User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-33695797-20200703215633/@comment-6032121-20200704141406

Actually, The Dalek Dictionary is very much written as an in-universe resource, as are most similar features in the Dalek Books. Inside a Skaro Saucer, for example, is supposedly based on the information available to "us" humans of the 25th century, which includes a machine which is drawn with very little detail because its functioning is top-secret.

Again, The Book of the War and A Brief History of Time Lords both tell very clear stories in the conventional sense of "account of one or more events within the fictional universe" — respectively, the story of the first 50 years of the War in Heaven (and/or the story of the Shift corrupting a reader of the in-universe Book), and the chronological story of the Time Lords as a species.

The precedent for "in-universe works of fiction that describe stuff instead of telling a story" is that they're invalid. I don't like it any more than you do, but unless it can be proven that TARDIS Type 40 Instruction Manual is narrative, then we are bound to deem it invalid, I fear, and confine information from it to BTS section.

User:Chubby Potato's account above seems to be that it does present a fractal narrative like BotW and ABHoTL; do you dispute this description? You say it does not "follow a story structure or a chronology", which is concerning. But something can be a story without following a conventional structure (hence BotW), and, of course, without being chronological (The Magician's Apprentice ends with a scene purposefully placed out-of-order for no in-universe reason whatsoever).