Survival is literally my take on John Wyndham’s short story of the same name, which I read too many years back to count, when I was at boarding school and they wanted me to read ‘better’ science fiction than Doctor Who. There were two stories that I remembered distinctly. One was Pawley’s Peepholes, in which people in present day London started to see ghostly figures in futuristic clothes appearing. It turned out to be time travel tourism when people from the future came to look at their ancestors. Survival was a much darker story which Spenser fairly neatly explains in this story.

I remember a story from the 1950s. I don’t remember the title exactly, or who wrote it, but it was about the crew of a deep space ship that suffered some sort of failure. They were drifting, and rescue was likely to take years. So they rationed their food and tried to make do, and then somebody gets killed and, would you believe, a woman announces she is pregnant and demands extra rations….”

“Freaky coincidence,” Davie admitted. “But there’s something more, isn’t there?”

“They kept the bodies, too,” Spenser continued. “Only somebody noticed that one of the bodies had been mutilated – flesh stripped from it. They suspected an alien entity at first, then realised the ghastly truth. Somebody on the ship had turned to

cannibalism…”

“Yeeerk,” Davie commented. “Remind me to check that freezer facility soon.”“I think you should,” Spenser said. “Because… at the end of the story, a rescue ship finally gets there. They open the airlock and all they find is a wild eyed woman holding a child in her arms. And she looks at the rescue team and says ‘Look, baby, food.’”

Well, I didn’t want to exactly copy that plot, so in mine the child is a flesh-eating alien and the mother as helpless as everyone else on board the space station. The thing that separates plagiarism from homage, however, is referencing, which is why Spenser draws attention to the existence of the Wyndham story. Wyndham, incidentally, has always been a huge influence on Doctor Who. At least two stories, Seeds of Doom in the 1970s and Terror of the Vervoids in the 1980s, owes something to The Day of The Triffids. I used the Chrysalids, one of his other great works as the basis of Chrístõ’s relationship with his Human students in Theta Sigma. And, most recently, people have, mistakenly, as it happens, drawn connections between Midwych Cuckoos and Torchwood; Children of Earth. So I’m continuing a long tradition, here. I might even have an idea for a Pawley’s Peepholes variation for Torchwood.

The International Space Station, is a beautiful thing. I have wanted to feature it in a story for a long time. This one gave me the perfect opportunity. There is plenty of information about it on the internet. And by beautiful coincidence, while I was finishing the story off, the Eurovision Song Contest was on TV, and two Russian astronauts aboard the ISS launched the voting. Fate was smiling on this story.

Sukie Campbell is growing up fast in these stories. She is becoming as much of a petrolhead as her older brother, and a fervent feminist. All those traits may well come through in later stories. Watch this space.

And yes, all the U.N.I.T. people have appeared in Doctor Who. I gave them all promotions since the story is set some eight years in the future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station
http://www.shuttlepresskit.com/ISS_OVR/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wyndham