Fic: Cold Dreaming

[jjpor]

So, er, I was trying to write one fic and ended up writing a completely different one instead. By accident. Don't tell me that has never happened to any of you.

Title: Cold Dreaming
Rating: Teen
Characters/Pairings: Madame Vastra/Jenny, various OC Silurians, Strax gets a mention because he's Strax
Warnings: Bloody swordfighting-related violence

Comments

[jjpor]

Thank you very much. :D I'm glad you liked it.

As you have noticed, there is quite a bit of palaeo-geekery worked into this fic. I don't pretend to be anything more than an interested layperson - I'm sure I'm getting some of the science wrong. F'rinstance - I think the consensus now is that the Chicxulub impactor was probably an asteroid (some astronomers even narrowed it down, I believe, to being likely to have come from one particular group of asteroids, on the evidence of orbits etc). When I was first reading "proper" books about dinosaurs, back in the day, though, they always used to say it was most likely a comet, and I don't know, comets are more poetic, aren't they? Omens of doom and all that.

Regarding different "races" or even species of reptile-people living at the same time, all covered by the catch-all (and inaccurate) term "Silurians" - it seems likely, doesn't it? The original Silurians the Brig killed, the Sea Devils and the new series lot Vastra originates from - they're all very different in appearance and even habitat. I also wonder whether there was more than one Silurian "extinction" or whether some of them reawakened back in the extreme past, like millions or hundreds of thousands of years ago, to terrorise early humans, explaining the weird race-memory thing going on in the original Silurians story. I like to think Vastra's type do still have an actual third eye, but vestigial with no external opening. And they use it as a concept in their cod-samurai meditation techniques, just like some real-life mystical traditions speak of opening the "third eye" as a metaphor for enlightenment/whatever.

I also wonder whether there's something weird and genetic going on with Vastra's people - considering most (all?) of the speaking female examples we've ever seen have been played by the same actor. Are they clones or something? That'd give the barracks-room femslash a somewhat creepy edge, if they were in some sense actual "sisters". O.o

I don't think the "Silurians" are themselves closely related to dinosaurs. They don't strike me as particularly dinosaur-like, not as we understand dinosaurs now. I think they're descended from some ancestor pre-dating the dinosaurs, but I wouldn't like to say by how much. The Permian mass extinction (which as you probably know was much worse than the K-T event) could perhaps have been caused by the downfall of some previous Silurian civilisation in a nuclear war or ecological apocalypse or something along those lines. Or maybe the Silurians weren't the first intelligent species to inhabit Earth...? Not that there's any evidence for that in Who "canon"...that I can think of? Hmm...