Lives of Christo Mian I – Soldier of Gallifrey - was inevitably going to bring Chrístõ into contact with his father immediately before the war against the Gyrewarriors of Sarre. In earlier stories, especially ‘All The Eggs in One Basket’, and in many of the Marion and Kristoph stories, the war with Sarre had been mentioned as happening when his father was a young graduate. He had gone to fight along with others of his generation and had been a prisoner of war for a very long time, undergoing tortures that left his mind and body broken. He underwent a forced regeneration similar to that which Hext was put through in Liberation of Gallifrey.

Since they had to meet this first incarnation of Chrístõ Mian somewhere offworld, the only safe place, away from the battle, was obviously going to be on the troop ship heading towards Sarre. Some readers commented that these scenes with the young officers waiting for their moment of truth reminded them of Starship Troopers. I can see what they meant about that. There were some scenes in the early part of that film that depicted young, untried soldiers who didn’t yet know if they would be heroes or cowards.

However, just to surprise anyone who thinks they know my literary tastes, General Borusa is loosely based on Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt from the Warhammer 4000 novellas by Dan Abnett. This is a sub-culture you’ve either heard of or you haven’t. I was given a set of the novels by a young friend who thought they might interest me. And surprisingly they did, despite being a rather dark and lurid vision of the future and a long way from the books I read for my English literature degree. I haven’t looked at them for about ten years, but something of the culture stuck in my mind, and General Borusa, the last of his kind, a military man from a planet that embraced pacifism, was a throwback to it.

This was a fairly straightforward story, other than that, in which Chrístõ comes face to face with his father’s past for the first time. I have a feeling that the war against the Gyrewarriors of Sarre will come up again at some point, however.