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Night of the Humans is one of the first three announced Eleventh Doctor novels, released on April 22, 2010.
Publisher's summary
"This is the Gyre – the most hostile environment in the galaxy."
250,000 years’ worth of junk floating in deep space, home to the shipwrecked Sittuun, the carnivorous Sollogs, and worst of all – the Humans. The Doctor and Amy arrive on this terrifying world in the middle of an all-out frontier war between Sittuun and Humans, and the clock is already ticking. There’s a comet in the sky, and it’s on a collision course with the Gyre...When the Doctor is kidnapped, it’s up to Amy and “galaxy-famous swashbuckler” Dirk Slipstream to save the day. But who is Slipstream, exactly? And what is he really doing here?
Characters
References
- Charlie and Slipstream mention the planet of Gold, Voga, which previously appeared in the 4th Doctor's Revenge of the Cybermen They also mentioned that, because of the discovery of these Golden planets, Gold was now much less valuable.
- Dirk Slipstream was once a prisoner on Prison planet Volag-Noc a planet the Tenth Doctor has been to twice.
- Amy refers to Star-Whales from The Beast Below, and 'intergalactic felons' - possibly a reference to the Talerians from Apollo 23.
- The Doctor says that Amy is 'the girl with a monster in her wall'.
- The shipwrecked Herald Of Nanking featured as a working spaceship in Llewellyn's The Taking of Chelsea 426.\
- One of the crashed spaceships is made from Proamonium, found only on Proamon.
Notes
- The NASA deep space probe Pioneer 10 appears as part of the Gyre's Landscape.
- The Gyre humans' names are all taken from so-called "Spaghetti Westerns". The human leader Django shares his name with the eponymous hero of the 1966 film ; Tuco is a character (played by Eli Wallach) appearing in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (also 1966); while Manco is the name given to Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" in For a Few Dollars More.
- Lake Mono, the lake of acid the humans use to execute their prisoners, may be named after Mono Lake, California, a location used in the Western High Plains Drifter.
- Dirk Slipstream's ship, The Golden Bough, takes its name from the book by Sir James George Frazer.
- Similarly, the Sittuun ship, the Beagle XXI, is probably named after the ship which took Charles Darwin to the Galapagos Islands, a journey that would inspire his later works On The Origin of Species and The Voyage of the Beagle.
- The smaller craft used by the Sittuun take their names from 20th Century jazz musicians. The buggy, Ella, is named after the singer Ella Fitzgerald, while the "helipod", Bird, takes its name from saxophonist Charlie Parker, whose nickname was "Bird".
- The Gyre is located in the Battani 045 system. Muhammad ibn Jābir al-Harrānī al-Battānī (c. 858CE - 929CE) was an Arab astronomer and mathematician.
Timeline
Night of the Humans occurs after: Apollo 23
Night of the Humans occurs before: Claws of the Macra