Second paragraph of third story (“The Tunnels to Heaven”, by Andy Bodle):
All was still but for the occasional passing functionary. The Reminder Screens were projecting the same old slogans. The Facilitator at the desk was reciting her Tenets as if today were a day like any other.
A set of short stories about Bernice Summerfield’s life before she joined the Doctor. Most of them are OK; the first (“Biology Lesson on Mal Oreille”, by Xanna Eve Chown, a Malory Towers spoof)) and last (“Thirty Love”, by Eddie Robson, in which she tries to explain tennis) are rather good; the second last (“Blood On The Tracks”, by Andy Lane) is an outstanding tale of searching for an artifact which turns out to be more than we have been told, at least for Benny. For Benny continuity buffs really, but enjoyable. You can get it here.
Next up is Bernice Summerfield and the Vampire Curse, by Mags L Halliday.
Obvious “save” (if this were the Who discontinuity, say, and we needed to gloss it somewhat less breathlessly in a subsequent novel) one could simply add some Lumping to the Periods of Splitting. After all, the Russian component had several subsidiary levels of federalisation, so hardly inconceivable to do the same with the Caucasians, the Central Asians, etc.
But in the spirit of Dave Gorman and having a look at what that’s done to the graph, one would think that any SF writer worth the name would plot the available data, and do some sort of best-fit analysis to a power-law curve, as a starting point. And then chose the number they wanted to use in the first place.