Author Notes

The chapter title was the provisional title of the novel The Also People. The provisional title of this chapter was ‘The Yeti on the Loo’, and you all know why, so I don’t need to explain.

We never see the Martian hang-gliders in action, which is a bit of a shame. Note that the Martians also have ‘tripods’ (as the Martians in The War of the Worlds did), and machines that look like the Martian war machines in the fifties film version of War of the Worlds.

Benny comes into her own here. This was inspired by something Mark Clapham told me – Morrisons supermarket’s own brand vodka was, and maybe still is, called Morrotov. Well, Mark was a university student at the time, he’d know. Benny said in Love and War that there’s not a problem in the world that can’t be solved with vodka. Here she demonstrates this by making a Morrotov cocktail.

And the Doctor dies. SFX had already reported that the Doctor died halfway through the book, so everyone knew it was coming. It was the last book, I could do it. Every other book, you know for a fact that he’s going to come bouncing back. Not here. Some people objected that BBC were doing Eighth Doctor books, so he couldn’t die. Look again – the Doctor says he’s twelve hundred years old. This book clearly happens after the BBC Eighth Doctor books (and still, even after the Earth arc, in the future of the current EDAs – although the Doctor remembers The Dying Days in The Scarlet Empress). You can have your EDAs, but it’ll end like this. I realised afterwards that this is exactly what happens in the last episode of Star Cops, where Nathan dies. The title of that episode? Little Green Men – there’s this discovery on Mars, you see, and it’s uncovered this conspiracy to keep the existence of Martians secret...