A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)
- You may be looking for the fictional book.
Doctor Who: A Brief History of Time Lords was a book intended to be a Gallifreyan history textbook, written and amended through time by its author.
Publisher's summary
The Time Lords are an immensely civilised, and immensely powerful, race. Yet we know very little about them, save that they can live forever (barring accidents) and possess the secrets of space and time travel. Their history has been shrouded in myth and mystery. Until now.
A Brief History of Time Lords unlocks the secrets of this ancient, legendary alien race - a civilisation that inflicted some of its most notorious renegades and criminals on the universe, but was also the benevolent power that rid the cosmos of its most fearsome enemies. Drawn from the ancient records of Gallifrey, and handed down from generation to generation, this remarkable book reveals the Time Lords in all of their guises: pioneers and power-mad conspirators, time-travellers and tyrants, creators and destroyers.
Be careful who you share it with.
Plot
Preface to the First Edition
In all of its history, there can be only one constant regarding the planet Gallifrey.
Lies.
Or more accurately, the lies of Rassilon and his inner retinue of Time Lords. While a Level 5 planet would say that "history is written by the victors", the Time Lords understand that history is re-written by the future. As a result, even the contents of this record, with its time sensitive pages may not be entirely accurate. All the author can promise is that it is one truth about the Time Lords, one that the old men in funny hats are determined to keep hidden away.
The Shining World of the Seven Systems
Within their protective bubbles, the Time Lords can out-sit eternity. And when they look beyond their cities, they sneer at the Drylands, the ancient trees, the weeds, the sludgy snow, and the looming mountains.
The truth of it is that Gallifrey is a beautiful planet, full of rich colours. Once, the author muses, the early inhabitants of the planet must have marvelled at their world, not just its beautiful wilderness and majestic mountains but also the wildlife, just as colourful as the wilderness that birthed them. Officially, Gallifrey is the only planet in the universe not have its eco-system ravaged by its dominant species, with no extinction occurring as a result of the Time Lords' actions.
Unofficially, that's another lie. The Last Great Time War killed all animals but the flies. And indeed, it was the Time Lords who fought the war. The Gallifreyans, who comprise the overwhelming majority of their world's population, lived outside the cities as simple farmers, whose crops feed even the Time Lords.
At the age of eight, every Gallifreyan child is taken from their family and brought to the Untempered Schism to assess whether or not they will become a Time Lord. As the author notes, the greatest fear of any seven year old was not that they'd fail, but rather succeed. Succeed and be sealed away in a bubble, doomed to shut out their previous life forever more.
The Citadels
Gallifrey has two main cities. The Capitol and Arcadia. The structures of both metropolises reaching deep into the bowels of the planet.
The Capitol is divided into eight Sectors. Sector 1's main tower houses the Panopticon, a vast hexagonal chamber (with each side, possibly, honouring one of the six Founders of Gallifrey) in which great events of state were held. Elsewhere in the tower is the Capitol Museum, where the symbols of presidential office are on display, along with examples of every kind of robe of state, from the President and the Gold Usher to the Chapter Cardinals.
Sector 2 is the political heart of the Capitol, housing an enormous assembly room for meetings of the full High Council, a conference room for the Inner Council and other small gatherings, as well as the President's office.
Sector 3 is entirely dedicated to the Chancellor and the Chancellery Guard while Sector 4 contains the Castellan's office, the courtrooms, and the Security Compound, which itself comprises detention rooms, interrogation cells, and several execution rooms, most of which were officially disused.
Sector 5 comprises hundreds of libraries, records rooms and archive stores and leads directly into Sector 6, which houses the various Chapters of the Time Lord Academy, the largest structure in the Capitol after the Panopticon, and the main force-field control area for the transduction barrier that shields Gallifrey.
Sector 7 is dominated by the Communications Tower, from which Space Traffic Control and Temporal Control monitored and logged every passing vessel in Gallifrey's vicinity. It is also rumoured to be the site of Gallifrey High Command's War Room, together with an extraction chamber — although the existence of such chambers is officially denied.
Finally, Sector 8 is home to the Time Travel Capsule landing bays and an array of repair shops. Below the repair shops lies the TARDIS Graveyards, where TARDISes that reached the end of their lifespans are despatched. Somewhere in the citadel, a set of chambers are said to be allocated to the Celestial Intervention Agency, but no one outside the Agency knows exactly where those chambers are with a conspiracy theory even opining that architectural configuration keeps their command centre moving. Below all that lies the Panopticon Vaults, where the Eye of Harmony was kept. Below those are the Cloisters, the physical location of the Matrix, guarded by the Cloister Wraiths. And beneath all of that, buried near the very core of Gallifrey, lie the Time Vaults, where all the forbidden weapons of the Omega Arsenal were locked away.
Here the author notes, that the edifices of glass and metal surround his kind to such an extent that no one can realistically be expected to take it all in. The Communications Tower alone is fifty-three stories tall.
So, the author asks, who exactly is meant to be impressed by all the glamour?
The Dark Times
The Time Lords, the author muses, are an odd lot. As a race, they know virtually everything about every alien species, yet they very little about their own history. And they admit to even less than what they know.
Where, for instance, did regeneration come from? Everyone on Gallifrey can do it but was it a natural ability or another of Rassilon's creations? And why thirteen incarnations? The Time Lords have long (always?) been able to grant more regenerations, so where did the limit come from?
Perhaps, the author theorizes, the answer might lie in Gallifrey's history with Karn, the resting place of the Sisterhood of Karn and what remains of Pythia's following.
Once magic had been exiled to the red planet, Gallifrey, riding a technological surge unrivalled until the rise of the Dalek Empire, went off to build an empire, spreading out like a particularly haughty disease. When these early Gallifreyeans encountered other races however, they took it upon themselves to "shepherd" these lower life-forms with what races they couldn't conquer outright being allied with to form the Fledgling Empires.
One species, the Racnoss, who drew power from the dangerous huon energy, an energy form that unravelled the atomic structure. The Empires went to war with the Racnoss and wiped them all out (save one of course, it would later turn up on Earth 4.6 billion years later). Officially all huon energy was destroyed, unofficially it was quietly incorporated into Gallifreyan travel technology.
Or perhaps, the answer comes from the Time Scoop (something the author leans more towards given that its mundane name is more indicative of an earlier era). The Time Scoop was used to pluck lifeforms out of time and deposit them into the Death Zone where they would fight for the amusement of the Gallifreyans (and eventually someone erected a force field around the Zone). Eventually, Rassilon made himself known and managed to get the Time Scoop retired, though, the author notes, he never dismantled it outright.
During the Time War, the author reflects, the Time Scoop would be reactivated to find bestial monstrosities to use as weapons. Something that, incidentally, proved that extinction had happened on Gallifrey as Rassilon resurrected beasts from the planet's prehistory. Idly, the author wonders if any are still around.
The Old Time
Whatever the truth of Rassilon's rise, what is accepted is that it gave way to the Old Time as more detailed records began to be kept. Almost certainly so Rassilon would never be forgotten. When exactly The Book of the Old Time was written, no one knows. But a decent guess can be made based on the lack of Omega in the book's pages.
A contemporary of Rassilon, Omega was another renowned engineer and scientist. Partnering with Rassilon, their first major creation was validium, a living metal. Unfortunately for the duo, the living metal's sentience made it too difficult to control. Setting a pattern for the future, the validium was locked away in a nigh-impenetrable vault where it would be casually stolen with no one the wiser.
Instead, Omega and Rassilon began working on their time travel theories. As they soon realized, time travel required an enormous energy source. To counter this, they developed two complementary theories. The first was that if the time vehicle's interior dimensions were much larger than its exterior ones, the power cost would be cut down. This was the birth of dimensional transcendentalism. The issue of actually getting this massive power source led to the birth of the first stellar manipulator, prosaically dubbed the Hand of Omega.
Despite his eagerness however, Omega got his sums like totally wrong and was swallowed by the first black hole and deposited into the anti-matter universe. On the plus side though, he left behind the power source, and a chance for Rassilon to not only get the sums right but place himself at the centre of history.
With the power source, the Eye of Harmony, the Gallifreyans became the Time Lords as Rassilon began fortifying Gallifrey, shielding it behind the transduction barrier. The Hand of Omega was subsequently disassembled before it was locked away in a nigh-impenetrable vault where it would be casually stolen with no one the wiser.
The Artefacts of Rassilon
Each of the artefacts was imbued with stupendous power despite their primitive appearance. Something the author reckons was to preserve mystique and be remembered, but also believes that the Time Lord founder failed to account for the inevitable stagnation.
The Eye of Harmony, an exploding star in the act of becoming a black hole and suspended in a permanent state of decay, was placed within the Obelisk of Rassilon, thanks to the shielding of the Sash of Rassilon, within the Panopticon.
The Eye, set in an eternally dynamic equation against the mass of the planet, was sealed to prevent the black hole from consuming Gallifrey. The raw artron energy that flowed from the Eye was then siphoned off into new time travel capsules with each containing a mathematically modelled subset of the Eye, holding a splinter of the black hole within them. Access to this power source was granted through the Rod of Rassilon.
A second artefact was known as the Great Key of Rassilon, which would grant absolute power if used with the Rod and the Sash. Confusingly, the Key of Rassilon was another artefact, it granting access to the Matrix. The Matrix seems to have borne from the idea that the average Time Lord lives for roughly four to five thousand years with that knowledge and experience being something Rassilon was eager for future generations to use. At the moment of death, a Time Lord's brain was scanned and all of their memories and experiences were uploaded into the Matrix, itself a living computer, its algorithms able to generate prophecies. Rassilon, being Rassilon, attached some pseudo-religious nonsense to his last great invention in the form of the confession dial, a ritual act of purification.
Befitting its creators, the Matrix had a massive sense of drama, one of its first prophecies speaking of the Hybrid, a creature that would "stand in the ruins of Gallifrey and destroy a billion, billion hearts to heal its own." But as the prophecy was billions of years off, it was quietly ignored.
The Law Giver
Among Rassilon's many means to ensure his legacy was establishing the Laws of Time, or more accurately, he dramatically said something that bore a great similarity to the basic laws of physics. Another law was the baffling and dangerous The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey. Baffling because it doesn't contain any laws and dangerous because it's actually a key to Shada, a half completed prison. And like all other great artifacts of power, the book's importance was forgotten, and it was dumped in a vault to be quietly stolen.
Like all great tyrants, Rassilon's reign eventually came to an end when he sealed within the Tomb of Rassilon, or perhaps he voluntarily retired into it when he realized the end was nigh. Though the Black Scrolls of Rassilon, the Harp of Rassilon, and the Portrait of Rassilon, instructions were left to enter the Tomb and claim the Ring of Rassilon for the gift of immortality. But as Rassilon had come to realize that immortality was a curse, the Ring trapped these would be tyrants as living stone.
Such a shame then that he forgot that attitude entirely when the Time War came.
The Record of Rassilon
Though the Time Lord empire had long since been dissolved, and the former colonies liberated, exploration continued apace. Before the non-interference policy, the Time Lords influenced the Vogans, to the point of the Seal of Rassilon adorning the aliens' society, banned miniscopes, though such technology is remarkably similar to Time Lord paintings, unsuccessfully arbitrated the war between the Rutan Host and the Sontaran Empire, and went to war.
When the Great Vampires ravaged the cosmos, the Time Lords led the defence. The creatures' energy makeup prevented any energy weapons from being used and, according to The Record of Rassilon, great bowships were constructed, their steel bolts disrupting the monsters' form. The Great Vampires were hunted to extinction with the war, officially, causing them to lose their lust for violence. All it would take was one more crisis for isolationism to sink in.
And that came when the Time Lords went to Minyos. The Minyans, in their primitive state, saw the Time Lords as gods and readily accepted the technological gifts until they grew powerful enough to kick the Time Lords out. Eventually the Minyans learnt how to split the atom which led to them, eventually, splitting Minyos, with the Minyans fleeing in ion-drive starships.
Almost immediately, the non-intervention policy took hold and the era of stagnation followed.
Galactic Ticket Inspectors
to be added
A State of Decay
to be added
Novices of the Untempered Schism
to be added
Gallifrey Falls...
to be added
...No More
to be added
Gallifrey Rises
to be added
Characters
to be added
References
- A boy wrote A Brief History of Time Lords after seeing the Doctor.
Notes
- The text on the Master claims that there are many rumours about his fate following Doctor Who. Some state that he was saved inside the Vortex by the mythical Esterath, other saying that he remained trapped in the Doctor's TARDIS, his mental resources transferred into an android, acting as the Doctor's companion or pet. Others said that he was, finally, dead.
- The section on Salyavin proposes a theory that, due to temporal instablities, the events of his encounter with Skagra unfolded "on at least four occasions, involving at least two different incarnations of the Doctor". This is a reference to the various retellings of TV: Shada.
- When listing off the things that the Doctor left Gallifrey with, "the President's daughter" is included alongside Gallifrey's moon. This is a reference towards brief one-off lines included in TV: The Magician's Apprentice and Hell Bent, which reference the Doctor losing "the moon" and stealing the "President's daughter." Alongside this passage is an illustration with all of the other things mentioned to be stolen, and in the place of the President's daughter is an image of Susan Foreman. This would suggest that the President at the time of the Doctor running away from Gallifrey was possibly the Doctor's off-spring. However, the book fails to recognise that the Doctor truly is Susan's grandfather, later going on to mention several stories which suggest that she was not his granddaughter.
- Susan being referred to as a direct descendant of Rassilon or another founding father is a reference to PROSE: Birth of a Renegade and the suggestion that Susan was taken into the Doctor's care, as referred to in PROSE: Lungbarrow.
- When describing Susan settling down on Earth, it is stated that she stayed with a human either named Campbell or Cameron. This is a reference towards an alteration to David Campbell's name in PROSE: Doctor Who and the Zarbi, listing it instead as Cameron.
- When describing possibilities of the Hybrid, there are indirect references to Ashildr, the Bad Wolf, the DoctorDonna, and River Song.
Continuity
to be added
External links
- Official A Brief History of Time Lords page at Penguin Books
