Author Notes

It’s unclear what the men are doing putting that thing on the roof , because I never explain it. They are setting up a homing beacon for the Martian ship, the same sort of beacon that the Martians need in The Seeds of Death. It’s why the ship ends up over Trafalgar Square. But I never explain that properly. Sorry.

Note that Bessie’s registration number has changed.

Until Mariner, most scientists thought Mars had primitive life, and none doubted that it could support life, at least in the sense that the top of Everest or Antarctica could ‘support life’. Even as late as Viking, some people still held out hope. By then, it had been clearly established that Mars in the Who universe had a breathable atmosphere. So here, they’re only discovering what anyone who’d seen Pyramids of Mars already knew.

One prediction I got wrong – I thought Mary Robinson would be the new Secretary General of the UN, but Kofi Annan got the job.

I love the end of this chapter – there’s a real sense of pace. It breaks the rules, too, of course. This was the era of the X-Files. Bex was a huge fan, and joked that she really wanted to see an episode which ended with Mulder and Scully saying all that usual guff about how there probably were aliens, but they’d never have any concrete evidence... just as one of the flying saucers from Independence Day flew overhead and the caption ‘to be continued’ comes up. That scene doesn’t quite make it into The Dying Days, but the sentiment behind it – that Doctor Who could do the ‘foreplay’ that the X-files does (conspiracies, government cover-ups, aliens) but, unlike the X-files it could then go onto the ‘orgasm’ of full scale alien invasion – informs the whole book. But TDD still breaks the rules – alien invasions aren’t allowed to be public. I only got away with it because it was the last book.