I, Alastair (novel)

I, Alastair
Main character(s):	Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart, Ben Knight, Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart
Featuring:	Benton, Anne Travers, Eileen Younghusband
Main enemy:	Sally Wright, The Accord
Main setting:	London, Great Britain, Inferno Earth, 1968
Key crew
Publishers:	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

Worldbuilding

• A group of six IRA members, referred to as the "Cumbria Six", were held responsible for a nuclear explosion at Windscale in 1966 and were publicly executed on television. This is an allusion to both the real-life Windscale fire and the IRA's terrorist campaign.
• Excerpts from a suppressed memoir by an unknown author are used to worldbuild and exposit on the Party's ideology, a possible reference to a banned book doing the same in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
• Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart refers to the assassination of Charles de Gaulle and ensuring France retained Algeria: in our timeline, there was an attempted coup against de Gaulle by nationalist army officers and French settlers intent on preventing him from allowing Algeria to become independent.
• Lethbridge-Stewart fought an insurgency in Aden and committed massacres of civilians to suppress 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).
• The Resistance plan is codenamed "the Italian Job", alluding to the real-life 1969 British heist film of that name.
• The Palace of Westminster was burned down and was reconstructed as the New People's Parliament. The Chamber of the House of Lords survived the fire and is now used as a venue for important political ceremonies. The old furniture was removed but as there was no Blitz, the original Pugin stained glass windows were still intact.
• In the 1940s all non-white people were deported from Britain and forced to work in poor conditions in the Caribbean and Africa; an opponent of the Party claims the death toll is between sixty to eighty per cent, although her reliability is questionable (see Errors for elaboration).
• A system of labour camps exists to punish and rehabilitate people sentenced by the People's Court for political crimes, a particularly dense cluster of camps is located in the Home Counties surrounding London. The unknown author of the expositional memoir refers to the camp system as an "archipelago" across the country, alluding to The Gulag Archipelago by real-world author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Other camps exist in remote areas such as the Isle of Mull, presumably to make escape more difficult for detainees considered at high risk of escape attempts. Even the free civilian staff and guards consider the Mull camp unpleasant to work at.
• It is implied the true horror of the Party's regime is that it does not need to act as a terror state like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or Maoist China in N-Space in order to retain control. The Party carefully frames any violence it commits as a calm and measured response to (real or imaginary) injustices inflicted on society as a whole. Even its opponents do not accuse it of crimes against humanity as grave as those of many real-world 20th century totalitarian states.
  • The Party's tyranny is a subtle one of lulling dissent to sleep by maintaining high living standards and heavily publicising the wrongdoings of the regime's enemies. This type of "iron fist in a velvet glove" approach was used by many real-world authoritarian leaders such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Josip Broz Tito, Lee Kuan Yew, and France-Albert René.
• In 1962 the Resistance movement destroyed Nelson's Column (an allusion to the real-life destruction of Nelson's Pillar by the IRA in 1966), however the executions of the group's leaders did little to arouse any public sympathy for the movement and it became inactive for several years.
• When the Resistance emerged from hibernation in 1968 it had become even more fanatical and bloodthirsty than the Party itself, launching a mass co-ordinated bomb attack resulting in thousands of civilian deaths and engineering an unplanned blackout deliberately intended to cut off the electricity supply to hospitals. This alludes to a famous quote by Friedrich Nietzsche: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

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) At the very least it is strongly indicated he may be a Time Lord. When speaking of his heart condition he says that his "hearts are not what they once were"; there is a rumour from zealots that he could once extend his life but has had the ability taken from him; when Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart starts referring to alien infiltration, the Leader initially seems about to have him dragged away (which Gordon takes as meaning he's not convincing him).
• Alastair spends this story as Column Leader before his promotion as Alistair spent the early Lethbridge-Stewart books as a colonel.
• Knight remembers meeting the 'false' Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart nine years ago, as depicted in 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 established in 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.
• Mention is made of the RAAF, a parallel of the real-life Royal Auxiliary Air Force (presumably in this universe the abbreviation stands for Republican Auxiliary Air Force). The Party is suspicious of the regular armed forces and prefers to keep them busy outside of the Republic to avert any risk of a coup. Early in the story the Leader orders some military pageantry to boost public morale, explicitly of reservists as few regular servicemen are on active duty within the Republic at any one time,
• Alastair's great-uncle was executed at Cromer.
• The Travers family has connections to the revolution, with Edward's uncle one of the first to enter Buckingham Palace in 1943.
• 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 memory blanks 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.
• While not covered in this book, Edward Travers here is from an alternate timeline. PROSE: The Schizoid Earth established the Inferno Earth Travers had died in 1930s Tibet, while the alternate Travers fled his timeline with Alastair; he was "collected" by External Security and whisked away to the Vault.
• Anne Travers and her father work at the Vault, as Anne would in the Lethbridge-Stewart books - here, they are 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 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.
• Non-violent opposition did continue to exist after 1968, but organised opposition consisted mainly of "crackpot" groups considered to be largely harmless eccentrics rather than actually dangerous. The main threats by the 1970s were individual articulate libertarians and spies who worked for foreign powers. (TV: Inferno)

Errors

• The book uses worldbuilding elements from The Face of the Enemy where the RSF have fought aliens since 1959. Despite this, nobody in the RSF or the Cabinet seems aware aliens exist. Even Director Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, commanding the group since before they ran into the Bannermen, only knows of aliens as rumours and old reports, and can only offer those to the Cabinet.
• 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.
• In I, Alastair the publicly owned broadcaster is referred to as the "RBC", despite the name "BBC" being used in both The Schizoid Earth (set in 1959) and Still Lives (set in 1974 or 1980) and so is likely an error missed in editing.
• An opponent of the regime claims the masses are impoverished, but it is stated in the extracts from the censored memoir that the energy crisis was a result of the economy growing rapidly, causing the demand for electricity to outstrip supply. In Inferno foreign nationals such as Harry Slocum and Greg Sutton are shown to have sought work in the Republic, implying the economy was thriving and offered better job prospects than in their home countries despite the regime's poor human rights record. In Night of the Intelligence it was implied the Party has retained power because the public had their material needs met and thus had no appetite for rebellion. The Resistance member was held under duress with threats of violence being made against members of her family, so her statement could be unintentional exaggeration from a state of high emotion.
• Nuclear power is said to have been banned after the IRA sabotaged Windscale. But in Still Lives the Nuton Power Complex is mentioned, with no evidence that nuclear power was prohibited, merely that the electricity grid was under-capacity and a radical solution was needed.
• The RSF make use of submachine guns that are referred to as "Uzis". However this poses a number of continuity issues. As there was no Second World War or holocaust in the Inferno universe it is highly doubtful that the State of Israel exists. Similarly, Uziel Gal, the weapon's designer, was in prison in 1943 in the real world, on the Inferno Earth it is unlikely he would ever have been released.