Thursday 15 August 1991

Timewyrm: Exodus

Our tribute to the great Terrance Dicks concludes this week with a discussion of his first original Doctor Who novel, but we also take the opportunity to talk about what he achieved and how much we all owe him. Kate Orman and Adam Richard join us for Timewyrm: Exodus.

Notes and links

First, some background.

The Virgin New Adventures launched in 1991, as an “official” continuation of our cancelled show. It comprised 61 novels over nearly six years, including books by Classic Series writers Terrance Dicks, Marc Platt, Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel, as well as New Series writers Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts and Russell T Davies — not to mention five-and-a-half novels by our very own Kate Orman. Virgin lost the rights to Doctor Who in the middle of 1997, but the range continued until the end of 1999, with twenty-one novels featuring Benny Summerfield, a companion created by Paul Cornell for his 1992 novel Love and War.

Terrance Dicks didn’t get to launch the Virgin New Adventures: Timewyrm: Genesys is the second novel in the range. The 28th novel, Terrance’s sequel to State of Decay, was called Blood Harvest, which — together with Paul Cornell’s Goth Opera — was used to launch a second series of original novels, the Virgin Missing Adventures. Finally, when BBC Books acquired the rights to publish original Doctor Who fiction, they launched their series with a novel by Terrance — The Eight Doctors, which is not very highly regarded, sadly.

There are many dystopian novels set in an alternative timeline where the Nazis won World War II. Adam mentions Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), which depicts life in a United States partitioned between two mutually hostile Axis powers, Germany and Japan.

In an episode of the dreadful British science-fiction series The Tomorrow People (1973–1979), Hitler’s Last Secret, Part 2, Michael Sheard plays a revived Hitler, who is in reality a galactic criminal called Neebor from the planet Vashig. Here’s Neebor’s gruesome (and alarmingly cheap) unmasking for your viewing pleasure. Or not.

Blackout (2010) and All Clear (2010) are two novels in the Oxford Time Travel series by Connie Willis. The premise: In 2060, it’s possible to send students and historians back in time, confident in the theory that it’s impossible to change the past. But now three people find themselves trapped in World War II and start to find discrepancies that might change the outcome of the War.

Perhaps unwisely, Peter consults some reviews of Timewyrm: Genesys that he finds on the Time Scales website.

And finally, here’s the text of Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, just to remind us all that one day even our most impressive achievements will come to nothing.

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And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Mere hours after the release of this episode of 500 Year Diary, over on Maximum Power, we’ll be releasing an epic retrospective of the whole damn show, featuring hosts from every hemisphere, discussing how Blake’s 7 has thrilled, delighted, titillated and enraged us over the years. So until then, keep an eye on the website or on your podcatcher of choice.

Last week, we released a new episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, Startling Barbara Bain. In it, we watch an episode called The Infernal Machine, guest starring Leo McKern and his massive scary robot spaceship husband, who turns up on the Moon and starts menacing the base in what is now the traditional fashion.

Instead of taking Christmas off, Untitled Star Trek Project released one more episode for 2025, in which Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watch another highlight of the franchise, the season premiere of Season 4 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Way of the Warrior. This is one of our favourite episodes of the franchise and of the podcast: you won’t want to miss it.