Before the Legend (short story)

Before the Legend was a short story published in Doctor Who Annual 1975. It featured the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith.

	Third Doctor
	Sarah
	Lantans
	England, 23000 BC
	Doctor Who Annual 1975
	September 1974
Doctor Who annual
← Previous	The Battle Within
Next →	Scorched Earth

It depicted another version of the Fall of Atlantis.

Summary

to be added

Characters

• Third Doctor
• Sarah Jane Smith
• Lantans
• Lantan leader

Worldbuilding

• Lantis is the capital city of the Lantans.
• An earthquake and tidal wave submerge the continent on which the Lantans live.
• Sarah is reading Astrology - The Key to the Future, which suggests that the positions of the stars are repeated every 25,000 years. This is one reason why history repeats itself.
• Sarah wonders about the astrological details of the Doctor's birth, suggesting that he was likely born in a repetition of the same astrological conditions that created the Lantan leader.

Notes

• The concept of Atlanteans being an alien race was explored in the popular 1940s stories of Richard Sharpe Shaver, which were later presented as truth in PROSE: Are We Alone? ^[+]Loading...["Are We Alone? (feature)"]. Authorship of text in the Annuals is uncertain, but the author of Are We Alone? may have also authored Before the Legend. PROSE: The Lost Ones ^[+]Loading...["The Lost Ones (short story)"], an earlier Annual story, also featured an account of the Atlanteans with elements inspired by Shaver.
• The unnamed Lantan continent which is submerged by the sea in this story is implicitly Atlantis. The idea of Atlantis as a continent was earlier part of PROSE: The Lost Continent of Atlantis.

Continuity

to be added