TARDIS Amenities homages a couple of ideas from around science fiction and fantasy. Well, ok, steals a couple of them. The galaxy inside a marble is obvious, isn’t it! The entire plot of Men in Black I was about such a galaxy. The ‘sorting hat’ that shows the wearer the universe crosses a couple of genres all by itself.

The Sharon Stones was a throwaway gag that came to me when somebody mentioned the name of the actress in passing on a TV programme. It may have been done before, I don’t know.

But the biggest steal of all is the autobiography section of The Doctor’s library. That comes directly from Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather. Death owns the biographies of everyone on Discworld, and the lives of the living are written every minute. The sound of quills scratching on parchment is a background noise to the library in his house. It’s a beautiful, fantastic idea that only got used properly that once in all the Discworld novels. And I always felt if anyone else had a library with living biographies in it, it would be The Doctor. He is the one character other than the Discworld’s Death who would truly appreciate such a collection. And he also has a granddaughter called Susan.

The Doctor’s biographies aren’t of everyone in the universe, just the people he has known in his life, and who he keeps a watchful eye on, still. Susan, of course, is a particular case in point. He promised to ‘come back’. He never has. But this way he knows she’s happy and doesn’t need him.

I have tried to keep the Eleventh Doctor stories in a separate universe to my other Doctor Who fiction, so the name I gave The Doctor in Unfinished Business doesn’t get used. Susan is still unaware of what her grandfather is up to. But I decided one character should cross over. Humphrey Boggart was first introduced in the Theta Sigma stories in 2006. He is not actually a boggart. That was just a really daft pun. He is a creature made of darkness itself who comes from a cave system that used to be full of his own kind, but they died out for lack of Humanoid company. Humphrey joined Chrístõ’s TARDIS crew and was the hero of several stories, but I always wondered how to explain his absence in The Doctor’s universe. The solution, Humphrey had himself a long hibernation in the biography section! I plan to give him some storylines in future Eleventh Doctor adventures, since his resurrection went down very well with Theta Sigma fans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogfather
http://wiki.lspace.org/wiki/Death%27s_Domain

http://www.pearsecom.co.uk/thetasigma/14humphrey.htm