Frequently Asked Questions
WHAT IS TIMELINK?
TIMELINK is a non-profit venture, and is totally unauthorised by the BBC. The book is 324-pages, soft-cover with a plastic binding, A4 size, 8 point text. It covers various aspects of Doctor Who continuity, specifically taking all the references and quotations and trying to link them all together. The book contains a chronology covering everything from the Big Bang to 10,000,000 years in the future.
The ISBN is 0-473-06853-2
Only the stories broadcast on TV are used as the base material - the book does not include the novels, audios, comics or other media. Most fans are familiar with the TV episodes, most of them being readily available on video or broadcast on stations around the world, which is why this limitation of the canon has been used.
Here is a list of the Chapter heading and a brief description of the questions they examine:
The N-Space Universe - Is Gallifrey located in the same galaxy as Earth? What is Alternative Time? Is History fixed, or can it be changed?
Timeline - A Chronology of the Doctor Who-niverse - from the Big Bang to the destruction of Earth...
Gallifreyan History - How old is the Time Lord race? Do all Gallifreyans have the ability to regenerate? What is Gallifrey's relative time in relation to Earth's? What is the First Law of Time? Why do the Doctor and the Master always meet one another 'in sequence'?
The Doctor's Age - When was the Doctor born? How can the Doctor's age jump from 759 in Season 15 to over 900 in Season 23?
Life On Gallifrey - How old was the Doctor when he left Gallifrey? Where is his family? Why did he leave Gallifrey? How old is the TARDIS? Is 'Doctor Who' is real name? Is the Doctor really a doctor?
An Enigma Called Susan - Who is Susan? What is her real relationship with the Doctor? Is Susan a Time Lord?
Half-Human? - Has the Doctor always been half-human, or is it only his eighth incarnation? How many hearts did the first Doctor have?
More Than A Time Lord? - Was the Doctor a contemporary of Rassilon's? Where did the Hand of Omega come from? What is the Time of Chaos? What is the secret that the Nemesis knows? Whose faces appear during the mind-bending contest with Morbius?
Cyberman History - Is Revenge Of The Cybermen set before or after Earthshock?
Dalek History - Is The Evil Of The Daleks the final Dalek story? At what point in Dalek history does the Master's trial in the 1996 TV Movie take place?
The UNIT Years - Are the UNIT stories set in the 1970s or the 1980s? Is Sarah Jane Smith really from 1980?
Name-Dropping - What does the Doctor keep in his pockets? Who are all the famous people the Doctor says he has met? How many adventures did the Doctor have before he left Gallifrey?
Storyfile - All 158 stories broadcast between 1963 and 1989, plus K9 and Company and the 1996 TV Movie are examined, listing continuity links, real-time story durations and explanations for the Timeline dates. Questions asked and analysed include where did the Valeyard come from? Which Doctor launched the Nemesis into space?
And much much more!!
About the author
Jon Preddle was born in New Zealand in 1964. His earliest Doctor Who memory is of a scene in Planet Of Giants. He grew up watching Patrick Troughton's Doctor, due to the screenings of the programme in New Zealand being four years behind the UK broadcasts.
He is a major contributor to the highly regarded New Zealand fanzine TSV (Time Space Visualiser - see below for details about this fanzine), for which he writes an irregular column, Doctor's Dilemma, in which he attempts to solve many continuity queries posed by other readers. This column was a major influence behind Timelink.
In 1988 he appeared on the New Zealand edition of Mastermind, a TV 'quiz show', with Doctor Who as his specialist topic. He won his heat, and reached the semi-finals, but failed to make it to the grand final. In 1990 he appeared on a quiz panel featuring other well-known Doctor Who fans, screened during the (now-defunct) UK satellite station BSB's Doctor Who Weekend in September 1990.
In 1993 he won the New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards Best Writer trophy, and in 2001 he won the Sir Julius Vogel award for Best Writer (chiefly for TIMELINK). He has produced an unauthorised novelisation of Revelation Of The Daleks scripts, but Timelink is his first full-length book.
He has had material published in several genre magazines, including Doctor Who Magazine, In-Vision, and TV Zone.
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The following mini-interview with Jon Preddle appears in TSV #60:
What is the background to TIMELINK?
Jon: I had read Jean Marc Lofficier�s Earth chronology in the first hardback edition of his Programme Guide back in 1981. This covered the stories only as far as Season Eighteen. In 1987, after seeing in an American fanzine a list of dates that went up to Season 22, I started to work on my own timeline including the seasons missing from Lofficier�s. I completed the notes for this in 1989 once I had seen Season 26. Originally I was thinking of presenting my chronology as a series of separate timelines in TSV (the acclaimed New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club fanzine) covering each Doctor, and various foes like the Daleks, Cybermen and the Master. But I also wanted to include notes and observations about certain continuity elements, and it just grew and grew from there.
Once I had started putting everything together in the early 1990s I adapted some of the information into several short test articles for TSV, plus the odd Doctor's Dilemma solution. It got to the point where I realised that to do this bit by bit, chapter by chapter in TSV, it would take several years to achieve, and that was not the best option. The only way to do it any justice - especially given the amount of time I have spent on it - was to do it as a separate book.
Why has it taken you ten years to complete the book?
A variety of reasons, really. There have been many external influences that have caused delays, such as overseas holidays (I�ve been overseas six times in the last ten years!), moving house twice, and generally getting on with life! Besides, this was a project that I could work on only in the evenings and weekends, or as time permitted. In 1993 Lofficier updated his Earth chronology in The Terrestrial Index so I lost interest in the project. A few years later I resurrected it, but by late 1995 Lance Parkin�s A History Of The Universe was announced, so everything was put on hold yet again! The Paul McGann movie was on the horizon also, and Marvel was still running their telesnap series. I stopped further work on the book until such time that all the telesnaps had been published.
Many fans have read The Discontinuity Guide, as well as the afore-mentioned chronologies in The Terrestrial Index and A History of the Universe, and therefore might be reluctant to buy another book that covers the same ground. What has TIMELINK got to offer that these books don't?
Quite a lot, actually. There are, of course, bits that are the same - that's only to be expected - but there is more that is new. [Refer to the Chapter list above.]
The Earth History in Jean Marc Lofficier's books is heavily flawed; it lacks consistency because he only covers stories that are set on Earth, or feature Earth colonies. Besides, Lofficier doesn't offer full explanations for the dates he uses; as far as I'm concerned the explanations are the most important part of any chronology guide.
The invaluable Discontinuity Guide is predominantly a summary of continuity elements, with little square-bracketed sections or box-outs discussing awkward anomalies. Also, they only brush over dates under the Location heading, and in many most cases they don't offer a date if one isn't known.
A History Of The Universe (AHOTU) on the other hand, is chiefly a book of story synopses with short notes explaining the dates. Take out the synopses and you�ve got probably a 150-page book. I don't have synopses, and my timeline runs for only 25 pages!; it is my explanations that form the bulk of TIMELINK. TIMELINK is well over 260,000 words, whereas AHOTU is around 135,000.
In terms of new stuff, TIMELINK has the advantage of being more up to date by covering the Paul McGann movie, which screened after the other books were published. And while Parkin's book includes dates from the Virgin novels and radio plays, I have only used the televised stories; I have included K9 And Company, but not Shada. (My reasons for this are explained fully in the book.) About half of my dates are different from those suggested by Parkin. For example, I have set Dragonfire in 1987, whereas Parkin sets it 2 million years in the future! AHOTU has over 20 events that Parkin has been unable to give a date to due to lack of clues. I have been able to suggest dates for many of these.
The way in which the information is presented is very different; I have separate chapters covering various topics, all of which point towards the timeline. For example, I have two chapters dedicated to establishing how the Gallifrey stories can be dated. In AHOTU Parkin keeps all the Gallifrey stories separate from the main timeline because he couldn't work out a way to fit Gallifrey in. I believe I have found a way.
One of my favourite chapters is Name-Dropping, in which I have listed what I feel is a complete list (a bold claim!) of all the non-televised adventures and encounters with famous people mentioned by the Doctor. I've never seen such a comprehensive list in any other publication, so that is something new for readers.
TIMELINK also includes story durations, which is another thing I have not seen in any other publication. I have broken the adventures down into the number of days they last in terms of real-time for the characters. While it originally took several weeks to tell the story by watching it on TV, what a lot of people forget is that the adventures take place over a much shorter period of time.
So, yes, there is a lot in TIMELINK that is new and has never been written before - at least not that I've seen anywhere else. If this doesn't convince you to buy a copy I don't know what will!
TSV
TSV is New Zealand's oldest and most popular Doctor Who fanzine, and in 2000 celebrates its thirteenth anniversary and the publication of its sixtieth issue.
TSV is currently published three times a year. Issues contain articles, letters, artwork and comic strips, news and fiction. Contributors include some of the best talent from New Zealand - and international - Doctor Who fandom.
Regular Features of TSV include:
� News features - Latest information on the books, videos, merchandise and fan events, both as they happen and when they reach New Zealand.
� Doctor's Dilemma - Jon Preddle takes questions about Who continuity and tries to explain them plausibly.
� Comic Strips, Fiction and Artwork - Material submitted by some of the most talented fans in the country!!
� Interviews - With people such as Andrew Cartmel, Tom Baker, Mark Strickson, Paul Cornell, Lance Parkin, Gary Gillatt, Gary Russell, Andrew Cartmel and whoever else we can get hold of.
� The Karkus - That superhero and intellectual (ha!) giant is beating up the baddies in a TSV near you.
� Reviews - Of all the latest books, videos and suchlike.
� Story Files - Indepth looks at the making of some of Doctor Who's finest stories, and the not-so-fine stories too.
TSV's interviews, articles and reviews have been reprinted or quoted in publications including The Doctor Who Handbooks, Doctor Who - The Eighties, The Discontinuity Guide, Licence Denied, The TV Companion, In-Vision and Doctor Who Magazine.
Subscribe to TSV and become part of a large network of people of all ages who share an appreciation of the traveller in time and space known as the Doctor.
Visit the NZDWFC Books Web Page for details of other available books and unofficial novelisations, e.g. Resurrection Of The Daleks*, Shada, The Pirate Planet*, Revelation Of The Daleks* and City Of Death.
Refer to the TIMELINK FAQ page for more details
on TSV and THE NEW ZEALAND DOCTOR WHO FAN CLUB
www.doctorwho.org.nz
*now available!!!
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