NOTES ON NOBODY’S CHILDREN
WARNING: This page contains substantial SPOILERS for Nobody’s Children.
NOTES ON THE DRACONIANS
Although they only appeared once in televised Doctor Who, back in 1973’s Frontier in Space, the Draconians were clearly Doctor Who’s Klingons: inscrutable, warlike, obsessed with honour and locked in a decades-long cold war with humankind. The subtext may not have been a subtle one, but it was necessary at the time.
They’ve turned up in a surprising number of Doctor Who spinoffs down the years, appearing in novels, comic strips, audio plays and straight-to-video films. Occasionally they do something interesting, although as often as not they simply rant a bit about honour and express their generally low opinion of females.
Jon Blum’s take in ‘The Loyal Left Hand’ is a brilliantly clever subversion of this. He suggests that the Draconian men’s misogyny allows their women to exist outside the honour code, effectively allowing them to do the dirty work – the spying, assassination and propagandising – which would dishonour the men.
The two Draconian characters in ‘Nursery Politics’ – Ambassador Jarith Kothar and his wife Ithva – are other people’s creations. Kothar appeared in the audio dramas The Judas Gift and Freedom of Information, where his character as a backstabbing bastard but a surprisingly moderate politician was set out quite effectively. He also appears in ‘The Loyal Left Hand’, which introduces Ithva as a major character.
In writing Kothar, I was chiefly interested in creating a voice that would contrast with and complement Mwshi’s. I’m not sure how well I succeeded. I had wanted to give Kothar a complex, latinate sentence structure and a vocabulary of subtle yet very precise shades of meaning. Unfortunately the way he’d been written in The Judas Gift and Freedom of Information was as rather a plainspoken devious bastard, so I had to compromise. As I write them, though, his thoughts are a good deal more labyrinthine than what comes out of his mouth.
His wife and unacknowledged spymaster Ithva I had some trouble getting to grips with, until I decided to write her as a very slightly more devious, marginally more ruthless version of Bree from Desperate Housewives. She’s one of the two characters whose narratives address Benny in the second person, the other being Victoria. By coincidence these are the two female characters, but it still felt appropriate in light of their greater intimacy with her.
(Jason’s even more intimate with Benny, of course, but his voice sounds far more authentic when it’s whingeing to an imaginary third party.)
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