The Analysis Bureau (novel)

The Analysis Bureau does not exist. Ask any questions about it, and the same answers always greet you. There's no trace of any department matching that name in any branch of Government, only speculation and wild rumours.

At the beginning of the 1960s, some conspiracy theorists even started to claim that there was a village, once the home to an entire community, abandoned during the Second World War due to flooding. They said it’s where experiments and tests are being carried out. Some even claim that the Analysis Bureau used the village as a base of operations, and that there were underground bunkers built way beneath the rural façade of cottages, shops and even a village green.

Of course, those who got anywhere near the truth disappeared just as quickly as the people who asked too many questions, because they were the ones who refused to believe that there was no such thing as the Analysis Bureau.

Plot[[edit] | [edit source]]

to be added

Characters[[edit] | [edit source]]

Worldbuilding[[edit] | [edit source]]

Amelia Stone was friends with a performer named David Jones, the birth name of David Bowie.
Mr Quebec is implied to have taken the blame for the events of the original Quatermass story. Grubber was arrested for stealing fragments of a capsule at Knightsbridge, referencing Quatermass and the Pit.
Mr Quebec refers to "Dr Quist's team", "Sir Michael Gerrard", and "the Ministry of Research" as other people who could investigate in Incident Two. Quist was the lead of the 1970s show Doomwatch. Sir Michael was the lead in mid-60s show R3 about a unit working for a Ministry of Research.
Doctor Anthony Ridge has a brother called John, a reference to Dr John Ridge in Doomwatch.
The stories predate the 1968 story The Invasion, and Professor Watkins is featured in The Synthetic Man, detailing his first encounter with Tobias Vaughn and Packer.
Banks goes undercover as a South African mercenary called Van Hereden, pretending he assisted the failed 1966 coup in the Congo. He took the name from a pulp novel he'd read.
As "Van Hereden", Banks claims to have worked for Marien Ngouabi's paratroopers.
At the end of the book, the alternate timeline is called "the dark dimension".
In the alternate timeline, World War II was fought by Neville Chamberlain (with Winston Churchill unknown by Travers) against Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union, while Hitler was shot the day the war started. The British Rocket Group later made a publicly successful rocket launch in 1952, making Travers and Quebec famous. An excavated dinosaur skeleton at Christmas 1960 caused a "near riot". In the late Sixties, a fascist group called the Esteem Party looked set to take over the country with internment camps for IQs under 110 and class segregation, before an unnamed figure replaced each Esteem MP with his own men, then sent a militia to burn down Parliament.

Notes[[edit] | [edit source]]

Stone says it is 8th April 1967 in The Damocles Project. In The Synthetic Man, the "attempted revolution" in the Congo, happening in the summer of 1966, is inaccurately dated to "only a few weeks ago".

The book comprises of four short stories. The first three are interlinked. The fourth story is an unpublished 'lost' Lethbridge-Stewart story, Originally planned as a free on-line story via the Candy Jar Books website, it was held back when it was realised the theme of the Brigadier being imprisoned clashed with the plot of their book Mind Of Stone.
The story titles are The Reconnaissance Of Death, The Damocles Project and The Synthetic Man. The 'lost' story is called Hide In Plain Sight.
The stories are referred to as 'Incidents' rather than stories, as a tribute to Philip Martin, who called each episode of his TV series, Gangsters, in the same way, instead of calling them Episode One, Episode Two, etc. Martin also worked for Candy Jar Books, who published his third Gangsters novel shortly after he passed away.

Continuity[[edit] | [edit source]]

The empty village and Mr Quebec had previously appeared in Tom Dexter's PROSE: The Cult of the Grinning Man, working for the army. That story was set in May 1969.
Grubber's Moles retrieved technology from the Shoreditch Incident (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) and the Post Office Tower. (TV: The War Machines)
The third story shows the abduction of Professor Watkins by Vaughn. (TV: The Invasion)
Vaughn is trying to build a group of satellites that will broadcast a message into space. (TV: The Invasion)

External links[[edit] | [edit source]]

Official The Analysis Bureau page at Candy Jar Books