NOTES ON NOBODY’S CHILDREN
WARNING: This page contains substantial SPOILERS for Nobody’s Children.
NOTES ON THE IAS’PAR
The Ias’par – the alien seedling-children who Isaac is looking after in Little Caldwell – haven’t appeared in print before. They come from a rejected proposal of mine for an early BBC Doctor Who novel. I called it Relativity, although it might have stood more chance of being accepted if I’d gone with my preferred title of Baby Rachel and the Sexually Dimorphic Punk Polecats from Outer Space.
Like Nobody’s Children, Relativity was themed around the idea of family, but more precisely around weird methods of reproduction. It involved the Doctor’s TARDIS ‘budding’, and a teenage Time Lord – who saw the Doctor as a mentor, that being the latter’s nearest approach to reproduction – managing to imprint himself on one of the resulting pocket universes so that it became in infant TARDIS. It had a human baby, the aforementioned Rachel, being born. And it involved an aeons-old interstellar war between two alien species, the Vahni and the Ias’par, each of whom reproduced by means of Weird Sex.
The Vahni (who, for reasons which entirely escape me now, were named after a college contemporary of mine) were the sexually-dimorphic punk polecats, who kept their non-sentient males in pens and whose female young only attained sentience and adulthood when one of the older Vahni died. Each clan had only three adult females active at a time, and they fitted into circumscribed social roles of maiden, mother and wise woman.
The Ias’par were much as they’re described in ‘Nursery Politics’, except that the females had a brief mobile phase during puberty. (That was just too much to fit into Isaac’s already overlong expository paragraph, unfortunately. Of course it’s possible he doesn’t know all the details of Ias’par biology.) Once impregnated, these tree-women took root again, incubated thousands of spores and then, explosively, died, scattering their children across a vast area. The species as a whole were natural colonialists.
In the novel proposal for Relativity (which, I should add, was written more than ten years ago and is not a work of any great sophistication) the Vahni represented the stereotypically female nurturing principle, while the Ias’par represented macho acquisitiveness and aggression. The idea was that the species’ divergent biologies set them at loggerheads, and that the conflict between the two might never be resolved.
It wasn’t exactly subtle, I’ll admit.
Anyway. If you’ve already read Nobody’s Children (and if you haven’t, I did warn you not to read all this), then some of this material may be sounding familiar. I found myself going back to some of these ideas – mercifully stripped of the embarrassing war-of-the-sexes tosh – during our planning stages, and some of the core concept found its way into our collective plans for the culture-clash between the Draconians and Mim.
It’s a much better repository for it. The only decent things about Relativity, variant title aside, were the puns I used as chapter titles. For instance, one chapter involved finding a skeleton in a Scottish Presbyterian church, and was called ‘Kirk and Bones’.
...Actually, thinking on it, that’s terrible, isn’t it? So there you go.
- Notes on Nobody’s Children.
- Back to Notes on The Order of Proteus.
- Buy Nobody’s Children at Peculiar Tomes.
- Buy Nobody’s Children from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com or Big Finish Productions.
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