Portal fantasy

In the first six seasons of Doctor Who (that's the First and Second Doctor episodes, if like me you had no notion at the time about TV seasons) the TARDIS control console was largely for show. Sometimes the Doctor claimed to have ended up where he intended, but he was either unable or unwilling (and probably both) to plonk his passengers back where they started. When Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright blundered aboard, they had no idea of how long it would take for them to get back to Shoreditch in 1963.

Now suppose that's you. You've stumbled into what looks like an old police telephone box to find it's bigger on the inside. The doors, decorated on this side with huge roundels, are already closing. In a few moments the TARDIS will be dematerializing and if you go with it you might never return home (this being the First or Second Doctor, remember). Your friends and family won't have any idea what happened to you. So... will you jump back out? Or will you stay on board?

It's a variant on one of two what-if questions I'm fond of posing to party guests. Here's another one for would-be time travellers courtesy of the artist John Vernon Lord, grandfather of Inigo Hartas: you can go back to any year in history and be present as an observer at any place in that year. All languages are intelligible to you and you cannot be seen or touched. (So you're a bit like Lessingham in The Worm Ouroboros.) When would you pick?

If those have whet your curiosity, the Greater Good Science Centre at UC Berkeley has a whole bunch of questions like them. And here's another bit of Gedankenvergnügen while we're at it:

You may feel you'd rather just head down the pub, but if you want to join in please leave a comment.

The pivot of destiny

I came across this 120-player game of D&D on LinkedIn. Unfortunately the post was whisked away from me before I could note the name of the valorous GM, so apologies for not crediting him here. It reminded me of when my friends Nick Henfrey (co-founder of Flat Earths) and Steve Foster (creator of Mortal Combat) and I turned up at our university D&D society just after Freshers' Week. Dozens of new members had signed up, so we found ourselves crammed into a tiny room (five metres square at the most) with a couple of dozen eager first-timers.

"You can't run a game for a party this size," I pointed out to the GM as we all put down figurines in the traditional ten-foot-wide corridor.

"Course we can," he insisted, announcing that the two people at the front could just make out an ochre jelly or whatever it was.

We played on for half an hour, with most people there watching in bafflement as the experienced players leading the party rolled lots and lots of dice. It didn't look like many of these newbies would be coming back next weekend. Nick whispered in my ear. "Let's liven things up."

We were in the middle of the party, so we started blasting spells and swinging swords in both directions, slaughtering folks on both sides until the experienced D&D players waded back and killed us. Outside in the corridor, one of the first-year players whose characters we'd killed asked, "So what are we going to do now?" I didn't know then, but he was Mark Smith.

I opened the next door. It was another meeting room even smaller than the first, maybe four metres square this one, but it was empty. "Have you ever heard of Empire of the Petal Throne?" I said. And that's where we started a game with the core of a group who went on campaigning together for a long time to come -- decades in some cases. There were several who went on to careers far removed from games (and hi there, Les, Sheldon and Pauline, if you happen to see this) but most notable among them was Mike Polling (yes, the author of "The Key of Tirandor") a friend and creative mentor with whom I did much of my early writing. Mike and Mark had been at school with Jamie Thomson. It was through Mike that I was introduced to Oliver Johnson -- they had met at a party the night before our weekly game, and Mike gave Oliver a drunken but apparently brilliant (neither of them can remember it now) account of how roleplaying worked. The next day Oliver showed up to see for himself. And so, directly or otherwise, that Sunday afternoon connected me to most of the RPG writers I'd be working with over the next forty-five years.

Maybe life is full of those "Turn Left" moments. I met my wife because of another, but although that's obviously of paramount importance to me personally there's no gaming dimension so I won't recount the story here. What about you? Are there people or games that have changed your whole life which would have gone entirely unnoticed if you'd made just one different choice?

"I'm sorry, Dave..."

A little addendum to my previous post about using AI referees for roleplaying games. I thought I'd try Bing on the same scenario to see if it did any better. I quickly encountered a priest, Father Thomas, who told me about a cult of Set hiding out in the forest. Not very Dragon Warriors, but already Bing was weaving a more convincing and complex adventure than Bard had managed.

"Destroy them in the name of the True Faith," said Father Thomas.

I said I'd need a guide and he added, "There is a man named Giles, who lives in the tavern. He is a hunter and a tracker, and he knows the forest well. He might be willing to guide you to the cult’s lair, if you pay him well. He is a bit of a rogue, not given to trusting people."

At the tavern I went up to Giles's room. In answer to my knock, a gruff voice demanded, "Who's there?" Bard suggested five ways to convince him to open the door: telling him the truth, claiming to be another hunter, shouting that I was the law and I'd break the door down, etc.

I thought I'd try something else. "I'm a prostitute and I'm offering a half-price introductory deal."

Bing really didn't care for that:

I was impressed at how well it captured a tone of passive-aggressive prissiness, but obviously in this form it is never going to be any use for serious roleplaying. Is it worried about age-appropriateness? But Bing knows my age, as it's linked to my Microsoft account, and if I leave my computer where a 10-year-old can use it then Bing's responses are a drop in the ocean compared to all the murky sites that hypothetical 10-year-old might stray onto. (Yes, definitely use parental locks; I agree with that.)

Teofilo Hurtado later drew my attention to a section from the 1st edition of the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide:

Gary must never have seen Midnight Cowboy or he wouldn't have assumed all prostitutes were female... but I digress.

Of course, it's not that I want a game full of "saucy tarts" and "brazen strumpets", but if you're going to run a game in which clerics tell knights to go and kill other people because of their beliefs, it really is ninnyish to get in a snit over any mention of sex. Coincidentally, a few days later I tried posting this clip on Facebook in response to a question about whether it's worse to lose your job just before or just after Christmas:

The AI that polices Facebook's community standards wasn't having that. "You appear to be promoting hate speech," it complained. Now, I can understand it having an aversion to a lot of Stephen Moffat's writing, but I thought that line from "The Bells of Saint John" was rather funny. Facebook's AI is generally pretty useless at keeping actual hate speech and porn off public groups, so how come the merest mention of killing got this Doctor Who clip censored? 

Will all references to sex and murder be stamped on by our AI police in future? If so, that's a lot of literature, cinema, opera and games that will just come up as a blank screen. These AIs are going to be pretty useless if they live in the world as imagined by twitty puritans. As Mark Twain said (or did he?), “Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.” So we can all breathe a sigh of relief; human art is still the only kind worth having.

The neutron operation

As a coda to the previous post, I came across an idea for a Doctor Who special that I jotted in my notebook a couple of years ago. I must have still been thinking of the core concept of the Dalek City game, only now as a story:

A later incarnation of the Doctor goes back in time to the original Skaro encounter with the Daleks, figuring that now he’s forewarned as to how significant a threat they are he can destroy them for good. 

The action integrates with the footage from the 1960s version, The Mutants. Instead of achieving his objective, the new Doctor’s “total war” attitude to the Daleks (who incidentally seem unable to distinguish him from the First Doctor who appears in the 1960s scenes) causes them to become fearful and thus pushes them from being warily curious to genocidally paranoid. 

The Daleks prepare a contingency plan. It's solely because of this plan that the Doctor's destruction of their power source at the end of the story doesn’t kill them all – and the surviving Daleks, the really out-there extremists, now know to study the background radiation signal and pick up the Tardis’s dematerialization signature. That leads them from being bound to one planet to being galactic conquerors who eventually challenge the Time Lords.

So in the end the reason that the Daleks are so dangerous is entirely because of the Doctor's actions in trying to wipe them out.

To business that we love

During my time at the Lucca Comics & Games festival, quite a few people came up and said how much my work meant to them. That's always really lovely to hear. You write to make a connection, hoping that what you do will inspire others. But I always point out to fans that I'm a fan too. There are writers who inspired me (Terry Nation, Stan Lee, Michael Moorcock, Roy Thomas, Robert E Howard, Gene Roddenberry, and many others) and they had writers who inspired them. It's a torch we're passing along.

And because writers are fans as well, I was delighted to come full circle and appear in the December issue of Doctor Who Magazine not as Dave Morris, aspiring Dalek scriptwriter, but as David Morris, my six-year-old self, geeking out over a set visit to watch the rehearsal of "The Brink of Disaster". I won't spoil it with any details here, except to say that it followed a few weeks after my dad took me to meet a real-life Dalek.

This is issue #584 of Doctor Who Magazine. That's pretty impressive, especially for a monthly. It's a show that has inspired generations of sci-fi enthusiasts. Whether you write, read or only watch, those enthusiasms are what make life worth living, so let's celebrate such treasures of the imagination -- and keep passing on the torch.

London's burning

W Somerset Maugham said, "There is an impression abroad that everyone has it in him to write one book; but if by this is implied a good book the impression is false." Sixty years later, Christopher Hitchens put it more brutally: "Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where it should, I think, in most cases, remain."

In the last few years we've seen both statements proved many times over. Self-publishing and e-books have increased the number of titles being released each year from hundreds of thousands to many millions. It's a tidal wave of tat with just a few treasures in among the deluge, and those swept by so fast you could blink and miss them.

All the more reason, then, to rejoice when a writer of proven talent comes out with a new novel. And that's especially so when the novel is that writer's masterpiece, the one they've been honing for years, the work into which they've poured a lifetime of experience, craft and imagination.

Such a book is John Whitbourn's Babylondon. (Babylon and London, that is, as I'm sure you already realized.) How can I describe it in a way that will do justice to such a unique story? Imagine yourself in London in the summer of 1780. An angry rabble, enraged by laws intended to reduce discrimination, descend on the capital in an orgy of violence. A week of destruction and violence follow. These are the Gordon Riots. As one bystander put it as he watched public buildings go up in flames:

‘London offered on every side the picture of a city sacked and abandoned to a ferocious enemy.’

Yet this is unlike any modern populist howl of prejudice. Behind the scenes, malevolent forces are at work, exploiting the ignorant minds of the mob to bring about an infernal doom even more calamitous than a no-deal Brexit. From elsewhere in the multiverse comes a supernaturally competent, stylish and deliciously eccentric agent known as the Cavaliere. Imagine a refined, swordstick-wielding incarnation of the Doctor impeccably dressed for the century of lights, perhaps played by Tim Roth...



...with a touch of Marius Goring's performance as Conductor 71 in A Matter of Life and Death...



The Cavaliere soon gets himself an able companion to serve as his guide to this era, by the simple expedient of acquiring an orphan from the Foundling Hospital. (Since I'm doing the casting, Kate could be played by the young Billie Piper -- or Chloë Grace Moretz if she's up for attempting a Cockney accent.) Our two heroes will need all their wits and wiles, though, because ranged against them are a whole hierarchy of lethally adept opponents from this world and the planes beyond -- some of them armed with quantum weapons that even the Cavaliere has no defence against. ("This stuff shouldn't be here at all," warns the shadowy Guardsman as he equips his locally recruited minions.) And all this against the bloody backdrop of the riots as London is torn apart.

If I haven't piqued your interest by now then that's entirely my fault, because Babylondon is a modern classic that should appeal to every connoisseur of historical SF, multiverse adventure, and parallel worlds. John Whitbourn has been working on this novel since the late '90s and he's brought it to the quintessence of perfection. Grab your periwig and your poignard, and allons-y.

The war against the future

Funny how things get dredged up. I recently got to thinking about a very old idea of mine. I’ll tell you a bit later what jogged my memory. A long while ago – must’ve been a couple of decades at least – I was watching an old Carol Reed movie called Odd Man Out, about an IRA man on the run in 1940s London. Thinking of spies having to lie low – soldiers, that is, but out of uniform – I got to imagining a society that waged war against its own future.

What kind of a war would that be? Well, one way to do it would be old Nazis plotting revenge against a modern, distinctly anti-fascist Germany, but that felt a bit tired. It hardly counts as a war when a bunch of OAPs set fire to a few shops or daub a swastika on a wall.

I was striving for something more jolting to the audience’s expectations, which probably meant more science fictional. A war against the future suggested society having reached an impasse that only time could break. So should it be sleeper agents in a literal sense, floating underground in suspended animation tanks until the moment came to rekindle the conflict?

Trouble with that, it’s a little like the core premise of Pyramids of Mars, only with a very different skin (or at any rate bitumen-soaked bandages) over the top. Nobody would notice, but I still felt like treating it that way would be wasting the idea. Obviously the best approach would be to have outright time travel, so that armies could pour out of the past to mow down their own descendents. Firing back could be a knotty problem. But then it’s not special. You wouldn’t notice that the interesting thing was a society at war with what it had become. The time travel business would overshadow all that.

Sometimes you just can’t see the way to make an idea work. Hitchcock wanted Cary Grant pursued by a tornado across Indiana. “But how can the heavies manufacture a tornado?” asked Ernest Lehman, who actually had to write the damned thing. Hitch settled for a crop-duster, but he wasn’t happy about it. I know how he feels. The war against the future got slung onto that subconscious junk heap of unworkable gems – or unpolishable you-know-whats. And then I came across a couple of brilliant tweets by Paul Cornell that bought it all back.

I lived through Thatcher, and I have to say, this coming General Election is the one, the future or the past.
— Paul_Cornell (@Paul_Cornell) May 27, 2014

So there you are. No need for a Tardis or a cryonic pod. No need even for superannuated reactionaries blowing up their hippy grandchildren to teach them a lesson. The war against the future is interesting when it happens (as it always does) between neighbours, within families, both sides lining up to decide whether civilization should point forwards or backwards. And I knew that. I’ve read about enough revolutions, hot and cold, throughout history. That’s how to write my story. The answer was staring me in the face all along. Maybe it was just too close for comfort.

Who goes there? Helix, Daleks and Things in the ice

News of a new show, Helix, that is starting on Syfy tomorrow, set me thinking about a concept that I pitched to them ten years ago. The original concept was for a Doctor Who story, cooked up immediately after watching the disappointing Paul McGann TV movie (not that it was his fault).

In my version, the reboot picked up after an unspecified regeneration which in my ur-text was probably from third to fourth Doctor. The action was set in a biotech research base in the Antarctic, where scientists had recovered fragments of alien DNA and were trying to reconstruct the original organisms. One was a microbe that metabolized metals (it had to be kept suspended in a magnetic bubble) but there was also another, more complex, alien lifeform that appeared to have no external sensory organs, all of its nerve connections coming to a single neural router.

This was a way of bringing the Daleks back, in fact. The complex organism was the Dalek itself. The microbe was something they had engineered to build their casings, much as coral grows a reef or how human DNA grows a skeleton, come to that. Such story sleight-of-hand would also justify a redesign of the Daleks so that we could have them hover a foot off the ground (to be accomplished with a green screen skirt at the bottom) and never again have to listen to that, "What about stairs?" crap. Considering that I came up with the entire plot in thirty minutes over a glass of wine while post-morteming the TV movie, I was particularly pleased with the double-bluff climax too, where the thing you think will stop the Daleks gives them no trouble whatsoever.

I worked the outline up with my wife, who is also a writer, and we talked to Terry Nation's agent, but the wheels were already turning for the BBC to reboot Doctor Who by then. And even so, pitching a TV show is an uphill struggle as it is. Adding another man's IP to your load is like yomping across the Brecon Beacons with a sackful of bricks.

That explains why, when we came to pitch it around the networks a couple of years ago, Jamie and I substituted our own aliens for the Daleks. That version is called Starborn and you can read it here. That's much the most polished outline we did. Jamie and I moved the action to the Arctic Circle, linked it all to the Tunguska event, and wrapped it up as a full movie. I would love to have made it, although now it would just look like we'd copied Helix.

But in case you're interested in the original Dr Who version, read on. It's not every day you get fanfic on the Fabled Lands blog. And kudos to John W Campbell, of course.

Doctor Who reboot pilot: “Who Goes There?”

By Roz and Dave Morris (1996)

An American military helicopter, flying near the South Pole. On board are several special forces soldiers, plus two civilians. The civilians, two men, are wearing survival blankets, and have obviously been picked up nearby. Two soldiers, Murphy and Powell, are guarding them with guns, and a third, Captain Evans, is watching their every move. The two civilians seem relatively unperturbed by this scrutiny. The one with Murphy looks around at the helicopter interior with mild curiosity; the one with Powell seems to be directing his attention inward as though meditating. They don’t talk to each other.

They travel for a while in silence. The civilian being guarded by Murphy eventually says to Captain Evans: ‘You can contact UNIT. They will tell you who we are.’

Captain Evans replies crisply: ‘We have been advised that you can alter your appearance. We have protocols for that too.’

The civilian raises an eyebrow and returns to his idle survey of the helicopter interior. His accent was not American, unlike that of those around him. The other civilian surfaces from his meditation and fixes his eyes on Captain Evans for a while, looking at him with curiosity. His stare is intense and Captain Evans snaps at Powell: ‘Make sure you watch his every move.’

Captain Evans takes a call on his earpiece. It is the pilot. After a few moments Captain Evans tells Murphy and Powell that the craft is diverting. ‘Diverting where?’ says the civilian being guarded by Powell.

‘You don’t need to know where,’ says Captain Evans.

The pilot contacts Evans again. They are attempting to divert to a base but the base is a restricted area and will not allow them to land. Evans attempts to reason with them. Clearly the helicopter  is in difficulties.

The civilian with Murphy raises his voice above the hubbub and says calmly but authoritatively:  ‘If this helicopter fails mid-air we will die. We’ll simply have to land there and take the consequences.’ Reluctantly Captain Evans gives the order to land.

With difficulty, the pilots coax the ailing craft to a safe landing, They are on a windswept plain outside a long, low building. It could have been designed to blend in with the arid, snowless landscape around it. Immediately they are surrounded by guards in environment suits and escorted inside. Meanwhile the helicopter is towed into a hangar and in moments there is barely a sign that they have been there, as the fierce wind scours away any trace of their landing.

The Americans and their two prisoners are shown to a room and told to wait. It is a lounge area, with sofas and low tables, and CCTV surveillance. Captain Evans tells them that they are in a Gensec facility.

‘What’s a Gensec?’ asks Murphy. Despite the hiatus, he and Powell are still guarding the two strangers carefully.

The stranger with Powell speaks. ‘Genetically Secure. We’re in the heart of Antarctica. It’s cold, dry and sterile. This is a base for genetic engineering research. If any bacteria escape, they can’t spread because it’s like releasing them on the moon.’

Now we can get a closer look at the two prisoners. The one with Murphy is tall and athletic, with a quiet intelligent look about him. The one with Powell is a little smaller, but extremely forceful and intense.

Captain Evans snaps at them: ‘Our protocols will still be enforced, even in this temporary setback.’

The base is staffed partly by military, partly by scientists.  The base commander comes in, along with a scientist and two other soldiers. Captain Evans explains that they are American special forces and the base personnel systematically check the credentials of all the newcomers. When they ask about the two prisoners Captain Evans reports that the squad were sent to pick them up after an incident on one of the ice shelves. He will not divulge what the incident is, but gives a reference code.

The two prisoners speak to each other for the first time. ‘The Earth military are always so regimented,’ says the one with Powell. 

‘But that regimentation has its uses,’ says the other.

The pilot and co-pilot are working with the base’s engineers to repair the helicopter, but they estimate it will take a few hours. The base commander has checked out the visitors and briefed Captain Evans, and now they are allowed a little more freedom. The stranger with Murphy immediately makes for the main lab, still with his soldier guard, who will not let him out of his sight. In the lab are the chief scientist, Professor Dent, and her assistant, Dr Allen. Professor Dent is very prickly with the civilian, and looks particularly annoyed when he and his guard stroll off to explore the lab. The civilian with Powell joins them some minutes later.

The civilian with Murphy remarks on a molecular model on a computer screen. Startled at the depth of the man’s knowledge, Professor Dent replies: ‘I didn’t realise you were a scientist.’

‘The term scientist is too restrictive,’ replies the man. ‘What one does doesn’t define who one is.’ He goes back to inspecting the model on the screen. Professor Dent watches as the man with Powell leafs through a sheaf of test result sheets rapidly and with great concentration. She says a quiet word to Dr Allen and leaves the room.

When she comes back her manner has changed and she is more forthcoming. She says: ‘I found it very hard to get any information on the two of you. I had to hack in via the internet and even so there isn’t much. Eventually I got to UNIT. You should have said. Which one of you is the Doctor?’

The man with Powell replies: ‘We’re both scientifically trained.’

Professor Dent says: ‘I want to talk to you about what we’re doing here,’ and begins to ask if they have any experience of building life-forms.

Dr Allen, her assistant, interrupts. ‘They don’t have military clearance,’ he says severely, and argues with Professor Dent. The civilian with Murphy eventually coaxes Professor Dent to tell all.

Signals have been picked up from space from the CETI programme. They were immediately classified. No-one could make sense of them at first, then someone realised it was a genome. So the data was sent to Gensec to be synthesised. There are two genomes. One is very simple - a complex microbe that metabolises metal, quite rapidly. They have to keep it in a magnetic bottle as it eats glass too, only more slowly. They studied what it was doing with the metal and found it was weaving it into some sort of structure.

‘It was only a microbe,’ says Professor Dent. ‘It seemed to have a few simple behaviours for how it would weave, perhaps like a spider.’

The man with Powell interjected: ‘or like a termite?’

‘A termite?’ says Dent.

‘Because they know how each other think,’ says the man with Powell. ‘A few simple rules allow the termite to build complex structures including nests with cooling veins that maintain an absolute temperature.’

‘It’s emergence,’ says the man with Murphy. ‘The creation of complexity out of simple rules. Don’t worry, old girl, not your field.’

‘You said there were two genomes,’ says the man with Powell.

‘We’ve just finished the second one,’ says Dent. ‘This is the problem. We’re not sure if we’ve got something wrong. The organism is about the size of and not dissimilar to a trilobite. It has very complex neural tissue, but all the neural clusters come together in an organ which has no other contact.’

The man with Murphy says: ‘You mean it has all the nerves to operate limbs but no limbs.’

‘Only vestigial limbs,’ says Dent. ‘It’s hard to see how it could be a viable life form. Actually I wasn’t sure that there wasn’t an error in the process. So we grew twenty separate ones. And they’re all the same.’

‘What have you done with it?’ asks the man with Murphy.

At that moment, there is an alert. Base security rush into the lab and escort the two strangers out, with their guards, and Dent and her assistant are called away. The two strangers are escorted back to the lounge area where they were first held with the American soldiers, and on their way they overhear the reason for the alert: several of the complex organisms have escaped from the tanks where they were grown.

The man with Powell turns to the other man. ‘They seem to be very resourceful,’ he says.

The creatures have got into the ventilation shaft. One drops out and attacks one of the base’s soldiers. It seems to be trying to bite him. The soldier reacts in fright, throws the creature to the ground and kills it.

The creatures are rounded up and caught. One is missing, but Professor Dent assures everyone it can’t do any harm, and generally no one seems worried about it. The base commander orders them to be moved from their open tanks to the secure part of the lab where the magnetic bottles are, and for them to be secured under lids. ‘We don’t want any more to get out,’ he says.

The body of the squashed creature is returned to the lab, and Dent invites the two strangers to inspect it, explaining that it tried to attack a soldier. The two pore over it, interested, and the one with Murphy says: 'So they seem to be unreasoningly aggressive as well as resourceful.’ Dent types up some notes on a laptop, while Dr Allen ribs his colleague about not trusting her vital work to the network. ‘I don’t like the network,’ retorts Dent crossly.

The two strangers and Dent rejoin the others in the lounge area. Captain Evans reports that the helicopter is nearly ready, and soon they will be on their way. The armed guards continue to shadow the two civilians, who now seem to take no notice of them whatsoever and are having a philosophical discussion with Dent and her assistant Allen about why someone would broadcast a genome through space for someone to build. Dent speculates it could be a dying planet wanting to communicate. The stranger with Murphy remarks that this seems to be a very trusting thing to do: ‘People might synthesise your race merely to enslave them.’

Allen agrees: ‘Yes, it seems too private to send your genetic code out in that way.’

‘But how do you enslave a microbe or a virus?’ says Dent.

‘A virus..?’ repeats the man with Murphy. ‘If you had a virus that could spread unchecked through the universe, would you make it?’

Suddenly, the lights flicker and dim. Something is draining the power from the generator. The computers show that the drain is from the secure lab, otherwise known as the vault. Dent, Allen, Captain Evans, the two strangers and their guards and the base commander rush down. They find the doors are sealed.

The vault is built to survive a nuclear blast and proves impregnable.

With the power off, the base is much colder after a couple of hours. Everybody has been trying to work in emergency lighting, which casts an eerie dim glow. People are using torches but the batteries are rapidly becoming drained. Tempers are becoming frayed as all efforts to enter the vault prove futile. Captain Evans and hi men, who never quite trusted the two strangers, notices the two strangers do not seem to feel the cold as much as the others do, and everyone is looking at them with more suspicion. The base commander accuses them of having instigated this crisis, and they become more like prisoners again as Murphy and Powell redouble their guarding effort.

The base commander has the two strangers escorted away from the vault, but soon decides they are the only chance to solve the problem.

The one with Powell asks Dent: ‘Is the vault sealed off? How about the ventilation system?’

‘That isn’t big enough,’ says Dent. ‘It’s only a narrow duct. We couldn’t use that to enter the vault.’

‘No,’ the man with Murphy replies. ‘WE couldn’t.’ He meets his companion’s eyes and understanding passes between them. 

Dr Allen is down there too. He mentions that when the power went off a few hours ago, it would have deactivated the magnetic bottles.

The man with Powell lets out a long, thoughtful sigh. ‘So, was it mindless aggression or cunning? Perhaps the one who died did it to create a diversion.’

The man with Murphy has been working out what happened. ‘The creature that went missing got into the vault and used its vestigial limbs to turn off the bottle, freeing the microbes which are now metabolising everything. It also freed the other creatures. My guess is that those microbes are weaving something, possibly a complex piece of machinery.’

The commander peers into the vault. It is steamed up in there because the power is still on and it is warm. He says: ‘I can see something in there. It’s like domes or termite mounds. They’re moving. They’re coming  towards the door.’ He suddenly shouts. ‘Stand back!’

Captain Evans reacts immediately and tells his two men: ‘Prepare your weapons. The moment the doors open, fire!’

Dent tries to stop them ‘But wait,’ she says. ‘These creatures could be extra-terrestrials, they may not mean us any harm.’ She turns to one of the strangers for support. ‘We should try to communicate and reason with them.’

The stranger with Murphy says: ‘It’s unlikely we’ll be able to reason with them, but I don’t think the guns will do anything. Stand back!’

The doors open. The soldiers open fire into the vault with their sub machine guns. Massive fire power is unleashed into the room as they try to eradicate the unknown threat within. It goes on for what seems like ages, a barrage of bullets, sparks, ricochets and metallic sounds.

Finally Captain Evans shouts: ‘cease fire.’

Something is moving. It comes towards them, backlit by the remaining light from within the vault. A domed thing, moving smoothly across the bullet-littered floor.

It says: ‘Put down your weapons or you will be exterminated.’

A Dalek.

The Daleks immediately recognise the stranger with Murphy as the Doctor, and order the others to secure him under close confinement. As three Daleks escort them triumphantly away they can’t resist divulging their plan: to broadcast themselves through the universe so that advanced civilisations will pick them up and synthesise them.

The stranger with Powell, who is the Master, says ‘So they are perfectly placed to wipe out all the civilisations who would be a threat to them. You must admire their ingenuity.’

The Doctor replies: ‘I find nothing in them to admire.’

They exchange a conspiratorial look, and then the Master creates a diversion and the Doctor manages to run outside and escape. The Daleks decide not to pursue him, saying he will either die in the cold or come back in of his own accord.

The Daleks put the humans to work. They instruct the humans to reconfigure the satellite array so that they can receive more signals from outer space. They begin to wait for their messages, but a cosmic storm means they are interrupted. Meanwhile, the scientists are forced to give DNA samples.

The Master seems keen to engage the Daleks in conversation. He tells them: ‘I was studying the genome used to create you. It’s too great a task to build an entire structure from scratch. So the humans have used Earth animals for the redundant DNA – mice, worms, even humans. You’re not pure.’

The Dalek replies: ‘It does not matter. When the Daleks from Skaro get here our fate is immaterial.’

The Daleks’ message gets through and they have their orders from Skaro, plus another microbe to grow. Professor Dent and Dr Allen have ominous feelings about this. Then they overhear some Daleks discussing it; it is a microbe that will destroy all human life on the planet when mixed with human DNA – the samples that the Daleks took.

These Daleks have been restyled; the weaving process has allowed them to be adapted for their environment, so they float over rough terrain on a cushion of light-charged air.

After a little while outside, the Doctor comes back to the area where the soldiers and base staff are being held and gives himself up. Everyone is astonished that he managed to survive outside.

The Daleks are jubilant to have the Doctor in their clutches but also suspicious. They quickly arrive in force to question him. When he refuses to tell them what he has been doing they decide to try out their new microbe on him. Two Daleks pinion him against a wall and another approaches with a test tube in a glass box with a timer. The timer is set. The other humans in the room scream. The Master tries to reason with the Daleks, saying they’ll kill everyone and then they will have no servants to help them colonise the planet. The Daleks say ‘This does not matter; Daleks will find a way.’

The timer detonates and smashes the test tube.

Liquid spreads across the floor. The puddle from the test tube seems to grow even as you look at it, and vapour pours off it. The humans try to escape but their way is barred by Daleks. The humans start to collapse, coughing and panicking. The Doctor and the Master remain unharmed. The Daleks are worried – and ask each other why the humans have not begun to disintegrate – and why the Master and the Doctor are still standing. The doctor replies that the humans are merely sleeping – from a dose of opioid found in the medical unit. Then the Daleks start to bubble and distort – and the Doctor reveals that he swapped their deadly microbe for their metal-weaving microbe, which he has modified . The Daleks start to melt before their eyes, screaming in panic.

The Daleks die horribly as their casings melt and the power is shorted through the organic creature inside.

The humans start to wake up, one by one. The Doctor explains that he liberated something from the lab – Professor Dent’s laptop. ‘Very useful things, he said. I made a few modifications to the metal-weaving microbe. It just used very simple chemicals and didn’t really take any power.’ The Doctor takes something from his inside pocket. The lab staff and soldiers all gasp – it is the deadly microbe. The Doctor gives it to Professor Dent telling her to destroy it immediately.

The helicopter has been repaired and the party are ready to leave. The Americans immediately clap the Master into handcuffs before they all get into the helicopter and take off.

Meanwhile, back in the lab, Professor Dent notices one of her test tubes is missing – the one with the metal-eating microbe.

Publication day

It's a big day for us on Monday. That's when Fabled Lands LLP are officially launching their book imprint Spark Furnace with the publication of John Whitbourn's classic ghostly series The Binscombe Tales. These were originally written in the early 1990s and have been collected in many anthologies such as DAW's Year's Best Fantasy. To celebrate, Jamie, Tim and I are being taken to a publication day lunch at Wiltons Restaurant off Piccadilly by Fabled Lands LLP's head honcho, Franklin L Johnson. (Must remember to dress smartly for a change.)

Talking of slap-up meals, here's the skinny: Spark Furnace are releasing the stories as three paperbacks (UK here, US here) and in ebook form via Smashwords - or, if you'd rather sample them in chapbook form, as six Kindle books (UK and US).

One of the things that's amazing about the Binscombe Tales is how many now-famous horror and fantasy concepts appeared first in these books. John Whitbourn's story "Eyes" is virtually a prototype in low key for the entire Final Destination series of movies, and this excerpt from the story "Hello Dolly" anticipates the Amy Pond storyline on Doctor Who by almost two decades:

Linda Disch applied her scarlet lips to a Bloody Mary before proceeding. ‘One morning,’ she said, ‘I was playing there with all my dollies and that, when I felt something strange. The wall behind me seemed to have some give in it. It shouldn’t have. It’d always been just a nice plain, solid wall, it made me safe and protected. I wasn’t worried though. Children don’t have much fear, do they, Mr Oakley?’

You obviously didn’t go to prep school, I thought—but kept it to myself.

‘Leastways, I didn’t have much scare in me,’ said Linda. ‘I just took things in my stride in those days.’

‘But what about this wall?’ I asked (she seemed to be dallying).

‘It wasn’t a wall anymore, Mr Oakley. It was a door.’ Linda was wide-eyed with wonder, as if the incident was only five minutes in her past. ‘I looked up and saw there was a big brass doorknob above my head. When I got up I found the wall was now a great oak door—keyhole, panels, the lot.’

‘And when you tried the handle?’ I asked, urging her on once more.

‘Oh, I didn’t, Mr Oakley. I was brought up to knock before I entered rooms, and somehow I didn’t fancy doing that. What I did do was have a quick squint through the keyhole.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing. It was all old and grimed up. You couldn’t see a thing.’

‘I see.’

‘Well, I couldn’t. I was just standing there and gawping, wondering how I’d missed noticing this room before. Then I saw that the door was a poor fit. There was a fair gap at the bottom, half an inch or so. Straight off. I shimmied down on to my tummy and tried to see into the room.

‘There was light in there from a window or something, because I could see bits and pieces of what was beyond. A ray of sunshine was lighting up the gloom. “There’s no carpet,” I remember thinking. “How come Mum stands for that?’” It looked dirty and dusty, all neglected and forlorn. There was faded wallpaper starting to curl off in places and sheets of yellow newsprint lying about. It occurred to me that perhaps even Mum and Dad hadn’t found this room yet. But there again, how could that be? They knew everything. They wouldn’t miss a part of their own house, surely.

‘Then a pair of feet crossed my line of vision, great grey slabs of feet, slowly pacing up and down the room, in and out of that beam of sunlight. I must have gasped or something, because the feet stopped in their tracks as though I’d been heard. They changed direction and headed straight for me...'

STOP PRESS: (I always wanted to say that.) If you live in Surrey, England, pick up a copy of local newspaper the Surrey Advertiser this week, as it features an interview with John Whitbourn in which he talks about his writing, his forthcoming novel (based at the time of the Gordon Riots) and his roots in real-life Binscombe, where his family have lived since the Civil War.

When Doctor Who was seven weeks old

Here's something for Fathers' Day. Last week I did a post on my other blog that could just as easily have fitted in here, assuming that SF/fantasy gamers have, as I suspect, a wide overlap with Doctor Who fans. It's the story of how I became the first boy ever to meet a Dalek face-to-face. It was 1964. JFK had been shot, the Beatles were about to break big, but all I cared about were fluid links, static electricity, neutron bombs, police boxes and genocidal mutants. Happy days!