The Infinity Doctors (novel)

The Infinity Doctors
Doctor:	The Doctor
Main enemy:	Omega
Main setting:	Gallifrey The Needle
Key crew
Publisher:	BBC Books
Writer:	Lance Parkin
Release details
Release number:	17
Release date:	16 November 1998
Format:	Paperback Book; 16 Chapters, 280 Pages
ISBN:	ISBN 0-563-40591-0
BBC Past Doctor Adventures
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Next →	Salvation

The Infinity Doctors was the seventeenth BBC Past Doctor Adventures novel, marketed as a novel to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Doctor Who. It does not state explicitly which incarnation of the Doctor features in the novel. Set primarily (though not completely) on Gallifrey, it also has within its narrative references to Gallifrey gleaned from all other previous appearances and references to Gallifrey.

Publisher's summary

"Sing about the past again, and sing that same old song. Tell me what you know, so I can tell you that you're wrong."

Gallifrey. The Doctor's home planet. For twenty thousand centuries the Gallifreyans have been the most powerful race in the cosmos. They have circumnavigated infinity and eternity, harnessed science and conquered death. They are the Lords of Time, and have used their powers carefully.

But now a new force is unleashed, one that is literally capable of anything. It is enough to give even the Time Lords nightmares. More than that: it is enough to destroy them.

It is one of their own.

Waiting for them at the end of the universe.

Featuring the Doctor, this adventure celebrates the thirty-fifth anniversary of Doctor Who.

Plot

to be added

Characters

Gallifreyans

• Omega
• Patience

Time Lords

• The Doctor
• Larna
• Lord Savar
• The Magistrate
• Lord Hedin
• Castellan Voran
• Chancellory Guard Raimor
• Chancellery Guard Peltroc
• Technician First Class Waymivrudimqwe 'Waym'
• Helios

Sontaran delegation

• General Sontar
• Admiral Krax of the Three Millionth Fleet
• Chancellor Stroc
• Chief of Staff Groll

References

The Doctor

• The Doctor thinks to himself that his father's name definitely wasn't Ulysses, and that he might be a professor at Berkeley.
• The Doctor was born in the House of Lungbarrow.
• The Sontarans and Rutans are brought to Gallifrey by the Doctor to make an attempt at peace.

Gallifrey

• The Seal of Rassilon is an omniscate.
• The Doctor's rooms have six sides. They hold many bookshelves, a wooden globe of Sol Three and a wine rack with a dozen of the galaxy's finest vintages. On the mantel is an ormolu clock. There are also two paintings: one computer painted, the second hand painted (by the Doctor) of a woman holding a scroll with the words "Death is but a door" written in High Gallifreyan. Speaking those words opens a door to a zero room where thousands of candles burn, honouring the woman in the painting.
• The Doctor is a member of the High Council.
• The Doctor offers tea to guardsmen Raimor and Peltroc.
• The Doctor has a cat named Wycliff.
• Ohm is an ancient Time Lord god.
• Tyler's Folly is on the High Council agenda to be discussed as there are "disturbances" on the planet.
• The Time Lords know of names that will appear in history books of the future: Varnax, Faction Paradox, Catavolcus, the Timewyrm; these are threats that the Time Lords are destined to survive.
• The Time Lords know of a war against an implacable enemy, that will result in the destruction of Gallifrey, though even after several millennia of knowing about this they have not decided what action to take.
• The Founders of Gallifrey are six individuals: Rassilon, Omega, the Other and three others.
• Qqaba is a Population III star.
• The Doctor uses a toy tafelshrew to distract a guard to get to his TARDIS.

Individual Gallifreyans

• Marnal is mentioned several times as a Time Lord who lacked planning in the wars he fought.
• Morbius is also mentioned in the past tense.
• Hedin is compiling a comprehensive history on Omega.
• The Doctor is one of the highest ranking Prydonians.
• Larna is one of the Doctor's most promising students. She develops a friendship with the Doctor.
• Lord Savar lost his eyes a couple of regenerations ago. In his current body he is an accomplished telepath and has two distinct personalities.
• The Magistrate wears black. He's the Doctor's oldest friend and sparring partner and has a goatee.

Gallifreyan locations

• There is a clock tower in the Old Harbour that rings out bells throughout the Gallifreyan day.
• The clockwork figures inside the clock tower have developed sentience and may be the most intelligent things on Gallifrey.
• The Citadel is patrolled by the Watch.
• In the southern corner of the Panopticon is a statue of Omega wearing a space suit like the one he wore at Qqaba.
• If you enter the Panopticon from the north you would walk under the legs of Rassilon. Rassilon is (always) portrayed as wearing leather sandals.
• Another statue is of Apeiron, who wears spiky combat boots.
• The Citadel dates from the time of Rassilon and Omega; all Time Lords live in the Citadel, which is dimensionally transcendental.
• Olyesti is one of the Three Minute Cities east of the Citadel, reachable by rail.
• The Tomb of the Uncertain Soldier contains a body of a Gallifreyan soldier who fought in the Time Wars and chose at the critical moment to wipe out his own timeline.
• Flowers of Remembrance of the Lost Dead are either held or grown within the Citadel.
• Low Town is a shanty town that grew up around the columns that kept the Capitol dome stable.
• The Endless Library is a repository of Time Lord knowledge.

Gallifreyan technology

• The Doctor uses a Transmat to copy himself.
• The Time Lords use a time scoop to bring the Rutans and Sontarans to Gallifrey. The Doctor also builds a primitive time scoop to bring the delegates to his TARDIS.
• There were two Hands of Omega.

Groups

• The Doctor mentions Centro, the Klade, the Tractites and the Ongoing as possible groups who could have created the effect.

Individuals

• The Doctor owns a (possibly Terran) cat called Wycliff.
• General Sontar is the mastermind behind the two thousand year war with the Isari. He is a clone like the other Sontarans, but he is a full duplicate and not just a genetic clone; he has the original Sontar's memories.

Locations

• The Needle is what used to be Savar's TARDIS, stretched out across time and space by a black hole.
• Hindmost is a planetoid of baryonic matter so far from Gallifrey that a TARDIS would have to be re-engineered to be able to make the journey there.
• Huwyma was a Rutan world which was conquered by Sontarans.
• The territory of the Sontaran Empire is called Established Space.

Notes

• Which Doctor and precisely when this story takes place is difficult to place. Lance Parkin personally classifies this as both a First and Eighth Doctor novel. He's also told an interviewer that the Infinity Doctor is "clearly not the eighth Doctor of mainstream continuity. He does look like Paul McGann."
• The Infinity Doctors was originally intended to be part of a two-novel series, with the other half called Mentor and written by Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum; the plot would have revolved around a mad Time Lord who bent space and time so the Doctor never left Gallifrey. However, Orman and Blum were too busy with PROSE: Seeing I to write Mentor (though they later used elements of it in Unnatural History), so Parkin rewrote The Infinity Doctors to be stand-alone. Said Parkin, "I also realised that most of the readers would be expecting the bit where the universe goes all wobbly and turns back into the 'real' Doctor Who universe, and once I decided not to do that, it was very liberating." Other parts of Parkin's original plan ended up in PROSE: Trading Futures.
• The Doctor thinks to himself that his father's name definitely wasn't Ulysses, but he is a professor at Berkeley. In several of the early 1990s proposed TV movies of Doctor Who, Ulysses was the name of the Doctor's father. Parkin's later Eighth Doctor novel PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles introduced a Time Lord adventurer named Ulysses who was stated to have a half-human son, though this was never explicitly identified as the Doctor. The novel PROSE: Unnatural History featured a renegade Time Lord teaching as a professor at Berkeley and going by the name Daniel Joyce; the Eighth Doctor told Joyce that the name "suits" him, a probable reference to the fact that real-life author James Joyce wrote the novel Ulysses. The same novel also establishes that the Doctor's father's name was erased from Gallifrey's records, apparently explaining the Doctor's confusion in The Infinity Doctors.
• Of the threats the Time Lords were/are to survive, Varnax is mentioned in several (unmade) Doctor Who movie scripts featured in REF: The Nth Doctor; Faction Paradox first appeared in PROSE: Alien Bodies; the Timewyrm first appeared in PROSE: Timewyrm: Genesys; and Catavolcus first appeared in COMIC: The Neutron Knights.
• BBC Books announced that a "print on demand" reprint edition of this novel will be made available as of 31st August 2011 as the imprint revisits adventures featuring the first eight Doctors. This book is also available as an ebook from the Amazon Kindle store.

Continuity

• The Doctor mentions several groups who could have created the Effect: the Klade (PROSE: Father Time) and the Tractites, (PROSE: Genocide)
• Lord Savar appears and tells of how he lost his eyes. The Doctor later finds them and returns them. (PROSE: Seeing I)
• The Eighth Doctor visits a professor at Berkeley who has an assistant called Larna. (PROSE: Unnatural History)
• Patience was saved by Omega at the last moment after being shot in the head. (PROSE: Cold Fusion)
• The Doctor again remembers the day that the Lord President sent his guards to the Doctor's home searching for Susan's mother. (PROSE: Cold Fusion)

External links

• The Infinity Doctors at the Doctor Who Reference Guide
• The Discontinuity Guide to: The Infinity Doctors at The Whoniverse
• The Cloister Library: The Infinity Doctors