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ABOUT THE BOOK

The Time Lords are an immensely civilised, and immensely powerful, race. Yet we know very little about them, save that they can live forever (barring accidents) and possess the secrets of space and time travel. Their history has been shrouded in myth and mystery. Until now.

A Brief History of Time Lords unlocks the secrets of this ancient, legendary alien race – a civilisation that inflicted some of its most notorious renegades and criminals on the universe, but was also the benevolent power that rid the cosmos of its most fearsome enemies. Drawn from the ancient records of Gallifrey, and handed down from generation to generation, this remarkable book reveals the Time Lords in all of their guises: pioneers and power-mad conspirators, time-travellers and tyrants, creators and destroyers.

Be careful who you share it with.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steve Tribe is the author of Sherlock: Chronicles, Doctor Who: The TARDIS Handbook, Doctor Who: Companions and Allies and Doctor Who: The Time Traveller’s Almanac and, with James Goss, of The Doctor: His Lives and Times, Doctor Who: A History of the Universe in 100 Objects and Doctor Who: The Dalek Handbook. He has compiled three University Challenge quiz books and edited more than 500 books, short stories and audio dramas.

CONTENTS

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COVER

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

INTRODUCTION: THE SHINING WORLD OF THE SEVEN SYSTEMS

CHAPTER ONE: THE DARK TIMES

CHAPTER TWO: GALACTIC TICKET INSPECTORS

CHAPTER THREE: A STATE OF DECAY

CHAPTER FOUR: NOVICES OF THE UNTEMPERED SCHISM

CHAPTER FIVE: GALLIFREY FALLS …

CHAPTER SIX: … NO MORE

CHAPTER SEVEN: GALLIFREY RISES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

COPYRIGHT

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For Mandy – always
And for Lucy – my little star

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I didn’t expect to write another Doctor Who book after exploring the Doctor’s Lives and Times with James Goss for the fiftieth anniversary.
My thanks therefore go to:

Albert DePetrillo for commissioning this book anyway

Grace Paul for helping it on its way

Paul Simpson for hunting down errors

Lee Binding for being kind to it when it was struggling into life

Richard Shaun Williams for bringing a new dimension to some very old images

And especially to Richard Atkinson for his tireless and brilliant design work

23 November 2016

CHAPTER ONE

THE DARK TIMES

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We Time Lords are an odd lot. Sitting for millennia, observing and recording the minutiae of every instant of every life form everywhere throughout existence – and yet our knowledge of our own history is so fragmentary. We know little, and admit to less.

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When precisely, for instance, did we develop the capacity to regenerate? The Time Lord miracle: a complete physical and mental renewal, gifting ourselves new lives whenever we wish to, or when age, illness or accident forces us to. Did we emerge from the primordial soup with thirteen lives? Or did Rassilon sit in his tower, playing with test tubes and genetic looms until he had woven just the right cocktail? And why thirteen lives? Is that an inherent natural restriction? We’ve long (always?) been able to dole out complete new regeneration cycles, so perhaps that magic ‘thirteen’ is some artificial limitation to prevent anyone going on just that little bit too long?

Maybe a clue lies on the planet Karn. It is accepted / suspected / rumoured (delete according to taste) that the Sisterhood of Karn originated on Gallifrey and is tied to the Time Lords until the End of Time. Since what we know as the Dark Time and what they call the Time of the Stones (which is pithier?), the Sisterhood has shared the Elixir of Life with the Time Lords. The two races are equals in mental power, though the Sisterhood’s telepathic and telekinetic abilities far outclass the Time Lords’. There are even some forbidden accounts that place the Sisterhood at the apex of the earliest Gallifreyan hierarchies. Then came some revolution, some fierce argument, some arid academic dispute, and off went the Sisterhood, to become keepers of the Flame of Eternal Life and Utter Boredom. While the universe was still less than half its present size, off to Karn went all the magic and superstition while, back on Gallifrey, science and reason gained the ascendancy. Karn grew a cult; Gallifrey grew an empire.

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The Sisterhood of Karn

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The early Gallifreyans mounted a charge on technological advancement probably equalled – many millennia later – only by the Daleks. From simple transmat and transduction devices to the first forms of space travel and then interstellar travel, Gallifreyans spread through the cosmos like a tidal wave, or a disease. They began to encounter other life among the stars and, with that innate, unbending sense of superiority, they quickly decided that those other species needed policing. No, ‘shepherding’ might be more apt a description for what the Gallifreyans were up to as they built their empire. Lesser mortals were subjugated or judged too dangerous and eliminated. Gallifrey was canny, though, forming alliances – the Fledgling Empires – wherever it found powers too great to conquer.

One species, the Racnoss, derived its power from Huon energy. They were not just particularly hungry giant spiders, they were also using an energy form that unravelled the atomic structure. The Fledgling Empires went to war against the Racnoss, and the Racnoss were wiped out, more or less. One survived. (One always does.) It turned up on Earth about 4.6 billion years later, where it was cornered, drowned and burned. And the Gallifreyans got rid of Huon particles, more or less. Canny again, they quietly hung on to Huon energy, placing remnants of it at the hearts of their new travel machines. The earliest form of rudimentary time travel was born.

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The Empress of the Racnoss
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A Racnoss Webstar

Well, that’s one theory. Another is that it all began with the invention of the Time Scoop. (This is especially persuasive because of that pompous Time Lord way of distracting from the rubbish name with impressive capital letters. ‘Huon’ sings of poetry and destiny; ‘Time Scoop’ just sounds like a big plastic utensil.) The Time Scoop could scour the eons and snatch things out of their time, depositing them in a pentagon of barren land safely walled off by mountains – the Death Zone. Once set down, the alien creatures would fight and kill each other for the amusement of the watching Gallifreyans. As the beings they kidnapped for the Games became more and more lethal, someone decided to add an impenetrable force field, just in case.

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The Time Scoop game board

Tremendous powers, misused disgracefully. And a tremendous opportunity for a young scientist, engineer, architect and all-round clever-clogs with an eye on politics. It’s thought that Rassilon made his name on the High Council campaigning against the Games, and possibly his first act as President was to seal off the entire Zone and forbid the use of the Time Scoop. Note that he didn’t disassemble the thing or erase it from history; he kept it hidden away in the Capitol and left a handy set of instructions called the Black Scrolls of Rassilon. Sure enough, several of his successors would uncover it – see Chapter 3.

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The Black Scrolls of Rassilon

Much, much later, the Time War put an end to any scruples about gathering up potentially useful monstrosities and depositing them in the Death Zone. The aim now, of course, was to research and develop new ways to fight the War. Which is when that official untruth about nothing ever going extinct on Gallifrey was comprehensively debunked: the resurrected Rassilon delved into the planet’s prehistory, poked around in its Jurassic period and found gargantuan animals – Dinosauria. These were massive creatures, and massively destructive, and they came with their own built-in armour. Having been scooped out of their own extinction, they were experimented on and transmogrified into horrors beyond imagination.

Perhaps there’s still a few of them wandering around out there.

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The Dark Tower in the Death Zone

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Rassilon’s ascendancy coincided with Gallifrey’s emergence from the Dark Time into the Old Time. It’s at this point that somewhat more detailed records come into being, with Rassilon evidently keen that his preeminent role be preserved and venerated. We don’t know that he wrote The Book of the Old Time, but we can hazard a fairly safe guess, not least because it entirely forgets to mention Omega or any other.

Omega was also on the High Council and was another renowned scientist and engineer. Together, he and Rassilon created validium, a living metal, intended to be Gallifrey’s ultimate defence. They learnt fairly quickly that a sentient metal that can think for itself, tell you what it’s thinking and laugh at you when you try to switch it off was not necessarily the fool-proof defensive system they’d hoped for. Establishing a pattern, they took it apart again, locked it up in a vault and totally failed to notice when it was stolen.

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Omega in full protective armour

Meanwhile, Rassilon and Omega had been working on their time-travel theories, and calculated that to have full mastery over Time they would need a colossal energy source: to create a time field for a single sufficiently large vehicle, say 5 x (106) kilos, required 109 mega K-tons of power. Between them, Omega and Rassilon devised two complementary solutions.

Firstly, they theorised that the overall power requirement could be lessened if the size of the thing they wished to power could be reduced. At its simplest, if the vehicle itself were not much bigger than a cupboard on the outside, then it would need a lot less energy to move it; and if it could simultaneously be vastly larger on the inside, then it could still be used for travel, research and war. To achieve this, the real space-time event (the exterior) needed to be mapped onto a separate continuum (the interior). This was the birth of transdimensional engineering, a key Gallifreyan discovery.

The power requirement was still immense, of course. The second part of the answer lay in stellar manipulation. Detonating a star would enable them to harness the energy of the consequent supernova; the invention of black holes was no more than an interesting side effect. Omega developed a remote stellar manipulator, a powerful and sophisticated device that would allow him to detonate a star – from a safe distance. The story goes that, never shy to publicise his own achievements, Omega waved his new invention at the High Council and bellowed: ‘This hand – My Hand! – shall be the hand that liberates our people from the Chains of Time!’ At which point Rassilon, with one eye on his forthcoming memoirs, drily christened it ‘the Hand of Omega’.

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The remote stellar manipulator – the ‘Hand of Omega’

Sadly, Omega had got his sums wrong, and he was nothing like far enough away from the supernova he set off. He was blown into the black hole and lost in a universe of antimatter. But he left behind him the basis on which Rassilon founded Time Lord society. Plus a chance for Rassilon to get the sums right and place himself at the centre of all the histories:

Rassilon journeyed into the black void with a great fleet. Within the void, no light would shine and nothing of that outer nature continue in being, except that which existed within the Sash of Rassilon. Now Rassilon found the Eye of Harmony, which balances all things, that they may neither flux nor wither nor change their state in any measure. And he caused the Eye to be brought to the world of Gallifrey wherein he sealed this beneficence with the Great Key. Then the people rejoiced.

The Book of the Old Time

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The black hole created by Omega

With the Eye of Harmony sealed safely away, Rassilon turned his attention to securing the planet. He devised a quantum force shield – the transduction barrier – that surrounded the whole of Gallifrey. Any disturbance to its dynamic equilibrium would atomise the planet, taking the surrounding galaxy with it.

And so began the Rassilon Era. The Gallifreyans were rebranded as the Lords of Time, Omega was rebranded as a myth, and the remote stellar manipulator was taken apart, locked in a vault and eventually stolen.