User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-4028641-20170525044210

So it's been a rather long-standing practice on this site that when secondary monsters are licensed out to collections of stories (such as Bernice Summerfield in Decalog 5: Wonders) we only count the stories which feature said DWU concepts, instead of every story in the book.

With this in mind, I wanted to bring into question why two stories from The Dalek Outer Space Book which have nothing to do with anything from the DWU are currently covered on this site as fully valid stories. These being The Sea Monsters and The Unwilling Traveller. In this case, I not only am going to argue that these should be invalid, but that their pages should be deleted from our databases.

Keeping in mind that I do not consider 'The Orbitus to be part of my analysis, do to it at-least featuring Dalek technology.

Now because the Dalek annuals and comics have become so highly regarded as an essential part of the history of the show, many would likely forget that they are no different from the Auton films of the 1990s or the K9 TV series. In that, they were not published by the BBC, and they only exist because of a specific license pertaining to one race of villains from the show. Thus, when a story fails to feature even the suggestion that the writer intended for it to be set in the same universe as any element every featured in the DWU, then it almost usually fails rule 4.

Consider as example Tales from the TARDIS, back-up strips that were simply reprints of Stan Lee comics with narration by the Fourth Doctor. It's been pretty consistently decided that because these stories are wholly unconnected to anything other than the initial panel of the Doctor, they are invalid. So invalid that none of the individual stories feature any pages outside of the link towards the main series.

It should be noted that in the case of this book, there is already one story featured inside which does not have a page: a Chris Welkin-Planeteer comic story which is a reprint of a newspaper comic. All three of these comics (Sea Monsters, Unwilling Traveller, and Welkin-Planeteer) are printed in a row -- seemingly to put all of the non-Dalek stories in the middle of the book.

Just to recap the stories:

The Unwilling Traveller features a burglar who breaks into an institute only to be sent into the future, and then the past. He eventually ends up back home, and is arrested for breaking and entering. No reference is made towards the Daleks or even Sara Kingdom.

In The Sea Monsters, disruptions in a reactivated machine cause the fish in the sea to grow and evolve, and the fish are eventually killed by an H-Bomb.

Unwilling is very hard to defend. In the case of The Sea Monsters, however, it can be noted that the suits (and the people in the suits, although they have different names) are identical to those featured in The Dalek Trap. However, we have no indication that both of these stories feature characters from the same operation or organization. All we can really say is that they wear similar space-suits, keeping in mind that these suits are identical to those featured in classical Dan Dare strips. I doubt one could justify using a rather common looking space suit to claim that a story was based in the DWU.

Based off of how little attention these stories have actually received on this site, I imagine that obscurity has mainly driven them to be included. If not, I'd love to hear the rationale from people who want them to be included.