(back to the doctor who bewildering reference guide)
so vile a sin
authors:    ben aaronovitch and kate orman
isbn:    0 426 204840
confusion quotient:
In an unusual move, I'd like to dedicate this page to Mzwakhe Mbuli.  He's informally known as the People's Poet of South Africa, was persecuted during the Apartheid era and was an occasional critic of the police there.  He was framed by the police for doing a bank robbery several years ago,and is serving a 13-year sentence.  Crime is a big problem in South Africa, but so is law enforcement.
Also, more African history is available in connection with a new BBC series narrated by Hugh Quarshie: The Story of Africa


So Vile A Sin - Cover Page

In her research, Kate Orman started a couple of threads on the newsgroup sci.astro. Here they are: Author need Tethys help ... How big would Callisto look from Io?
Dedication page
For Karifa Sam Aaronovitch: His daughter, presumably.  The baby's arrival was one of the delaying factors in 'So Vile A Sin's production. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Karifa Aaronovitch is mentioned again in the Acknowledgements, where *he* is thanked "for not eating *his* father's telephone" (emphasis added). Not Ben's daughter, then. Oops.
Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting.  -William Shakespeare, Henry V II.4: In that scene the King of France is conferring with his princes about his English policy.  He'd rather be cautious and take steps toward his defence; the Dauphin, who delivers this line, favours a more offensive posture.

p.1
The body on page one:  In murder mysteries, it's common to be presented with the murder victim on the first page.  I think Ben wrote this bit. 
CinC Thangese liKhosi Oxhobileyo:  CinC stands for Commander-in-Chief.  I don't understand the IsiXhosa language.
Valhalla, Callisto:  Callisto is the third-largest moon in the Solar System: a bit over 4800 km in diameter, almost as large as the planet Mercury.  It orbits Jupiter at a radius of about 1.9 million km, farther than the other three major Jovian moons:  Io, Europa and Ganymede.  It has a heavily cratered surface and shows no signs of tectonic or geothermal activity.  It has the oldest cratered surface in the solar system.  The largest crater system on it is called Valhalla.  In this book the innermost 600 kilometres of Valhalla is covered with an atmospheric dome. Here is an excellent link to lots of information about Callisto.  Callisto

p.2
1 September 2982: I think Kate wrote this bit.
Umtata Reclamation Zone: Umtata is a town in Transkei, between Lesotho and the Indian Ocean.  Nelson Mandela, one of the most famous of the !Xhosa people, was born there.  Mandela usually goes for the Western look and the silk shirt over more "traditional" lifestyle. I put the word in quotation marks because tradition, even for Africans, can be extremely subjective. Africans developed habits no more inefficient than other people, and were only seen to be backwards by Europeans who didn't know what African life was like. Africans may keep their ceremonial dress as part of their heritage or as a reaction to cultural imperialism, but European interference has had a strong influence on how Africans see themselves.
High-tech versions of the kopje, great stones piled on stones:
overcities: Skyscraper cities where people live in the last couple of centuries of the Third Millennium.  They hover over the Earth's surface with repulsorlifts.  Most wildlife is dead and the surface levels are the crime- and poverty-ridden Undertown.  There's a lot about the Overcities in 'Original Sin'.

p.3
Behind him, a group of Ogrons moved: There's a lot of Ogrons in this book.  And they get more characterization than just being the Daleks' dumb brutes.
Behind them, a group of Earth Reptiles: Silurians and Sea Devils.  Some of the New Adventures advanced more accurate and PC names for Indigenous Terrans.
Colour Sergeant Muller: The colour sergeant is responsible for the flags.
flags: I ought to mention here that the flag on the cover looks a lot like one I first saw about fifteen years ago, agreed to be the new international Flag of Earth.  Set on a black field, to the flagpole side there was a large yellow circular section representing the Sun.  Partially inset into the Sun was a blue circle representing the Earth, and partially inset into that was a grey disk to stand for the Moon.  It's clarified in p.27 that the azure-and blood red circles are the sigil of the Inyathi Forresters.
buffalo soldiers: Reference to a Bob Marley song about African slaves turned into soldiers in the American Civil War.  And possibly a part of African-American heritage. And Roz's clan name means "buffalo".
DPM fatigues:
Inyathi clan: Inyathi is Roz's family name.  The Doctor first mentions it at the beginning of 'Sky Pirates!' to her considerable irritation:  she doesn't know how he discovered it, and is actually trying to avoid her family ties at the time.
Zulu costumes: The Zulus are another powerful nation in the South African region.  In the early 19th century the Zulus became rather expansionist,and may have had considerable conflict with the !Xhosa - however, due to a concurrent European invasion and propaganda from the Afrikaans people and the Zulus themselves, the details are uncertain.
Knights of Io:  The Inyathi Forresters own Io, Jupiter's innermost major moon.   Here    is an excellent info page about Io.  I should mention that Io orbits Jupiter in a zone of intense radiation that would prove fatal to human explorers without a great lot of shielding that would be too heavy to lift into space.  Sorry to disappoint you readers of 2010: Odyssey 2.  As well it is the most volcanically active planetary body in the solar system,and its bedrock rises and falls more than 100 metres in tides produced by Jupiter and its other moons.  Io
POVs: Play on words for points of view.

p.6
All the King's Horses: I think Ben wrote this bit.
OLM regulars: Ogron Light Marines.
PG ordnance:
AP Seekers: I guess they're adreno-pheromone seekers, if they home in on the smell of human fear.
Purgatory: Planetary training ground for the Imperial Landsknechte.  (translation:  Land Knights?)  Purgatory is terraformed in multitudes of compartments to simulate the environments of lots of different possible battlegrounds.
Landsknechte: One of the Earth Empire's armies.(Text submitted by Mick Gair)The German 'landsknechte' translates as 'land farmhands'.
p.7
each one a few parsecs closer to Earth: Parsec is a conjunction of Parallax Arcsecond.  When you're travelling out of the Solar System, the distance at which the angle between the Sun and the Earth, 150 million km, appears to be only 1/360th of a degree, is one parsec.  It's equal to about 3.26 light years. 
dishonourable discharge: They tear off your badges, rank pips and buttons, break your sword, take away your gun and kick you in the pants.
last bottle of juke:
halfway up the remains of the Ching Ma bridge:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) A bridge in Hong Kong, but that much is obvious from the context anyway. A suitably futuristic reference, as the bridge had not yet been completed when 'So Vile A Sin' was published.
spaceport at Chek Lak Lok:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) At present, the site of the Hong Kong International Airport. A suitably futuristic reference, as the airport had not yet been completed when 'So Vile A Sin' was published.
Wars of Acquisition: Expansionist period of the early-to mid-Thirtieth Century.  Eventually collapsed, as you can read in 'Original Sin'.  The crisis on Solos in 'The Mutants' is retconned to fit into this time period.

p.8
The Falardi:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Alien race mentioned in 'Original Sin'. Roz believed for a time that it was a Falardi who killed her partner Fenn Martle.
The Qink:
stabsfeldwebel:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) German; rank equivalent to warrant officer. This is the rank Vincenzi held before he was booted out of the Landsknechte (confirmed p.10). Fluellen is subtly hinting that he knows who Vincenzi is.
Centillion sake from the Asumi habitat in Procorus: Sake is a potent Japanese wine, served hot.

p.9
Fluellen: Sounds like a character name Isaac Asimov might have thought of.  Or maybe Arthur C Clarke in Childhood's End.  Fluellen was a Welsh officer in King Henry's army in Shakespeare's Henry V
Captain Fluellen is a valiant but slightly ridiculous figure with a hot temper and a thick Welsh accent. His quarrel with Macmorris and Pistol provides much-needed comic relief, especially when he forces Pistol to eat the leek he wears in honour of St. David.
'A few hundred years back a compiler was a smart system that wrote specified network code.  That was before computers and information systems became autonomously referential.  You told the compiler what you wanted to do and it translated it into operating code.  Back then they still had languages for computers.  I collect them.': Kind of like this WYSIWYG HTML editor I'm using now.
'I've got SARTRE, micro-nietzsche, FLENSE and even a fragment of the original DALEK source code.':

p.10
unteromzier:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Looks like a really bad typo for "unteroffizier", which rank is equivalent to corporal.
the Aspenal Campaign:
Three tours on Orestes: The Ogron homeworld.  In 'Mission: Impractical' the Ogron homeworld is called Braah, but that takes place a couple of million years in the future.  The planet could have been renamed or replaced by then.  (Text submitted by Mick Gair)The Ogron homeworld is first referred to as Braah in 'The Romance of Crime'. As for Orestes, a lot of the Greek placenames in this book are taken from plays written by the Greek Aeschylus in the Fifth Century BC.  Look them up, they seem plenty violent. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) As an aside, the middle play of Aeschylus' Orestes trilogy gets a mention in the NA 'Theatre of War', on p.272.
Centcomp:  The Earth Empire's equivalent of  the Matrix on Gallifrey.

p.11
The Broken Paradigm:
I think Kate wrote this bit from an outline by Ben. Imaginary pub in a reality bubble somewhere in Puterspace - the e-Dimension where reside the consciousnesses of Artificial Intelligences and mundane life-forms that can jack into it.  Check out 'Love and War' and 'Transit'.
FLORANCE: Artificial Intelligence (AI) that was originally the security software at the Stone Mountain datastore on the Moon in 'Transit'. The Doctor broke in to destroy all trace of his existence sometime around 2100 and suggested the AI get a name.  FLORANCE avoided responsibility forthe security breach by hiring a lawyer and suing its employers for civil rights violations.  It then invested heavily in real estate on Pluto,and hired a brace of laid-off Solar Transit System security guards as custodians.  FLORANCE turned up again in 'SLEEPY' and 'Seeing I'. 
Yemaya 4: The location for 'SLEEPY'.  Namedropped several times in this book, because the co-author wrote it.

p.12
DKC: The Dione-Kisumu Corporation.  Evil African interplanetary conglomerate based on one of the moons of Saturn in the 23rd Century.  Engaged in psychic experiments with AIs.  Part of the Psi-Powers conspiracy that leads into this book.  Dione is 1120 km in diameter.  It's the fourth largest moon in the Saturnian system.  It was discovered by Cassini in 1684.Dione
Billy Gibson's little boy all grown up and out to party:William Gibson - invented the phrase "cyberpunk".  Canadian science fiction author of books like Neuromancer and Virtual Light, and short stories like the original "Johnny Mnemonic".
Exxilon caches like palaces of crystal: The Exxilons had an ancient empire that disappeared.  Check 'Death to the Daleks'.  They visited Central American civilizations, apparently.
BAR B, one of the Yemaya veterans: (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) We first met BAR B in 'SLEEPY', where it was one of the AIs that assisted the Doctor.

p.13
"Commercial VR doesn't use much more than a terabyte,": 1 terabyte is about 1028 gigabytes.  Right now 256 megabytes is considered pretty good.  That's about 1/3900th of what FLORANCE means.
Oberon Stellagraphic database on Oberon: Oberon is the outermost major moon of Uranus.  It's the headquarters of the League of Adjudicators first mentioned in 'Lucifer Rising'.  It is retconned to explain the Investigators from Earth in 'Colony in Space', 'The Mutants' and 'Terror of the Vervoids', as well as the conveniently-named assassin's guild, the Grand Knights of Oberon from 'Revelation of the Daleks'.

p.14
"Rumour had it that it was developed by species of intelligent fungus and propagated through the Church of the Vacuum.":(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) There's a scene in 'Love and War' where the Hoothi unexpectedly attack the heroes inside Puterspace, which seems at least vaguely relevant.
"Whatever happed to them?"  "Something Terrible."  "What could be worse than the Hoothi?": I'll give you one guess.

p.15
Gravitas: a quality that could reshape the spaces of the datascape:  And a quality the Doctor possesses.  This is a protocol representing the Red-Headed Doctor from the Flying Dutchman TARDIS in 'Transit'and King Arthur's Merlyn from the novelization of 'Battlefield'.

p.16
FLORANCE told the Dutchman about the special psychiatric complex on Dis, about the half a dozen patients who met his criteria.  Men and women who officially didn't exist any more: Read about Dis on p.21 or in 'Original Sin'.

p.17
"I notice you didn't tell him about the Bitch Queen of the Universe,":    Probably referring to the N-form on Aegisthus.  The N-form is a secret weapon of the Time Lords in their ancient war against the Vampires.  The N-form manifests itself as a molecular window into a pocket dimension that looks for psychic activity.  When it finds psychically active vampires, the pocket dimension explodes into the real world and goes berserk until the vampire's whole planet is dead.  (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) On the other hand, "the Bitch Queen of the Universe" sounds like an epithet that might be applied to the Empress, and BAR B might be referring to the fact that Centcomp is malfunctioning because the Empress' mind is going.Read on.
Spaceport 20 Overcity:  I think Ben wrote this bit.  The numbered Overcities correspond roughly to major 21st-Century cities on Earth.  I wonder where this one is.
Sibongile: That's the girl's name.  How's it pronounced?
her heavy rhino-skin jacket riding up her bhunti and framing the outline of her beelies:  Ben.  Pure Ben.  There are so many dead-end references in this bit, I'm not going to try with most of them.
Hiths With Attitude singing "Male at Last":The Hith are a race of large slugs in 'Original Sin', like the Gastropods from 'The Twin Dilemma'. They're hermaphrodites, so they acn change genders. The Empire invaded Hithis in the Wars of Acquisition, and kicked the Hith off the planet. The Hith formed a strong diaspora culture and they all started changing their names to things like 'Completely Bereft and Doomed to Exile' to make humans feel bad for what they'd done. Started making music about it, too.(Text submitted by John Anderson) They got their name from NWA, a Hip Hop group from around 1990 that started Dr Dre's career.
p.20
IMC WANTS YOU TO DIE FOR ITS PROFIT MARGIN: IMC is the Interplanetary Mining Corporation, the first of the nasty space conglomerates created by Malcolm Hulke for 'Colony in Space'.  Read the novelization, 'Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon'.  The characterization of the IMC men is so much more clear-cut and two-dimensional.  IMC popped up again in 'Love and War'.
ElleryCorp: My money's on it being either a subtle dig at Jason Haigh-Ellery (although for 1997 that's a bit early) or a comment on the crime fiction magazine Ellery Queen. I think Bernice works for ElleryCorp a some point, either before 'Love and War' or during 'Another Girl, Another Planet' perhaps.
(Text submitted by Mick Gair)ElleryCorp were also mentioned in 'Human Nature' and 'Original Sin'.
shampooing: Appears to be some kind of expletive.  Check p.31.
the DMZ facing the Sontarans: Evidently the Sontarans ('The Time Warrior', 'The Two Doctors') have contact with the Earth Empire but cannot be persuaded to take a break from their war with the Rutans and fight us instead.
propping up the governments of Castus, Eridani and Asume: Epsilon and Omicron(2) Eridani are both stars less than 20 light-years from the Sun, which are rather like the Sun.  So maybe good places for colonies.

p.21
shampooed up the pondorossa: Fu...  no, I'll leave that to your imagination.  The Ponderosa was the setting of the well-known cowboy TV show Bonanza with Lorne Greene.
"We're looking at ways to oppose the levee.  Do you want to come?": A levee is like a dike constructed to prevent floods.  A levy is more like a draft.
Dis:  I think Kate wrote this bit..  Dis was introduced in 'Original Sin' as the Earth Empire's prison planet.  Dis is what remains of the homeworld of the Greld from 'Empire of Glass'.  When the Greld resisted the Empire during the Wars of Acquisition, the Empire used a quark bomb to turn the Greld sun from a white dwarf star into a red giant, killing them all.  Credit Lars Pearson, I, Who.  By the Year 4000 in 'The Daleks' Masterplan' the Galactic Federation's prison planet is Desperus. The location of Desperus remains unclear, largely due to cack-handed awful scripting of the episodes of 'The Daleks' Masterplan'.

p.23
"The landing on Iphigenia?": Iphigenia was the daughter of Agamemnon in Homer's legends of the Trojan War.  Prevented from sailing to Troy for a very long period of time, Agamemnon was forced to sacrifice his daughter to brighten up the weather.  Years later, when he returned home to Mycenae after burning Troy to the ground, he was himself murdered by his wife Clytemnestra for being a psychotic old bastard.  Orestes is the name of another planet in Iphigenia's solar system, where the Ogrons live.

p.24
"The other doctor?":The Doctor's found out the location of this woman and her crewmates in the Hospital for the Criminally Insane on Dis from FLORANCE.  Her ship had attempted a landing on Iphigenia and had come into contact with a Nexus that gave them access to different quantum-dimensional timestreams.  The shock drove them mad.  Some of them ended up dead, and one got a powerful psi-weapon planted on her brain.
Kibero Patera, Io: Kibero is a mythical toad that lives in the Underworld, giving mankind fire. You can download a map of Io with placenames including Kibero Patera in .PDF format from http://wwwflag.wr.usgs.gov/USGSFlag/Space/nomen/index_images.html  And I think Ben wrote this bit.
the House of Scheherazade: Fashion house named after the narrator of The Thousand and One Nights.  Scheherazade was newly married to a prince who happened to be a notorious matricide.  To play for time and stop him having her head cut off, she told him lots of stories until he fell in love with her.

p.26
the rise of the Liberal Reconstructionists on Tara: As in 'The Androids of Tara'.

p.28
Terran species from before the Dalek invasion: The Daleks conquer Earth in the 22nd Century ('The Dalek Invasion of Earth', 'GodEngine') They invaded again in the mid-26th Century ('Beige Planet Mars', 'The Sword of Forever'). But they were driven off before establishing a bridgehead on Earth and instead left behind a bunch of metagenic weapons that played merry hell with Earth's genepool for decades.
lucite dust covers: Do we use them now?

p.29
Part of the heritage of the Gwalchmai family:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) This is Genevieve's family being referred to here. (Gwalchmai, whose name meant "hawk", was a hero of Welsh legend, sometimes identified with Gawain of Arthurian legend.)
mostly poetry: Sassoon, Naruda, Baldrick's Listen to the Song I Sing.  A Penguin copy of Achebe's Things Fall Apart: Siegfried Sasson was British, one of the Great War poets.  Naruda - ?  (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Pablo Naruda, a Chilean poet, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.Baldrick's war poetry is unique to the Curtis-Elton Rowan Atkinson comedy Blackadder Goes Forth: "Listen to the song I sing/War's a horrid thing./So I sing, sing sing/Dingalingaling."  Chinua Achebe was an influential author in postcolonial Africa.  Ben Aaronovitch named the President of Earth at the time of the Thousand-Day War with the Ice Warriors after him.
A set of sleeve notes were propped up against the antique fiche viewer embedded in the table top - for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) A play (or, perhaps more accurately, a poem with stage directions) by Ntozake Shange, first performed in the mid-1970s. And yes, that is its actual title.
Greed Incorporated: The Rise of the Space Corporations by M. Ashe: Mary Ashe was one of the colonists on Exarius who stood up against IMC in 'Colony in Space'. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) In addition, passages attributed to Greed Incorporated: The Rise of the Space Corporations appear in several places in Lance Parkin's A History of the Universe.
the Cyber Wars: Referred to in 'Revenge of the Cybermen'.
Imperium Draco: The Draconian Empire from 'Frontier in Space'.  It's never established whether they're called Draconians because of their strict social structure, their reptilian appearance, or if their homeworld is in the direction of the Earth constellation Draco.
The Fitzgerald translation of The Lament of the Non-Operational : Dalek poetry.  Probably something beautiful and evocative like "UNDER ATTACK!  MY VISION IS IMPAIRED!  I CANNOT SEE!!  MY VISION IS IMPAIRED!!  I CANNOT SEEEEEEE!!!!  ...NESD."(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Roz, in 'The Also People', tells FeLixi about her father(?) making her memorise these poems.
She felt a twinge of envy; she would have loved to spend her school days among such history: Roz hated it - she ran away and mananged to escape history for a while travelling in time.  This book is how she re-entered history in a big way.
A portrait in soluble polymers.  Two teenage girls against an impossible sweep of Ionian landscape: The cover portrait.  Leabie and Roz when they were younger and hadn't fallen out with each other.

p.30
"I'm his concubine.  Do you know what that means?"  Mr Fiction did a sudden back flip and yelled, "Look at me, look at me!": Cute.  A concubine is part of a powerful man's harem. 

p.32
Someone had done an incomparable job of erasing all trace of the younger Forrester sister.  Duke Walid, for reasons best known to himself, wanted to find out why: Okay, here's the lowdown on Duke Walid.  He has ulterior motives I won't spoil for now, but he's basically the Baroness Leabie's main competitor in the Imperial Court.  They have a cordially cold war going on at the moment, and Fluellen rescued Vincenzi from an unlucky suicide attempt to recruit him into a secret army fighting for Leabie, Walid, Duke Armand of Earth or another faction.  All parties are preparing for war.

p.33
"I'd like to introduce you to the latest microreclamation project of House Forrester.  Extinct for almost two millennia.": African elephants aren't yet extinct in 2001, although they're not as well-protected or domesticated as in India.  Indlovu is probably Swahili rather than IsiXhosa- it describes elephants in the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as South Africa.  The first !Xhosa peoples were the southernmost vector of the Bantu Migration, which started out from Nigeria as much as 5000 years ago and spread out and changed different parts of sub-Saharan Africa as it went.  Zaire as well as the Transkei.  The elephant habitat reaches into South Africa.

p.37
Piazza Tereshkova: Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova was the first woman to orbit the Earth, in Vostok 6 between June 16th and June 21st, 1963.  Her current whereabouts are uncertain, but she is probably still living in Russia.

p.37
Fury: Erinyes, also called the Furies in Greek mythology. They were the three avenging deities Tisiphone (the avenger of murder), Megaera (the jealous one), and Alecto (unceasing in anger). (The Tisiphone was Bernice's father's warship in 'Return of the Living Dad) In most accounts the Erinyes are the daughters of Gaea  and Uranus; sometimes they are called the daughters of Night. They lived in the world below, from which they ascended to earth to pursue the wicked. They were just but merciless and without regard for mitigating circumstances. They punished all offenses against human society such as perjury, violation of the rites of hospitality, and, above all, the murder of blood relatives.
These terrible goddesses were hideous to behold; they had writhing snakes for hair and blood dripped from their eyes. They tormented wrongdoers, pursuing them from place to place across the earth, driving them mad. One of the most famous legends about the Erinyes concerns their relentless pursuit of the Theban prince Orestes for the murder of his mother, Queen Clytemnestra. Orestes had been commanded by the god Apollo to avenge the death of his father, King Agamemnon, whom Clytemnestra had murdered. The Erinyes, however, heedless of his motives,pursued and tormented him. Orestes finally appealed to the goddess Athena, who persuaded the avenging goddesses to accept Orestes' plea that he had been cleansed of his guilt. When they were thus able to show mercy, they became changed themselves. From the Furies of frightful appearance, they were transformed into the Eumenides, protectors of the suppliant. The Fury Megaera is the model for the Megara Justice Machines in 'The Stones of Blood'.
Aegisthus: In Greek  mythology, the son of  Thyestes and his daughter Pelopia. Desiring to avenge himself upon his brother Atreus and acting on the advice of the Oracle at Delphi, Thyestes consummated an incestuous union with Pelopia. Shortly afterward, Atreus married Pelopia, not knowing she was his niece.  When Aegisthus was born, Atreus accepted him as his own son. Aegisthus later learned his true identity and, urged by Thyestes, killed Atreus. While Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, was away fighting in the Trojan Wars, Aegisthus became the lover of Queen Clytemnestra. He helped Clytemnestra kill her husband upon his return from Troy. Together with the queen, Aegisthus then ruled Mycenae for seven years; he was murdered by Agamemnon's son Orestes. Oy, nobody gets out of this legend with their innocence intact.
The city crouched under its dome on the airless Zhongjian Plateau:
Sunrise came when the moon orbited out of the shadow of its primary and into the warmth of her father's smile: This is unclear.  Sunrise on Io comes when the sun rises above the horizon, except when Jupiter gets in the way.  And consider that Io is tidally locked, one hemisphere always facing Jupiter and the other facing out into interplanetary space. So half of Io never sees Jupiter at all, let alone see it eclipse the Sun. And Jupiter only covers a diameter of about 20 degrees from the surface of Io, according to the fabulous planetarium application Starry Night .  So sunrise on Io usually happens when the Sun comes over the horizon.  Oh, and this passage is the first-ever appearance of Roz's father.


Sunrise on Io
Sunrise on Io




p.38
Electra: Electra, in Greek mythology, was Agamemnon's other daughter . After Clytemnestra and Aegisthus killed Agamemnon Electra sent her brother, Orestes, to safety at the court of an uncle. She stayed behind in Mycenae, living in poverty  under constant surveillance while Clytemnestra and Aegisthus ruled the kingdom. Electra sent frequent reminders to Orestes that he must return to avenge the death of their father. At the end of seven years, Orestes and his friend Pylades went secretly to Agamemnon's tomb. There they met Electra, who had come to pour libations and offer prayers for vengeance. Orestes revealed his identity to his sister, then proceeded at once to the palace, where he killed Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Electra later married Pylades.  At this point, the saga ended...  until Electra's children hit puberty.
In 'Death and Diplomacy' Jason's pet alien Shug pipes up and accuses Bernice of holding an Electra complex: Idolizing her father, who disappeared in battle with the Daleks and was accused of desertion, she holds such high standards for male companionship that she is bound to lose at loving.  Credit Lars Pearson from I, Who.
Kirlian sensor:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) A device for detecting and recognising the unique energy field generated by each living thing. (Such a device doesn't exist in our world, but might in the Doctor's.) Named after Semyon Kirlian, who thought he'd invented such a device in 1939. (Note that, even if it worked as claimed, Kirlian's specific technique would be no good for covert surveillance, as it requires the subject to be in prolonged physical contact with a photographic film.)
"I don' sell gun, I sell frock only.": I'm not sure who started the "Guns vs. Frocks" debate, but once it was out in the open the dichotomy between effeminate whimsy and calculated violence in the New Adventures was extremely visible.Gareth Roberts has said that he came up with these terms.
Boulevard Gagarin: Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was the first man to orbit the Earth, in Vostok 1.  His flight was on April 12, 1961. He was killed in a MiG-15 crash on March 27, 1968.
an AG jack: (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Judging by the other appearances the abbreviation (e.g. on p.47), AG is short for "anti-gravity".

p.39
like a portcullis: The portcullis is a heavy gate in the threshold of a castle.
a pair of matching PVC mules and a gauss microwire pistol: Mules are a kind of shoes.  A gauss gun accelerates its projectiles electromagnetically, it doesn't use gunpowder or other chemicals.  And it fires microwires instead of bullets.  Microwires are like the flechettes Ace used in her Space Fleet days.  Flechettes are used today: their advantage is that because they're very thin they slip between the fabric of bulletproof vests.  Nasty, but they tend to go right through rather than slow down and knock targets backwards.
hydrogen-xenon battery pack: Randomly-chosen elements, or do we have fuel cells like that today?
It was designed to fire wire-thin flechettes of depleted uranium.  Not a lot of stopping power, but on full auto it could empty the clip of sixty in less than a second: Depleted uranium is in dispute these days over allegations that although it's purged of high-radiation isotopes it's caused cancers in Serbia and Iraq, two theatres of war in which it's been used. Depleted uranium is very heavy and there's not much point using it if you don't plan to take advantage of its stopping power. 

p.40
Via Grissom: Virgil Ivan "Gus" Grissom was the second American in space.  On July 21, 1961 he made a suborbital flight to the altitude of 190 km in the Mercury spacecraft Liberty Bell 7.  After splashing down his capsule sank in circumstances which are not fully understood. He flew again (both Gagarin and Tereshkova flew only once) making three orbits of the Earth with John Young in Gemini 3 on March 23, 1963. He was designated part of the primary crew for the shakedown flight of the Apollo spacecraft designed to orbit the Moon, but a short circuit that sparked while the spacecraft was sealed with a 100% oxygen atmosphere caused a sequence of events that led to a fire that killed Grissom and his two crewmates on January 27, 1967.
the Quadrant: 'Damaged Goods'.
...her pupils the size of pinheads.  The woman was narced on something: Drugged. Okay?

p.41
"We just got back from pitch over Van Neygen's armpit.":
The rest of the block was leased out on a floor-by-floor basis to light industry, commercial service companies and something that advertised itself as a Memory Boutique.  WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU - DISCOUNT! A long time ago, in a previous life, Roz would have paid a place like that a quick visit with a search warrant and a psyche forensic team:  Roz herself has been brainwashed once or twice before.  Most notably, she had her own memories adjusted after discovering her partner in the Adjudicators (and her lover), Fenn Martle, was on the take.  So she had to kill him. Then she erased all her memories of how the relationship ended.  The story was told in 'Original Sin' - at the end of the book she remembered what she'd done and decided she could live with the emotional scars after all. A later novel,'Oblivion', involves Roz being kidnapped from the point in time she and Fenn Martle were just starting to work together. She freaks out most of the time,and when she gets put back she doesn't remember much. A more descriptive term is "Mary-Sue". In 'The Mary-Sue Extrusion' Bernice Summerfield had a Mary-Sue installed in her mind. It's like a sleeper program that can erase memories and invent a new personality. Bernice got it so that she could hide herself from detection by the Gods of Dellah, powerful alien psychics she expected would find her when she went back to the planet they had recently devastated, to fetch her cat. I digress. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) The slogan is a reference to the Philip K. Dick story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" (which inspired the Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall).

p.43
On this page I have to flag a little soliloquy in which Roz contemplates time paradoxes.  I've already explained the Yemaya 4 connection with 'SLEEPY'.  Roz is smoking cigarettes produced at the colony on Yemaya 4.  When the Doctor first took her there, in the 23rd Century, he said that the colony was about to be destroyed.  And yet by their actions the destruction of the colony by the Dione-Kisumu Corporation was prevented, and now Roz can remember Yemayan cigarettes from her youth.

p.44
PINK FLOWER, TORPEDO LOUNGE, LADY GREY, DK'S: DKs are Dalek Killers - introduced in the Doctor Who Weekly coomic strip.  Abslom Daak, a 25th-Century convicted murderer, is sentenced to be transmatted into Dalek space and to kill as many Daleks as he can before he is himself killed.

p.45
The Ogron matrons chanted sadly for their poor lost boys, the sons and sister sons that vanished long ago with the metal gods: The metal gods are the Daleks - who used the Ogrons as a mercenary army in 'Day of the Daleks' and 'Frontier in Space'.
Born on Spaceport Six Overcity, graduate in geophysics at SP5 University: Not sure where Spaceport Six Overcity is.  SP5 University could be an obscure reference to the very first Doctor Who comic strip, published in TV Comic.  Doctor Who's two grandchildren, John and Gillian, eventually left him to study at Zebedee University.  At some point in the 1990s this was retconned to become ZBD University.  Of course, in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Africa the English letter "Z" is pronounced"Zed". It sounds a lot more like the French and other romance-languages pronounciations of the letter.  Oh, and SP5 could also stand for Spaceport Five. (Text submitted by Mick Gair)In 'Original Sin', Central City (formerly London) was renamed Spaceport Five Overcity. Spaceport Five Undertown's landmarks included Trafflegarr Square and Sintjaimsys, according to 'Just War'. <
Tethys Tethys deep-space school: Tethys is another of Saturn's moons. Here's a good page about it.

p.46
On 4 June 2980 the cutter dedocked from the ISN carrier Catherine the Great and set off for Iphigenia at ten gees: Catherine the Great was a German princess who inherited the Russian Empire.  There are varying opinions of the Catherine Zeta-Jones TV Movie about her, but at least Paul McGann and one of his brothers were in it.  To set off for Iphigenia at ten gees seems a little extreme.  That's an acceleration of 100 metres per second every second; pretty effective for getting out of a planetary atmosphere or a deep gravity well, not a spacecraft carrier. 
Riban boys with hormone-retarded bodies: As in Ribos from 'The Ribos Operation'.
Elegant Argolins and bad-tempered girls from Segonax: 'The Leisure Hive' is set on Argolis.  Segonax is the setting for 'The Greatest Show in the Galaxy'.
it was time for the ten-cent tour:
molybdenum: Metallic element found in large quantities on the Sense-Sphere ('The Sensorites').  The natives there were reclusive and didn't appreciate human surveyors lusting after their planet.  'The Sensorites', according to a couple of dating estimates, also takes place near the end of the Third Millennium.

p.47
dwarf-star alloy: Introduced in 'Warrior's Gate'.  White dwarf stars are the compacted cores of dead stars.  To visualize this, imagine the Sun's mass of extremely hot and pressurized gases burning for 8 billion years.  And imagine the state of whatever it's been sitting on for all that time.  As the star runs out of efficient fuel and burns hotter, its outer layers boil off into space leaving the core behind.  Dwarf star matter is especially dense so the author of 'Warrior's Gate' used it in starship hulls as shielding against micrometeoroids, radiation, time flux and the escape of the enslaved Tharils, the navigators.
"Its total mass is one million tons and it is assisted, as you can see, by four AG-assisted columns at a height of a hundred metres.": By my calculations, just standing underneath that weight would make you 0.04 grams lighter by its own gravitation, assuming your planetary surface had Earth-normal gravity. But one million tons of dwarf star alloy doesn't take up much space; its density is ten metric tons per cubic centimetre. A million metric tons of dwarf star matter would make a metre-thick sheet about 2 metres wide and 4 metres long.
"McShane," said Roz, "Sarah McShane.  I'm a correspondent for Inawo media feed." Ace's real name is Dorothy McShane.  Or as she later styles it, Dorothée McShane (Alt+Num0232 for anyone else out there getting the hang of Microsoft keyboards).  Anyways, the name is good cover for other companions - in 'Cold Fusion', Chris Cwej used the alias Bruce Jovanka.  In 'Matrix' it's implied that Ace's surname is Gale, but that's a bit crap and a tired reference to The Wizard of Oz as well.

p.48
Young Agronomists' Club: Agronomists are business-minded biologists.  In 'Terror of the Vervoids' Professor Laskey was an agronomist.  She was transporting enslaved plant-life she'd engineered to Earth as servants.  But she somehow forgot that she had given them deadly stings, until they broke free and started killing people.  She claimed to be a "thremmatologist" rather than a plain agronomist, but there's no such thing.  Arthur Stengos in 'Revelation of the Daleks' was also an agronomist.
Mei Feng had startling grey-blue eyes with epicanthic folds: (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) An epicanthic fold is "a fold of skin of the upper eyelid that partially covers the inner corner of the eye". (American Heritage Dictionary) Epicanthic folds are, I believe, a feature typical of oriental eyelids.

p.51
Piazza Jemison: Probable but obscure.  Dr Mae Carol Jemison flew on the Space Shuttle on STS-47 between September 12th and 20th, 1992.  It was a life sciences mission using the Endeavour orbiter with a Spacelab module that made 127 orbits.  Dr Jemison is an African-American woman.

p.53
The single hair she'd stuck across the bottom was still intact: An old trick for spies like James Bond - in Dr. No he checked his room against snoopers by using spittle to fix one of his own hairs across the lip of his dresser drawer.  When the room gets a going-over, whoever checks the dresser doesn't notice the hair's been displaced.

p.55
Mother of Nobody: Ogron women seem to be taking names rather like the Hith from 'Original Sin'.  Mostly because their boys are mostly dead in other peoples' wars.

p.56
N-gram: The N-form's gateway to the real universe is a little scar tissue on the brain.  N-gram is a play on words for "engram", a theoretical explanation for how memories work.  Used to be more popular in the Sixties - you may find some episodes of the original Star Trek that mention it.  I think L. Ron Hubbard worked it into his Scientology crap - some people will believe anything.
the Goddess of Justice and Mercy:

p.57
Her engagement ring: At the end of 'Just War' Roz got engaged to Captain George Reed, a British intelligence officer in the Second World War.  But she left with the Doctor anyways.  She also had a relationship with feLixi, one of the incredibly powerful People from the Worldsphere in 'The Also People'.  But he turned out to be a bad guy.

p.58
"Human kill all orange monster things - Ogrons have nothing to fear and worship.": We briefly visited the surface of  Orestes in 'Frontier in Space', although it wasn't called by name.  When confronted by an impractical orange amoeba, they got scared and buggered off.  One or two of them may in fact have been so scared that they let down their guard and got eaten, I don't know. 

p.59
"We not fight to win yet.  Fight only to cause trouble, to bring many human soldier here.  If they here then they not where they needed later."    "You are working for someone," said Roz.  "Who is it this time, the Sontarans?  Or have you gone back to your old masters again?"    "Not masters," said Mother of Nobody.  "Not all-the-sames or metal gods.  We have friend now, human friend to help us fight humans." She slammed her palm down on the bar and grinned at Roz.  "Who is truly stupid race now?":   The implication here is that one or the other of the factions of the Imperial Court is prolonging the insurrection on Orestes to keep armed forces away from Earth and make a coup d'etat easier to pull off.

p.60
What couldn't be outsmarted had to be outrun.  The Rift Valley Rap: An allusion to the reflexive fight-or-flight response to danger.  All animal life does it.  And running away from danger is a recurring theme in Doctor Who. The Great Rift Valley runs through East Africa, most of the oldest fossil finds of our hominid ancestors have been found there.

p.62
The thing about hyperwave, the thing that made the whole ecology of the human datascape possible, was that it was always switched on.  Once a transmission station was in resonance with another station, a continuous signal had to be broadcast in order to maintain the link: This may have been brought up in another novel;  'Deceit', perhaps?  And is this at all like the way Internet servers communicate?
(Text submitted by John Anderson) No it's not. Internet computers recontact each other every time they talk, they don't maintain a continuous signal (usually).

p.64
She made the guard lie down in the recovery position and then shot her too: Recovery position is taught in first aid.  The posture is supposedly the safest way of recovering from semiconsciousness.  Lie on your side with your lower leg bent to cradle the upper one, which you keep straight.  Your lower arm cushions your head, and the upper arm goes straight out.  You're lying down to avoid dizziness, and you're also less likely to hurt yourself if you have a seizure.  And you're on your side with an unobstructed airway so you won't choke on your own vomit.

p.67
"Everything I learnt is here in this palmtop.": Since Palm Pilots came out I instinctively call them palmtops.  Nobody understands me.

p.68
The tall, curly-headed stranger just raised his hands.  "It's me,' he said: It's the Doctor.  It may not be the Sixth Doctor or the Red-Headed Doctor.  In fact, later in the book we learn about more Doctors than the mind can comprehend with ease.  This is one of them.
"I'm on Iphigenia, Roz.  I need your help.  Desperately.  Come at once.  Aulis.  You won't miss it.": Aulis is a big crater on Iphigenia, as we will soon read.  Not sure about its derivation,but www.aulis.com is a website about the Face on Mars, crop circles and ancient alien architecture.  Which seems satisfyingly appropriate.

p.70
"I just this minute got a report that on its last trip this hopper visited Mictlan.": Not the Domain of the Celestis from 'Alien Bodies'. Just another colony planet.  Mictlan is the Underworld in Aztec mythology.  Hence the punchline, "Mictlan's a nice planet, if you like dead people."
"There's just been an outbreak of Breckenridge's Scourge reported on Mictlan.": It's made up.

p.71
In his time he'd flown everything from an Adjudicator flitter to an experimental Nazi plane: He crashed the flitter and sustained severe burns over most of his body.  He made an emergency landing in Hyde Park with the Nazi plane, blew it up, and got arrested as a German spy.  'Original Sin' and 'Just War'.
Professor Martinique:
Emil Zatopek: Named after a championship runner from Czechoslovakia in the 1950s.  Here's a page about him.
Iaomnet Wszola:

p.73
The mountain of Artemis, the Greek goddess whom no man could see unclothed on pain of death: If you say so.  And that's a rather heavy metaphor.
"The largest crater anywhere in human space,": This may belabour the point.  The largest crater in our Solar System, Olympus Mons, is 550 km across although it happens to be volcanic.  Aulis Crater has, we observe, the aspect of an impact crater.  Like the 400-km Odysseus Crater on Tethys,or the 130-km Herschel Crater on Mimas.

p.74
"It looks as though a meteorite strike took a bite out of the mountain," said the Doctor.    "That's right," said Martinique, a little surprised.  "Revealing a complex substratum.": Aulis Crater is as natural as the mountains at Disneyland.

p.75
The Ogron eyed him for a moment.  "Good food," he said.  His voice was deep and throaty.  He made a sound like coughing, deep in his chest, and the other Ogron joined him:The idea is that the Ogrons' native method of communication is subsonic and comes from vibrations deep in the torso.  We get more details in 'Interference'.

p.77
hyperspace did strange things to your eyes as they tried to focus, and it always made his head ache: The idea comes from some old Star Trek novels, trying to describe in detail the new warp speed effects from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  Although the effects would likely be a bit odd.  And why are they taking at least 24 hours to make a hyperspace trip from one of Clytemnestra's moons to another?  The moons probably aren't more than 6 million km apart.  There's also a loophole sometimes used that you can't go into hyperspace near a large planet because of side-effects of its gravity well.

p.78
After lunch, Chris crawled out through the airlock and spent an hour welding things together on the hull: In hyperspace?  I thought that wasn't very safe.  In 'Frontier in Space' the Doctor only did it in normal space.
Chris had heard of a ship on the Earth-Titan run which had got so nervous about one of its retros that it changed course for the nearest repair station, and the crew didn't even realize until they were halfway to Mars: Titan is Saturn's largest moon.  The Doctor destroyed a colony there to kill off the Swarm in 'The Invisible Enemy'.  Actually the script editors implied that he set fire to the methane atmosphere and blew up the whole moon, although that's impossible: fire requires oxygen, and there isn't any on Titan.  That was about the Year 5000.  And Mars isn't always conveniently between Earth and Saturn, quite often it's on the far side of the Sun. Titan
"The Communards,": Some band or other?

p.79
"It reminds me of someone I used to know," said Chris.  "They used to play this at the clubs we went to.": David Daniels from 'Damaged Goods'.
"Hey," she said, holding up the cassette case.  "I know this one- Sting.  Didn't he go on to found a religion?"    "That was Prince," said Chris.  "Sting went into politics.  I think he was assassinated in the early twenty-first.": Sting's more stuck to acting.

p.80
"They're decelerating at irregular intervals, the maximum deceleration being thirty gees.": Decelerating by 300 metres per second every second.  At that running at that delta-V (change in velocity) for 100 minutes would move them 5.5 million km and change their velocity by 1800 km/s.

p.81
"I think you should stop broadcasting Jimmy Somerville now.":
"This is the interceptor Albert Edward, out of the ISN Victoria :
Albert Edward was Queen Victoria's first son, and grew up to be Edward VII.

p.82
Ident X181/481: Any meaning to the number?
The gas giant was a massive, faintly glowing ball, cutting off the sunlight, filling the bridge with reddish shadows: I'm willing to go out and state that Clytemnestra is a brown dwarf star.  Brown dwarfs sit on the fence between very large planets and very small stars.  They're not quite massive enough to sustain fusion in their cores, but they produce a certain amount of heat and light. 
Using strict orbital dynamics, it's a bit hard to imagine Iphigenia orbiting less than a certain distance from Clytemnestra.  There's something called the Roche Limit, which is manifested in dynamic gravitational forces pulling insecure objects like small moons apart.  When a really massive planet is so close as to be covering a large part of the sky, its moon is attracted to it with differing amounts of force and orbital velocity on different parts of its surface.  When the attraction is spread out over too much sky and the moon is particularly loosely formed, it breaks apart.  Think of it like making a sudden turn in your car.  Apart from the acceleration that pushes you towards the outside of the turn, the car has a turn radius that you can't make any smaller.  Fortunately your front axle is solid enough not to fall off when you tryto decrease your turn radius.  Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the fragmented comet that collided with Jupiter in 1994, had been broken into at least 24 large pieces when it flew underneath Jupiter's Roche Limit.  Artificial satellites aren't vulnerable to the Roche Limit because they are too small, light and solidly built to be pulled in different directions by the planets they orbit.

p.83
Kim Wilde vanished in a puff of silence:
screaming in Czech:
"I'm burning!  Sailing in the lake of fire!  Planets emerging born out of the red sear in the lake, crawling above!": I only really included this because I heard Kate Orman listens to Rush, and this sounds a bit like Geddy Lee lyrics in pain.
The Doctor shrugged as though something was irritating him, and a tiny drop of blood ran out of his nose: It's a psychic attack from Aulis Crater.

p.84
He was murmuring about tacking across the wave of oblivion, hot chaos licking at the hull of his boat, and yelling at his neighbour to turn the noise down:
"Not 'Don't Leave Me This Way?" 
The Doctor shook his head.  "It's a powerful source and we're still very close.  I'm afraid I had to take drastic measure: Frankie Goes To Hollywood." 
"'Relax' or 'Two Tribes'?"   
"'Relax'," said the Doctor.  "The psycho buffer remix.":
You probably understood this bit, it's a little obvious.  Eighties pop music.

p.85
"Either he left his institute ident at home, or he's a Wild Card.": In the Thirtieth Century there are a fairly large number of telepaths, compared to the Twentieth.  To keep them safe and manage their talents there's an Institute for the Gifted for their registration.

p.86
"I'm qualified in everything except HTML markup and dentistry.": I am now writing unlicenced HTML markup.
"What are our Ogron friends up to?"
"They're in their quarters, as always," said Chris.  "Probably playing ludo.":
(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) When pondering why Chris thinks the Ogrons might be playing a probably long-extinct board game, it might be worth noting that Ludo is also the name of a large, ape-like creature with orange hair that appears in the film 'Labyrinth'.

p.87
psychokinetic: Able to move objects with your mind.  Not necessarily able to read peoples' minds to start with.

p.90
"Thanks.  I've already worked out that Iaomnet's not a student.  Or not just a student, anyway.  She's probably a double-eye.": II: Imperial Intelligence.  Not sure if they first appeared in 'Original Sin' or not.
He felt the dream come down like a terrible weight on his chest, like a tornado blowing through the tiny cabin:  This is a nod to the fact that Chris is a latent telepath himself, as we read in 'SLEEPY'. He's reacting to the psychic signals as well.

p.91
A voice came slithering out of the dream's scaly face: Is Chris dreaming about the Silurians that seemed destined to inherit the Earth in 'Blood Heat'?
All those skins, torn loose and blown away in the wind, all those different faces, sailing past him, glimpses of faces smiling or serious, but all of them the Doctor.  Shedding his skin, his skins, shattered like a dropped cup: We're getting a POV on the Sid Sutton title sequence that used to have the Doctor's face whizzing by.  It symbolises that the Doctor's possible lives have been fractured.

p.92
"Someone must have disabled the safeties.  I'll bet you anything the other suits are the same.": So the backup space suits were sabotaged.

p.93
"Cassandra," breathed the Doctor: Cassandra was one of the daughters of King Priam of Troy.  The God Apollo was in love with her and offered her powers of prophecy.  She refused him, and so he cursed her so that her prophecies would always be ignored.  She warned the Trojans not to bring the Horse inside the city - they brought it in anyways.  When Troy fell to Agamemnon, she became his slave.  She warned him that he would be murdered when he got home - he went home anyways, and the two of them were killed together.  And Cassandra's the outermost planet inthe system.
"Bad rock," said Son of My Father: The Ogron's on the right track.

p.94
counterpane:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) A quilted bedspread.

p.95
"Double, double, toil and trouble," said Thandiwe, "Fire burn and cauldron bubble.": Macbeth, Act 4 Scene 1. The chorus of the Three Witches.

p.96
displayed a menu made up of half a dozen mikons:

p.98
"Unlimited rice pudding," said the Doctor: The Seventh Doctor sent up one of Davros' rants in 'Remembrance of the Daleks' with these words.
"'Boney,' I said, 'an army marches on its stomach.'": Quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte for which the Third Doctor shamelessly took credit.
The Doctor was beginning to get heavy, even with Iphigenia's 0.09 gravity: Earth's Moon has 0.17 Earth-normal gravity.  In 0.09 gravity, when you drop a stone it accelerates at 90 cm/s2.  When you drop a stone on Earth it accelerates at 10 m/s2.  

p.99
Her instructors at Loki had been big on statistics:
Whatever it was that resided in the central chamber, it was truly alien and powerful in a way that she couldn't understand.  And if Martinique was right, there were thousands just like it, scattered throughout the Empire and beyond: Just to clarify, if there are two thousand of these *things* in our galaxy, the possibility of any one particular star hosting one is 0.000002%.  The possibility that any one star hosts more than one is pretty small.
"Balderdash, my dear Professor Blinovitch," said the Doctor.  "I've met myself dozens of times and I haven't exploded yet.": If I've got it straight,the Blinovitch Limitation Effect prevents you from crossing your own time-stream.  Ian McIntire wrote probably the clearest explanation of Blinovitch in PerfectTiming 2, titled 'Unlimited'.  It dovetails with something Stephen Hawking said about when identical particles occupy the same point in space/time they annihilate each other.  McIntire also claims that only the oldest Doctor in any reunion carries the memory of that reunion, in accord with some kind of unity between the structure of the Universe and the minds within it.  Aaron Yeoman Blinovitch was born April 1st,1890, died May 9th, 1937, and was reborn June 17th, 1984.  In his first life he published his Temporal Mechanics based on studies in the Reading Room of the British Museum (like Karl Marx.)  Out of print on Earth, the text is required reading on Gallifrey.  Afterwards, Blinovitch derived and solved the Agathon Equations, which give mathematical expressions for why the Universe is entropic. As a result,he reverse-aged to death and began a cycle of reincarnation as people named Bellin Vosh, Patient 19, the Vegan temporal physicist 923GUI, Arenblovit, William Novice, Research Unit BNOVZ, Buckminster Fuller and others. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Not "reborn". "Unborn" would be a better word. Anyway, this sentence, and the four sentences following, are probably unnecessary detail, not to mention 95% made up out of whole cloth by Ian McIntire. Is just a thought.I did it because I owe Ian a beer. Nootch.
In 'Mawdryn Undead' the Brigadier from 1979 met the Brigadier from 1983.  There was a big bang.  In 'Happy Endings' four versions of the Seventh Doctor were in the same room at the same time, and Muldwych from 'Birthright' was there too (whoever he is.)  When the Doctor handed something to Muldwych, they made sure not to touch each others' hands.  And if you've seen Jon Blum's fan video 'Time-Rift', you'll know about the ray guns that are in fact the same ray-gun, that cause power brown-outs whenever they're put close to each other. And if I was to count up the number of times the Doctor has met himself to this point, I would count six times in 'The Three Doctors', twelve times in 'The Five Doctors', twice more in 'The Two Doctors', twelve or sixteen more times in 'Happy Endings', twice more in 'Cold Fusion' and six more times in 'The Sirens of Time'.  Not counting any fan fiction or comic strip encounters,or the mental encounters in 'Timewyrm: Revelation'. A grand total of at least 30 times.
"Beware the memories of the compassionate tent," said the Doctor.  "I'll have your eyes for that.":(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) In 'Original Sin', the Doctor finds himself locked in a room with a homicidal psychopath who threatens to remove the Doctor's eyes if the Doctor can't explain why what he does is different to what the psychopath does.
"Is it time already?" said the Doctor.  "No, go back to sleep - it's nowhere near time yet.": This is a flashback to 'Timewyrm: Revelation'.  Check out my page   on that marvelous book: p.55.
"Just because you're paranoid," said the Doctor, 'doesn't mean they're not out to get you.":
"Aspidistra baby!":
"I also distinctly remember his being torn to bits by an N-form in Northern England.":
an alternate 'Damaged Goods'.
"I need you to pretend that you're my friend.  That we have a history together."
"Doctor, you're not making any sense," said Iaomnet.  "What the hell is going on?": Exactly the way the Doctor's companions are stereotyped as speaking.

p.101
"Didn't we have fun a Bernice's wedding?  I thought Da Vinci's cake was the high point of the reception, didn't you?": Read 'Happy Endings'.

p.102
ISN Wilfred Owen, Sassoon Class: Both of them Great War poets.(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) And it was meeting Sassoon that prompted Owen to become a poet, so the Wilfred Owen being a Sassoon Class starcraft is sort of appropriate.

p.103
But whatever was in there had screwed up reality to the point where there were Goddess knew how many extra Doctors walking about, appearing like sad ghosts in a Chinese fairy tale: This sounds like a bit more than Roz should be sure of at this point, although she has received visits since the first.  And I don't know much about the use of ghosts in Chinese theatre.
Another one had appeared to her in her cabin en route, furiously scribbling coordinates on the wall with a stick of crayon.  A short guy in an oversized suit.  "Don't tell the Time Lords I was here," he insisted.  "I keep to myself, one step ahead of them.  But only one step.": Any idea if this one is anyone in particular?
But I thought you were living in Hampstead."
"What?"
"With George.":
Reference to the possibility of Roz staying on with George Reed after 'Just War'.

p.105
"Or that you were killed by yourself in Woodwicke.": In 'Christmas on a Rational Planet' there was a problem with an Amaranth, a Gallifreyan tool that rebuilds reality.  One of its side-effects was that it rebuilt a whole new version of Roz from the bio-print she carried in her arm - a version based on Roz's personality when she was younger, angrier and more xenophobic.  The replicant almost killed her.

p.106
ISN Doran: The Michael John Doran.  A friend of mine.  Mike Doran is one of the best-known Canadian Doctor Who   fans.  He's contributed and helped edit several fanzines and chaired at least three successful Doctor Who conventions.  And he also had a character named after him in 'Oh No It Isn't!'

p.107
The surviving screen was running a continuous sweep of the comet's surface: If Cassandra was in our Solar System, it would be a Trans-Neptunian Object.  Like Pluto.  There's an ongoing debate about whether Pluto is a planet or a comet.  I frankly don't care what we call it though.  One thing: Cassandra's been given a name, but it's a very small planet orbiting at great distance from its sun.  Unless it already has special importance,it's not likely to be noted as deserving a name, and not a catalog number.

p.111
The creature's bat wings were spread out, collapsed beneath the weight of its body.  The fine bones of the wingtips were as thick as a human arm: It's one of the Great Vampires ('State of Decay').  Dead for ten million years.  Somehow I thought the early Time Lords' war with the vampires might have been a few hundred times farther back in history than that, but there might just have been a protrusion from ancient time into the age of ten million years ago for a campaign in our galaxy.
"Imagine the power of this thing when it was freshly dead.": The Doctor's corpse in 'Alien Bodies' was psychically active, so no wonder the same happens with the Great Vampires.
"The Real World Interface of these early models was rather unstable.": He might mean the Cassandran TARDIS or the Great Vampires.  Great Vampires, like Time Lords, are bigger on the inside than on the outside.

p.112
they must have travelled fifty kilometres through the angular white corridors: Take a long time to walk that far.

p.113
bowships: What the Time Lords used to stake the Great Vampires.
After it was damaged and its crew killed, it was captured by Agamemnon's gravity and has been following its erratic orbit ever since.  Sending out an equally erratic call for help in a tight beam.  The beam is probably supposed to be aimed at a particular base or planet or what-have-you, but Cassandra's wandering orbit means that the beam is constantly twisting and turning all over the heavens.  When that beam passes within range of a surviving N-form, that N-form automatically switches to full combat mode.":   Which is supposed to explain Mei Feng's sudden explosion as well as the 1987 London N-form. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) And the N-form attack that triggered the Quoth migration in 'The Death of Art'.Extremely unlikely, even though the beam is being broadcast through time.  But more likely to explain Mei Feng - Cassandra's only a few billion km from Aegisthus rather than a few thousand light years from Earth.

p.114
Lieutenant Kidjo:

p.115
The fleet supply lighter Claremont:
shut down the biode in his left eye:
Biological diode.  Probably a light-emitting diode (LED) screen.

p.116
putting the Claremont on the Petri dish: Jellied medium for breeding colonies of bacteria for closer study.  Or metaphoricals of same.
Sokolovsky was tall and muscular, straight-spined, beppled to look like an albino: Body-beppling was introduced in 'Original Sin' as a Thirtieth Century cosmetic procedure.  It tweaks your genes and makes you look interestingly different.  When we first met Chris Cwej he'd been beppled to look a bit like a humanoid lion (He sustained severe burns over most of his body during the course of the book, and looked human when he healed apart from his large frame and pointed teeth).  There was another character who looked like a humanoid elephant.
Caxtarid: One of the alien races Kate Orman is fond of using in her books.  There's Caxtarids in 'Return of the Living Dad'.
He remembered the year of the disaster: 2975, when half the Earth went mad: In 'Original Sin' the INITEC Interstellar Corporation parked a stolen Hith warship, Skel' Ske, in hyperspace on Earth.  The ship was powered by icarons, particles native to hyperspace; in this way the ship was designed to use less power in hyperspace than other designs.  The icarons manifested themselves in real space by randomly turning humans living on Earth into homicidal maniacs.
Corruption in the Order of Adjudicators: At the end of 'Original Sin', as Roz came to terms with killing Fenn Martle, and as INITEC ceased to be a going concern, she and Chris were framed by their boss.  The Adjudicator Secular Rashid, like Martle, had also been in on INITEC's scheme to secretly exploit Hith military technology (I think) but probably hadn't anticipated the mass disturbances caused by icaron particles.  Rashid may have been exposed as corrupt by the Forresters, seeing as how Roz' name is cleared by the end of this book.

p.117
The Empire no longer serves the interests of humanity, Sokolovsky told himself.  It was almost a catchphrase in the resistance: Was this originally something about General Motors?

p.120
"Security teams iota, epsilon, scramble immediate!": Iota is the ninth letter of the Ancient Greek alphabet.  Epsilon is the fifth.
Cappiello:
"Flechette gun," said the young man, "ideal for shipboard combat.": On Babylon 5 the logic was that plasma guns wouldn't breach the hull like bullets.  I suppose flechettes can be engineered to shatter against hard surfaces rather than poke pinholes in them.

p.123
"Yes, sir," said Vincenzi.  "Was this part of the plan?": Vincenzi parachutes back into the story here.  The mysterious pirates from the Claremont are in fact units from one of the secret armies House Forrester and House Walid are building up.

p.127
"Justice," said Chris.
"Fairness," said Roz.  They traded a high-five:
Cool.
"The Pequot.": The Pequot were a Seventeenth-Century Nation of Native Americans in Connecticut.  A couple of new nations (including the Mohegans and their leader Uncas, who were fictionalized in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans) split off from the Pequot due to internal politics and disruptive influences from Dutch and English colonists.  The remaining Pequot were all killed by smallpox and a war with the English colonists in 1637.  The Pequod, Captain Ahab's doomed whaling ship in Moby Dick is named after the Pequot.  Chris identifies the ISN Pequot as an "Indigenous Class" warship.

p.129
"Iphiko class fighters - eight Wings of them": Iphiko is IsiXhosa for Wing.
"But they're Ogrons," said the Doctor.  "Ogrons don't do this.": The Ogrons in this book are everything the Ogrons in Pertwee-Era Doctor Who weren't.  Kind, endearing, insightful and heroic.  It's wonderful.

p.130
It took him all the way back to Black Body 27 and the remembrance of real fear:  Black bodies are nonluminescent elements of Dark Matter.  Usually just planets that've been ejected from their native solar systems, or maybe made out of stranger stuff.
Ident said that one of the bogies was a Magritte-class heavy cruiser,probably the Giacometti, the other two were a Dog-class and a Jaguar-class destroyer - Dingo and Cougar: René François-Ghislain Magritte (1898-1967) was a French surrealist painter.  He did the onewith the bowler-hatted man with an apple in front of his head.  Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was a Swiss abstract sculptor.  Perhaps the most outstanding of his surrealist pieces is The Palace at 4 AM  (1932-33,Museum of Modern Art, New York City), an architectonic skeleton holding suspended figures and objects that expresses the subjectivity andthe fragility of the human sense of time and space.  The dingo is an Australian feral dog. The cougar is a big cat native to the Americas, just as the jaguar is a South American big cat.
The Magritte-class carried soldinosc, really big, high-V missiles with a thirty-six megaton warhead: Not sure what soldinosc means.  Polish for "soldier" maybe?  36 megatons is quite big; the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were about 1/4000th as powerful.  More powerful devices than 36Mt have been set off in atomic test programs, and on Earth one would give you a pretty hard time if it went off at a range of anything less than 100 kilometres.  Not to mention fall-out and electromagnetic disturbances, which are conditional on the altitude of the blast.  In space, I'm not sure how effective a weapon like that would be.  Electromagnetic effects might be pretty severe, although they might depend on the strength of ambient electromagnetic fields.  Blast would be pretty minor, but dependent on what the bomb was covered in.  Blast and heat isn't slowed down by atmosphere in space, and just keeps expanding out and dropping in strength by pi x R3 per unit distance.  Radiation is no more or less a problem, depending on how the bomb was tweaked for blast and radiation yields.  But there wouldn't be any fall-out.

p.132
Dhaulagiri, Nepal: Very high mountain in the Himalayas.
Thandiwe had gone for a walk through the seminary: This seminary is a special place.  Read on.

p.133
It showed a soldier from the old days, a woman in very heavy armour:
She had coppery hair and wore the same simple green clothes as everyone else here:
This is a hint.
"It's a saying of the first Brigadier," said Joanna.  "One of the nineteen calls to action."
"I can't read it."
"I'm not surprised, it's in British, a sub-dialect of Ancient American."
"What does it say?"
"'Shoot the winged man with five quick bullets.'"
"What does it mean?"
"Ah," said Joanna, "I'm afraid that it rather depends on which school of interpretationyou follow.":
The seminary is a fortress of the Unitatus, the Thirtieth Century descendents of UNIT.  It's an extension of the Zen Buddhist ideas the Brigadier picked up in 'No Future' and were mentioned in passing in Ben Aaronovitch's novelization of 'Remembrance of the Daleks' and Marc Platt's novelization of  'Battlefield', as well as 'Transit'. We first met the Unitatus in the 26th Century in 'Cold Fusion'.  Not sure where UNISYC from 'Alien Bodies' and 'Interference' fit in, but they're even more desparate to protect Earth from alien invasions than UNIT. Also not sure about the Knights of Jeneve from 'Dragon's Wrath': UNIT is based in Geneva,and their leader's voice in the audio version of 'Dragon's Wrath' was provided by former UNIT actor Richard Franklin.  So UNIT survives in some form from its inception sometime around 1970 until at least the Thirtieth Century. I'm not sure what the other eighteen calls to action are, but this mangled translation goesback to 'The Daemons', when the Brigadier uttered the order: "Jenkins,the chap with wings there. Five rounds rapid."  DoctorWho  fandom is already divided into schools of interpretation.

p.134
"This is no miracle.  The reclamation projects I've funded have the potential to restore this whole planet to its former state.": Leabie is at the forefront of a new environmentalist movement.  This, combined with the fact that her sister is the Doctor's best friend, is meant to show her to be a great and just leader although she is commanding a secret and unlawful army to overthow rival factions with their own armies in the corrupt Imperial Court.  She's by far the lesser of two evils, despite the obvious fallacy: what exactly was the former state of the Earth's environment, and how important is it to get it just right?
I suppose that by giving the Unitatus their snow back, she's got them on her side.

p.135
Simon: The university student from Spaceport 20 Overcity has let a bunch of financed terrorists, possibly allied with House Forrester, persuade him to go research the Doctor's past.
Ulmus procera: Here.

p.136
It took him almost a minute to pick out the shape of the house. The lines of roof and wall suggested by the squiggle of vines and moss andshrubs: It's the House at Allen Road. Chronologically, last seen circa 2109 in 'Transit'.  Novelogically, last seen circa 2030 in 'Warchild'. Its most recent appearence was in 'The Dying Days'.
Holstek Firefly:

p.137
Simon spent just half a second lying in the mud with silverfish crawling over him: Silverfish are little bugs.  They look a little like potato bugs only more shiny and thin.  Fishy, in fact.  When I worked as a dishwasher I found they liked hiding in stacks of warm, fresh-from-the-machine dishes.

p.138
Genevieve: Walid's concubine from the prologue on Io has been sent to investigate Allen Road.  She ends up falling in with Simon.

p.139
lapsang souchong: From the Fujian province of China comes this very distinctive tea with its exotic smoky flavor.  After plucking, the leaves are withered over cypress or pine wood fires.  After the rolling process, they are placed into wooden barrels until they begin to emit their own pleasant aroma.  As a final step they are placed in bamboo baskets and hung on racks over smoky pine fires where they dry and absorb the essence of the smoke.  The finished tea leaves are thick and black and when steeped in hot water produce a bright reddish-orange cup of tea.  The flavor is very assertive and appeals to those looking for a bold cup of tea.

"Not at all," said the old man.  "Doctor Smith.  I'm pleased to make your acquaintance.": Briefly, and summing up references from the next few pages, This is an alternate Third Doctor who chose to stay here after the Time Lords pardoned him.  He helped a little with alien invasions after that, and in 2010 concluded a peace treaty with the Ice Warriors. Earth became Martian property and the Ice Warriors protected humanity from aliens for centuries; let's face it, despite our expansionist tendencies most humans just want to be left alone.  And the Silurians and Sea Devils were allowed to come out of hiding peacefully.  Doctor Smith is living with a fictional Silurian named Takmar, and keeps a Venusian in the bathroom. Presumably he's had all the fittings removed so as not to poison it. He knows he's from an alternate timeline.

p.141
an Earth Reptile version of a Tisanesmade: Herbal tea-maker.

p.142
"There must be a drudgebot around somewhere,": To do drudgery and chores.  Some of the old Audio-Visual fan audios had evil robot minions called Drudges or Drudgers, but that's probably not implied here.

p.144
"Some of me are killed in a prison cell by the Earth Reptiles and left to rot.": Reference to 'Blood Heat', an alternative timeline in which the Doctor was killed before he could produce an antidote to the Silurians' plague - the Earth was taken over by the Silurians although some pockets of human resistance held out.
"Some of me have gone on to destroy whole worlds - always in a good cause, of course.": Reference to 'Remembrance of the Daleks', in which the Doctor tricked Davros into destroying the Dalek homeworld, Skaro.  Also 'The Pit', in which the Doctor is responsible for destroying an entire solar system in order to prevent the Yssgaroth (Great Vampires) from breaking through into our universe again.  And also his recent destruction of Cassandra.
"At least one of me is a ruthless dictator with my picture up everywhere.": The idea that the Leader from the alternate universe in 'Inferno' is an alternate Doctor exiled by the Time Lords who dominates Earth society rather than helping it in little ways.  Paul Cornell, and maybe a couple of his friends, picked up from the notion that the picture of the Orwellian Leader looks a bit like one of the pencil-drawings the Second Doctor refused to choose for his next face at his trial in 'The War Games'.  Also,a deleted sequence from 'Inferno' that was included in the BBC video was a radio broadcast from the Leader's news service about the volcanic activity breaking out; the radio voice was Pertwee himself doing an impression of Lord Haw-Haw, the British Fascist and traitor who broadcast propaganda from Germany during the Second World War.
"The original Doctor?": Yes, and who knows if this implies the Other, or the faces from 'The Brain of Morbius'.

p.145
The fact that he looked so ordinary was a definite plus for a terrorist.  Worked for Mr Jamey:

p.147
A routine autopsy performed by machines that ticked and murmured as they peeled back the layers of Sibongile's body and invaded its secrets. Killed stone dead by a non-lethal crowd-control weapon.  Something sonic:
So there's been a certain amount of missed ground in the saga of Simon and Sibongile.  I really don't think it was a bad thing that the actual riot was cut from the final draft.  The effect is heightened by just seeing the aftermath here.

p.149
the metaship Joseph Conrad: Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski was a Polish-born author and world traveller.  He wrote a lot about the darker aspects of the human psyche.  His most remembered work isHeart of Darkness, about a riverboat journey up the Zaire River in the Belgian Congo.  It was a shambles of a colony, with massive human rights abuses that went totally unpunished.  A good story, but not a realistic appraisal of the state of affairs in Africa today.  The Rwandan Genocide was a pretty fucking awful situation, but that was planned and was done by responsible people.  Even more insane.

p.150
"Its route takes it from the Listeners' original home, Viam, forty-eight light years from Earth, all the way out to the rim of the Empire and back again, in a continual two-year journey.": It's explained that the Empire never came in contact with the Listeners, whoever they were.  They heard us coming from our communications traffic, and abandoned their solar system. 

p.151
"So it's sunny all the time," the bagbot said, "The tourists seem to like it.  Except the Lacaillans.  Apparently on their homeworld it rains all the time.": Abbe Nicholas Louis de la Caille (1713-1762) was an astronomer who catalogued early lists of nebulous objects in the night sky.  Most of his observations were carried out in South Africa in 1751 and 1752.  There's also a Lacaille star catalog, but I'm not sure if that was written by him or one of his descendents.  Lacaille 9352 is one of the nearer stars to the Sun.  It's 10.74 light-years away in the southern constellation Sculptor.  It is 30% as bright as the Sun and has about half its mass, but its diameter is 1.5 times larger.  It's a main sequence, class M2 star. I'm guessing, but I would say it's substantially older than the Sun.  My data suggests that its spectrum shows only 10% of the heavy elements present in the Sun's atmosphere, so any planets it may have may be too short on key elements to have produced life.
Lacaille 8760 is also a nearby star.  It's 12.5 light years away and is about 50% as bright as the Sun.  It's also a variable star with the designation AX Microscopii.  Although its brightness variation isn't very big, it might stop the development of stable life forms.
"I flunked the Turing - no human talks about luggage all the time.": The Turing test, which may or may not have been mentioned in 'The Turing Test', is a thought experiment.  The point at which computers can be regarded as intelligent and conscious is the point at which talking to one is no different than talking to another human.  At that point, the computer's passed the Turing test.  Alan Turing was an English mathematician who worked for the code-cracking establishment at Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire.  He designed some of the world's first computers. He was also homosexual, and was eventually ostracized and driven to suicide despite possessing one of the two best brains Britain has produced in the last hundred years (the other belongs to Stephen Hawking.)
the Lord Jim shopping centre: Lord Jim was another book Conrad wrote.  It's about cowardice and the futility of bravery.  Rather good, made into a film with Peter O'Toole and Jack Hawkins.

p.152
"It's taken us a month to get here.": Just a time-check.

p.153
Roy Liechtenstein: (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Pop artist.

p.154
It was like finding the missing part of a jigsaw puzzle under the bed.  "Emil?" she hissed: The duplicate Doctor is in fact Emil Zatopek, disguised as the Doctor as a side-effect of the Nexus, the thing which is causing all these weird timeline effects.(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) The effect is probably related to the bit at the bottom of p.21, where the same thing nearly happens to Chris.
"Almayer's Storage reopens at eight thirty tomorrow morning.":(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) 'Almayer's Folly' is another Joseph Conrad novel.

p.155
Dargolian Jus de Claymore '56: A claymore is a traditional Scottish sword.  Also an anti-personnel mine.

p.156
Retro-Objectivist philosophy:
The lounge was empty, except for a Ybarraculan curled under one of the plastic seats, homeless or hopelessly delayed:


p.161
Janus: One of the moons of Saturn.  Quite small, only 190 kmin diameter.  It was only discovered in 1966, and until the Voyager spacecraft visited Saturn in 1980 it was the innermost moon we knew about.  In 2986 Empress runs Centcomp from Janus.  Janus @ the Nine Planets Website

p.162
"I'm particularly fond of the Mogarian sculptures.  It's shame they have to be kept in those gas containers.": Mogarians appeared in 'Terror of the Vervoids'.  Mogar has a methane atmosphere.  'Terror of the Vervoids' takes place in 2986.
THE DOCTOR: I saw a museum like this in Paris.
WSZOLA: Where's that?
DOCTOR: Europe.  Once upon a time.  The spoils of conquest, treasures from Egypt and Europe.  Very impressive, while it lasted.
WSZOLA: Why?  What happened to the museum?
DOCTOR: The English came and took most of it away.  The spoils of conquest:
I'd have to guess this means the Louvre - but the English have never sacked that. The Rosetta Stone (with which Egyptian hieroglyphics were decoded)was discovered by the French in Egypt, and the Stone is now displayed in the British Museum because the British defeated the French while they were still in Egypt. The Rosetta Stone was never in Paris.  Iaomnet doesn't know what Paris is becauseit was destroyed in 2086 by the Ice Warriors. It had been rebuilt and fell into ruin again by 2595 in 'The Sword of Forever', and I guess one of the Overcities was moored on top of it.

p.164
He was like something from a horror sim.  The cold-blooded and insane killer who looks entirely harmless, even comic.  The sims about the year of the disaster were full of characters like him: The Seventh Doctor is being compared to a Hannibal Lector character.  The year of the disaster was caused by the icaron crisis in 'Original Sin'.  The chief psychotic in 'Original Sin' was Dr Zebulon Pryce, who is a Hannibal Lector-like character.  But from his name and appearence he seemed more likely to be played by Jonathan Pryce, who can play a pretty convincing nutter.
the Empress Gloriana: I believe we first met the Empress in 'Orginal Sin'.  We get a biog of her on p.244.  Her real name was Helen Kristiansen and she was crowned almost 150 years earlier.

p.165
Genevieve ap Gwalchmai: This surname style is Welsh. The corrupt Adjudicator Bronwen ap Bryn was a character in 'Lucifer Rising',in 2156.
the Pontifex Saecularis: Adjudicator Secular.

p.166
Japetus: Iapetus is the outermost major moon of Saturn.  It's spelt 'Japetus' in Arthur C Clarke's book 2001: A Space Odyssey .  It's unusual because of its large orbit, which takes 79 days to run and is slightly inclined.  It's tidally locked with one side facing Saturn all the time.  The leading hemisphere is covered in dark dust, and the trailing hemisphere is covered in cleaner ice; the effect of this is that when we look at Iapetus from Earth,it is much brighter when it's east of Saturn than when it's west of the planet.  Iapetus
The Androzanies: Androzani Major and Androzani Minor, from 'The Caves of Androzani'.

p.169
"The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes": Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 2.  "When beggars die there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes."  Calpurnia, Caesar's wife, warns him that the bad weather is an omen that things will not go well if he goes to the Senate in the morning.  Although Caesar's wife is above suspicion, he disagrees with her. In 'Transit' the Doctor delivers Caesar's reply to this line, "Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once."  Just before jumping into the Domain of Fred.

p.172
the Bohemian teaspoon: The Doctor's a bit of a Bohemian, and he plays the spoons.
The monsters arrived: All of a sudden everybody in the courtroom with psi potential turns into a variety of amusing and dangerous abominations that try to kill the Doctor.  He survives and escapes with Genevieve and Duke Walid. 

p.176
"I thought you needed Quoth to do that," mused the Doctor: The Quoth were sub-dimensional life-forms in 'The Death of Art'.  They had a universe in a doll's house in Paris.  Exposure to them activated psi-powers and attracted the attention of elements of the psi-powers conspiracy. The Doctor eventually rescued the doll's house and dropped it off on the surface of a neutron star, where the Quoth could feed peacefully on quark particles.

p.177
"Sometimes my life is like a series of repeats.": Fnur fnur.

p.178
humming 'I Heard a Rumour':(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Song by Bananarama, on their 1987 album 'Wow!'

p.179
"Ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly be passing over Odysseus Crater on our way to Ithaca City.  For a excellent view of the Crater and the Temple of the Goddess, please take a seat in the port-side viewing chamber.": Odysseus is a real crater, you can see it in the pictures of Tethys.  It looks a lot like Aulis Crater on Iphigenia.  In the Troy legends Odysseus was the King of Ithaca.  He was one of Agamemnon's allies. He's also known as Ulysses, and was the main character in Homer's Odyssey .

p.181
The Gulf of Tonkin: Part of the South China Sea beside Viet Nam.  A bit of a flashpoint for American involvement in the Viet Nam war.
Lonely Galaxy Guide to Tethys: Today's Lonely Planet guides are popular travel handbooks. 

p.182
"He stopped the Jeopards from invading their neighbouring planet," said Roz.  "A year later the Empire swept in and conquered both worlds.": This might have been covered in another Kate Orman book. The other planet was inhabited by the Jithrai.(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Nope, first mentioned here.

p.183
First chance she got she picked up a heat ray.  It was a smaller version of the standard Martian weapon: Martians used heat waves in HGWells' The War of the Worlds - the Ice Warriors use sonic cannon. But those rifles from 'The Curse of Peladon' looked like they used heat.

p.184
"An honest officer of the law will quickly be detected and eliminated.": So the corruption in the Guild of Adjudicators is still there.

p.186
"I was a cook aboard the Renoir.":(Text submitted by Paul Andinach)Auguste Renoir, famous French painter.

p.188
"Six wars have broken out in twenty-four hours," she said.  "Like brushfires.  Only one of them in the solar system - the Antarctic Alliance lobbed a missile at the Horne Collective.": As in Cape Horn in South America?

p.193
Roz looked at her suddenly.  "FLORANCE!': Roz met FLORANCE on Dione in the 23rd Century in 'SLEEPY'.  She freed the AI from the Dione-Kisumu Corporation.  Now Roz and Chris are about to be arrested and interrogated by unregistered psis working for the Conspiracy.  FLORANCE gives their minds a link into Puterspace so they can act faster than the thugs and escape.

p.194
"I've always wondered," said Chris, as the shuttle headed for the great black yonder, "why it was a bat out of hell.": As in the Meat Loaf album. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) As in the old expression the Meat Loaf album was named after - meaning very fast.

p.195
James Llewellyn, House of Forrester, Internal Security: Llewellyn is Fluellen, the man who recruited Vincenzi to the Forresters' Secret Armyback in the prologue.  Fluellen sounds rather like Llewellyn pronounced with a Welsh accent.  And he's been trailing Roz to keep an eye on herfor Leabie.  Now he's come forward.

p.196
Black Sea Aquaculture Centre: The Black Sea is an inland, freshwater sea in Eurasia.  It borders on Ukraine, the Caucasus, Turkey and the northern Balkan states.  It's rather near the ruins of Troy.
futomaki:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) A type of sushi.
Joanna Morceli and Simon Frederson: Any use of the names elsewhere?
"I never thought I'd see the Children of the Sea and the Seventeenth Third of the Benevolent Triad having a conversation.  Or the Monkey Boys in the same room as anybody.": The Seventeenth Triad are Earth Reptiles, but I don't quite get this.(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) The aim of the meeting is to get various insurrectionist groups to co-operate (on [spoiler deleted]'s plan) instead of competing to achieve their various usual goals. The Children of the Sea are an aquatic Earth Reptile group, the Seventeenth Third of the Benevolent Triad are a Silurian group, and "Monkey Boys" is probably just an insulting Earth Reptile name for humans.

p.197
"Tanj, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that to sound as awful as it did.": Tanj is a very silly fake cuss word.  Even less tolerable than "cruk" - harder to tell what it could possibly mean. (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Tanj originates (I think) in the works of Robert A Heinlein. It's an acronym for "There ain't no justice."

p.198
Port Elizabeth, Skag: The original Port Elizabeth is a town on the coast of the Eastern Cape of Good Hope, in South Africa.  It's not far from the Transkei area.
He was remembering when the world had been much smaller, a single corridor, on Level 113 of Sir Guilliam Habibi's stack, Spaceport Six Overcity: There's a bit of 'Colony in Space' where the Doctor argues against IMC's factory colonization program, claiming that people on Earth are already living like battery hens.  This is a reference to that.
she shrugged and said that everyone had always cleaned the corridor on Saturday morning: There's been a civic ordinance in Haiti for years that on Saturday mornings everyone is to participate in cleaning away garbage and things like that.  I'm not sure how the tradition has held since Haiti achieved basic democracy.

p.199
Janinski Galleria:
ersatz Chianti: fake wine.  Chianti is made in Italian Tuscany, near Florence.

p.202
He was determined to walk the whole of the outer hallway, a thirty-kilometre stretch of carpet and windows circling the building at its base: The Forresters' palace on Io is an upright cylinder or cone about ten kilometres thick at the base and three kilometres tall.  Chris is a big guy, and earlier he was jogging with Ogrons; he ought to be able to jog thirty kilometres in not much more than three hours.

p.204
It was like an arcology:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) A meeting between architecture and ecology. And that's about all I can remember offhand. There's a bit about arcologies in 'The Dark Path'.

p.208
I was up to my arse in Sloathes at the time: The Sloathes were the obligatory monsters in 'Sky Pirates!'.  They raided other planets for treasure, and then just sat on the stuff.  They were shapeshifters.  They eventually turned out to be misunderstood.
It reminded her, perversely, not of the legendary forests of West Africa as it was supposed to, but of Little Chalfont, England: I can't find Little Chalfont.  It may be an early name for Little Caldwell from 'Return of the Living Dad'.  The book was provisionally titled, and the first part of the book was finally subtitled, 'Big Trouble in Little Chalfont', or Caldwell.

p.209
"Do you remember the time I broke Twolumps?": Twolumps was a bot that looked after Roz and Leabie when they were gorowing up.  It may be a reference to the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus - the Ministry's tea lady is Mrs Twolumps, and she refers to the gentleman in the office as Mr Teabag.

p.210
On this page it is revealed that Thandiwe is a clone of Roz.
"I imagine a time when there are no Forresters, when everything we've built up is washed away in some catastrophe.  Or worse, just trickles away to nothing.  The line must continue, as it has continued for a millennium.": Snippets of the Forrester family history were anthologized in Decalog 4: Re-Generations.  It's in chronological order but tells stories of independent people, Forresters all, having adventures in mystery, science-fiction and other things leading up to the downfall of the Earth Empire around the year 3000 and the chaos that followed it.  At the end of the anthology, in a story called 'Dependence Day', Thandiwe escapes the coming Dark Age to save the Forresters.

p.211
modern makossa:

p.213
    He smiled.  "Once upon a time...that's a good way to start the story.  Once upon a time, there were unicorns and bread-and-butterflies, planets like giant apples and suns like red balloons. But since no sentient life had yet evolved, there was no one to notice theywere impossible, so no one minded.  And then along came the Time Lords."
    "The Time Lords were the first sentient beings?"
    "The first to evolve in this universe, yes," said the Doctor.  He finished his tea and poured another cup.  "Back then we were the Shadow people, caught between the warm dark of magick and the cold light of science.  Magick predominated for a long, long time.  And then Rassilon made his decision."
    Roz had forgotten her tomato soup, listening.  Don't think of it like a sitrep, she thought, think of it as a fairy story.
    "The world solidified around us, like water turning to ice.  Squeezing out the magick.  But, like an ice cube, there were little cracks and bubbles.  Psi was the last magick to survive, perhaps because it was the least impossible, the closest to science.  The residue of psi became a network of ley lines, stretching through the universe in improbable directions.
    "It's still there."
    Roz said, "And Iphigenia is ...on one of the ley lines?"
    The Doctor nodded.  "The Time Lords were aware of the ley lines before the Wars began.  We'd chosen to make the universe rational.  Its irrational citizens objected.  So we turned the psi lines into weapons.  A Distant Early Warning line that stretched through the galaxy, studded with receivers the size of mountains or even small moons, parabolic dishes disguised as craters.  Listening for eruptions of psi power beyond Gallifrey."
    "Iphigenia," said Roz.
    "Yes.  A quarter of the moon is jammed with Time Lord technology, riddled with access tunnels.  They just built a fake crater over the top, so the Vampires wouldn't notice, and left it there."
    "They must have realized someone would notice.  There must have been hundreds of Martiniques through the millennia."
    "Remember," said the Doctor, "back then there were no other intelligent races.  None that mattered, anyway, as far as we were concerned.  Just the Time Lords, and our enemies.  The residual horrors of the universe before this one, and the Great Vampires, sucking dry every planet they could reach."
    "So the expedition came into contact with the ley line," said Roz.
    "A primary source of unimaginable psi power.  A well of magick," said the Doctor.  "Where everything that's possible is boiling under the surface of the universe.  Zatopek is working for the Brotherhood."
    "Ah."
    "When I realized what we were faced with, I insisted we leave right away.  Zatopek and Iaomnet were very, very insistent.  I warned them about the fate of the previous expedition.  Close contact with the Nexus simply drove most of them mad, left one of them sliding through different realities, and left an N-gram burning inside Mei Feng's brain. They already knew what had happened.  I should really have just let them wave their guns about and make threats, but I was curious... I should never have got so close to the thing."
    "Chris's dream aboard the Hopper," said Roz.  "He said it was as though a great wave of psi power washed out from the centre of the planet."
    "When I came into contact with the Nexus, it released every potential possibility of my existence.  Well, almost all of them.  If I dust off some of the mathematical manuals in the TARDIS library, I can probably do the calculations.  In any case, all those probabilities were thrown loose, spraying loose into the galaxy.  Some of them found places to settle.  Zatopek was very close.  As I recall, he was holding a needler to my ear at the time."
    "So he turned into you," said Roz.
    "Not quite," said the Doctor.  "Me, with some tiny difference.  Some decision I didn't make, some road I didn't travel... maybe that Doctor just had something else for breakfast for that morning.  In any case, Zatopek's own psi talents allowed him to gradually emerge."
    It was all starting to make sense, in a nonsensical kind of way.  "That explains the you that contacted me on Fury," said Roz.
    The Doctor nodded.  "The distribution of possibilities is chaotic, but broadly, the further you get away from the Nexus, the more bizarre they become."
    "One thing I didn't get - why blow up Cassandra, but not Iphigenia?"
    "All TARDISes have a self-destruct device," said the Doctor, "but the cosmic ley lines don't have such a convenient facility.  Blowing up the planet would leave the Nexus quite unharmed."
    "And the N-forms?" prompted Roz.
"Mines," said the Doctor.  They didn't just detect psi.  They actively attacked it.  Anything that wasn't Gallifreyan.  But the Time Lords didn't pick up their toys when they were finished with them.  There are still a small number of N-forms, usually damaged and insane, left lying about the galaxy.  The ones which didn't want to stop killing were the hardest to find."  He stirred his tea agressively.  "Typical Time Lord blunder.  Create something ludicrously powerful and then forget all about it. Decide you're going to be entirely rational, and then have a psychic war which lasts for millennia and decimates half the galaxy."


I apologize to Kate Orman for having to nick such a large section of her expository dialogue.  But be fair, it's more honest than my own suppositions.  And since this book is long out of print,never to be seen again, there's less harm done.

p.216
A dozen murders happened in the space of ten minutes: Some psis of the Forrester household staff turn into monsters.  They break into the Forresters' private rooms and kill Leabie's children Somezi and Mantsebo, and ten other family members and staff.  Thandiwe's Fat Monster Eater bot immobilizes the monster sent to kill her.

p.221
Mont Blanc: The tallest mountain in France, 4810 metres high.  It lies on the border with Italy.
He had walked five kilometres across the valley floor, beside a crisp and freezing stream: This is Duke Armand, the ruler of Europe. Note that this takes place in July, but that we're in the mountains explains the cold.  Although there's no snow up there any more.
some of the mountains had needed repairs after a local war in 2547: The Second Dalek Invasion happened in 2545, according to several different sources that pinpoint that date at least roughly: 'Frontier in Space', 'The Planet of the Daleks', 'Love and War', 'The Sword of Forever' and 'Beige Planet Mars'.  'The Sword of Forever' suggested that a lot of Europe was laid waste by the Daleks' metagenic weapons, which introduced mutations like the ones from 'The Daleks' Masterplan' into the ecosystem.

p.222
Maybe they'd show him a little respect.  Soon.  When his plans came to fruition: Duke Armand, not Walid, is a traitor serving the Brotherhood.  This is a plot twist. 
"I speak for the Brotherhood," said the woman.  He could hear one voice - twelve voices - a hundred voices - echoes at the edge of his consciousness. 
"For the Grandmaster," he said:
The Grandmaster is the group mind that masterminds the Brotherhood.



p.226
"Would you believe that robot had never heven heard of Jimmy Stewart?": Actor from a few decades back.  Often wore fedoras, like the Seventh Doctor.  And the Doctor's just been arguing about synthetic felt; Stewart once starred in a film called Harvey, about a man who can see a six-foot-tall imaginary rabbit.
"The only way to get genuine leather shoes is to have them sent over from the Crow Nation:   In their own language, the Crow tribe of southeastern Montana call themselves Absaroka, or the "bird people". To the early French explorers and voyageurs, the Crow were called the "handsome men"  because of their beautifully worked garments and the long flowing black hair that sometimes reached all the way to the ground. The name "Crow" came from crudely translating the term "Absaroka" into "Crow people" instead of "bird people."  Crow Nation link
Groenewegen's department store: Sarah Groenewegen is a friend of Kate Orman's, and a fellow fan.  She used to write for the fanzine Bog Off!, and gets referenced in a number of novels by Kate Orman and Paul Cornell.  She may have a brother.(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) There is also a Stephen Groenewegen active in Australian fandom, but I don't know what relationship exists between him and Sarah.
frangipani:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) The frangipani plant, Plumeria rubra, is noted for its fragrant pink, white or yellow flowers.
Doc Dantalion: The Birastrop psychotherapist who wiped Roz's memories in 'Original Sin'.  Birastrops are very long-lived.  Dantalion first appeared around 1973 in the Pertwee-era Decalog 2: Lost Property piece 'Where the Heart Is'.  At that time he was euthanizing depressed civil servants and experimenting on their bodies.  The Doctor persuaded Dantalion to stop, and to donate his extensive property to become the new UNIT headquarters seen in 'The Three Doctors'.  In 'The Brain of Morbius',Morbius claimed his new body had the lungs of a Birastrop.(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) And Dantalion said he'd be back when mankind's idea of ethics more closely resembled his own.

p.228
"A shutterfly.  I appropriated it from a couple of JayJaxians who were trying to extract a psi embryo from me.":

p.233
Zanzibar: Island off the coast of Tanzania, in East Africa. Used to be independent, when Tanzania was called Tanganyika.  An important trading post.  There's a divisive ethnic problem there between descendents of Arab traders and Swahilis, although to anyone raceblind or non-Tanzanian there's no physical difference between them.  So it seemed in Professor Gates' TV series Wonders of the African World.  The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama arrived there in 1499, as the Doctor well remembers.  Da Gama was following up from Bartolomeo Dias, who had charted the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa soon before.  He sailed with four ships.  Da Gama found Arabs and unfriendly waters along much of the East African coast.  He went on to found a colony at Goa, in India.  The Portuguese, though they didn't know it, missed the Chinese trader Zheng He (also known as Cheng Ho) by more than fifty years.  Zheng He had fleets of hundreds of trading ships ten times as large as da Gama's boats, and sailed as far as Mogadishu, 1500 km up the coast from Zanzibar.  Here's a link to a page about Zheng He.

p.237
Had he found a way to stop Kopyion destroying the Seven Planets?:Kopyion was the villain in 'The Pit'.  He was actually a refugee from Ancient Gallifrey, the one-armed Hero Liall a Mahajetsu.  He and the Doctor had to destroy the Seven Planets to stop the Yssgaroth escaping into our universe, yadda yadda yadda.  When 'The Pit' was written, the plan was that he was the Other.  However, 'The Pit' was rather badly written and got brushed under the carpet. The one-armed thing also put him in the running for being Grandfather Paradox ('Christmas on a Rational Planet', 'Alien Bodies').


p.238
nanites racing to tear up the dead tissue, build fresh muscle in its place: If you want to say the Doctor maintains his body with nanites, that's okay.  But it shouldn't be that simple.  He does dose his companions with nanites to keep them healthy but give them twisted ankles at opportune moments.  ('Deceit')
    
The cobra was five feet long andimpossibly heavy.  He had never seen one this close before.  He found himself admiring the detail of its face, each of the scales lovingly hand-crafted into a sleek, black, close-fitting garment, the lidless eyes behind the protecting spectacle, never closing, always watching.  Greeneyes, watching.
    For a moment he wondered if the shuttle door had been left open - one of the pets from Leabie's garden had escaped into the cool interior of the ship.  For a moment he thought that someone else would come in and lift the weight of the snake off his chest.  But only for a moment.
    "Ah," he said, "the Eternal Verity."
    The snake shifted her position.  His heart clenched in protest, making him struggle for breath.
    "All right," he gasped.  "You win.  I give up."
    "This isn't a game," said the snake.
    "The race, then.  The hare loses to the turtle.  Don't you understand?  You win."
    Her tongue lapped the air near his face.  "It's our bargain."
    "Then I'm ending it," he said.  "Enough.  I won't fight any more.  Do what you want.  Death.  Regeneration.  I don't care."
    "Not this time."
    "What do you mean?  Not this time?"
    "You haven't learnt your lesson."  She slithered forward, her tongue flickering near his ear.  "Without warning," she hissed.  "Without purpose. Alone and afraid."
    "I know all about that," he said.  "This situation meets those criteria, wouldn't you say?"  He shut his eyes.  "Quickly.  Before they come back in and that medic starts doing goodness knows what with his Feinbergers."
    The snake chuckled, sliding along his right shoulder onto the bed.  "You haven't learnt anything," she said.
    He tried to move, to bring her back to him before she could seek out another of his friends.  But his heart stuttered and clenched again, and he found himself sliding, sliding down into the dark.

Well, that was interesting.  The snake is Death, with whom the Seventh Doctor has conferred a number of times.  In 'Timewyrm:Revelation', 'Love and War', 'Human Nature' and 'SLEEPY' for example. The snake is also the Eternal Verity.  The Eternals appeared in 'Enlightenment',and Verity Lambert was Doctor Who's first producer.  (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) It's simpler than that - "The Eternal Verity" is Death's posh name. (The word "verity" means "fundamental truth".)
Another note is that this conversation also refers back to the parable on Tsuro the Hare and Danhamakatu the Snake at the end of 'The Also People' - also by Ben Aaronovitch - which we can now see was foreshadowing Roz's death.

The snake is also a nod to the Soulsnake from the TV Movie, to highlight the Seventh Doctor's death and preserve the Master's life force to trouble him again another day.  The Seventh Doctor will die, without warning or purpose, after stepping out of the TARDIS into a hail of bullets in San Francisco; surgery causes complications with his alien biology, and the last thing that goes through his mind is an aria from Puccini.  Later, he regenerates.
p.241
Valhalla: Part of Asgard, the warriors' afterlife in Norse mythology.   Valhalla is also a large impact crater on Callisto.

p.243
"Here you are, sir," said the life-saver bot.  The spindly android crouched down by the side of the pool and handed Chris the magazine, which it had carefully dried and pressed before reading several of the more interesting articles: I just found this bit quite amusing, thought I'd share it.

p.244
"Citizens will make merry on pain of death?": Reference to the 1980s remake of Flash Gordon.  It's a bit awkward, it's meant to indicate that making merry is what one's supposed to do.
The Doctor counted thirty-eight of them, all set to news channels, from TopTenPercent to the Jovian Intranets: Seems like Internet references... I think TopTenPercent is one of those quality HTML awards sites.
Just endless processions through the gardens of Callisto, special G roadways laid down to prevent the participants from floating away: Callisto is actually one and a half times more massive than the Earth's Moon.  The force of gravity on its surface is reasonably strong, but likely awkward for anyone from a higher-gravity environment.  There's some logic in installing gravitic webs ('GodEngine') on planets with less gravity than Earth.  In a galaxy-spanning empire, extensive transportation leads to people born on a planet with a certain force of gravity may spend most of their lives on a planet or asteroid with very different gravity. Or none at all.  Arthur C Clarke usually writes about people born in zero- or micro-gravity choosing not to return to Earth either because it would be impossible for them to function there, or it would be at least very difficult.  These days, the space program puts a lot of emphasis on returning their astronauts and cosmonauts to the Earth's surface, even after extended periods in zero-G.  They'd save billions of dollars if they stopped building heavy heat shielding and wings and landing gear and tackled the problems of  permament presence in space.  Instead of risking hip injuries when they returned to Earth gravity the astronauts would be cut off from most human contact, which is sort of like the original pioneering spirit.

p.247
"As usual, we drop in, and history coalesces around us.": I think that's in Virgin's New Adventures Writers' Guide as to how the playing-with-history thing works.

p.250
Mr Cwej was staring up at the palace.  It was a massive, inverted cone, more cones shooting up from its black, glassy surface, like a vast, sparkling artificial mountain: Like the Forrester palace, only black.

p.253
He reached out and cupped one of the roses in his hand.  It uncurled, slowly, a silky movement across his skin.  He watched, half expecting the thing to bite him, but it just opened and opened until it filled his palm.
    "See," said Genevieve.  "It only does that with people who've got some latent psi ability.":
This is last-minute foreshadowing.  Duke Walid has some toys made for psis.  He's also an agent of the Brotherhood, and he's about to kidnap Chris and the Doctor. 
"Won't you come with us, Mr Cwej?" said Iaomnet.  Her voice was like an angel choir, dozens of voices coming out of her mouth: Iaomnet is speaking for the Grandmaster of the Brotherhood, like Armand's minder earlier.  Also a bit like the Empress used to speak like a gestalt (group mind).  It's dichotomy; the Doctor's already met and killed the Empire's gestalt leader; he's about to meet the Brotherhood's gestalt leader.
"It's almost time for the conjunction.": A conjunction is an astronomical description of one or more planets and stars passing each other in the sky.  The Moon usually has a conjunction with a few of the brighter planets and stars every month.  Planets move slower and take weeks to pass by stationary stars.  There's usually a nice planetary conjunction every year or so.  Every year or so there's a marvellous spring conjunction between Venus, the crescent Moon, and Jupiter or Saturn or Mars.  Conjunctions are a big factor in astrological readings, bbut I hasten to add that astrology has no practical purpose and is just a bit of fun - I explained why in my guide to Alien Bodies.  During the Year 2000 a bunch of speculative thinkers wrote about the possibility that a conjunction of most of the planets on May 5th, 2000 would cause tidal disasters that would wreck civilization and pull the Earth out of its orbit.  They were totally wrong.  This conjunction Iaomnet's talking about is some kind of focussing event that will allow a Nexus somewhere in the Solar System access to the minds of most human psis.  The Brotherhood doesn't really control the Nexus, but they figure that turning on the Nexus will maximize humanity's psi potential.

p.255
The Brotherhood said, "Incorrect.  You have immense potential with the necessary treatment.": The Brotherhood's referring to Chris's latent psi-powers.  Chris is later retrofitted with some Time Lord biology and regenerates a couple of times ('Dead Romance', 'Tears of the Oracle'.) So there may be something to this.  Then, at the end of 'Twilight of the Gods', Chris gets reverse-aged back into puberty.  He has an interesting timeline.

p.256
He was tall and imposing and blond, but he wore black, and a brightly coloured waistcoat with a golden badge in the shape of a cat.  "This is who I would have been if I hadn't regenerated,' he said.  "Or one of them.  He seems a very serious fellow.  His experience with Fenric changed him a great deal.": The Sixth Doctor was vulnerable to becoming the Valeyard '(Millennial Rites'.)  In 'Head Games' suspicion is raised about how apparently pointless was the Sixth Doctor's death. (He fell down and banged his head on the TARDIS console in 'Time and the Rani'.  Ergo, "head games".)  Hidden in his own mind, the Sixth Doctor very much resents the Seventh Doctor's manifestation, especially because he fears the Seventh Doctor is more like the Valeyard than he ever was.

p.259
"My name is Huitzilin,": Aztec king-cum-god who took over the Doctor's body for a while in 'The Left-Handed Hummingbird'.
"In this alternative, your throat was torn out by a werewolf.": (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) 'The Greatest Show in the Galaxy'?

p.260
"You died of shock while being interrogated by a military telepath.":
'SLEEPY'?
a secret chateau on Triton hidden under one of the cryovulcanism research bases, deep in a crater that spat out liquid nitrogen at odd intervals: One of Genevieve's wedding presents.  Triton is Neptune's largest moon.  Triton@The Nine Planets  The Waro from 'The Devil Goblins from Neptune' made their home, at least temporarily, on Triton.  The British Rocket Group sent a space probe to Triton sometime around 1970. Triton

p.261
The Turtle was here.  The one who eats everyone: Kate Orman wrote about turtles being part of Youkalian mythology and symbolism in 'SLEEPY'.  Youkali was one of those huge, ancient empires that completely disappeared but left behind huge monuments that nobody understands.  You know the deal.  There was a bit more Youkali research in 'Walking to Babylon', with implications of Youkali influence in Babylon and Ancient Egypt.  Pyramids, and worlds being carried on the backs of turtles.  This bit here implies Youkalian influence on the Jeopards' homeworld.  Youkali was originally the name of a song by Kurt Weill.  It's lounge music, Ute Lemper might sing it.  It's about a fantastic island that doesn't exist.

p.264
"How'd you make Pontifex?": (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Never mind that - how did he get back to his own time if the Doctor was killed on Yemaya 4? p.266
"Jack White killed her,": Killed Roz in an alternate timeline.  Who is he? (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) White was the leader of the Company forces on Yemaya 4 in 'SLEEPY'. But perhaps I'm thinking of the wrong chap; in a reality where Roz became Lady Forrester, would she have gone travelling with the Doctor?
"We'll be in Ionian space in ten minutes," Roz shouted: Light takes about six and a half seconds to travel between Callisto and Io.

p.267
The comet had been mostly ice.  It had melted as it struck the atmosphere, chunks of rock exploding out of its core.  They had rained down all over the training world: The comet strike on Purgatory, the Landsknechte training planet.  This is a pretty inelegant description of a comet strike.  A comet hitting a planet starts to act like a liquid when the atmosphere slows it down, like a wet wad of toilet paper hitting a wall. It doesn't melt right away - ice is too great an insulator for that. And in two seconds it's hit the planetary surface in a big plastic glob and released a large amount of heat and kinetic energy, which makes craters, secondary impacts and nuclear winters.

p.268
"How long have you been planning this?"
"Forever," said Leabie.  "Forever.":
Leabie was building up her army before the beginning of this book with Llewellyn and Vincenzi and so on.  She got away with the Victoria after the Cassandra incident, and she started the riots on Earth to distract the Landsknechte.  She may also be responsible for bombing Purgatory.  She may have been financing the Ogron resistance on Orestes, also to distract the Landsknechte and the Interstellar Navy.

p.270
"Can you believe this, they're fighting in Achebe Gorge.  There hasn't been fighting on Mars for centuries.  Not since the Ice Warriors.": Reference to the Thousand-Day War in 'Transit'.  There's been a bit of fighting on Mars since 2086 - the Daleks invaded there in 2157, but a virus damaged their wiring systems so they cordoned off the planet until the Solar System was won back.  According to 'Beige Planet Mars' in the Second Dalek Invasion in the mid-26th Century a Dalek fleet bombed the Martian missile bases, military spaceports and took over the planet. The humans there formed a resistance led by General Keele, and managed to defeat the Daleks with a little help from a certain somebody...

p.272
A pair of battleships colliding near Phobos: Phobos is the innermost Martian moon.  Phobos@The Nine Planets  Its name means "fear" in ancient Greek.
the Valles Marianes: Misspelt; it's actually the Valles Marineris, a big canyon system on Mars.  Achebe Gorge is part of it.  The Valles Marineris was named after the Mariner space probe that discovered it.

p.273
Mimas, 26 August 2982: Mimas@The Nine Planets Mimas is the seventh of Saturn's roughly thirty known satellites.  It has a big crater on it called Herschel, and looks like the Death Star.  Mimas On August 29th, 2982 Io, which is near Jupiter, and Mimas near Saturn will be about 2.1 billion kilometres apart.  Light would take almost two hours to travel between Io and Mimas, so this could be a hyperspace trip.
"Tethys is tidally locked," he said.  Chris glanced across to the screen.  "Its great crater always points in the same direction, thirty degrees above the ecliptic.  A signal from there would drift out into space, well clear of the other moons and planets.  But Mimas' crater is locked only two degrees about the ecliptic.  Shoot a beam from the centre of Herschel, and it would pass through the entire solar system, slightly more often than once a day.": Sort of right.  Odysseus, the crater on Tethys, isn't right on the moon's equator.  Herschel Crater on Mimas straddles the Mimian equator.  However, the plane of the ecliptic is the path around the sky in which the planets orbit.  The whole Saturnian system is inclined by 25 1/2 degrees to the ecliptic, so that the angle at which we see Saturn's rings and moons changes from year to year changes during its 26-year orbit.  Neither crater has a continuous angle to the ecliptic plane.  And the Saturnian system is inclined at almost right angles to the plane of the Galaxy, so signals couldn't be broadcast to very many other stars.
Both Tethys and Mimas are tidally locked with one hemisphere facing Saturn.  And every day, a beam from either crater would sweep out the same area of sky. 

p.274
Distantly, flashes of light reached them from a pair of warships locked in close combat in the Cassini Division: The Division is a space in between Saturn's rings.  An amateur telescope that can resolve the Cassini Division on a good night is a good telescope.  There's some info on the rings of Saturn at Saturn@The Nine Planets.

p.275
Malinowski:

p.276
NOCTIS LABYRINTHUS:
Part of the Valles Marineris.
Balotnikov, Colonel Ncube:

p.286
"Are you trying to tell me that Centcomp Node Number One, the centre of the Empire's computer control, has just been inhabited by an artificial intelligence?  Who the hell are you, anyway?"
"You may have heard of me," said the computer.  "My name is FLORANCE.":
This is about as far up in the Universe as FLORANCE can get.

p.287
ElleryCorp ('We have the technology'): Catchphrase from The Six-Million Dollar Man.

p.288
('This unit must never damage a human or by inaction allow a human to be damaged'): Isaac Asimov's First Rule for robots.

p.289
The Nexus was the centrepiece of a ... cocktail party?: It's just a cheap special effect.

p.292
"This can't be how the story ended!":(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) This ties in with the Doctor telling the alternate Chris on p.264 that "the story had a different ending", and the conversation between the Doctor and Kadiatu starting on p.309. Also it's probably a reference to the climax of the TV Movie when the Doctor shouts, "This can't be how it ends... STOP!!!"

p.294
the T'ai Tsung:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Famous Chinese ruler, the Second Emperor of the T'ang Dynasty.

p.295
the Ojibwa: A North American First Nations group.  Ojibwa is a distinct language as well.  The Ojibway Story

p.296
X-ray lasers: Modern-day x-ray lasers are very powerful and primitive - if one's ever been built it was only for weapons testing purposes.  An x-ray laser is a variety of atomic bomb sheathed in long bars of metal (tungsten, I think) which point in the direction of fire.  When the bomb goes off, a substantial amount of the x-radiation is funnelled into a pulse along the axis of the rods.  Then it disintegrates.  X-ray lasers were considered for use in destroying missiles in flight, part of the 1980s Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars Program.)  There's a handheld x-ray laser in 'The Tomb of the Cybermen'.

p.297
reticular vector gauge: From any story in particular? (Text submitted by Paul Andinach) The implication of the full sentence is that it's a reference to 'The Caves of Androzani', but I can't bring any actual evidence to mind.
One had stuck to his principles and had his throat cut by a hungry alien:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) 'The Two Doctors'.
One had had his brain fried by a computer, substituting for a dead synch-op:(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) 'Warriors of the Deep'.
One had been beheaded by an Ice Warrior:'Legacy'.
One lived in another dimension and visited Earth from time to time, sparking rumours that King Arthur was about to return: 'Battlefield'.
the Eocene era: The Silurian Era was between 440 million years ago and 410 million years ago, between the Ordovician and Devonian Eras.  It's further subdivided into the Llandoverian, Wenlockian, Ludlovian and Pridolian Subdivisions.  The Silurians were obviously meant to have evolved during that era, but life at that time was still pretty simple: coral reefs started to grow, fishes started to grow jaws, and plants and insects started living on land.  The whole Silurian thing was a bit dodgy: The Doctor starts calling the Earth Reptiles Silurians in 'Doctor Who and the Silurians' just because Doctor Quinn keeps a lot of books about the Silurian Era in his cottage.  Malcolm Hulke, who wrote the serial, didn't really read up on what actually happened in the Silurian Era.  (The Earth didn't capture the Moon during it either, but I digress.)  Hulke later wrote a retread of 'Silurians', called 'The Sea Devils'.  In it he gave the Doctor a line explaining that Silurians was a misnomer: they were in fact from the Eocene Period.  The Eocene Period was from about 54 to 38 million years ago.  The Eocene Period was part of the Paleogene Era, between the Cretaceous and Neogene Eras.  It's broken down into the Ypresian, Lutetian, Bartonian and Priabonian Subdivisions.  But since it took place millions of years after the dinosaurs were rendered extinct, it still doesn't ring true.  Gary Russell complicated matters in 'The Scales of Injustice', which is still not too bad for a book by Gary Russell.
One was alive and well and living in San Francisco with his wife: This is an alternate Eigth Doctor from the TV Movie who settled down with Grace afterwards.  But it could be Professor Daniel Joyce and his wife Anne, from 'Unnatural History'.  Who knows who he is.(Text submitted by Paul Andinach) Except that the TV movie hasn't happened to the Doctor yet, so it would have to be an alternate Doctor who received the Master's call several years earlier than our Doctor did. The Nexus is changing his timeline at different points in his past - and his future.

p.300
when they saw a man throw a ditz off a walkway: A ditz is a pet with vestigial wings.  This story is elaborated upon in 'Original Sin'.

p.301
a rental academic house on Youkali: Bernice studies Youkali for years, off-and-on.
the Tent of Ill Repute, run by a bunch of Lalandian pirates from the Rim: Rim of the Galaxy.  Lalande 21185 is the fifth-closest star to the Sun.  It's 8.3 light years away in Ursa Major.  It's a class M6 red dwarf.  Almost bright enough to see with the naked eye.

p.303
Maybe he's thinking about the time he and Roz huddled together next to the fire, beside a Berkshire lake on a freezing winter night: At one point in 'Return of the Living Dad' the Doctor got thrown out of a spacecraft in midair over the lake.  He was in trouble with shock and hypothermia for a bit, but body heat and a fire helped put some colour back in him.

p.304
a Caprisian dealer: Bernice was born on the Beta Caprisis colony.  Capris is a fictional constellation, or one not visible from Earth.

p.305
an expensive Shaker chair: Perhaps a relic from 1799 New York, 'Christmas on a Rational Planet'. The flintlock rifle could be the one with which she tried to kill Abraham Lincoln's grandfather.

p.306
"It's a wedding dress, isn't it?": Roz held a wedding dress after leaving George Reed with just an engagement ring in 'Just War'.

p.307
Jane's Ostentatious Aerial Combat Vehicles: Jane's produces a number of respectable trade publications for people interested in military vehicles and commercial aircraft.  Chris recognizes Kadiatu's current timeship as a souped-up Triangulum Swift 400 series.

p.308
"Wake up, you old bastard!" she yelled: This is a bit of an OTT portrayal of Kadiatu.  Although, she had been genetically engineered to be a superior soldier, independently discovered time travel, was tortured by mechanical ants that lived in dimensional rifts and is humanity's answer to the Pythia's Curse on Ancient Gallifrey.  So she's special.  It doesn't matter if her characterization is inconsistent.
"I'm not ready to be the Ka Faraq Gatri yet.": What the Daleks call the Doctor, or the Seventh one at least.

p.309
"The one who was quick enough to snatch Adric from the freighter.  The one who arrived thirty seconds before Oscar Botcherby was stabbed to death, instead of thirty seconds afterwards.  The one who saved Jan as well as everyone else.": 'Earthshock'.  'The Two Doctors'.  'Love and War'.

p.311
She had thought it was pretty funny when they slaughtered the bull, and Beni had walked out of the kraal, looking an interesting shade of green: The !Xhosa and the Zulus were pastoralists, some of them still are.  Their lives were anchored by the lives of their cattle.  A man with many cattle was a rich man.  Cattle were an important part of dowries owed by men to their fathers-in-law.  You couldn't get married until you had enough cattle to spare.  The Zulus may have become expansionistic in the early 19th Century to maintain their lifestyle in a drought by stealing other peoples' cattle.  A kraal is a ranch house compound, basically.  Bernice is a vegetarian, as verified in 'Ship of Fools'.


Copyright EricBriggs 2000
Earth to Scale
This is a part of Earth, to scale with the other moons I grabbed from Starry Night.