Author Notes

Another good chapter title, if a little lateral.

Originally, the scene with the President and his aide featured a flat-voiced FBI agent and his winsome ginger partner. Even though they weren’t named, this was dropped because the legal people got nervous. Bizarrely, I thought, given the number of ‘homages’ in the book. I have to note that this was the only book I ever got legal advice from Virgin on, and I got a lot. Perhaps, as it was the last Who book, the lawyers hadn’t got any other books to read that month.

I did wonder about the Queen evacuating the country. I suspect, in the unlikely event of alien invasion, that she’d want to stand her ground, in the same way the royal family stayed in the country during WW2. That would clash with what happens later in the book, though. This year, I’ve read a book called The Secret State, by Peter Hennessy, which says that in the event of nuclear war, the plan in the sixties was to get the Queen onto the royal yacht and off to Canada (‘if it still exists’ – not the yacht, Canada). I was also really nervous about involving ‘real people’ in the invasion section. You’ll note that, after six chapters chock full of real people, from now on it’s just fictional characters. As well as legal nervousness (not wanting to paint real people as collaborators or as accepting Martian rule) there would have been something irredeemably camp about having Gazza or Scary Spice joining the fight. Watching LA destroyed in Independence Day, though, I did find myself wondering how many movie stars survived.

With the Ice Warrior, I wanted to get across that it wasn’t just some tall extra in a costume with a head that didn’t fit properly. This was a monster, and it looked like a monster. The idea was that it was an Ice Warrior done on a Hollywood budget. Another little touch – the reason the TV Movie people gave for not using monsters was that they were too expensive – Phillip Segal said something like ‘the budget would run to about two monster costumes, and you can’t tell a story about the invasion of Earth with two monsters’. As a bifurcated handed salute to that sentiment, and sentiments like it, in The Dying Days there are never more than two Martians in the same scene. You could make this story for television on about the same budget as a couple of episodes of Born and Bred.