themselves. TARDISes are very much alive; so is the old and battered Hand of Omega, itself a relic from another age. If you looked at the ancient culture of Japan, before it adopted and outdid the invasive culture of the West, you might think it very unearthly indeed. The past is there to be respected, but there's no point in writing at all if you don't come up with something new.
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The body-bepple is a 30th century extension of tattooing or body piercing, allowing the fashion-conscious to remake their bodies into interesting (and exotic) forms. When Chris first appeared in Andy Lane's Original Sin, he was aptly beppled into the shape of a giant teddy bear.
Time Lords count their age in years and generations. Even over this, there seems to be rivalry. The Doctor keeps quiet when asked how old he is. He's going through his regenerations far too fast.
Chapter 13
Looking at the array of creatures that turn up in Lungbarrow, from gullet grubs to fledershrews, blossom thieves to scrubblers and neversuch beetles, it feels like time for someone to write a Flora and Fauna of Outer Gallifrey.
Natural history has always been one of my specialist subjects (see Ghost Light), and when I was about seven, I wrote to David Attenborough asking how I could go about being a zoo keeper. In those days, he presented the Zoo Quest series for the Beeb, exploring exotic locations in black and white and collecting animals for the London Zoo.
He even wrote back to me outlining his path through university and the BBC. My career never really followed