Week One: The Core Entries

I've always appreciated the way FP uses Frontios here. It's an episode one might not think of as influential, but it does introduce some pretty intriguing ideas about the relationship between the Time Lords, humanity, and the far future.

Absolutely! I really love that side of it -- it makes it feel more like an actual academic text, with the occasional differences in accepted facts. Which in turn makes the Spiral Politic feel far more real, albeit in a pretty metafictional way!

Who's writing the Book of the War from the Watsonian perspective, anyway? Is it Eremites

Is the one in Earth a weak point, or is it the Caldera from the original Homeworld, hidden there by Great Houses technosorcery for unaccountable cosmic reasons?

I don't know, I'm just wondering.

I think “Causalities of War” gave us an early clue: ”For obvious reasons this current volume is most concerned with humanity.”

It took me way too long to realize that the beasts in Inferno – and, by corollary, the beastly Earth Reptiles in Adolescence of Time – were Mal’akh. I doubt that’s what Miles had in mind when he introduced the babewyns in Adventuress!

I’d elaborate, but it’d be getting quite ahead of ourselves, wouldn’t it, for the purpose of this thread, at least?

I want these threads to stay on topic, ie “discussing what we just read”, rather than some “flexing FP lore knowledge” contest (which I’m as guilty of as anyone). Some questions can and should stay open-ended, especially at a stage as early as this one, so new readers can discover answers by themselves rather than one of us shooting down their speculations up front, which is just no fun. Maybe in the next thread I’ll include more specific spoiler instructions.

"It's fair to say history is no longer a safe place in which to live."

Alright. Finally reading The Book of the War! Warning - this one’s going to be a long post!!

First of all, I’m loving it so far. I’m coming at it having watched/read/listened to a whole lot of Who, but only two stories that have involved the Faction (Alien Bodies & Unnatural History). So I’ll start off with some comparisons and contrasts with the mainstream Who world that stood out to me:

• I don’t think the War really works as a “post-Time War” distant-future event simply because the Book says the only prior time war was the one against the Yssgaroth. And timing-wise, I think it’s safe to say that the War fills the same temporal niche as the Last Great Time War - ie. sometime late in the Eighth Doctor’s life - even if the exact nature of the relation between the Wars is open for debate.
• Apparently, the Great Houses found the idea of a military ridiculous before. But when we see a pre-series Doctor in Listen, his family members are wondering if he might go into the military. Perhaps when the Homeworld saw a need for a military, it retroactively placed one in its own history.
• The "casts" are the Shaydes from the DWM comics, I assume.
• "All the children of the houses would be involved" brings to mind All Hands on Deck.
• I remember seeing a tumblr post years ago that compared Entarodora's non-hominid form to a Dalek, paired with Cass from NOTD asking "who can tell the difference" between Daleks and Time Lords... (And apparently that post was by doctornolonger !)
• The Houses call the workings of history "equations", while the Faction calls them entities - and FP is right to some extent, as Death, Time, Pain all exist as beings in the DWU.
• The War universe has no parallels - just a changing timeline with a few bubble dimensions like E-Space. This is a pretty big difference from the way the Doctor Who Universe works, as per Inferno, but it might just be a matter of perspective.
• Small sub-universes bud in artificially-aged areas of the Spiral (which makes me wonder what’s been happening on Kembel), indicating the Universe might spawn in the distant future (and there is definitely a “next” universe in Doctor Who - according to the DWM comics, it’s filled with beings called Zytragupten)
• I don't fully buy the Time Lords as we see them on screen (at least the ones after The War Games) as FORCES OF NATURE - except perhaps as a collective. The ancient ones like Rassilon and Omega certainly resemble gods, though. And, who knows, maybe the Time Lords we see aren't really the ones who hold the power…
• This line, however, 100% sounds like the Time Lords I know - "the status quo is coded into every cell of their flesh and blood, so it's no shock to learn that their own past interests them as little as their own evolution." And they consider progress beneath them (like most royalty, I guess!)
• The Book says that the most important thing to note about the Great Houses is their sterility, as introduced in the VNAs (and ignored almost everywhere else). Similarly, terms like mother and father are called pre-regenerative terms, but other stories refer to regular family connections between Time Lords. I wonder if the Faction (or the enemy) is behind that, taking away a key aspect of the Great Houses’ identity.
  
• Also the term Cousin, introduced in Lungbarrow, is called “archaic” - but the cousins in that story were out of time for 700 years...
  
• Some Newbloods consider time-active species as a class above “Lesser Species” - in the Big Finish Gallifrey series, we see the Temporal Powers having special status.
• The enemy is said to be cultured with an agenda beyond destruction. (Which I initially contasted with the Daleks until I remembered the VNAs mentioned Dalek poetry)
• The “planet (that) would immediately take the Homeworld’s place” passage might be a reference to the Ferutu from Cold Fusion.
• The CIA became the Celestis before the War - in the BF Time War, the CIA lasted into the Time War but was closed in the early stages. Although perhaps...

Ditto. It was the existence of Mictlan that made me consider it - a bubble outside time is where Tecteun's lab was, after all, even if it was more physical than the Mictlan described here. Division appears to have been a secret faction on Gallifrey, probably within the (similar but less effective) CIA. And there are certainly candidates for membership within the EU... The chapter-less Sardon from World Game, the Director of Allegiance Ferain from Lungbarrow... Perhaps it was those Division CIA members who splintered away and became the Celestis.


I seem to recall something in the EU about the TARDIS moving the universe, not itself - but it’s entirely possible that I’m just thinking of the explanation of how the Planet Express ship moves in Futurama.


I mean, we have recently learned (in The Timeless Children) that the Doctor may have been injected into their universe from outside…

Some other cool ideas:

• The Great Houses "perceive themselves as being part of the historical process much more than being a people", the Homeworld is "more a focal-point for causality than an actual place" and the enemy is an "all-consuming process" as well. I like the repeated “not an X, but a Y” construction there. Really frames the Houses and enemy as two sides of the same coin…
• Forced Regen missions are a horrifying idea and I love them
• The Remote are an interesting idea - they want a revolution because it fits the narrative. Good thing people never get worked up into a frenzy by the media on our side of reality!!!!
• The Houses have a "lack of destiny" in the eyes of the post-humans, so cultures on the brink of becoming time active take pride in being lesser.
• The distant future of Frontios is murky and off-limits not because of its distance but because there are so many temporal powers by that point in history that things are very uncertain...
• I definitely thought (from my brief encounters with FP lore) that the Spiral Politic was just "all of time and space," but no it's "the parts of history that matter." (And yeah, as everyone seems to have noted already, it’s a great visual!)

Okay, one more thing before I go: some of the concepts in this really reminded me of a novella I read last year (on the recommendation of a user on the Divergent Universe forum) called This is How You Lose the Time War). I’ll pop this in a spoiler cause it’s a bit of a tangent:


Alright that's enough for one post I think, lol. Next time I'll try to share my thoughts while I read the Week Two entries...