Susan's Diary (short story)

Susan's Diary
Main character(s):	Susan Foreman
Featuring:	First Doctor
Key crew
Publisher:	BBC Books
Writers:	James Goss, Steve Tribe
Release details
Genre:	Science fiction
Printed in:	The Doctor: His Lives and Times
Release date:	26 September 2013
Format:	Short story
The Doctor: His Lives and Times
← Previous	Report on Term's Work
Next →	The Traveller From Beyond Time

Susan's Diary was a short story released in The Doctor: His Lives and Times.

Plot

Susan and her grandfather have recently been to Tiaanamat, to see the Long Song. Susan bought the 500 year diary for him, but he dismissed it as silly. She resolves to fill it in herself as a record of their adventures.

The Doctor does not let Susan help him pilot the TARDIS, and repeatedly checks the fault locator. She recalles meeting geese, sailing the metal seas of Venus, singing with the thought plants on Esto, getting lost on Quinnis, and winning an election on Dido. She enjoys travelling, but is disapointed that the Ship frequently lands on Earth, which she finds boring. Her and her grandfather have visited the Blitz, been locked up in the Tower of London, and met several kings which have all tried to excecute them. She notes that they are now stuck in 1963, and resolves to attend a local Academy.

Susan writes that she does not like school, as she is constantly mocked by the humans there. She finds it hard to be a 'teenager', but does enjoy reading, even if she finds it difficult to differentiate factual books from fiction. She has bought a Transistor radio as an attempt to fit in, and enjoys the latest music, whilst her grandfather has given her a long list of music that he deems better.

After not writing in the diary for a while, Susan is glad that they 'survived the cavemen', but is annoyed at her grandfather for kidnapping Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, as he would not let her keep pets but took them 'to give them a shock', and now they cannot get back to 1963. They have landed on a petrified planet, she's found a flower that crumbled in her hands, and her grandfather wants to explore the city.

more to be added

Characters

• Susan Foreman
• First Doctor
• The Monk
• Dodo Chaplet
• Ian Chesterton

Worldbuilding

• Susan once travelled on the London Underground. She considered it the worst form of transport ever devised. She compared the Northern line to the Doctor's TARDIS.

Notes

• This story acts as an in-universe of the recap of the First Doctor era from An Unearthly Child to The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

Continuity

• This Five Hundred Year Diary first appeared in TV: The Power of the Daleks ^[+]Loading...["The Power of the Daleks (TV story)"])
• A Constable Oswald filed a missing person report on Susan. (TV: The Name of the Doctor)
• Susan writes about her trips to Tiaanamat, (TV: The Rings of Akhaten) the Metal Seas of Venus, (TV: Marco Polo) Esto, (TV: The Sensorites) and Quinnis, (TV: The Edge of Destruction, AUDIO: Quinnis) and the Zeppelin air raid, (TV: Planet of Giants) before arriving in 1963. (TV: An Unearthly Child)