User:Epsilon the Eternal/Sandbox Ten

 covers certain sources, anthologies, etc, that are currently not covered by the Tardis Data Core Wiki.

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- A Better World'' (short story) -

A Better World was a short story written by Aristide Twain. It was the twentieth short story submitted by fans for the Doctor Who: Lockdown! series, for the Tweetalong of Turn Left. The main antagonist of the story, Auteur, was used under licence from Jacob Black.

Plot
In a crowded street in Shan Shen, Auteur notices Donna, and her significance to time. In a fit of hubris, Auteur decides to create a new timeline through Donna. He senses a power in the street, a Beetle, and Auteur tells its puppet, a fortune teller, to feed Donna to the Beetle. The plan is successful.

Auteur follows Donna to the new timeline, where he witnesses a Christmas Star firing upon the Earth. He knows the Renegade is dead, and, disguised as an ordinary human, shares a drink with a time-sensitive woman named Alice.

Auteur decides that he wants to tell Donna what he's done, to tell her she's the star of her story, but he's unable to reach her. Another time-sensitive woman stands in his way. One time, quite literally.

He's unable to do much, but he manages to sabotage an abandoned timeship, to seal the fate of the Renegade. Donna is sent back in time by a group of humans, and Auteur is left asking himself a question. Could she sacrifice herself for the Renegade?

Characters

 * Auteur
 * Donna
 * Fortune teller
 * Beetle
 * Alice
 * Wolf-girl
 * Timeship

Publisher's summary
Have you ever made up your own little stories based on your favourite telly shows, or wondered what would happen if two or more of your most loved characters came together in one mash-up of an adventure?

Between these covers, you'll find such disparate unexpected bedfellows as Basil Brush and Larry Grayson, Steve Zodiac and the Alien Alien Facehuggers, Doomwatch and Tomorrow's World, Inspector Gadget and the Cybermen, and many, many more.

Publisher's summary
A blonde in a catsuit flirting with the 8th Doctor, a scruffy old dear exploring a universe hidden in a cupboard in the Bus, the spitting image of the glorious Katy Manning on Neptune with its anatomically extravagant inhabitants, an elderly author of lesbian fiction… Iris has had a lot of faces, and been to a lot of places. She’s been all the way to the edges and back again, so it any wonder some of her adventures have been misplaced over the years, or grown tricky to uncover?

Here, gathered together for the first time ever in a new charity collection, are the Iris stories which appeared in charity anthologies, on convention stages, got lost on old web servers and fell down the back of the sofa… a selection of tales, both old and new, from the very edges of the Obverse…

Cover art

 * The cover featured art by: Blair “Baffled” Bidmead, Jay “el Logo Loco” Eales, Paul “Puzzled” Hanley, Bret “Befuddled” M Herholz, June “Discombobulated” Hudson, Jon “Wesley” Huff, Mark “Flummoxed” Manley, Mark “Missed” Michalowski, Cody “Vexed” Schell, Johannes Chazot, Zal Cryptid, and William Oxley.

Publisher's summary
Peevish actors are descending mournfully upon the remote English village of Happenstance for the funeral of TV legend Tom Baker.

His one-time costar Suzy Goshawk is sucked into a parochial vortex of intrigue involving the quailsome local vicar, Tom's acidulous housekeeper Mrs Frimbly and various other fruminous scumblebums. None of them can agree upon how Tom met his disastrous end, and Suzy is starting to suspect that something murksome and swervish is going on.

The snow comes down, and Suzy finds herself trapped at Baker's End for Christmas, with all the village's creepy pensioners enslaved by a strange, dancing dragon...and a Sinister Presence lurking on the sidelines.

Why are old ladies twerking their bottoms outside the post office-cum-mini-mart? Why is the vicar creeping about in the bushes in the dead of night? And why, just when all looks hopeless, does a strange, scobberlotching creature spring into view? Who exactly is the King of Cats in his furry costume and his battered crown?

Plot
Seeing some vaguely familiar faces sitting among the commuters, Suzy Goshawk is on a train, which whizzes past fields and forests, heading for its destination, Happenstance Village. One large lady sits opposite her, who worked with Tom Baker back in 1977. She asks Suzy if she knows how he passed, but Suzy knows as little as she does. The woman tells Suzy of an event she attended last summer with Baker, where he was convinced that the fans were doppelgangers because they hadn’t seen every episode nor could they “quote huge swathes of dialogue at the drop of the hat". After the woman believing his behaviour was a mystery, and Suzy believing that he was just having her on, they sit in silence for a while until the woman offers to do tarot cards for Suzy. The large lady draws a card, “The Large, Dancing Cat", which Suzy has never seen before. Switching trains, Suzy meets a man who tells her that he knew Baker, and that Baker had told him that “when his time came, he wouldn’t go like anyone else, he’d be going into space”. Suzy says that Baker was always saying things like that.

Arriving at the halt at Happenstance Village, Suzy follows the sombre crowd into the village, heading to the church. Finding her place among the crowded pews, two actors talk to her, and the female actress tells Suzy of her experience with Baker, flashing back to his fun yet disastrous cooking show. After the male actor tells Suzy of his experience with Baker, Reverend Ailing climbs the rector, telling them of his final encounter with Baker, not even two days before, where the reverend had asked Baker if he had contemplated helping out with the village pantomime during the pouring rain. Baker had told him that he was leaving this mortal coil, leaving Happenstance for good. The reverend continues on, and Suzy asks the fellow actors what happened to Tom Baker, as she still doesn’t know. The male actor tells Suzy that he heard that Tom was run over by a TV Licence detector van, and the large lady from earlier claims that Tom had chased the van away as he had suspected it of containing X-ray beams that saw inside his house.

Cast
(In order of appearance)
 * Suzy Goshawk - Katy Manning
 * Large lady - Lizzie Roper
 * Tom Baker - Tom Baker
 * Man - David Benson (uncredited)
 * Actress - ???
 * Actor - ???

Happenstance Village

 * Happenstance has a pond, a green, and a tumble down Norman church.
 * "Hokey Cokey" is playing in the church.

Tom Baker

 * Tom claims that his soufflés always come out perfectly.

Continuity
to be added

Biography
The Doctor once laid himself down in front of a bulldozer in front of Dent's home, leading Dent to think of the Doctor as "rather odd". He later documented this on the website whoisdoctorwho.co.uk. (PROSE: Who is Doctor Who)

Dent eventually got to know the Doctor, though they didn't get along too well, as the Doctor displayed no interest in killing Vogons, and he often had more of an interest at beating Dent at Scrabble whilst simultaneously reminiscing with Ford Prefect about their "wild time" together in college. (PROSE: The Christmas Invasion)

This was why the revelation that the Tenth Doctor thought that Dent was a "nice man" and was reminded of Dent when he wore pyjamas would've "tremendously" surprised Dent. (TV: The Christmas Invasion, PROSE: The Christmas Invasion)

Dent and his travelling companion Zaphod Beeblebrox were among many imprisoned in the Time Lord prison Shada during the Eighth Doctor's version of Skagra's defeat. (WC: Shada)

Behind the scenes

 * The webcast illustration of Shada's interior contains Arthur Dent and Zaphod Beeblebrox from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a nod to Douglas Adams.
 * In the recent sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, And Another Thing..., Arthur Dent compares the destruction of Earth to special effects on early Doctor Who.
 * Arthur Dent also appeared in the story 3am Eternal, printed in the charity anthology The Curse of Fanfic!.
 * Simon Jones played Arthur Dent in both the 1978 radio series and the 1981 TV serial of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

WHHttMoDW?
What Has Happened to the Magic of 'Doctor Who'? was the first short story printed in the Short Trips anthology Indefinable Magic, written by Gareth Roberts. The story took the form of a series of imaginary letters to the BBC from fans to complain about Doctor Who. Each letter was interspersed throughout the anthology.

I
Mr Raymond Phibbs from Ebbsfleet writes to Verity Lambert about his opinions on the ending of the adventure set on the planet Marinus, which he considered "telly fare" as opposed to the "challenging and dramatic science fiction" of the thirteen previous episodes. He explains how he found those first thirteen episodes to be "strikingly atmospheric and surprisingly mature", giving examples of the music in the Dalek story, as well as the strong morality in those first few episodes. He considers the story where they travel to Cathay with Marco Polo to be the turning point in quality. He goes into much detail about what he considers the pitfalls of the latest serials.

II
On 19 February 1967, Mrs Janet Trent from Ipswich, Suffolk, writes to Innes Lloyd to complain about how he has drained Doctor Who of its magic since he has been producer. Janet considers the show's storytelling under producers Verity Lambert and John Wiles to be "special" in comparison with Innes Lloyd. Janet gives several examples of what she considers good storytelling, and before contrasting it with counter examples, she demonstrates how she believes the Doctor's character has become butchered with heroism. She even points out that how his companions are essentially pop-stars ("even the boys!"). Coming back to her point about the shift in storytelling, she states that all the series seems to be focused on "B-movie alien invasions - war Machines, Daleks, and those inane Cybermen". She asks Innes to return Doctor Who to its former glory or else the viewers will turn to ITV - Janet admits she already has.

Characters
(In order of appearance/mention)
 * Raymond Phibbs
 * Verity Lambert
 * The old Doctor
 * Susan
 * Marco Polo
 * Mr. Chesterton
 * Miss Wright
 * Kublai Khan
 * Innes Lloyd
 * Mrs Janet Trent
 * John Wiles
 * Steven the pilot
 * Vicki the space orphan
 * Ben
 * Polly

I

 * The series began with the discovery of the Tardis by the teachers.
 * According to Raymond, the stories prior to the one with Marco Polo exemplified an interesting dynamic between the four characters, such as:
 * The Doctor's condemnation of the teachers' willingness to kill the caveman,
 * The teacher's disagreements over the pacifism of the Thals.
 * Raymond also considered the drama to be convincing, whether it be in the cavemen's forest or on the H-bombed planet Skaro.
 * Raymond found the Doctor's "aches and pains" meeting of Kublai Khan to be played for strained laughs.
 * He believes that Susan has devolved into an ordinary and stupid American schoolgirl, such as the time she walked into the Gobi Desert without telling anyone.

II

 * Janet notes how the series often went from "comedy in the Wild West to high flying space adventures with the Chumblies, from the horrors of the massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve to the jungles of Kembel with the Daleks and their alien alliance.
 * Janet believes that the Doctor should only be a scientist and explorer, not a hero.
 * Janet believes that Steven and Vicki are actual characters, unlike Ben and Polly whom she considers "decorative sidekicks".

Continuity

 * to be added

Category:Short Trips: Indefinable Magic short stories Category:Stories about Doctor Who Category:Stories set in the 1960s Category:Stories set in the 2060s