Desert Arrow, Confidential

Desert Arrow came about after writing a story for my Eight Doctors series in which the Fifth Doctor with Adric, Nyssa and Tegan travel on the Orient Express. In that story The Doctor mentions the Silver Bullet train which crosses the Great Fluxos Desert on the planet Flexella. This is actually from a story that ran in the comic Doctor Who Adventures a while ago in which the robot guards chased a nervous squid up and down the train demanding its ticket.

Anyway, having thoroughly enjoyed writing about the Orient Express and the Fifth Doctor, and then doing another Orient Express story with the Tenth Doctor, set in a different time and on a different Orient Express route, I thought Chrístõ and Julia ought to try the Silver Bullet on Flexella. I tweaked things a little bit. I made it the Desert Arrow instead of Silver Bullet, because people might have expected a story about werewolves and I called the desert the Great Iron Desert after Chrístõ explains to Julia about the oxides in the rock being worn down to iron filings by the wind.

The robot staff stayed. And that’s where a whole bunch of hidden and not so hidden cultural references come into play. Two Doctor Who stories are echoed, one deliberately, one less so. Grimwade’s Syndrome was invented as ‘fear of robots’ in the Tom Baker episode Robots of Death. It was named for Peter Grimwade, a script editor who was fed up of robot stories. Robophobia is the usual term for it. The Wikipedia entry on Grimwade’s Syndrome also has a link to a real world phenomena called Uncanny Valley which is worth reading about.

Robophobia and the unnamed robophobe who Chrístõ and Julia talk to brings into focus the character played by Will Smith in the film version of I Robot. This film doesn’t bear much resemblance to the original Asimov stories except in so far as it deals with the problems of Human/robot relationships, but the idea of a man who dislikes robots to an irrational degree comes across strongly.

When the robophobe turns out to be a cyborg, another Doctor Who reference comes into play. The characters of Bannakaffalatta and Max in the 2007 Christmas episode, Voyage of the Damned, both have issues about the way cyborgs are treated by humans on the planet of Sto. In fact, Will Smith’s character in I Robot is also a cyborg having received artificial parts after an accident. The robophobe here is something of a combination of Smith in I Robot, Bannakaffalatta and Max. Max, of course, tries to destroy his ship and planet Earth for revenge. My character’s plan is a bit less devastating but still rather deadly.

Murder on the Orient Express, of course, has to come into any long train journey. But this story isn’t really on those lines. The film it REALLY resembles is The Cassandra Crossing. In that film, a virus strikes the passengers on a train. All kinds of political machinations go on and the train is directed towards a bridge called Cassandra which was NEVER going to support the train. The outcome was just as Chrístõ explains it. The first class passengers survive and the others all die nastily.

I decided not to have a plague on the train. I just made it food poisoning. Or, to be precise, soup laced with an emetic. Syrup of Ipecac is a real substance. It has been around since before Chrístõ trained as a Victorian doctor in the 1860s. It is commonly used these days by girls with anorexia. It’s nasty stuff. The coating to delay vomiting is a science fiction addition to fit this story.

The bridges over the two gorges took me off to some interesting side tracks. The current longest suspension bridge on Earth is Akashi Kaikyo Bridge in Japan. But in a couple of years it will very likely be the Sunda Strait Bridge that will connect Java to Sumatra. I seriously think connecting two islands in a part of the world infamous for earthquakes, tsunamis and Krakatoa with anything at all is a bad idea. Hopefully it won’t fall down. I was quite surprised, though, to find that a suspension bridge could be as much as two miles long. It’s rather mind-boggling. The longest such bridge I’ve been on is the Severn Bridge and that’s scary enough.

The bridge that Chrístõ ‘borrows’ is based on a rather beautiful bridge called the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge in Cincinnati, Ohio. On the Wikipedia page listing the longest suspension bridges in the world there are all sorts of beautiful bridges but the Roebling one stood out for me. John A. Roebling, incidentally, was a civil engineer who also designed the Brooklyn Bridge.