p.2
telescopic sensor array: It peeps up out of the bedrock in much the same way as the speakers in Teletubbies.

p.3
suicide.nte: (Text submitted by Allen Robinson) nte spells note with the o missing.
dark-haired man, dressed in outlandish, antiquated clothes: Because he's worried Certain Powers may get suspicious, we are to assume this man is a representative of the People.  However, he could be the Doctor appearing illegally in a book in which he doesn't belong.  After all, "..there are treaties and arrangements at stake, contracts between important rivals."   The man speaks like a First Colonist from the Northern Hemisphere of Old Earth, but his voice falls more harshly on the end of his words.  Is that a Scots accent?  Although it sounds more like Gritpype-Thynne from the Goon Show, the man could even be the representative of some entities from the end of the book..
that would be telling: Line from the opening scenes of The Prisoner.  Q: "Whose side are you on?" A:"That would be telling."

p.4
group of faint stars:  Well, I guess that would have to represent Gallifrey, which means he's from the People.  The People keep the semblance of staying out of the business of Certain Powers in the Milky Way while meddling in little ways in much the same way as Stephen Cole of BBC Books and Simon Winstone of Virgin Books keep the semblance of staying out of each other's continuity, when in fact their authors take every opportunity to meddle in little ways.  An interesting twist to any future New Adventure would be that Certain Powers are meddling in the affairs of the People for a change.  I mean, they can't always be on the receiving end.  Or how about a BBC Book in which Certain Powers From A Distant Galaxy meddle in the affairs of the Time Lords?
Blue Mountain coffee: (Text submitted by Allen Robinson) Jamaican Blue Mountain, considered by many connoisseurs to be the world's best coffee.
tea from the Chinese People's Celestial Conglomerate: A great deal of tea comes from China.  Tea cultivation is one of the ways they employ convicts.
street pizza: After falling 187 stories to a sudden stop, the human body resembles pizza.
Telvos:
Hoopla IV:
New Rarga:
Wompom: Wompom is from a song by Flanders & Swan about an omni-useful vegetable.
Rattacatta:
Spindrast Maxima: Spindraft Maxima was last mentioned on p.140 of 'Deadfall', in a passage inspired by Simon Bucher-Jones.
Mondesfiore family: Slightly reminiscent of Lady Castafiore, the diva from Hergé's Tintin comics; possibly a conjunction with someting else.
Prince-Imran Suleiman: Reminiscent of generic Saudi or other arabic princes and oil barons.

p.5
liens:
"nothing there of note within thirty thousand light years": The galaxy itself is only 100 thousand light years across, which would put the group of faint stars in the middle of an unexplored third of the galaxy, or a significant distance away from the plane of the Milky Way.  Moreover, there are no stars even near our galaxy visible with the naked eye bright enough and separated enough to be seen and resolved from a distance of thirty thousand light years.
Name given to the constellation: Kasterborous, I presume.
the Bank's biggest secret: This is misleading.  The Bank doesn't know about either Gallifrey or the People.  But by distracting himself with the star atlas Sul forgot about renewing the liens preventing exploration of the certain planets, so the whole thing turned into a free-for-all with which the Bank was concerned.

p.6
1- ANGELS IN DIRTY PLACES:
Mega-Hints For Type II Civilisations: At the moment, humanity has reached the Type I phase of Freeman Dyson's notions.  Type I is the stage at which a race is technologically advanced enough to engineer their planet.  Granted, he haven't sorted the balance of nature or the problems of food distribution and what have you, but we are redesigning the Earth in one way or another.  A Type II Civilisation can engineer their solar system. Dyson imagined a shell being constructed around a star to capture all energy radiated from it.  The Dyson Sphere in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode 'Relics' is similar to that of the People from 'The Also People'.  A Type III Civilisation can engineer whole galaxies.  Assuming that galaxies look spiral, elliptical and irregular by nature, threre are no signs of galactic engineering on the scale of Dyson's sketches; he drew galaxies with snowflake structures, joined by structures thousands of light-years in size, et cetera.  The idea that any civilisation anywhere in the present or past of our universe has had time to evolve from amoebae up to such flamboyant galactic architects is utterly ludicrous.  This isn't science fiction for nothing.  If I were a Type III Civilisation, I'd just organise a few focussing mirrors near a supernova or a starbirth nebula and open a tanning salon.
later withdrawn: A good thing too, as Certain Powers are bound to go to the lengths of leafing through college yearbooks hunting for evidence of a People incursion.
Freeman Dyson: 20th-century visionary  who invented the concept of the Dyson Sphere, and favours other notions such as the Gaia Hypothesis, that the Earth is alive.  Although his ideas may not be verifiable, at least they're socially responsible.
The Worldsphere, Another Galaxy: AD 2594: According to all previous accounts the People inhabit the far future, at least 10 million years from now.  Furthermore, their galaxy is at least two million light-years away to start with, and even though they have at least warp travel capability, the relative time effects would be confusing.  The time here is given as the present because we need some frame of reference, and the People can time-travel anyways.
Gabriel: Archangel type, part of the God in-joke.

p.8
emulation mathematics:
yellow Post-it note: Benny adds bits to her diary withPost-it notes she gets from the 20th Century.  'Down' made the point that she can rewrite her history with them.
'Past the Deadline Event Horizon with Straitjacket and Butterfly Net by Bernice Summerfield': What is the significance of this note?
Turkish coffee: According to the people at Grolier, the only Middle-East country from which coffee is a major export is Yemen.  But Turkish coffee is widely reputed to be fiendishly strong (I don't know from experience, with the consequence that this website is updated far too slowly).

p.9
'the bells being measures of spirits': Brandy is often drunk out of large bell-shaped glasses.
red, baked brick: The Babylonians first invented bricks.  Modern bricks are still kiln-fired in brickworks, brick isn't a natural sedimentary rock.
chutzpah: Nerve, guts.
'the feet': So when Shakespeare and the others translated the King James Bible they replaced words describing genitalia with the word 'feet'.  I've never heard of that before, and I can't corroborate it not.  And the bit about Jesus washing his disciples' feet gains new depth and loses the ring of truth, especially as the Pope' s done it every Easter since.  But it is jolly funny, isn't it? (Text submitted by Allen Robinson) Although it's been a common misconception since the early 18th century, there's absolutely no evidence that Shakespeare had anything to do with translating the King James Bible. Considering that he wasn't fluent in Greek, and couldn't read Hebrew at all, modern scholars think it's pretty unlikely.  According to a set of Shakespeare after-dinner parlor cards by Barry Kraft to which I have access, the rumours of Shakespeare's involvement in the King James Bible are based on hints that he may have had something to do with the final revision, and left a couple of clues in the 46th Psalm.  He was 46 in 1610, the year the Bible was completed.  The 46th word of the translated psalm is 'shake', and the 46th word from the end is 'spear'.
The Kinky Gerlinky Memorial Saturluna, Beer Race and Pyjama Jump: Is Saturluna some alternate way of saying 'Saturnalia'?  Anyways, I think this phrase is intended to convey the idea of one of those archaic and embarrassing drunken university romps not discouraged by the faculty.
the Julian Clary Fellowship Professor of Sexuality in Fashion History: Julian Clary is, and I hope you pardon the phrase, a bit of an old queen.  His television personality is effeminate and he has a sharp wit at insulting people on the basis of their fashion sense, intelligence etc.  He also played the 7th Professor in  Professor X , the web parody of Doctor Who first mentioned in Ben Aaronovitch's novelisation of 'Remembrance of the Daleks'.
the Dressing Up As Other Galaxies' Religious Figures Special Interest Group: The main way in which we've seen the People occupying themselves is through membership in Interest Groups.  Different IGs have different subject matter, and different amounts of significance to the People's significance.  The DUAOGRFSIG might be no more that a dress-up club, but the XR(N)IG (Xenocultural Relations (Normalization) Interest Group may be responsible for the deaths of twenty-six billion of the insectoid Great Hive Mind of the Universe thirty years before 'The Also People' took place.

p.10
multiplicity of races: The People have extensive access to advanced genetic beppling equipment, with the result that the can potentially have totally different DNA matrices and physical appearences.  Add to this the fact that the survivors of the Great Hive Mind, and supposedly any other former enemies, were assimilated into the People as ordinary Persons.
deus ex machina: Literally, the God from the Machine.  Ancient Greek paywrights sometimes found it necessary to come up with a role for a god who would descend from the heavens to resolve an otherwise insoluble situation.  The deity appeared dangling over the stage by means of a crane.  The greek translation was theos ek mechanes.
paterfamilias: The head of a family or household having the authority belonging to that position over the persons composing it;
'She had picked up a number of survival reflexes in her travels':
Godzillae E.R.Burroughsia: Read 'Down'.  Godzilla is the Japanese-American monster film star.  Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote the Tarzan stories, and others dealing with prehistoric monsters on Mars, which made some of the basis for 'Down'.
The Suitcase of Social Embarrassment: Terry & June considered as a metaphor for a world in crisis:

p.11
'Can I get you a glass of sherry, Vicar?': Has anyone seen that Monty Python sketch about the vicar with a tank of Amontillado sherry on the church roof?
Clarence: Was the name of the angel in the Frank Capra film It's A Wonderful Life starring Jimmy Stewart.
'some ghastly pun based on 1950s popular culture':
mid-twenty-first-century Postquake Californian Gay Chic: California is in an earthquake zone, San Andreas Fault, waiting for a huge earthquake any year now.
'No sunglasses and trilby': In 'Oh No It Isn't!', God's agents were dressed as the Blues Brothers.  Conveniently, they were on a mission from God.  But Jake and Elwood wore pork-pie hats, not trilbies.  for trilbies, see p.12 of 'Goth Opera' and p.88 of 'The Face of the Enemy'.
'My nearest colleague is busy saving falling business people at the moment and making other arrangements.': OK, we've established that Gritpype back on p.3 was a Person.  By why did he bother saving Sul Starren's life?
Tiny and Interesting Interest Group: I thought it was the Tiny But Interesting Interst Group (TBIIG).  Introduced, for our purposes, on p.214 of 'Oh No It Isn't!'
making suspiciously inedible dip for the People's parties: In 'The Also People' it was revealed that God always sends veggie dip to parties, and it's always the kind that no one uses.

p.12
'An archaeologist could snoop where angels might fear to tread.': Can it be a co-incidence that Rebecca Levene and Simon Winstone, editors of the New Adventures, plan to publish a further book in the line entitled 'Where Angels Fear'?
Alcophobe:
'I know my life seems to be falling into a Bernice-has-a-university-problem-goes-on-a-field-trip-almost-gets-killed-but-triumphs-brilliantly-and-solves-her-domestic-crisis-into-the-bargain style of thing': That's the formula for the books as well.  What a coincidence.
'I take it the book's going badly then,': I wouldn't say that.  It does seem, though, that every sentence has a double meaning.  That's interesting, but it's a pain in the ass for me, who has to type it all out.
Jayne: Jayne Waspo,  part of Benny's tutorial group from earlier New Adventures such as 'Oh No It Isn't!'.
Mr Misnomer: 2530s pulpzine character first mentioned on p.23 of 'Down'.  At the time, it was the area of study of Ash Juliandis, a Neuroseismology (!) student.  Ash's thesis at the time was about the historical context of sexual tension in the pulpzine, whereas Jayne's thesis has no historical context whatsoever.  You'd think that Simon Bucher-Jones kept the references to the Mr Misnomer essay, but ascribed them to Jayne, rather than Ash, because the latter was studying Neuroseismology (yeah, right) and not Archaeology.
Cro-Magnon wristwatch: Historically more inaccurate than the 1066 wristwatch misplaced by the Meddling Monk and discovered by Steven and Vicki.

p.13
Galactic Myths of the Far Frontiers: Another potential bestseller for the Summerfield name.
Melmoth Jackson: Jackson's misadventures have a particular Bucher-Jones ring to them.
Maginty's World:
Ninjucoid assassins:

p.14
Mechanista-A-Gogo Companies: A-Gogo is apopular suffix appended to the names of nighclubs.
lethal Brighton rock: Well that's an improvement. Also see p.11 of 'Venusian Lullaby'.
quark-disassociators: Quarks are some of the most elementary particles known to exist.

p.15
major-domo: Chief of staff, or head butler.

p.16
strong-atomic-force canceller: The strong atomic force is responsible for binding atomic nuclei together.
third planet of Barnard's Star: Barnard's Star is a small red dwarf about 6 light years away.  It's about 1/2500 as luminous as the Sun.  Its visual magnitude is 9.53, absolute magnitude 13.4.  It is famous for having the greatest known apparent or proper motion, relative to Earth, of any star.  Apparent motion is the angular distance a celestial body crosses in a given period of time.  Barnard's Star's apparent motion is 10.29", which means that it takes 351 years to change its place by one degree in the sky.
Powers That Will Be: Current theory has it that the Time Lords existed in the distant past, so Bernice can't be referring to them.  Maybe she foresees a time when the New Adventures can use Doctor Who characters again, or a time when the TV series will be renewed.
'I'm a Ship.': The Ships are also People, hence, 'The Also People'.  The circumstances under which Clarence stopped being a Ship become suspicious in Kate Orman's 'Walking to Babylon'.
James Mason: English actor from films such as Lolita, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Desert Fox.
Keanu Reeves: Canadian actor and star of such films as the Doctor Who ripoff 'Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure', 'Point Break' and 'Speed'.
Grown Not Made Special Interest Group: See p.9

p.17
Lumartran Ethics:
the Levitating Swine of Gadarene III: (Text submitted by Carl Henderson) Probably a play on the old expression "when pigs fly."
all of God's jokes were obvious:
Steve Austen: The Six Million Dollar Man.
The Gulag Archipelago, New Rarga: The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (1973-78) is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's massive three-volume study of the Soviet penal system as it evolved between 1918 and 1956.
recently gravitationally locked: In astronomical terms.  Well, several moons in the Solar System are gravitationally locked to face their primaries.  The Moon is locked with one hemisphere facing the Earth.  Its rotational period is the same as the period of its orbit.  Easing into gravitational lock like this takes time.  The satellite has to be in a stable orbit, and the Moon is.  Silurian purists should skip this bit, because 'Doctor Who and the Silurians' was wrong.  The Moon couldn't have been a captured body otherwise it would be in a more eccentric orbit.  Secondly, the mass of the satellite has to be slightly off-centre.  Earth's Moon has a great number of impact craters and maria on the near side and mostly just small craters and mountains on the far side, suggesting unequal aging.  So you can imagine how it happens; the more massive side of the moon decelerates when it moves away from the Earth, and accelerates as it approaches.  The rotational period slows and stops over an astronomical period of time.

p.18
Ninth-Zone-Supported: This may be a Ninth Zone related to the Third Zone in 'The Two Doctors' although that area is supposedly in the 20th-Century time zone.
(Text submitted by Mark Boyes) There's an in-joke you missed on about page 18 or so. There are two characters who are references to The Eggs Files, one of the regular sketches on children's entertainers Trevor and Simon's show Transmission Impossible.
Their sketches are always set in what looks like a power station, and are introduced by the two Mulderesque characters with the words:
"My name is Lincoln Eggs."
"And I'm his... close friend."
They go on to describe various ludicrous conspiracy theories with very obvious 'subliminal' red messages appearing on the screen, usually rude words taken out of context from what they are saying.
The wrap up is something like...
"What some advice?"
"You bet your bottom you do!"
"Take it from us, and stay in your homes."

p.19
Leavenworth Island: Leavenworth is an American prison. (Text submitted by Allen Robinson) Leavenworth Prison is in Kansas, and definitely not on an island.

p.20
Masonic skeet shoots:

p.21
Samanvra Vulpina, 38, 24, 38: Mags, the werewolf from 'The Greatest Show in the Galaxy' was from the planet Vulpana.  The numbers are measurements of bust, waist and thighs.
Alcatraz Peak: Alcatraz is another American prison.  It's the one on an island in San Francisco Bay popularised in lots of movies, et cetera.
'jimdandy, stupid, dumbarse reason': Interesting adjectives.  Other phrases used by Administrator Vawn towards his associate Earl include 'Snort it up', rad-excon, plum-bang, and dumbcluck.  What a flannelmouth; he deserved to get his mouth washed with soap.
radar ovens: Nowadays such ovens operate at microwave frequencies.  The advantage of microwaves is that they only work in line-of-sight.  Radar radiation is harder to shield.
Maxwell-Murdochs:We're talking about autolit engines - computers that write newspapers.  They've just been locked into lowbrow tabloid mode.  Rupert Murdoch owns a large number of tabloid newspapers.  Robert Maxwell did the same, but he died under mysterious circumstances on his yacht several years ago.

p.22
Christopher Lee: Actor from several Hammer Horror films, and the title role in the Roger Moore Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun.

p.23
Canopus: Alpha Carinae.  Visible magnitude -0.72, absolute magnitude -3.1.  Spectral type F0 1b, distance about 100 light years.  The brightest star visible only from southern latitudes, the second-brightest star visible overall, next to Sirius.
Lucifer: The fallen angel, one aspect of Satan.

p.24
2-MURDER MUST ADVERTISE:
The Hotel Hesperon, No Prior Claim (Yed Prior X): Yed Prior is also known as Delta Ophiuchi.  Visible magnitude 2.72, spectral type M1 III, distance 140 light years.
B-movie SF historical: I can't remember a door opening in Star Trek without the sound effect added.
Francine Mondesfiore: Remember that the Mondesfiores control the access corridors to the Telvos Nebula (p.4).

p.25
The Nine Systems: Some kind of interstellar political organisation.
turpitude: Base or shameful character; baseness, vileness; depravity, wickedness.

p.26
St Dismas' Eve: Never heard of St. Dismas, but he sounds depressing.  The syntax outlines the eve of a Feast Day, like St. Bartholomew's Eve.  Feast days were celebrated in Medeival Europe, and there's a book called Days of the Saints which says which day is assigned to which saint.  I've been in Ripon on St. Wilfred's Day, and Wilfred's the patron saint of Ripon.  There was a jolly parade and a midway in the market square, the Morris Dancers were there, and an old man on a horse.
Lessee:

p.27
Papa DuVal Mondesfiore: Francois Duvalier, called Papa Doc (1907-1971), was president of Haiti from 1957 until his death.  He formed the Haitian secret police, the Tontons Macoutes, and legalised Voodoo.  I guess the Mondesfiores are in-fighting.
chlorine-laced supervisor's office: Introduced in 'Oh No It Isn't!', Divson Follett is Bernice's head of department in Archaeology at St. Oscar's.  He is a reptile who breathes chlorine.

p.28
hot pants versus chinos: Kind of like guns versus frocks.  Benny likes chinos and hot pants, although she has mentioned chinos more in the past.  Chinos are light-coloured heavy cotton, not denim though.  Indiana Jones wears them.
dozen or so networks: In 'Deadfall' the network was DNN.  In 'Mean Streets' it's a sorry excuse for a campus radio station.
Pinochan's Bay: Is this a reference to General Pinochet?

p.29
President Murtangi:
Priapus IX: (Text submitted by Carl Henderson) To get the full joke you need the whole phrase "the extremely rude crop circles of Priapus IX"  Priapus IX is a play on "Priapism"--a word for the medical condition of prolonged painful erection. In this context, "Priapus IX" obviously refers to a really big boner...
Leviathan Major: Leviathan is the name of some huge aquatic sea animal (real or imaginary) of enormous size, frequently mentioned in Hebrew poetry.  Also Hobbes' organism of political society, the commonwealth.
Ripley's Believe It Or FO!: Last mentioned on p.184 of 'Deadfall'.

p.30
'Violent Elizabeths': Unruly children, possibly named after some thrash band or other. Violent Elisabeths are parodies of Violet Elisabeth from the Just William Books by Richmal Crompton.

p.31
spontaneous AI node formation: The point at which a computer becomes self-aware.  Officially, the first time it happened was in 2109, in the case of FLORANCE from 'Transit'.  However, BOSS from 'The Green Death' and WOTAN from 'The War Machines' were both self-aware AIs whose existence and destruction were covered up in the 20th Century.
Pavlovian simplicity:Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936) was a Russian physiologist best known for his discovery of the conditioned reflex.
hyperwave: I can't remember which book introduces it or which time period, but hyperwave is a network of constantly-operating hyperspace communication links.  The links have to be constantly open and carrier waves broadcast classical music when messages aren't gong through.
Holst:Gustav Holst(1874-1934) was one of the leading English composers of the early 20th century.  His most popular composition was 'The Planets', themes based on mythology about all eight major planetary bodies known at the time of composition.
Wagner:Richard Wagner (1813-1883), regarded as the greatest composer of German opera, used German myths and legends as a basis for his librettos. Tannhauser, Lohengrin, and the tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen are among his most admired operas.
Justifiable Ragnarok: There's the Gods of Ragnarok from 'The Greatest Show in the Galaxy'.  But I think this is just some kind of loud music, as Ragnarok is one version of the mythical Apocalypse.  In Norse mythology, Ragnarok is an apocalyptic vision of the last days of the world, the twilight of the gods when the sun grows dim, the forces of evil are let loose, and gods and giants slaughter one another and all creation. Justifiable Ragnarok is my (imaginary) band.

p.32
Malkovitch Fellows, Daedalus Chair of Applied Physics: In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a sculptor, architect, and inventor revered as the personification of arts and crafts.  An Athenian imprisoned in Crete, he built the Labyrinth to house the Minotaur for King Minos.  Later imprisoned by Minos, Daedalus escaped with his son, Icarus, on wings of waxed feathers.  Icarus, however, flew too close to the sun;  his wings melted, and he fell into the sea.  Daedalus settled alone in Sicily.
Farouk, his head of department: Farouk was involved in the Perfecton expedition in 'Oh No It Isn't!', despite not being named as such.  Perhaps it's the first name of Professor Singh, Theoretical Physics, introduced on p.31.
Great Wall of China visible from space:  Nope, a great deal of detail is visible from space.  The claim has been made, though, that the Wall is the only artifact visible from the Moon.  I don't believe that, but the claim has been made.

p.36
3-DARK AND STORMY LIGHT: 'A Dark and Stormy Night' is one of those bland opening sentences celebrated in the Bulwer-Lytton contests.
canonicity: Because this Mr Misnomer adventure may have been authored by a different autolit engine, its canonicity is unofficial.  It's sort of a License Denied scenario: often fan fiction is barely distinguishable from licensed material, although it can take liberties and use the phrase 'Yowling cataclysms' or slash situations never fully explored officially.
Herr Doktor Harbinger: Mr Misnomer's arch-foe in extracts printed in 'Down'.
the fur of the common polar bear has remarkable fibre-optic qualities: That's not to be taken seriously; this is fiction within fiction.  But it's scary that this situation doesn't distinguish the text from licensed Mr Misnomer material.

p.37
mechanical karma: Karma is in Buddhism, the sum of a person's actions in one of his successive states of existence regarded as determining his fate in the next; hence, necessary fate or destiny, following as effect from karma.  Mechanical karma is karma as connected to Newton's laws of motion, and what is the punishment for walking in one direction around the Equator so many times that the Earth slows down and stops.
invasion of parallel universe meta-termites: Like the Ants in 'Set Piece'.
Burroughs' cut-up techniques: Possibly Edgar Rice as in 'Down', but maybe William S., the Beat Generation author who used prismatic, multi-viewed perspectives and presumably chain-of-consciousness writing.
Men In Black Hats: MIBs are well known; the Blues Brothers clones who appeared in 'Oh No It Isn't!' less so.
wadi: Dried up river bed.  It's a North African term.
pH: Potential free hydrogen.  pH is measured in terms of the relative amounts of hydrogen ions (H+;  protons) and hydroxide ions (OH-) present.  A pH value may fall anywhere on a scale from 0 (strongly acidic) to 14 (strongly basic or alkaline), with a value of 7 representing neutrality.  Strongly acidic solutions have molecules dissolved in them which break down into ions while in solution.  Hydronium ions, represented by one hydrogen nucleus, H+, make solutions more basic; hydroxide ions, represented by one hydrogen and one oxygen atom, make solutions more acidic.

p.38
zoonie, twenty-second-century slang:
Calvin Klein IV: I wasn't aware that the current incarnation of CK was a Junior, so this is probably a great-grandson.  Calvin Klein is the designer, not the model.
Herakles: Or Hercules, if you prefer.  Ancient Greek-Roman legendary demigod.  Lost his temper and killed his family at one point, and was punished with being sent to perform twelve herculean tasks.
rumpy-pumpy: The first time I ever heard this euphemism for sex was in an episode of Blackadder.  Almost impossible to figure out its derivation; it's doubtful it'll make it into the Merriam-Webster word calendar anytime soon.
I've been sold a pig in a poke:
ghostwrite: One of the meanings of the book's title is God's use of a 'ghost device' to write for Bernice.

p.39
somewhere in a foreign God there wasn't a patch of pseudo-neurons that were forever Benny: I think this is a reference to a Rupert Brooke First World War poem, but I may have the wrong poet.
Paranoid Frontal Lobe Removal Headache Number None: (Text submitted by Carl Henderson) PA reference to commericials for Excedrine brand pain relievers, that used the catchphrase, "Excedrine Headache Number Nine."
how do I know that I'm not the simulation now: The irony is that Benny is a work of fiction.  There are many more ironies like this, and reference to them will be minimal.

p.41
Bernice 'Jonah' Summerfield: Once again, the imponderable dilemma of why the central character of a science-fiction series encounters more conspiracies, alien invasions et cetera than her colleages.
penumbra: half-shadow.

p.42
Helen Gamoranski:
Ordifica: Ordovician Period, 500-425 million years ago?
Hotop Company: Sure I've seen this before, don't know where.
space elevator: The typical space elevator extends to synchronous orbit.  Geocentric orbit doesn't really say much, as any orbit is celestial-body-centric to something.  the strong synthetic rope could be wound from monomolecular fibre like the Lift in 'Lucifer Rising'.  The Spire is only 300 km high, so presumably it's the single largest, planet-bound structure in explored space in that it's the most massive or voluminous.

p.43
Carbon 60 et cetera: Isohedral molecules look like geodesic domes, which were invented as architecture by Buckminster Fuller.  The isohedral molecules were named fullerenes in his honour, and are also known as buckyballs.  Arthur C. Clarke used them in 3001: The Final Odyssey for his space elevator.
"Noun's got high-power chaotic predictors working on the stock-market futures": Like Sul Starren.  Incidentally, how come people in the 26th Century are still betting on the market instead of real investment?
"they don't need no stinking lizards.": Based on a quotation from the John Huston film 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre' starring Humphrey Bogart.  Hiding out from bandits, Bogart is confronted by one and bluffs that he his a hunter and offers to show the bandit his badges.  The bandit says "We don't need no stinking badges" and Bogart shoots his hat off.

p.44
ionic columns: Evidently the Canopusians have pulled some ancient Earth architecture out of the Spire. Ionic is opposed to Doric; the Ionians were the population of Ancient Greece before the Doric invasion; afterwards, the Dorians were Sparta and the Athenians were Ionian.  The Dorians eventually took over the whole show after the Pelopponesian War.
priest holes: The current definition of a priest hole is a hidden closet or hole under the floor.  Priests running away from Henry VIII or any of the following religious reformers hid in them.

p.45
an old farming couple standing outside it with the man holding a pitchfork: The image is from a portrait entitled "American Gothic".

p.46
Hilbert space transposition: (Text submitted by Carl Henderson) Hilbert Space is a multi-dimensional abstract mathematical construct developed by mathematician David Hilbert. However, as often happens to purely abstract mathematics, Hilbert Space turned out to have some real-life applications. It was incorporated into Quantum Mechanics theory by John von Neumann. A good basic introduction to Hilbert Space is on the web at:  http://www.hia.com/pcr/hilberts.html

Seb O'ran: What does the name mean?  Is it Sebastian?
Morry: This name means something, but I'm not going to tell you what.
baryon number: The difference between the number of baryons (neutrons and protons being the most common) and antibaryons.

p.47
erikson coil, inertron shielding, californium emitter:
snick, snack, snorum: Seb and Morry also seem to use rather odd adjectives.
Vo'lach Wonder Lubricant: Later.
Lorentz-Fitzgerald tesseractic compaction through Minkowski space: Minkowski space appears to be hyperspace.

p.49
4-COMMERCE AND VISITATIONS:

p.50
"evolutionary cusp between mammal and reptile": But reptiles don't evolve into mammals.  They're distinct, not to mention being an Earthbound and non-Canopusian class of animal.  Dinosaur survivors evolved into birds. (Text submitted by Carl Henderson) The reptile-to-mammal transition is one of the best-recorded in the fossil record. For a quick introduction, see the  Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ, Part 1b  at the Talk.Origins archive.

p.52
'It's speaking our language,": No TARDIS systems here, but there's another mechanism than traders from Noun at work.
Ghost languages: Another meaning for the title of the book; languages which come to the Canopusians through the Spire.

p.53
Bernice's dream: In fact, Benny's whole line of thinking from the last chapter could have been influenced by the Spire.
Quasiliving Artefacts™:One of the things made by the Hotop Company, which employed Captain Johansen.

p.54
hoi polloi: Greek.  The earliest I've encountered it is in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.

p.55
telescopic sight: The Canopusians can get technology through the Spire.  Of course, they may just have been paying attention when Fellows and Johansen were using one to look at the Spire in the last chapter.
fingernails: Wasn't Geth just dreaming about something being done to his fingernails?

p.56
The Tower of Silence, the Cleft Stick, the Different Drum, Morton's Fork:

p.57
Newgate Calendar: Newgate Prison was built in 1770 and demolished in 1902.  It doesn't work with Morry giving the date as 1734.  It was pretty vicious, though, and inspired prison reformers Edward Wakefield and Elizabeth Fry.
Duodecahedrons: The Dodecahedron was a set piece in 'Meglos' as the Tigellan power source.  Are there two?

p.58
Ninja tea-ceremony: The Japanese tea ceremony, or cha-no-yu, is the ancient practice of serving tea according to a strict ritual that defines the manner in which tea is prepared and served. Rooted in Zen Buddhism, the art of the tea ceremony symbolizes aesthetic simplicity through the elimination of the unnecessary.  Zen monks, not ninjas as far as I can tell.
a good games session: There's some kind of innuendo in this passage.

p.60
Spinward Corporation:First mentioned in 'Deceit', the Spinward Corporation was one of the first Multi-Planetary Corporations in the 22nd Century. Spinward was first known as the Butler Corporation in 2009 in 'Cat's Cradle: Warhead', when it was responsible for trying to put human consciousness into machines instead of repairing the environment.  In 2107, according to A History of the Universe, Butler merged with Eurogen to become the EB Corporation.  Such corporations eventually took the Earth into receivership when the government collapsed in 'Lucifer Rising', just before the Dalek Invasion in 2157.  In 'Deceit' Spinward were running a colony on the planet Arcadia for sinister purposes; the colony ship EBC Back to Nature had left for Arcadia in 2112.  EBC eventually became Spinward.  Ace's Auxies were sent to Arcadia ostensibly to fight Daleks, but really to blow the whistle on Spinward for the Earth Government.  Spinward was most recently mentioned in 'Deadfall', when Tolland mentioned that he had worked for them in the Wars in 2555. Mentioned again on p.89.

p.62
Goll gamma-male: The Goll are one of three native Dellahan power blocs, the others being the Sylan Federation and the Tashwari, who had St. Oscar's built.  The gamma-male bit suggests some kind of Brave New World-ish eugenics.

p.63
trustarfarian bubblehead: Rastafarians have interesting hairstyles?
Perfecton Expedition: From 'Oh No It Isn't!'
Jervis Lochlin:
classical O'Neill orbital colony: Gerard K. O'Neill designed those huge cylindrical space colonies with cities and countryside on the inner surface.
1:1 scale models of Saturn 5 rockets: Saturn V was the rocket used in all the big Apollo moon missions.  It was 111 metres tall.
Menlove Stokes: Artist and iconoclast from the Missing Adventures 'The Romance of Crime' and 'The Well-Mannered War', in which he ended up on Dellah in time to wangle tenure before 'Oh No It Isn't!' took place.  He uses bodily fluids as his medium.
the Us world:

p.64
Elspet Vespatrick:
The ruins in Antarctica: Unsure what is meant by this.  Benny is investigating Antarctican ruins at the beginning of 'The Sword of Forever', and in 'The Scales of Injustice' a lost Earth Reptile shelter in Antarctica is mentioned.  Nothing archaeological there, though, as the Earth Reptiles are rehabilitated into society long before the 26th Century.
blue and red circles: Well, it also seems to represent the red-shifted universe.  Assuming the Big Bang theory is right, the Universe is expanding.  A light source on the other side of the Universe is moving away from us at a large fraction of the speed of light.  Although the speed of light is more or less constant, and no matter how fast the light source is receding the light will still reach us at the speed of light, the wavelengths of light will be elongated.  Longer wavelengths inhabit the red end of the visible spectrum of light, so this expansionary universe is red-shifted.  If the mass inside the Universe was sufficient to stop everything running away, things would start to move towards each other.  Wavelengths of light from light sources on the other side of the Universe would become foreshortened.  Shorter wavelengths inhabit the blue end of the visible electromagnetic spectrum.  Current theory opines that there isn't enough mass for that to happen, and the Universe will keep expanding, cooling and decaying.  Ironically, the redshift makes the light source seem less energetic: elongated wavelengths are less energetic than shorter ones.  That's why we need protection from ultraviolet light, which is beyond the blue end of the spectrum, but not infrared light which is beyond the red end.
neo-Velikowskianist: Immanuel Velikovsky was a controversial scholar in the 1960s.  He used readings from ancient religious texts, including the Bible, as evidence for a catastrophist model of the Solar System in which ,for example Venus was a comet produced by Jupiter at the time of the Exodus in the Bible.  His book was entitled Worlds in Collision.

p.66
Jane Steadman:

p.67
5-IN SEARCH OF ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS: Sounds like von Däniken to me. The Swiss writer Erich Von Daniken has attracted immense interest from the public with his highly controversial theory that aliens communicated their knowledge to primitive human beings in ancient times, enabling the latter to evolve into civilized humanity.  Von Daniken travels and lectures widely, and his books, including In Search of Ancient Gods (1976) have sold millions of copies worldwide.  Scientists discount the evidence presented in his books and dismiss his claims.

p.68
axons in her brain: Apart from being a ruthless vampire-like alien hive mind ('The Claws of Axos') axons are fibers in the brain which are relatively uniform in diameter and often covered with a myelin sheath. They normally serve to transmit information from one neuron to adjacent neurons.

p.69
Benny's dream: Read this over when you get to the end of the book, and you'll know why I told you to.
Its wife was mistaken for a hat: (Text submitted by Carl Henderson) This is a reference to an essay in the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by clinical neurologist Oliver Sachs. The essay in question deals with a man who, after a stroke, confused objects due to brain damage.
Slough and Epsom: Two London suburbs.  Slough is in Buckinghamshire, although if the counties have been amalgamated I've no idea what it is now.  Epsom is in Surrey, and is the source of epsom salts, a laxative.

p.70
Singh's Collapsar Conjecture:
Professor Owl in Cosmology: Owl is first mentioned on p.32 of 'Oh No It Isn't!', a book by Paul Cornell.  She was described as an elderly, rather buxom cosmologist with a monocle and a grey cardigan. Most of Paul's books have owls in them, but he disputes the claim that they all do.
Zul-Copperberg Equations:
dark matter:  The current leading theory of the formation and evolution of the universe is the Big Bang theory.  It calls for a universe containing much more mass than has actually been detected or estimated to exist in celestial objects and interstellar matter.  Theorists therefore assume that about 90 percent of the universe's mass is in an as-yet undetectable, exotic form that astronomers have named cold dark matter.
tachyons: A tachyon is a hypothetical particle, proposed independently by Gerald Feinberg and by George Sudarshan and coworkers, capable only of faster-than-light speeds.  The tachyon theory is consistent with Einstein's theory of relativity.  If tachyons exist, they would spontaneously emit light by a process similar to Cherenkov radiation, even in a vacuum.  Attempts to detect tachyons, by searching for suitable Cherenkov radiation and analyzing elementary-particle reactions that could give rise to tachyons, have yielded no evidence of them, and at present their existence is doubtful.  Cherenkov radiation is the electromagnetic radiation emitted by a charged particle moving through a medium with a velocity greater than the velocity of light in that medium.  Yes, the speed of light is subject to change, but only when it passes through a medium.

p.72
adamantine: Incapable of being broken, dissolved, or penetrated; immovable, impregnable.

p.73
"Woe and lamentation upon the heads of the Gods who have seen what will befall their children's children, and cannot change it.": The BBC Book 'Alien Bodies' mentions a climactic war in the Time Lords' future which may be the reason no trace of their civilisation remains in the present.
canonical: That word again.  Of course, it's never explicitly stated in Doctor Who that the Time Lords are a thing of the past, but in 'Genesis of the Daleks' one of them brags about how old they are.  Some maturity.

p.74
If you can't stand the heat stay out of the future: Kitchen.  And the future is less hot, as matter and energy degenerate.  The Big Bang was the hottest moment.
Something's rotten in the state of Canopus: (Text submitted by Carl Henderson) A paraphrase of Marcellus' line in Scene 1 of Shakesphere's Hamlet: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."

p.75
Coriolis force winds: In the Northern hemisphere water tends to spin counter-clockwise down the toilet, and weather systems tend to break to the right.  In the Southern hemisphere water tends to spin clockwise and weather systems break to the left.  This is all an effect of the Earth being a spinning round body.  The Earth rotates from west to east, so any mass of air drawn towards the equator from the North Pole by centripetal acceleration will lose ground and drift eastwards because the land under it rotates faster the farther it is from the pole.  Meanwhile, any air mass moving north from the equator gains ground and moves west as the Earth below it rotates slower.  Air breaking west from the equator meeting air breaking east from the Pole forms counterclockwise weather systems.  In the Southern Hemisphere, the same process is upside-down, so weather systems are clockwise.  Can anyone explain this better than me?  Anyways, weather systems should be a problem for the Spire.
alpha-female: Andrew Cartmel's books 'Cat's Cradle: Warhead', 'Warlock' and 'Warchild' mention the alpha-male in the context of a wolf-pack mentality.  It goes farther that personality Type-A's.  Bernice certainly isn't a Type-A, but she's the closest thing to an alpha-female Antok has, assuming all the male academics are even less successful alpha-males.

p.76
Heirosarch: The soothsayer Heironymous from 'The Masque of Mandragora' was based on Girolamo Savonarola, a fifteenth-century Florentine mystic.  He ruled the city for some time with divine inspiration.  When he pissed off the Vatican, he was challenged to an ordeal by fire, which he sort of lost.  Heiro- may connote being able to foretell the future, but it may have something to do with a hereditary position.
Wunderkind: Wonder child.

p.78
folded Minkowski tesseractic compaction: See p.47.  I think it means hyperspace; a wavefront of virtual particles is the empirical effect of something bigger going on in hyperdimensional space-time.  Did that sound believable?  Well all this Minkowski lark is only ever described from Morry's point of view, and the author makes a good joke of it.

p.80
four brightly painted statues, apparently of children's toys: Oh, I can't spoil the surprise now..
Unless he left a note of course: And why would an arch-criminule want to show his hand so early?
'Morry 1 to Morry 2.': OK, Morry has plugged himself into the senses of one of his ninjucoids.  Or has he copied his mind so the ninjucoid thinks like him?  Why are there two Morrys thinking independently of each other?

p.82
6-SAILING TO BIZARRUM:
The single largest alien artefact I've ever encountered that was not burnt to a frazzle by an inconvenient nova the moment I got near it: The direct reference is to the Perfecton civilisation in 'Oh No It Isn't!', which got starbaked at the climax of the novel, forcing Benny to run away.  But she has had a run of bad luck as far as alien artefacts go; she had to abandon her research on Heavenite civilisation in 'Love and War' when the planet was unexpectedly invasion by millions of Hoothi spores and their moon-sized gas dirigible.  The Althosian System blew up in 'The Pit' just when she found out what was really going on there.  She arrived in the Lucifer System in 'Lucifer Rising' just in time to see it quarantined and drawn off into a pocket universe through a black hole.  Her big chance to explore Silurians (sorry, Earth Reptile) civilisation was lost when the Doctor switched off the parallel universe where they took over the Earth in 'Blood Heat'.  The Elysian Artefact started falling apart as soon as she arrived in 'Parasite'.  A pretty checkered archaeological career, all in all.
thousands of years of stellar deviation, and the rotation of the galaxy's spiral arms: To make an example of galactic rotation: The Sun is about 30 000 light-years from the Milky Way's axis of rotation.  One orbit takes a shade over 200 million years.  It takes over a thousand years for the Sun to do a light-year in its galactic orbit, and when you get about 100 light years away, as far away as Canopus, even that much movement doesn't make much difference.  But if all the millions of visible stars are moving that fast, and we're talking multiple thousands of years, within a few dozen millennia the night sky's barely recognisable, even if the galaxy's only rotated a relative inch.

p.83
New Bosnian émigré: Yes well those stereotyped Yugoslavians get uppity about maps don't they.
Big Bulgaria: Bulgaria is sort-of a Balkan state, like Bosnia.
saturnine: Sluggish, cold, gloomy in temperament.
'pulsars, over seven hundred mapped in our galaxy alone': Physicists L. Landau, F. Zwicky, G. Gamow and W Baade were among the first to propose neutron stars, supernova remnants.  If a supernova is the implosion of a star, a neutron star is the compressed core.  The force of the implosion is so strong that the core's atoms are compressed until there is no space between subatomic particles.  Protons collide with electrons, cancel their charges and become protons.  Neutron stars are big masses of neutrons.  The compressed mass of a neutron star is only a few miles across, but used to be a star hundreds of thousands of kilometres in size.  The law of conservation of momentum, the one about the figure-skater, means that the neutron star rotates with the same force, despite its reduced size, so it spins really fast, on the scale of seconds and milliseconds.  Its magnetic field is compressed and is also extremely strong, producing feedback in radio waves at the magnetic poles.  If the poles aren't aligned with the axis of rotation the neutron star appeares to flash on and off, and it's a pulsar.  Not all of the galaxy's pulsars are lined up with Earth, so if we haven't discovered 700 that could just be because we can only see the ones visible from Earth.  Incidentally, Simon Bucher-Jones' previous book, 'The Death of Art', concerned the microdimensional Quoth, quarkovores which used to live in a neutron star.

p.84
quasars: Quasi-stellar objects.  They look like stars, but only because they're so far away they look like points of light.  The redshifts of quasars are strikingly large, meaning they must be very far away, meaning they must be extremely bright to be visible from such distances.  Their nature is not entirely certain, but most explanations involve gravitational collapse and black holes trying to gobble large amounts of matter, heating it up and producing the large amounts of visible radiation.

p.85
ten to the power eighteen years: 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 years.  I don't think we've discovered anything, let alone quasars, one quintillion light years away.  Even 25 billion light years is a struggle.
hypercanasta: Canasta is a card game related to RUMMY.  In its most popular form, it is a 4-person game for two sets of partners played with two regular 52-card decks, plus four jokers.  Douglas Adams is one SF author fond of scifiifying games such as ultragolf, intergalactic bar billiards and Brockian ultracricket.
magnum opus: Large or important literary work.
party poppers: poopers?  Ah well they have little bioengineered farting noises, so they must be one of those party favours like whoopie cushions.  Possibly inspired by that Monty Python sketch with Eric Idle trying to sell CS gas canisters, melting nighties and beer taps shaped like penises.

p.86
Bernice picked at her salad: Bernice's vegetarianism was introduced recently in 'Ship of Fools'.  It caused a bit of a stir as some vegetarians already assumed that, as a 26th-Century extension on contemporary university culture Benny was already a vegetarian as well as being bisexual.  That's another issue.  Apparently Andy Lane said that.
pressor technology: Some kind of force field, like the ones on the holodeck in Star Trek to give the holograms substance.
Michael's Mass term: The Feast of St Michael is 29 September, one of the four quarter-days of the English business and scholastic year.
the feast of St Barnabas and all Toads in the Third Revised Protestant Calendar: Are there no godless colleges in the UK on which to base St. Oscar's?  Still, with a name like that it's no surprise.  I'm enrolled in University College, the official godless college of the University of Toronto.  We've got a ghost story too.  Two of the college architects, freemasons I'll be bound, were in love with the same woman.  They were named Ivan Reznikoff and Paul Diabolos.  Reznikoff tried to kill Diabolos with an axe; we still have the axe marks on the door that mysteriously got in Ivan's way.  Diabolos killed Reznikoff with the help of the Devil and hid his body somewhere in the college.  Reznikoff is the ghost.  The coffee bar in our common room is named Diabolo's in Paul's honor.  The college paper (which I write for) is called the Gargoyle.  The place is built like a haunted castle, too.  Yes, instead of having contrived religious traditions, we have contrived unholy ones.
Peking duck:
figgy pudding: Traditional English Christmas dessert made of figs with that kind of sweet, thick brown pudding sauce possibly made with molasses or treacle.
expandable silly hat: Like the ones you get in christmas crackers.

p.87
amanuensis: One who copies or writes from the dictation of another.
That's Life: (Text submitted by Alan) Now-defunct British Consumer Affairs show, known for mixing a light whimsical touch with occasional harder-hitting journalism. And comically shaped vegetables.

p.88
MHD series-eleven plasma generator:
'Oh, Jim'll fix it.': Jimmy Savile OBE is (or was, I don't know) the host of a TV programme in the UK which deals with wishes, called Jim'll Fix It!.  Once he granted Gareth Jenkins' wish to meet the Doctor and see the TARDIS in a short sequence filmed during Colin Baker's hiatus between Seasons 22 and 23.  Co-starring Tegan and the Sontarans, it may have been entitled 'A Fix with Sontarans'.  See p.92 of Chris Howarth and Steve Lyons' Doctor Who: The Completely Useless Encyclopedia, which reveals another Jim'll Fix It episode of Doctor Who.
crispy duck: Aha!  I smell a contradiction.. Is Benny really an omnivore, or is she eating some engineered-for-consumption duckweed (which raises further questions about organically grown food.  With what we know about Benny's time period from 'The Swords of Forever' it's lucky that Dalek DNA bombs didn't invalidate the entire biosphere.  Or maybe duck is an alien vegetable in the same way that Noun is an alien planet.

p.89
Dbuk Industries:
local three-star empires: Possibly Spindrast Maxima, the Mondesfiore family and Prince-Imran Suleiman.
Eka-series exotic stabilized elements:

p.90
The Panic Fairy in the World of Stolid People: Although the message gets across, I doubt that this is actually a reference to something.

p.91
Colchicine and its qualities: Alkaloid with antimitotic properties.  Four hundred years since use in medicine.  gout, neoplastic deformation, familial Mediterranean fever.  GI tract.
the Dr Watson medal for sidekicks:  Wait for it..

p.92
Real Space Deprivation Syndrome: Never heard that mentioned before.  Perhaps Dr Steadman wants to keep an eye on Tenomi.

p.94
7-I AM THE ASSASSIN: (Text submitted by Alan) Marillion Lyric, from 'Assassing'.
microgravity field, bridge's exclusion from: In preface to my FTL rant on p.96, let me just say that I have never received or contrived a satisfactory explanation for artificial gravity in anything more than the centrifuge and constant acceleration models.  Because we're dealing with faster-than-light travel there must be some way of getting around the tendency of sudden acceleration to relativistic speed to reduce humans to a coat of brown paint, but I'm damned if I know it.

p.96
inert gases: Noble gases.  Helium, Argon, Xenon, Radon, Krypton.
memory proteins: Like the memory RNA from 'SLEEPY', except proteins store and transcribe information while RNA transmits it.
FTL starfield a computer construct: Oh, come on.  We've heard this before.  All right, when you accelerate to near the speed of light, light hitting you head on appears blueshifted in the same way that a police siren is high-pitched when it's approaching at speed.  Light sources behind you appear redshifted in the same way the siren drops to a lower tone once it passes you.  Then there's something else about light cones, which means that the stars in front of you appear to converge to a point, and the ones behind you converge to a point as well.  But then the unwieldy reality of FTL travel comes into play; from what little you can see of the outside universe, obscured by your speed, the Universe seems to be speeding up.  Once it speeds up to the point that you see the end of the universe, you've reached the speed of light, for what it's worth.  Meanwhile, to anybody watching from outside, your clock will appear to slow down, apacecraft will seem to get more massive.  Eventually your clock appears to slow down so much that it appears to have stopped, and your ship's apparent mass becomes so great that it turns into a black hole.  The other factor in acceleration to lightspeed is that once you get going so fast, it starts taking exponentially greater amounts of fuel to keep accelerating.  To reach lightspeed you would have to use the entire mass of the Universe as fuel.
    So by the 26th Century they must have discovered some way around the 20th-Century theorised pitfalls of lightspeed travel.  The issue is whether, from "Minkowski Space" or as we know it, hyperspace, you can see cool starfields whizzing past.  You do in Star Trek, although I once heard some half-assed explanation that what the crew sees outside the windows are just computer simulations of passing stars.  The obvious flaw with that explanation is that the same starfield is shown on all the exterior shots.  And how come the stars are passing so fast?  If you were passing a star every second, and stars are separated by roughly four light years, it'd only take seven hours to travel 100 000 light years and end up on the other side of the galaxy.  Since it's going to take Voyager several decades (sorry, I haven't memorised it unlike some people) to do 100 000 light years, I guess they do about four light years to the day.  Those rainbow streaks, whatever they are, are not stars.  Remember Star Trek: The Motion Picture?  No, of course you don't.  But I read an elegant explanation of the jump to warp speed works in that movie.  The rainbow colours that spray out at it are tachyons being annihilated as they slow down.  I have digressed to explain faulty science in Star Trek.  I apologise, but did it feel good.  A CGI starfield in 'Ghost Devices' is fine, because this is a book and there aren't any exterior shots to get my back up.

p.97
Honspar:
Tenairium Cartels:
Anti-Smuggling Corp:
von Neumann worms: self-replicating machines.

p.98
"I know that there's a big prize for anyone who can verify the conjectural basis of hyperdrive..": Aha, so even they don't know how it works.

p.100
(hereinafter 10 AOL): Since Fellows rarely uses the acronym AOL again, this may be him being silly, or a reference by the author, perhaps involved with a certain Internet Provider.
Laviscian trollop: Lascivious means inclined to lust, lewd, wanton stuff.

p.101
tetrahertz scanners: Which can presumably scan four frequencies at once.
gravitic vectorization:
Fendleman's Man: In 'Image of the Fendahl' Professor Fendleman examined a perfectly preserved 12 million year old Homo sapiens skull, which is impossible.  The skull, named Eustace, was a tool of the Fendahl, an Evil From The Dawn of Time.  Supposedly time-looped by the Time Lords, the Fendahl had manipulated humanity to a point at which it could manifest itself, which is why Fendleman was named Fendleman.  How Fendleman's Man became scientifically canonical is unclear, because Fendleman and all his associates, save one, were killed by the Fendahl.  The one that survived, Adam Colby, hadn't wanted to publish Eustace's discovery in the first place because it was as yet scientifically impossible.  Proving Eustace didn't get any easier, because the Doctor threw it into a supernova.

p.102
Delcorii the Centauri: Alpha Centaurans are hermaphroditic hexapods.  They flollop about on one foot, have six arms, and their heads are a single huge eye.  To make matters worse, they sound like the Queen.  When the director of 'The Curse of Peladon' first saw the Alpha Centauri costume, he compared it to a giant penis.

p.103
Ginsbergian dream machine: Allan Ginsberg, beat poet contemporary of William S. Burroughs, would probably approve of the concept of a dream machine. (Text submitted by Jamal Hannah) incorrect reference to the hallucinogen-making machine invented by Brion Gysin, not Ginsberg, though also a close friend of Burroughs. properly spelled "dreamachine". you can probably find instructions on making a small and simple one on the 'net.

p.104
at least six times higher than the Great Pyramid of Cheops: Originally 147m high.
cretins like von Däniken: Yup.

p.105
Knowledge Above All:
Giant cuddly aliens: I suppose I can reveal at this point that the four statues previously mentioned on p.80 are the Teletubbies, as well as being the Vo'lach.  "Duquincy, who considered himself a fair amateur biologist, thought that the statues were Canopusi attempts to depict the forces of nature - earth, air, fire, water - as nothing that vividly coloured would stand a chance in evolutionary terms.  Peterson though the four statues indicated that the Vo'lach were quadra-sexual, and that the differently patterned horns or antennae might be sexual displays if not actual sex organs."  It's as clear as day.

p.106
Archimedes: Athenian philosopher who discovered the displacement of water while getting into the bath.  He ran through the streets naked, shouting "Eureka!", making him the butt of a particularly bad joke in Episode 1 of 'Planet of the Spiders'.

p.107
Cherenkov radiation: Cherenkov radiation is the electromagnetic radiation emitted by a charged particle moving through a medium with a velocity greater than the velocity of light in that medium.
Nostrum: A quack remedy.

p.108
8-DOCTOR AT LARGE: A book entitled Is There A Doctor In The House? inspired a film and television series with variations on titles involving the word"Doctor".  The book also inspired the discarded episode title for episode three of 'The Myth Makers', which ended up with 'Horse of Doom' instead of 'Is There A Doctor In The Horse?'.
the Negotiator: So the Vo'lach has replaced the Canopusian disguise with Dr Steadman.

p.109
The Three Musketeers: In The Three Musketeers the King's Musketeers fight the Cardinal's Guards when Cardinal Richelieu attempts a coup.  That's an extreme bare-bones of the plot describing the guars and the Cardinal.

p.111
intercontinental bullet train: 'Tempest', which takes place on such a train, was published only a couple of months after 'Ghost Devices'.
cauls: Some kind of membrane from the foetal sac, placenta or uterus
venom of the Defarg:
Scarlet Rite:

p.114
9-HIGH DUNGEON: High dudgeon is a feeling of deep anger, resentment or offense.

p.115
story of a man who went to hell:
Old Norse: Look at the next entries.
Middle Period Martian: Look at the next entries.
wolves eating the moon: In Norse mythology Fenrir was a ferocious wolf, the offspring of Loki and the giantess Angerboda.  The gods subdued him with a magical chain, Gleipher, but in the process he bit off the hand of the god Tyr.  In the great battle of Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, Odin (possibly represented by the Moon) will be devoured by Fenrir.  In Doctor Who Fenrir is represented by Fenric from 'The Curse of Fenric'.
years of the great sterility: Indeterminate period of Martian Ice Warrior history.  The Martians are an ancient and scientifically advanced race based on Mars, a more-or-less sterile planet.  'The Dying Days' explores some of the aspects of Martian sterility.

p.116
glossolalia: The faculty or practice of speaking in tongues.
actinic blowtorch: The ability of electromagnetic radiation to produce chemical changes is called an actinic property.  Actinic rays range from the ultraviolet to infrared.  The actinide elements are the 14 chemical elements that follow actinium in Group IIIB of the Periodic Table.  Because of some chemical similarities, actinium is usually included in the series.  All of the actinides are radioactive, because their nuclei are so large that they are unstable and release great amounts of energy when they undergo spontaneous fission.

p.117
Chaucer's time: (1340-1400)
Ulgra scales:

p.119
infinite: We have a bit of a handicap understanding this word.  If something is infinite, doesn't it exist at the expense of everything else?  So the universe can be infinite, but if anything else is infinite it has to either be reflected in everything or destroy everything except for itself.
rest masses: When it's at rest relative to another body, an object has rest mass.  When it hits something else at speed, it exerts force which makes its mass seem greater.  When it's travelling at relativistic velocity its mass is exponentially greater.
imaginary numbers: The square roots of negative numbers; just keep reading.
the scientists who worked on the V2s could have talked Hitler out of the holocaust by describing peaceful uses of rocketry: This is the second page in a row Fellows has thought of Hitler.  But yes, Werver von Braun, who designed the V2, is quoted as saying, after its first successful flight, "An excellent rocket, but it landed on the wrong planet."  Still, besides building the moon rockets, von Braun designed both the V2 and other American rockets used to deliver nuclear weapons after the war.  He didn't have much of an aversion to building better weapons of mass destruction, then.

p.120
rustin seed:  Don't know what it is, but it means that one of Mandir's most trusted officers who took the report from the guard that found the real Dr Steadman on p.113 doesn't understand irony.

p.122
10 - YOU CAN'T BE TOO CAREFUL WITH LIFE:
Conway-White standard text: Conway-White is a reference to the excellent Sector General novels whose main character is Dr Conway.
deep-gel cabinets: 'Cat's Cradle: Warhead' introduced a basic form of suspended animation used in the 21st Century, also seen in 'Warlock'.  Suspended animation is the result of immersion in a chemical gel which also acts as a local anaesthetic.
aspic: A savoury meat jelly composed of and containing meat, fish, game, hard-boiled eggs etc.  Eeeuurgh.
my current middle name is Mud: Surprise is Benny's real middle name; a joke on the part of her mother.  Unfortunately I can't find the reference.

p.123
Northern Cross, Epsilon Cygni: The northern constellation Cygnus, or the Swan, resembles a cross and is also known as the Northern Cross.  Sadr, from p.1, is in Cygnus.  Epsilon Cygni is also known as Gienah.  It marks the eastern arm of the cross.  Its distance from Earth is less than 100 light years; 75 by the estimate in Burnham's Celestial Handbook.
libations to Old Father Space and the Virgin Worlds: Virgin Worlds is an imprint of science fiction published by Virgin Books, who also produce the New Adventures.
"Up the Greasy Pole" and other zero-gee anthems: This is in the context of a greasy pole as an inanimate object.  Presumably the 100-light year radius from Earth is some kind of boundary in the same way that the Equator and the International Date Line are in the nautical tradition, an excellent opportunity for hazing the rookies.  Also see p.37 of 'Eye of Heaven'.

p.124
Lagrange-point: I don't understand the orbital mechanics that go into this, but basically there are several points in high earth orbit where an object with no relative velocity will stay without being attracted by the Sun or the Earth.  Different points are identified by numbers.  Joseph Louis de Lagrange was a mathematician who applied calculus to orbital mechanics.  He calculated that three bodies rotating as an equilateral triangle have stable orbits. Thus, if the Sun and Jupiter are taken as two vertices of a triangle, then positions 60 deg ahead and behind Jupiter in its orbit are stable.  Lagrange explained the Trojan asteroids, which linger at these points in Jupiter's orbit.  The first Trojan asteroid was found on Feb. 12, 1906. Now more than 1,000 are known, twice as many ahead of Jupiter as behind.
slice of Edam:  Edam is a Dutch cheese, characteristically ball-shaped and encased in red wax.
inverse-cube law: The relationship between the apparent brightness of a source of light and its distance is an inverse-square relationship.  At twice the distance, the light source is 1/8th as bright.  The cube relation is because of the three dimensions the light is radiating into.  If something is radiating out in only two dimensions, like a planet's gravity on the plane its moon orbits in, the relationship of its strength to its distance from the center of rotation is only inverse-square.  Subspace energy transmission is supposed to reduce the energy loss.  This method of transporting solar energy through subspace sounds like the Martian attempt to destroy the Jacksonville colony with the GodEngine in 'GodEngine', except that the technology was sufficiently advanced to be Osirian and not 23rd-Century Terran.

p.125
Val-bloody-halla: Valhalla is the palace of the Norse Gods.  The Vo'lach are like Norse Gods in that they encourage fighting.

p.127
poisonous sulphate crystals: Sulfur occurs in living plant and animal tissue as part of the chemical makeup of the amino acids cysteine, cystine, and methionine.  Organic sulfur compounds occur in garlic, mustard, onions, and cabbage and are responsible for the odor of skunks.
aerofoil: wing-shaped.

p.128
Roz: Late companion of the Seventh Doctor in the New Adventures 'Original Sin' through to 'So Vile A Sin'.  This is possibly the first reference to Roz in the Benny Books.

p.130
Purple Love Rocket:

p.133
'I've just never known an emulation get at its own underlying code.': Benny has become so fantastically self-doubting that she rewrites her own history with post-it notes and can tell when she's only being simulated.

p.134
11 - NOSTRADAMUS WAS RIGHT: Michael Nostradamus (Michel de Notredame, 1503-1566) was a French physician and astrologer whose predictions of the future have fascinated people for centuries.
Lizard King:  I thought that was Jim Morrison.  Interestingly, in  The Pharos Project's fanzine Singularity #2 there's an interview with Paul Cornell which includes this quote: "We've got a spirit channel working at Virgin.  They're channeling Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix and they're both writing a New Adventure together, it's called 'Night of the Living Guitars'.  It's a journey through the desert wilderness of the unconscious.  The quote on the back is going to be "I am the lizard king I can do anything" and it's going to be put out under the name Daniel O'Mahoney."

p.135
an exploding penguin: Does not look like that.  I'm sorry. (Text submitted by Carl Henderson) Probably a reference to the "Penguin on the Telly" sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus. The penguin in question, rather than being on television, was on top of the television, and would invariably explode.

p.136
the colour of radioactive iodine: Iodine-131 has a half-life of 8 days and concentrates in the thyroid gland.  It is a major component of nuclear fallout.  It's also used in tests on the thyroid gland using I-131 markers and radiation cancer therapy.
Going down for the third time: Cliché.
Bernice hoped for an afterlife that didn't involve giant bloomers, pantomime horses, working for God and thigh-slapping: The last time Bernice died, (which seems to be fast becoming one of her favourite pastimes) was in 'Oh No It Isn't!' when she was transported into a Perfecton cabaret.
orange Nixon: Well he certainly wasn't Red.
Colonel Zembasi: Zambesi River, passing through Zambia, Botswana and Mozambique, used as a Dictator's name?

p.138
'To coin a phrase, I think the Gods are dead.': Nietzsche first said God was dea at the turn of the century, and God-is-dead theologies have been around since the Sixties, based on experience in the Holocaust.
Monstro in the old Tri-Disney holovid: The Disney animated feature 'Pinocchio' (1940) featured Monstro the Whale, which swallowed Giapetto and Pinocchio before he became a real boy and lost that annoying nose.

p.141
complete absence of university proctors' helmets: Possibly a reference to an episode of Red Dwarf.  "Even three million years into deep space, you can expect to find [a traffic cone] after a good night on the ale.  But where the policewoman's helmet and the suspenders come from is anyone's guess." p.175 of The Red Dwarf Programme Guide by Chris Howarth & Steve Lyons.
whiskey chaser: I'm not a whiskey drinker, but a chaser is either the shot of whiskey itself or the water/ginger ale or whatever you send after the whiskey to cool your throat.
cyanic derivative: A cyanide is any chemical compound containing the CN group (a carbon atom linked to a nitrogen atom) such as sodium cyanide, NaCN, and hydrogen cyanide, HCN.  The simple ionic cyanides have chemical properties similar to those of chlorides, typically forming soluble salts.  When dissociation of these molecules occurs, a negative cyanide ion is released.  The simple ionic cyanides, most notably hydrogen cyanide, are extremely toxic to animals;  for humans, a dose of 100-200 mg is lethal.
nonreactive noble gases: Occupy the far-right column O of the Periodic Table of Elements.  Helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon and radon.  The outermost, or valent, electron shell of atoms of noble gases are fully occupied so the atoms have a reluctance to bond with other atoms.  Oxygen is unlike a noble gas in that it has a high affinity for chemical change and is actually very corrosive.  Without oxygen we couldn't have rust or hemoglobin.

p.142
Die Hardest: Ultimate fictional sequel to the Bruce Willis movies Die Hard, Die Hard 2: Die Harder and Die Hard 3: With A Vengeance.
matt black with little red LEDS: Matt black is non-glossy black, not a name.  LEDs are light-emitting diodes, like those little red lights on my modem.  Their advantage is that they don't burn out unless you overload them.
puce neutron bombs: See the entry on neutron bombs on p.98 of 'Deadfall'.  Puce is a flea-colour (blame the dictionary for the double-entendre), purplish brown or brownish purple.  Prepuce is another word for foreskin, which has its own undertones of sex and death.
sine-wave function in the air currents: Snore.  Or maybe a raspberry, a farting noise blown through the lips in derision.  A sine-wave is a standing wave, that is the wave seems not to travel except up and down, like a skipping rope.  Sine is also derived from trigonometry, but I doubt that's as easy as pi.
pink-bobble people of Houseparty IX: Possible reference to the House Party movies starring the comedy rap stars Kid 'N' Play.  There were less than nine movies.

p.143
1940s Berlin kosher butcher: The idea being that after the Holocaust, there were less Jewish people in Berlin than there were before.
endangered species in the deep ocean trenches: The area of the world's oceans called the deep sea is the largest habitat for life on Earth.
shit on the furniture: Is that a typo?

p.144
Meta-Kraken: Deep sea monsters like giant squids.  John Wyndham wrote a book called The Kraken Wakes in 1953.  The Zygons' Skarasen from 'Terror of the Zygons' is grammatically similar, but biologically different.
strontium-90: Strontium is a soft, silvery metal with physical and chemical properties similar to those of calcium.  Many radioactive isotopes of strontium are produced in nuclear reactors. Strontium 90, with a half-life of 28 years, is formed in nuclear explosions; because it accumulates in the bones, it is considered the most dangerous component of radioactive fallout.

p.145
'Bang thud?': Stereotypical sound effect associated with suicides with handguns, not necessarily murders.  For several amusingly macabre examples, see the sequence about passing the sherry in 'Roger of the Raj', an episode of Ripping Yarns, the Michael Palin comedy series (thanks, Stewart.)

p.146
12 - TURING TESTS: The Turing Test is a test of intelligence in computers.  If you can have a human conversation with them naturally, they pass the test and can be defined as intelligent.  The test was devised by Alan Turing, the computer scientist who ran the code-breaking section of the British Foreign Office during the Second World War.  He invented the Turing Test, had the Turing computer language named after him, but unfortunately broke anti-homosexuality laws and eventually killed himself.

p.147
customer culture: I've heard of cargo-culture.  That's the sort of culture Leela evolved from (on an SF basis).  Real cargo cultures were based on carho drops on Pacific islands during the War, or in the deep jungle during famine or war or something.  Customer culture is probably derived from service-industry-dependent societies which collapse back into the State of Nature.

p.149
Grand Synod: Meeting of high churchmen, the episcopacy.

p.150
button: This button looks like a definite product of Tubby-technology.

p.152
francium-223: Francium is a radioactive chemical element, one of the alkali metals in Group 1 of the periodic table.  Its symbol is Fr and its atomic number 87.  The atomic weights of Fr isotopes range widely;  the stablest isotope is called actinium-K, with a half-life of about 21 minutes.  That might be francium-223, which the author says has a 21-minute half-life.  Francium was identified in 1939, when Marguerite Perey discovered it as a product of actinium decay. Francium occurs in such minute amounts in nature that it cannot be isolated.  Many francium isotopes, all radioactive, are artificially produced.  I really can't comment on the pyrotechnics here.

p.153
chicken tikka: some kind of East Indian nibble;  see the entry on tikka on p.159 of 'Deadfall'.

p.157
piles of sanitized dust: Like the crew of the Red Dwarf in 'The End', first episode of Red Dwarf.  I get the feeling the author is a fan; what with this and a talking Air Vent slightly more interesting than Talkie Toaster.
Twelve Just Men: Twelve Angry Men was a 1957 film directed by Sidney Lumet, about a jury which can't reach a verdict.  In this remake half the jury are killer cyborgs from the future.  Deja vu?

p.159
13 - THE NUCLEAR WAY TO UNIVERSAL PEACE AND BROTHERHOOD: There's a Grateful Dead song with a title similar to this.

p.160
the remaining Vo'lach just topped themselves in droves: The Vo'lach committed suicide.

p.161
transparent aluminium: Unlike the transparent aluminum in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

p.162
signals in the nerves as if the missing limb was still there: Ghost impulses.  I've never heard of the computer equivalent.
war to end war: We've been there before; the First World War was the War to end all wars.
Talk about the mouths of babes and sucklings!:
"During the mating season?": The old Goon Show joke comes during a dance, with the pick-up line 'Do you come here often?' followed by the encouraging reply 'Only during the mating season.'  When some animals are in heat they get rowdy.
"That might is right?": Sure.  Seen it before in political theory.
"It was actually policy between the power blocs on my species' original world: Presumably during the Cold War, although possibly an improper use of metaphor; Benny just said the Vo'lach had been trying to keep other cultures at equal levels in order to deter aggression.  It's hard to argue for a third force in the Cold War; the different sides also had different arms dealers.  Maybe it's more appropriate in the détente phase of the conflict, with the START treaties et cetera, when both sides are backing down more than trying to outflank each other's technology.

p.163
the submarine dived deeper: Should that be 'dove'?

p.164
Canopusi's equivalent of the First Station of the Cross:The stations of the cross are a series of 14 representations that depict the events surrounding Christ's crucifixion. Used primarily by Roman Catholics as visual aids for meditating on the passion, they are mounted at intervals on church walls or placed in outdoor shrines. The idea of the stations emerged during the Middle Ages, when they developed as a devotional substitute for actually following the Via Dolorosa, the route in Jerusalem that Christ followed to Calvary.  The first station was where Christ was condemned by Pilate.  You're a bit early for crucifixion; read 'The Sword of Forever'.
an impression of podgy babyness, and quizzical faces surrounded by neon fur, and strange plush antlers or antennae, different in each case: Teletubbies!
"The worst thing they look as if they'd do to you is give you a mouthful of fur from too friendly a hug.": Again!  Again!
Gold star and bar:  I can't find the other recent reference to a gold star, butI decided it wasn't an Adric reference.  A gold star is just a medal, so is a bar.  It can also be a title, like letters after your name, meaning Barrister, which is a lawyer.

p.165
vast green meadow, spacious arched dome, about half an hour, giant telephone: How can you possibly miss the Teletubbies similarities?  I don't remember any flying window boxes from the show, though.

p.167
'Freshly oiled, too.': There have been an inordinate number of references to the sub's oily atmosphere, and other oily things.  I should warn you that oil has a bearing (whoops) on the outcome of the story.

p.168
14 - MYSTERY UNDER THE SEA:
REM sleep: Rapid Eye Movements signal deep sleep and dreams.  No idea if there's a standard interval.
He had doomed itself: What does that mean?

p.169
dumdum bullets: Dumdum bullets have crosses cut into their front ends so they spread out when they hit a target, causing more damage than they otherwise would.
medusa'd: Never heard that word used as a verb.  The Medusa was a beautiful woman with snakes for hair, who kidnapped Andromeda in an ancient Greek myth.  Perseus came and rescued her.  The snakes are represented by the multi-adaptor cables.  Oh, and Morry's here.
larks: Game.

p.170
Occam's Razor: Occam's razor is a logical principle attributed to William of Occam, although it was used by some scholastic philosophers prior to him. The principle states that a person should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything, or that the person should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed. Basically, keep it simple.  This principle is often called the principle of parsimony.

p.171
spiky scar tissue:  Hey, it's a reptile.  Or not.
greaves: Armour for the legs below the knees.
"waving flags of all nations and scattering paper flowers": Morry has fallen victim to the Vo'lach weapon disease.
rapture of the deeps: Psychological affliction native to Jacques Cousteau documentaries, where you prefer to stay on the ocean floor and die of hypoxia rather than surface.

p.174
cat's cradle: I probably put an entry on this into 'Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible'.
Heath-Robinson botch-up: Rube Goldberg contraptions are extremely complicated and hilarious apparati which do mundane jobs like wake you up in the morning.  Heath-Robinson botch-ups are possibly some kind of military gizmoes, but the Grolier doesn't have an entry. (Text submitted by Allen Robinson) A Heath Robinson device is exactly the same thing as a Rube Goldberg device.   There's no evidence that either was influenced by what the other was doing. Apparently it's just a case of two people coming up with the same idea at roughly the same time.
cubist sculpture: In 1909, Picasso began to create a cubist sculpture.  Other sculptors who followed in the cubist idiom were Aleksandr Archipenko, Henri Laurens, and Jacques Lipchitz.
"We've been the sport and playthings of dead assassins, creatures of metal and programming both ancient and modern.":

p.176
hither and yon:  In the bedtime train story of the Little Engine that Could, there are two towns called Hither and Yon. (Text submitted by Alan) Hither and Yon are archaic english words meaning 'here' and 'there'.

p.177
Vo'lach Wonder Lubricant: Ta-da!
 
p.180
Ninjucoid: The Ninjucoid acts like an N-Form here.  N-Forms have already been used in 'The Ghosts of N-Space' and 'So Vile a Sin', only different.  Since the most recent N-Forms were hyperdimensional assassins controlled by the forbidden Time Lords, this probably isn't one of them.
Dante's Inferno: See the entry on p.192 of 'Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible'.  Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), wrote the poetic masterpiece La Divina Commedia, or The Divine Comedy.  It was a first-person narrative in which Dante was guided by the Roman poet Virgil through the Underworld, or the Inferno.
deadfalls:  Well, it's the title of a book.   I thought a deadfall was a fallen tree.
roc's egg: A Roc is a mythical bird of Eastern legend, imagined as being of enormous size and strength.

p.181
juggernaut: An institution, practice, or notion to which persons blindly devote themselves, or are ruthlessly sacrificed.  The word originated around an idol of Krishna which was annually paraded through the streets of Orissa, under which some devotees are said to have thrown themselves.
the anoraked figure: Possibly an angel, like Clarence or the Dark-Haired Man from p.3.  But why the anorak?  And why haven't we seen this one before?

p.182
16 - WHEN I SAY RUN, RUN LIKE RABBITS: Favourite strategy of the Second Doctor when faced with giant blobby monsters etc.
'Surprisingly few life forms evolve an immunity to being shot,': Yeti, Cybermen, Autons, Ambassadors, Primords, Axons, Daemons, Daleks, Ogrons, Gell Guards, Maggots, Dinosaurs, Giant Robots, Krynoids.. no wonder the Brigadier says 'Are there any alien races which aren't immune to bullets?' in 'Robot'.  It's all a matter of perspective.

p.183
moorhen: The gallinule, or moorhen, G. chloropus, is an aquatic bird common everywhere except Australasia.  Its head shield is similar to the coot's.
the Emperor Claudius: Claudius (10 BC-AD 54) was Roman emperor from 41 to 54.  His full name was Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus.  He suffered from a kind of paralysis and was considered unfit for a public career.  Because of the paralysis he had a stutter, which Benny is referring to here.  When Caligula was assassinated in AD 41, Claudius also expected to be murdered.  Instead, the Praetorian guard proclaimed him emperor while the Senate was debating the possibility of restoring the republic.  Claudius married his niece Agrippina II and adopted her son Nero.  It is believed that Claudius was poisoned by Agrippina.  He is the subject of two novels by Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1934).

p.184
"Just leave me, no, no, you go on": Clichéd line in escaping from bad guys movies with somebody wounded.  It supports the hypothesis that Captain Johansen is not ex-military.

p.186
surprisingly advanced antigravity mechanism: Like in 'The Pirate Planet'.

p.187
doomsday weapons: THE Doomsday Weapon, from 'Colony in Space', was a Time Lord Secret Weapon.
broad bean: The name bean was originally applied to the broad bean, Vicia faba, also known as the Scotch, or Windsor, bean.  This bean is still widely grown in Europe but is little known in the United States.
David: In case you've forgotten, David Foreman first appeared on p.95.  The similarity of his surname to Susan's becomes important later on.

p.188
high-blast fusion bomb:  Nuclear weapons can be tailored for high or low blast or radiation.  Neutron bombs, sometimes known as cobalt bombs, have high radiation and low blast, so that while they don't knock down buildings they kill everyone inside and make the place uninhabitable, just in case anybody was thinking of invading in the aftermath and stealing all the hardware.  Fusion bombs use more clean hydrogen fusion than dirty fission of heavy metal isotopes, and produce more blast than radiation.  Here's a link to the  High Energy Weapons Archive to find out more, and check p.98 of 'Deadfall'.
reaction drive: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, which is Newton's Third Law of Motion.  All rockets, jets and kicks in the ass are reaction drives, but this design is an actual concept in space flight.

p.189
17 - UP, UP AND AWAY!: Clichéd Superman dialogue. (Text submitted by Allen Robinson) The phrase comes from the Superman radio show, where it was used as a quick way to let the audience know Superman was flying. It only became a cliche when the comics and the TV show, neither of which needed it, started using it regularly.
a billion Hiroshimas: Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons, the equivalent of 15 000 tons of TNT (trinitrotoluene, 'Battlefield' Episode 1).  15 000 * 1 000 000 000 = 15 000 000 000 000, 15 trillion kilotons or 15 billion megatons, or as the author puts it 25 million megatons; well maybe I got the kilotonnage at Hiroshima wrong. If I assume that 6 teratons is equal to 6 000 000 megatons, which was the explosive power of the biggest fragment of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter in July 1994, which would have killed all life on Earth, we begin to see that this entry has involved the most mathematics of any entry in the Bewildering Reference Guide.
over nine kilometres a second:  Sudden acceleration from full stop to nine kilometres per second would be rather traumatic.  Escape velocity from Earth's gravity is only 11.18 km/s.  The Space Shuttle takes ten minutes to accelerate to 7 km/s, and the g-forces from that are pretty uncomfortable; and the potential off all the fuel at takeoff is equivalent to a not insignificant nuke.  That's the problem with nuclear reaction drive; there's no smooth acceleration.  You coast for some time, then let off a nuke behind you and your acceleration spikes.  If you accelerate for ten seconds under the blast, and speed up by 9 km/s in that time, you accelerate by 900 metres per second every second, pushing your stomach neatly out of your bum.  I think the Factory has some kind of inertial damping field a la Star Trek, because Benny only feels 2 1/2 gees; so why doesn't the field do a better job?

p.190
10-km crater: Nikita Khrushchev once claimed to have a 100 megaton nuclear weapon which could produce a crater 107 metres deep and 2900 metres across.
chintz: That white furry stuff with black spots you see on royal robes and such.

p.191
muted-laser target pistols: The furore over the misuse of laser pointers is growing.
it had seen the future and it was woks: One of the most eminent American reformers and journalists around the turn of the 20th century, Joseph Lincoln Steffens, 1866-1936, was a leader of the Muckrakers.  As managing editor (1901-06) of McClure's Magazine, he wrote a series of articles that documented graft and corruption in American cities, asserting that some cities were run by political bosses who remained in power with the help of powerful businessmen.  After visiting the USSR and meeting Lenin in 1919, he wrote:  "I have seen the future and it works."
electromagnetic pulse interference: A side-effect of some asymmetric nuclear explosions or explosions carried out above the atmosphere is the electromagnetic pulse effect ('Battlefield' Episode 1, although there may be more detail in the novelisation.)  EMP affects unshielded electronics, blocking TV and radio signals, causing power surges, brownouts and power failures, wiping magnetic tape, etc.  In a high atmospheric nuclear test around 1960 the EMP was felt in Hawaii more than 900 km away.
antimatter: Antimatter is a form of matter in which each of the particles that compose ordinary matter--the proton, neutron, and electron--is replaced by its corresponding antiparticle, that is, the antiproton, antineutron, and positron, respectively.  Antiparticles have the same mass and spin as their respective particles, but they have opposite values of such electromagnetic properties as charge and magnetic moment.  Because of its opposite properties antimatter is highly unstable in contact with normal matter, and tends to annihilate itself in a release of all its potential energy, so that hand-held amounts are sufficient to destroy planets, or so we think.
fire retro-rockets = faster orbit: One of the contradictions of orbital mechanics is that to slow down, you have to speed up.  If you want to catch up with somethng ahead of you in your orbit, if you fire rockets to speed up you'll automatically drift into a higher orbit and slow down, missing the target.  If you fire retrorockets you drop into a lower orbit and speed up; then you just need to pop back up to the old orbit when you catch up with the target.  Docking with the Space Station isn't that easy.

p.192
Gamma-ray lasers: Gamma rays are similar to X-rays.  They're both very powerful and they are both created in nuclear explosions.  Gamma rays are also formed in antimatter reactions.  X-ray and gamma ray lasers are one-shot deals.  Like the Goldeneye thingy from that James Bond movie.  There's an atomic bomb at one end, and several metal rods run along its length.  When the bomb goes off, in the small amount of time before the laser gets destroyed gamma rays or X-rays get channelled through the metal rods and shot off towards the target in about a 1-degree spray cone.  Range is limited, but such devices have been considered as part of an anti-ballistic missile system on Earth.

p.193
far enough away from the planet's centre of gravity to activate the hyperdrive: In Star Trek you can't turn on the warp drive from far inside a solar system or near a planet, otherwise you fall into a wormhole.  It's mentioned in Star Trek: The Motion Picture when the Enterprise has to leave the solar system first, and even then they fall into a wormhole.

p.194
Kesenko-Klein Flux Sun Rippers:
CAUTION: FUGUE-LIKE NEXUS CONSEQUENCES MAY PRECEDE/FOLLOW OPERATION OF THESE WEAPONS: A fugue is a polyphonic composition constructed on one or more short subjects or themes, which are harmonized according to the laws of counterpoint, and introduced from time to time with various contrapuntal devices.  I have heard fugue used to describe high-tension situations when the fabric of the Universe begins to warp, but I can't find that in a dictionary.  It may be a misspelling of the word fuge, which means running away.  'A Day In The Life' from the Sergeant Pepper album and 'Revolution 9' from the White Album seem pretty fuguish in the indefinable sense.  A Nexus is a leaping-off point.  In their non-aggression treaty with the Time Lords, the People are forbidden from interfering in the Temporal Nexus, meaning the process of timelines in our galaxy centring around Gallifrey and, partially, Earth.
pear-shaped: Yeah, what does that mean anyways?

p.195
"They've got a bloody Dead Star."  "That's 'Death',": The Death Star from Star Wars.  So Johansen *has* been watching movies.

p.196
1996 Nobel Prize for Physics: The prize was awarded jointly to David M. Lee, Douglas D. Osheroff and Robert C. Richardson for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3. The significance of a superfluid, a liquid which behaves in strange ways, doesn't seem to have much connection to speculations about reality-warping armageddon weapons.  Perhaps the significance lies in the origin of the Nobel Prizes themselves, funded by the riches of Alfred Nobel, the guilty inventor of TNT or dynamite, arguably the first armageddon weapon.  I got the reference in a hurry from the back of 3001, so blame Arthur Clarke not me! (Later) Whoops, a check shows I should have written Nobel Prize for Chemistry!  The 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was jointly awarded to Robert F. Curl, Jr, Sir Harold W. Kroto and Richard E. Smalley for their discovery of fullerenes.
carbon-60 and Buckminster Fuller:The futurist Richard Buckminster Fuller, 1895-1983, achieved an international reputation as an inventor, designer, and philosopher.  His geodesic dome (first perfected in 1947) encloses a greater volume with less material than any alternative form and may well be the most significant structural innovation of the 20th century.  The interesting large, spherical carbon molecules that display geodetic form have been named fullerenes, or buckminsterfullerenes, or buckyballs, in his honor.
stable transuranic elements: Man-made radioisotopes created by transmutation of uranium.  The most common transuranic is plutonium.
dwarf-star matter: See p.79 of 'Deadfall'.
neutronium: Neutron star matter.  Neutron stars are the imploded cores of supernovas.  In a supernova explosion a star which has used up its nuclear fuel cools off.  It loses its buoyancy against its own gravity, which had been held at bay by the percolating fusion core.  The star implodes and then the outer layers explode.  The core left behind is a neutron star.  In the implosion the core was compressed to the point that its atoms were forced in to such a small area that their electrons collided with their nuclei, cancelling particle charges and forming neutrons.  Neutronium made up that big ship-eating thing (not the amoeba) in that episode of Star Trek (the original series).  It also made up the hull of the Dyson Sphere in 'Relics', that Next Generation episode with Scotty.  Actually it was carbon-neutronium; combining neutronium with buckyballs was too much of a temptation.
GUT force field: Grand Unifying Theories are one of those mysteries Stephen Hawking talks about.  Apparently cosmologists and particle physicists are trying to figure out how the fundamental forces of the Universe relate to each other.  That's gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force which governs radioactive decay.  There may be another fundamental force, but we haven't discovered it.  The scientists work out the relationships with particle accelerators in which they try to collide particles with the energy they would have collided with in the energetic Universe shortly after the Big Bang.  If they get energetic enough the particles break down, simulating the pre-particular fractions of a second after the Big Bang.  At the moment we can only push back as far as Planck Time (pronounced Plonk), 10^-43 seconds Afterwards.  That's the point where gravity separated from what became the other forces.  Before that point all the laws of physics break down, and we can't rewrite them without GUTs.

p.197
great-great-great grandfather: Morry is a descendent of Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes' nemesis last seen falling off the Reichenbach Falls grappling with Holmes.  Earlier, he appeared in 'All-Consuming Fire'.

p.198
"Smash the..": Typical revolutionary phrasing.
metsubishi paratecknika: Metsubishi probably describes a ninja strategy, because it's similar to Mitsubishi, the Japanese corporation.  Paratecknika is a latin derivative, and doesn't belong married into Japanese, although the latin meaning works with the description.

p.200
Los Hombres de Sombras:

p.201
PTO: Please Turn Over.

p.202
18 - THERE WAS DEATH FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE END OF TIME:
biological leech-weapons of the twenty-ninth century: I don't remember those from 'Original Sin' or 'So Vile A Sin', or any TV serials which probably took place in that century, like 'Terror of the Vervoids' or 'The Mutants' (2).
vermin tacticians of a future Europa: Either the Jovian moon or the reconstructed continent from 'Managra'.
masked tyrants of the new ice ages: The Ice Age from about the 29th Century in 'The Ice Warriors, except there weren't any faith viruses in it.  The million jihads sounds like Magnus Greel from 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang'.
Vandors: Vandor Prime from 'Mission: Impractical' had yet to be published, but the Last Doctor from 'Alien Bodies' could be the Insane God.  The Van Doos was a notable Canadian regiment, but I think they've been disbanded.
seventh vial:
Lizard Reich: Nazi reference.

p.203
Enochian codes:Enoch was the father of Methuselah, the Oldest Man in the Bible. Enoch is described as a holy man who "walked with God" (Gen. 5:24).

p.206
Wee Free Interregnum on New Scotland: Wee is Scottish dialect for small. (Text submitted by Alan) 'Wee Free' is a well known (at least in Scotland) branch of the church, known for a high degree of puritanism.

p.208
genome tax: Either everyone in the 26th Century is taxed for their genes, their children or their clones.

p.210
G.K. Chesterton:Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874-1936, was a versatile and iconoclastic English author equally at home in many genres.  He wrote novels, criticism, poetry, biography, and innumerable essays.  Possibly related to Ian.

p.211
latest Sex and Archaeology blockbuster: Is this a 'Beyond the Sun' reference?

p.215
Flying Dutchman:The Flying Dutchman is a three-act opera composed by Richard Wagner and first produced at the Dresden Opera House in 1843. Based on a legend Wagner found in Heinrich Heine's Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelwopski (1833), the opera is the story of a man doomed to wander the seas eternally in his ship The Flying Dutchman until he is redeemed by a woman's love.  The Flying Dutchman is also the name of a ship visited by the renegade Cyberleader Kroton in a DWM Comic, which was stuck in a time-loop.  Basically a ship which can never come back to port.

p.216
'ERETH, ERETH, ARO GOMEK ARU,': Sounds more like Logopolitan intonations than Tubby-language.
'1001011001001011101110110100100010011010.': Can anybody read binary?

p.217
19 - COVER STORIES: This page is the scene from the front page, so Benny isn't on the cover.  If the Factory is landing around the Spire like a sausage roll, then either the cover is a bit wrong or it encircles the Spire higher up its length.

p.218
"I doubt it's full of..": But it is.  The Factory, that is.

p.220
nictitating membranes: Winking.
Revised Pentacostalist: Pentecostalism, a worldwide Protestant movement that originated in the 19th-century United States, takes its name from the Christian feast of Pentecost, which celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples. Pentecostalism emphasizes a postconversion experience of spiritual purification and empowering for Christian witness, entry into which is signaled by utterance in unknown tongues.

p.223
Banquo's Ghost: In M*cb*th, the Scottish play by Shakespeare, Banquo gets murdered by Macbeth, and his ghost comes back to haunt him.

p.225
20 - KILL THE DOG ON SUNDAY:

p.226
corn-king:

p.228
shit on a unicycle: typo, or South Park reference?

p.230
sonic booms: You don't hear a sonic boom whenever an aircraft breaks the sound barrier.  You hear it when the shockwave trailing out behind it passes you.  If the planetbusters are travelling just under the speed of sound they're still creating shockwaves, just not quite as pounding.
'The past is another country; we send our nuclear waste there.': (Text submitted by Alan) play on the opening line of 'The Go Between'.
Drop a bomb into a time machine, and send it back towards when and where the machine was built: It's been done, in 'Cold Fusion'.
gravitational field of a collapsar would have retarded time: Falling into a black hole, you accelerate to near the speed of light.  Relativistic effects make it appear to an outside observer that you are slowing down and gaining mass until you hit lightspeed, appear to stop, and appear to become so massive as to be a black hole at the same time as you hit the black hole.  Black Holes can affect time.

p.232
a million years hence: So it couldn't be the Time Lords, because they live in the past.  It could be the People, because they live at least a million light-years away, except that God does all of their dial-watching for them, unless it's just an IG watching.  Maybe it's Faction Paradox from 'Christmas on a Rational Planet' or 'Alien Bodies'; they love this sort of thing.  Maybe it's the Enemy or the Celestis from 'Alien Bodies'.

p.233
Veltrochi (sic) Love-In Groove Collective: The Veltrochni are a warlike race which look like a cross between the 'Alien' movies and the 'Predator' movies, created by David A. McIntee.  They annihilate the Tzun early in the Third Millennium and appear in 'The Dark Path' and 'Mission: Impractical'.

p.235
Death Marshal Falaxyr: Martian Grand Marshal Falaxyr was responsible for starting the Thousand Day War against Earth, a stunning defeat for Mars.  In 2157 he negotiated with the Daleks for Ssor-arr duss Ssethissi in 'GodEngine'.  Martians can live a long time, so the longevity isn't a problem between 22nd and 26th Century, especially because Falaxyr doesn't die in the Dalek blockade anymore.
Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief: (Text submitted by Alan) Child's rhyme to determine the profession of a girl's future husband.

p.236
contemporaneous dinosaurs: E.R. Burroughs, read 'Down'.
Watchmakers: Universal watchers from the imagination of one insane character in 'Christmas on a Rational Planet'.  So they're real.  Are they the Time Lords?  Or are they even more powerful?

p.237
planks with nails in them: favourite weapon of the slobbering halloween aliens from The Simpsons.
Jonbar Hinge Incident:
wonderwalls: Meant something to George Harrison, as he called one of his albums Wonderwall.  Then Oasis came out with a single.
Pikelets: (Text submitted by Alan) thinner version of a crumpet, served toasted.

p.238
Hrgrhrgrtrt:
Grandfather Paradox: Aha!
crystallized time: According to the Doctor Who New Adventures Writer's Guide, TARDIS theory has it that alternative possibilities are fluid until the TARDIS arrives and we have an adventure.  When the TARDIS leaves time becomes fluid again, but those moments stay crystallized and the fluidity still has to lead up to and agree with the next crystallization.

p.241
metatext: Some kind of poetic descriptive to do with the flow of the text, being more than the sum of its parts.  I think. (Text submitted by Carl Henderson) Actually writings about writings--like this Guide. Ties in with the whole "is Benny a fictional character" bits throughout the book.

p.243
side-effects: Alcohol and pills.  Hoo boy.

p.244
why do galaxies cluster together when the visible matter in them isn't enough to prevent them flying off into the void?: Dark matter.  Matter we can't see.  Or maybe some other force.  Hell, we don't even have reasonable models of how galactic arms rotate without winding up.  Most current theories of dark matter centre on rogue planets and brown dwarfs (MAssive Compact Halo Objects, MACHOS) and Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs).  Neutrinoes could be a form of WIMP if some of them have mass, but I don't know if anybody 's thought of tachyonic matter.
Why is the expansion rate of the universe so finely balanced?: Which explains the red and blue symbols.  I did a lot of cosmology in the entry on 'Timewyrm: Apocalypse'.

p.245
quasars: Well, a better explanation of them would also be useful.  But Christopher H. Bidmead may already have been there.  There's a quasar in the constellation Casseiopeia, and in 'Logopolis' the Master points the Pharos radiotelescope at a Charged Vacuum Emboitement in that constellation.  Maybe quasars are CVEs to E-Space.
Paul Dirac:The English physicist Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, 1902-1984, made significant contributions to the development of quantum mechanics.  Dirac's fame stems from his formulation in 1928 of a mathematical description of elementary particles that accords with both quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. Because of his contributions to the understanding of elementary particles, Dirac is considered to be one of the founders of modern quantum electrodynamics.  Dirac was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, the same post Newton and Hawking have held, at Cambridge from 1932 to 1969 and professor of physics at Florida State University, from 1971 until his death. In 1933 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics with Erwin Schrödinger.  He also accurately predicted the existence of antimatter.

p.246
endless clatter of dice that so horrified Einstein: Rejecting Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and probabilistic quantum mechanics, Einstein fudged and said God does not play dice.  Stephen Hawking's riposte was that not only does God play dice, but he sometimes hides them where we can't see them.
Time travellers: Like the Doctor.
future cops: Like Chris and Roz.
cosmic hoboes: She never met the Second Doctor in any book yet published.
Now I don't know if they still exist: So Benny may effectively have written herself out of the Whoniverse.  How convenient.
skycities and Empire: 'Original Sin'.
Federations: After the fall of the Imperium Humanum the Federation starts up, a much more humane gathering of humans and aliens.
peace treaties between galaxies: Bernice has violated the Temporal Nexus and committed an offense against the Time Lords.  This may be the beginning of the war predicted in 'Walking to Babylon' or the one referred to in 'Alien Bodies'.

p.247
half-rug poisoned by British Intelligence: I don't know if Hitler was really into chewing scenery.  Don't know if British Intelligence tried to get him at all.  Sounds more like a CIA-Castro plot.