The years pass, and the arguments go back and forth over whether
or not fiction, read or viewed, actually has an effect on the personality of
the reader or the viewer. Does violent fiction make a reader violent?
Does frightening fiction create a watcher who is frightened, or
desensitised to fear?
  It’s not a yes, or a no. It’s a yes but.
  The complaint about Doctor Who from adults was always, when I was
small, that it was too frightening. This missed, I think, the much more
dangerous effect of Doctor Who: that it was viral.
  Of course it was frightening. More or less. I watched it from behind the
sofa, and was always angry and cheated and creeped out by the
cliffhanger in the final moments. But the fear had, as far as I can tell, no
effect on me at all as I grew. The really significant thing, the thing that
the adults should have been afraid of and complaining about, was what it
did to the inside of my head. How it painted my interior landscape.
  When I was four, making Daleks out of the little school milk bottles
with the rest of the kids at Mrs Pepper’s Nursery School, I was in trouble
and I didn’t know it. The virus was already at work.
  Yes, I was scared of the Daleks and the Zarbi and the rest. But I was
taking other, stranger, more important lessons away from my Saturday
tea-time serial.
  For a start, I had become infected by the idea that there are an infinite number of worlds, only a footstep away.
  And another part of the meme was this: some things are bigger on the
inside than they are on the outside. And, perhaps, some people are
bigger on the inside than they are on the outside, as well.
  And that was only the start of it. The books helped with the infection –
the Dalek World one, and the various hardcovered Doctor Who Annuals.
They contained the first written SF stories I had encountered. They left
me wondering if there was anything else like that out there ...
  But the greatest damage was still to come.
  It’s this: the shape of reality – the way I perceive the world – exists
only because of Doctor Who. Specifically, from The War Games, the
multipart series that was to be Patrick Troughton’s swansong.
  This is what remains to me of The War Games as I look back on it,
over three decades after I saw it: the Doctor and his assistants find
themselves in a place where armies fight: an interminable World War
One battlefield, in which armies from the whole of time have been stolen
from their original spatio-temporal location and made to fight each
other. Strange mists divide the armies and the time zones. Travel
between the time zones is possible, using a white, boxlike structure
approximately the same size and shape as a smallish lift, or, even more
prosaically, a public toilet: you get in in 1970, you come out in Troy or
Mons or Waterloo. Only you don’t come out in Waterloo, as you’re
really on an eternal plane, and behind it all or beyond it all is an evil
genius who has taken the armies, placed them here, and is using the
white boxes to move guards and agents from place to place, through the
mists of time.
  The boxes were called SIDRATs. Even I figured that one out.
  Finally, having no other option, and unable to resolve the story in any
other way, the Doctor – who we now learned was a fugitive –
summoned the Time Lords, his people, to sort the whole thing out. And
was, himself, captured and punished.
  It was a great ending for a nine-year old. There were ironies I relished.
  It would, I have no doubt at all, be a bad thing for me to try and go
back and watch The War Games now. It’s too late anyway; the damage
has been done. It redefined reality. The virus was now solidly in place.  These days, as a middle-aged and respectable author, I still feel a sense
of indeterminate but infinite possibility when entering a lift, particularly
a small one with white walls. That – to date – the doors that have opened
have always done so in the same time, and world, and even the same
building in which I started out seems merely fortuitous – evidence only
of a lack of imagination on the part of the rest of the universe.
  I do not confuse what has not happened with what has not happened,
and in my heart, Time and Space are endlessly malleable, permeable,
frangible.
  Let me make some more admissions.
  In my head, William Hartnell was the Doctor, and so was Patrick
Troughton. All the other Doctors were actors, although Jon Pertwee and
Tom Baker were actors playing real Doctors. The rest of them, even
Peter Cushing, were faking it.
  In my head the Time Lords exist, and are unknowable – primal forces
who cannot be named, only described: the Master, the Doctor, and so on.
All depictions of the home of the Time Lords are, in my head, utterly
non-canonical. The place in which they exist cannot be depicted because
it is beyond imagining: a cold place that exists only in black and white.
  It’s probably a good thing that I’ve never actually got my hands on the
Doctor. I would have unhappened so much.
  A final Doctor Who connection – again, from the baggy-trousered
Troughton era, when some things were more than true for me – showed
itself, in retrospect, in my BBC TV series, Neverwhere.
  Not in the obvious places – the BBC decision that Neverwhere had to
be shot on video, in episodes half an hour long, for example. Not even in
the character of the Marquis de Carabas, whom I wrote – and Paterson
Joseph performed – as if I were creating a Doctor from scratch, and
wanted to make him someone as mysterious, as unreliable, and as quirky
as the William Hartnell incarnation. But in the idea that there are worlds
under this one, and that London itself is magical, and dangerous, and
that the underground tunnels are every bit as remote and mysterious and
likely to contain Yeti as the distant Himalayas. Author and critic Kim
Newman pointed out to me while Neverwhere was screening, that I
probably took this idea from a Troughton-era story called The Web of  Fear.
  And as he said it, I knew he was spot on, remembering people with
torches exploring the underground, beams breaking the darkness. The
knowledge that there were worlds underneath ... yes, that was where I
got it, all right.
  Having caught the virus, I was now, I realised with horror, infecting
others.
  Which is, perhaps, one of the glories of Doctor Who. It doesn’t die, no
matter what. It’s still serious, and it’s still dangerous. The virus is out
there, just hidden, and buried, like a plague pit.
  You don’t have to believe me. Not now. But I’ll tell you this. The next
time you get into a lift, in a shabby office building, and jerk up several
floors, then, in that moment before the doors open, you’ll wonder, even
if only for a moment, if they’re going to open on a Jurassic jungle, or the
moons of Pluto, or a full service pleasure dome at the galactic core ...
  That’s when you’ll discover that you’re infected too.
  And then the doors will open, and you’ll squint at the light of distant
suns, and understand ...
In the tale that follows, when the doors open, they open on the light of
India, in Kipling’s time, and on a long sun in a generation starship.
Walking through the doors we find ourselves in a baroque hard SF
fantasy, which mixes high tech werewolfism with an inverted retelling
of Beauty and the Beast. Meanwhile, almost in the background, a Doctor
Who plot begins and continues and concludes.
  Paul McAuley mixes the ingredients for this particular cocktail with
panache and style, combining nanotech virus, Whovian Easter Eggs, and
fabulism with the cocky delight of someone who knows he’s going to
take you on a remarkable journey, and that you’re going to enjoy every
moment in his company.
  Drink it deeply.
  There’s a crystalline pillar in the middle of an hexagonal control board
which is beginning to rise and fall, with a grinding noise like a universe
in pain. And very soon now those TARDIS doors will open, to reveal tygers, and the nature of the infection ...

Neil Gaiman
August 19, 2003