I, Alastair (novel)

I, Alastair
Main character(s):	Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart, Ben Knight
Featuring:	Benton, Anne Travers, Eileen Younghusband, The Accord
Main setting:	Republic of Great Britain, Inferno Earth, 1968
Key crew
Publisher:	Candy Jar Books
Editor:	Andy Frankham-Allen, Shaun Russell, Keren Williams
Writer:	Robert Mammone
Cover by:	Richard Young
Release details
Release number:	28
Release date:	24 June 2020
ISBN:	ISBN 978-1-913637-03-3
Lethbridge-Stewart novels
← Previous	Foreword to the Past
Next →	Domination Game

I, Alastair was the sixth novel in the seventh series of Lethbridge-Stewart, released under the banner of Bloodlines, by Candy Jar Books in 2020.

Publisher's summary

Hail the Leader!

Under the gentle guidance of The Leader, Britain has flourished after the removal of the dead hand of democracy and the old, corrupt aristocracy. Dominant in Europe, a great power around the world, the Republic stands as a beacon to wise, benevolent and firm leadership.

The team led by column leader Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart is the best and brightest of us all, ensuring that attempts to overthrow the natural order will be stamped into submission.

Those who stand with the leader ensure that Britain remains great, a power to be reckoned with, and a dominant force across the globe.

Unity is strength.

Plot

to be added

Characters

• Column Leader Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart
• Ben Knight
• Spencer Pemberton
• James Lethbridge-Stewart
• Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart
• John Benton
• Sally Wright
• Anne Travers
• Edward Travers
• The Leader

References

• The real-life fire at Windscale nuclear facility is much worse in this timeline, killing Seascale village and causing the end of British nuclear industry.
• Excerpts from a suppressed memoir are used to worldbuild and exposit on the Party's ideology, a possible reference to a banned memoir doing the same in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
• Alastair spends this story as Column Leader before his promotion as Alistair spent the early Lethbridge-Stewart books as a colonel.
• Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart refers to Britain killing Charles de Gaulle and ensuring France retained Algeria: in our timeline, from 1960 to 1972 there were attempts at coups and assassinations against De Gaulle by nationalists afraid he'd accept Algerian independence.
• Anne Travers and her father work at The Vault, as Anne would in the Lethbridge-Stewart books - here, they're running it. Rather than being part of the Department of Technology, it's the Department of Energy and is concerned with Britain's power needs.
• Lethbridge-Stewart fought an insurgency in Aden and committed massacres of civilians to defeat it. This is an alternate version of the Aden Emergency, which in our world led to a British withdrawal, and likely a twisted reference one of Lethbridge-Stewart's real-life influences, Lt. Colonel Colin Mitchell.
• A painting of Robert Walpole, the de facto first Prime Minister, hangs in the Cabinet meeting room.
• Robert Dougall hosts the BBC's Nine O'Clock News, as he did in real life (though in real life it started in 1970).
• Lethbridge-Stewart threatens to have someone sent to Cromer, implied to be a labour camp and site of executions - also a reference to the famous line in TV: The Three Doctors.
• The Party and its true believers repeatedly invoke the decadence of the old rulers, while Party officials are shown having a high standard of living while the masses are deprived.
• The Resistance plan is codenamed "the Italian Job", referencing the famous 1969 British crime film of that name.
• The Palace of Westminster was burned and replaced by the New People's Parliament. The House of Lords' Chamber has survived the fire as a symbolic room. The furniture was removed but as there was no Blitz, the original Pugin stained glass windows were never broken.

Notes

• This is the first appearance of Benton in the Lethbridge-Stewart range, and as such features a creator credit for Derrick Sherwin, who created the character for TV: The Invasion.
• Mammone told an interview in 2021 that the Leader's paranoia and tendency to play cabinet members off against each other are based on Josef Stalin. He also admitted that when writing it, he'd forgotten about Paul Cornell's implication that the Inferno Earth ruler was a version of the Doctor; "in my head, the Leader was just another in a long line of very human tyrants."
• The book comes with a reprint of the short story Ashes of the Inferno.

Continuity

• The Leader is implied at points to be a version of the Doctor, as first established in PROSE: Timewyrm: Revelation. (This is not explicitly confirmed for legal reasons) The Leader refers to "hearts", which is taken as a slip due to ill health; there's a rumour from zealots that he could extend his life once but has lost the ability; when Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart starts refering to alien infiltration, the Leader initially seems about to have him dragged away (which Gordon takes as meaning he's not convincing him).
• All non-white Britons were deported and used as slave labour in the Carribean in 1943; the death toll is between sixty to eighty percent. There are also labour camps all over the Home Counties.
• Knight remembers meeting the 'false' Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart nine years ago, as depicted in PROSE: The Schizoid Earth. That puts this story in 1968 - the same year that the first Lethbridge-Stewart books were set.
• The book states the Bolsheviks lost the Russian Civil War and Knight is relieved not to be captured by "Tsarists", while Britain's uneasy American allies are headquartered in Richmond; the White Russians winning the civil war and a Confederate States of America existing was started by The Face of the Enemy.
• Oblique references are made to Alastair having a covered-up past. PROSE: The Schizoid Earth had him come from an alternate timeline.
• The Republic has an RAAF instead of an RAF.
• Alastair's great-uncle was executed at Cromer.
• Knight was killed in The Schizoid Earth, suggesting either he was one of the clones (more of whom Knight encounters in this book), or the Knight in this book is a clone. (His dodgy memory could also be a clue to this.)
• The RSF has rumours of odd things at Loch Ness (TV: Terror of the Zygons), "shaggy ghosts" on the Underground and a strange intelligence (TV: The Web of Fear), and spotted Tibetan Yeti while doing surveillance on China in the 50s.
• Travers was said to have died in Tibet previously (PROSE: The Schizoid Earth), however here he is seen to be alive and working with his daughter at the Vault. This suggests his death was either a cover-up, or Mackay simply didn't know the truth.

Errors

• Alastair doesn't believe in the existence of aliens and his father knows about previous incidents as rumours & old reports, even as the book uses worldbuilding elements from The Face of the Enemy where the RSF have fought aliens since 1959. Although in a book where cover-ups and lies are a key element, it is very likely that Alastair, being of a low rank, simply did not have access to information about the existence of aliens (therefore not really an error, just a false reading through not paying attention to the themes of the book).
• Ashes has James Lethbridge-Stewart discover that Alastair had reached Brigade Leader rank while he was away; in this story, James has not left the timeline when Alastair is promoted.