Author Notes

We see the Martians alone for the first time, and – surprise, surprise – they’ve got an evil plan that Greyhaven doesn’t know about.

The original idea of the book was that it would be the human characters who ascribed nobility and culture to the Ice Warriors, but the Martians would really be just nasty, snarling, spitting slabs of hate. Monsters, in other words. So the humans would keep going on about how they came from a noble culture, and had a code of honour, but everything the Martians actually did was just sadistic and nasty. After the book was finished, I saw Mars Attacks! where the Pierce Brosnan scientist character does that joke. But by then, the Martians, particularly Xznaal, had developed into pretty rounded characters. This chapter contrasts Xznaal and the Brigadier – both warriors, both having seen better days, both full of regrets, both thirsting for one last battle.

While, over the years, the odd ‘influence’ from Grant Morrison’s work has been felt in my books, the coronation of an alien as king of England predates the same scene in The Invisibles by a couple of years. It is, as Greyhaven is at pains to note, a fairly accurate depiction of a real coronation ceremony.

Christmas on a Rational Planet, Lawrence Miles’s 1996 debut novel, had a throwaway reference to the ‘recoronation’ of Queen Elizabeth II. I thought I was being very clever by tying up a loose end by showing why she needed a second coronation. But Lawrence was tying up a loose end himself – how there could be a ‘King’ in Battlefield (set in the mid to late nineties, and a couple of months before TDD) but the Queen could celebrate her Golden Jubilee in Head Games (a sequence of which was set in 2001). As is often the way, two people trying to solve a continuity error have left a much bigger one in its place.

The Brigadier and Eve joke about UNIT being a top secret organisation. In the TV series, while UNIT’s meant to be one of the most covert organisations on the planet, they also drive around in big lorries marked ‘UNIT’, and the (local!) reporters in Spearhead from Space know who the Brigadier is, which organisation he runs and that he investigates ‘little green men’. It’s clearly one of the worst-kept secrets in the world.