Fiction writing is not easy, and writing a novel is as tough as nails.
Even harder is writing a fanfic novel which strictly adheres to canon, and crossover stories which adhere to canon are absolutely grueling.
So:
- Writing a fan fiction crossover novel,
- which is a sequel of two other stories,
- adhering to the canon and rules of two universes
- (each with a different style of storytelling),
- with a cast of thousands,
- struggling to treat each of 11 main characters with equal dignity and time,
- while telling an exciting tale,
- and struggling to get across the philosophical points I want to make,
- all while getting the reader caught up to speed on several years of television history,
- and rescuing the first part of the story from a hard drive crash,
- is a fucking nightmare.
- Pardon my French.
Whew.
God, do I feel better for having said that. :::Doug fans himself for a few moments and drinks some water.:::
Well....now that I've got that out of my system, I shall proceed.
Continuity
Even the most casual of Doctor Who fans are aware that Doctor Who continuity is a royal mess. Twenty strongmen armed with sledge hammers would not be able to hammer Doctor Who's history into one cohesive picture. (Although Jean-Marc Lofficier gave it one helluva try.)
Doctor Who was a children's show which started in the early 1960s and lasted long into the 1980s. Basically, the emphasis was on the monster-of-the-week. Until its later years, most Doctor Who scriptwriters were only interested in writing their stories, taking the money and moving on. Continuity was never really the order of the day.
The result is that mankind's future, according to the Doctor Who mythos, is a hodgepodge of space travel, conflicting technological explanations, exploration, governments, etc. – whatever was needed to tell the story which was on at the time.
By contrast, the continuity of Earth 2 is as smooth as teflon when compared to Doctor Who. One of the many great things about Earth 2 is that the producers chose a continuity early on and stuck with it, telling a story that basically lasted an entire season. The few discrepancies on Earth 2 are minor, and almost any good piece of fan fiction could explain them away.
When I first started these Earth 2 / Doctor Who crossovers, I briefly toyed with the idea of trying to combine the continuities of both shows into one picture of mankind's future. But after thinking about it for a while, I realized I was giving myself a needless headache. The stories I was writing were so small in scale, it wasn't an issue.
That has now changed. With this third crossover, I have been forced to address crossover continuity, even if only for my own peace of mind.
(I could have used the old tried-and-true "alternate universe" method, but I really hate that. Once we start saying that established events are part of an alternate universe, they seem cheap and meaningless to me. Very rarely has the alternate universe method worked well in bringing two shows together. I want my stories and my heroes living in the same universe.)
When I wrote Earth Who, I decided that the continuity question was better left unanswered anyway, since they seemed incompatible at first glance. But then I realized that all I had to address was the latter half of the 22nd century. And now, after giving it some hard thought, I have decided to combine them.
This may not go down well with everyone. I can't help that, but I can state with confidence that nothing established in the following story contradicts the canon of either show, to my knowledge. Besides, if you don't like the continuity I lay down here, you don't have to adhere to it. ☺ The beauty of fiction is that it's fiction.
(By the way – Doctor Who canon is sometimes referred to as the "Whoniverse." Would this make Earth 2 canon the "Twoniverse?" Would the two together be called the "TWHOniverse?" Oh, never mind.)
A Crossover Crisis
But combining the continuities of both programs led to yet another problem: familiarity. Or rather, the lack of it. Very few people know enough about both of these shows to understand my third crossover without help. And I couldn't just dismiss the history of both shows, because weaving them together in ways that I thought were really neat was one of my main goals.
So I provided some help. ☺ We will now have a moment of silence for Chapter 1, which was sacrificed on the altar of "providing the reader with background information."
Thank you. :::sniff:::
We're talking time travel, the dream plane, Council and High Council plots, Gallifreyan politics, ancient enemies, double-crosses, and much, much more. I abandoned all hope of making this story easy. I go deep in this one – really, really deep.
I tried to make it funny so you wouldn't be too bored while getting caught up to speed. While writing this story, I never forgot that readers will be blind to one of the two shows, so I always found a way to include the explanations. (Hopefully.)
When I first wrote Earth Who three years ago, I set in motion a series of events which I knew would take at least a trilogy to complete. My knowledge of both programs is pretty extensive, and I had a vision of how they could be linked together on many different levels. This is my third story, and it completes that vision to my satisfaction. The only alterations I had to make involved making it accessible to as wide an audience as possible.
I am always leery of the word coincidences. I'm aware that people often see what they want to see, and will sometimes create connections where none exist. However, I cannot stop myself from spotting coincidences between the two shows which seem uncanny. The format of each show is vastly different, but beneath the surface I've found that Doctor Who and Earth 2 have very much in common.
One of the most amazing things about writing these crossovers is the way they just seemed to work themselves out. Sometimes, it almost seemed they were writing themselves, and I was just transcribing them.
This has occurred yet again with the continuity issue. There was only one serious obstacle to overcome. In finding a way around it, I turned a negative into a positive, and the two histories suddenly meshed so beautifully it almost seemed like design. It's kind of scary.
Why Do I Do This?
I can't explain why the Doctor means so much to me without getting personal. Basically, he is the only real role model I had when I was growing up. I didn't like the other kids at school and they didn't like me. Church was a cold place that didn't make any sense. My parents and my sister were strangers. I wanted to be left alone, so all I ever did was bury my nose inside my books and the television screen.
Only three good things came out of this lonely existence:
1. I learned the mechanics of good storytelling.
2. I abhor television today, because I recognize how full of garbage the idiot box really is.
3. I discovered Doctor Who, one of the few jewels shining in the darkness.
I still remember the night I tuned in to Doctor Who for the first time, when I was 12 years old. I didn't even know what kind of show it was, whether it was fiction or non-fiction. All I knew was that it kept catching my eye whenever I scanned TV Guide.
That first 25-minute episode was like a dream. There is something magical about the Doctor, something indefinable, which reaches out to people – especially children – through the television screen. He reached out to me that night, and for once, I had a hero. I knew he wasn't real, but at least he was good. He didn't wear a uniform and act all macho. He saved the universe with a smile and his wit and a bag of jelly babies. He procrastinated and left junk lying around his home, just like the rest of us. He fought ignorance with knowledge. He fought confusion with wisdom. He fought evil by just being friendly. And best of all, you could be the most different person on the block, and he'd offer you a jelly baby, too, without blinking an eye. He had qualities and morals no one else could even hope to match, and he swept me away.
I was convinced that no other TV program could affect me more deeply than this low-budget SF comic-book show from England. Twelve years later, Michael Duggan, Carol Flint and Mark Levin proved me wrong.
I have said before, and I say again, that it is pure joy to have my heroes meet each other – to throw the Doctor and Eden Advance into the same pot and watch what happens. They always surprise me. My only regret is that I will never see them together on screen; my own stories are all that I have.
And I'm starving for more! I have read and re-read my own two crossovers until I'm just sick of them!
There was only one solution – I had to write a third.
I am the only supplier of my own drug. Born out of an insane, hopelessly depraved need for a crossover connection that no one else has attempted, I am driven to toil away in dark dungeons, over bubbling beakers of chemicals, to bring to life the monster which now stands before you. Until the British Broadcasting Corporation and Universal Television get their acts together and have a police box land on G889, I will have to subsist on my own meager efforts.
The story so far is very simple: the Doctor has visited the world of Earth 2 three times, and now it's time to turn the tables on Eden Advance. Like dinner guests returning the favor, it's time for Earth 2 to visit the world of Doctor Who.
Let's see what happens, shall we?
Douglas Neman
Dallas, Texas
November, 2000