Dr Who - Journey into Time
Obverse Books charity anthology
Mission to Kembel
The Citizens of VOR
The Singing Sands
Journey into Time
The Flavajasibabaplaptica
The Silurian Plague
The original plan was to call this book Dr Who and the Silurian Plague. So glad we changed the title. This was the rough cover I did for the original title.
Six adventures for Dr Who...
A jungle planet with terrible secrets, a doomsday plague, an overly regulated world, a deadly trip to the beach, a celebration that gets out of hand and a trip sideways in time... just some of the challenges faced by Dr Who, accompanied by Susan, Tom and Louise.
Going beyond time and space, just one universe isn’t enough for Dr Who.
Notes:
I didn't write all of the stories in this book. In fact, the plan was for me to only write one, the novelisation of the lost 1960s Cushing Dr Who radio play, Journey into Time (which most of us only learned about in the last few years but which actually was a real thing.
As events transpired, I had to write three of the six stories because the writers who had volunteered to do two of them were too busy to make the deadline. That was fine, because I had a couple of ideas sitting in reserve. I was really pleased that the first set of four books had enthused other pro writers enough that they had volunteered to give up their time and talent to do a story for the book, even though they wouldn't be credited, at least at the time. The Silurian Plague was a story I'd considered for a movie. I think it could have been a good movie, too, especially once I knew that the Derbyshire energy plot from TV was jettisoned and the focus was on the plague. I have also long harboured the urge to do a historical set during the Silurian domination of Earth. Telling a story in 25 minutes on radio rather than a 100 minute movie did means stripping things down to basics but I think it came off rather well. Modest, ain't I? I really like Fury From The Deep. Victor Pemberton wrote a great script there. I liked his LP story The Pescatons, too, and later I got to like his radio play, The Slide. When I was thinking about the writers who might have been available to do scripts for the radio series, Victor Pemberton was high on my list. There was a bit of a watery theme to a lot of his work so I set this one at the beach.
Which brings me to the question of why the books were credited to aliases. Well, that goes back to the first set of books being for Tommy Donbavand. The books were about him, not whoever had written them He was what mattered and I preferred using an alias so that the focus was totally on Tommy.
The background meta narrative for the anthologies was that they were adapting a Dr Who radio series, aired by the BBC in the early 1970s, which had 25 minute episodes and limited casts. The books would novelise multiple stories in the same way the Star Trek and Space 1999 novelisations did back in the 1970s. I thought that would help place these as being from the 70s, and I think it worked.
A jungle planet with terrible secrets, a doomsday plague, an overly regulated world, a deadly trip to the beach, a celebration that gets out of hand and a trip sideways in time... just some of the challenges faced by Dr Who, accompanied by Susan, Tom and Louise.
Going beyond time and space, just one universe isn’t enough for Dr Who.
Notes:
I didn't write all of the stories in this book. In fact, the plan was for me to only write one, the novelisation of the lost 1960s Cushing Dr Who radio play, Journey into Time (which most of us only learned about in the last few years but which actually was a real thing.
As events transpired, I had to write three of the six stories because the writers who had volunteered to do two of them were too busy to make the deadline. That was fine, because I had a couple of ideas sitting in reserve. I was really pleased that the first set of four books had enthused other pro writers enough that they had volunteered to give up their time and talent to do a story for the book, even though they wouldn't be credited, at least at the time. The Silurian Plague was a story I'd considered for a movie. I think it could have been a good movie, too, especially once I knew that the Derbyshire energy plot from TV was jettisoned and the focus was on the plague. I have also long harboured the urge to do a historical set during the Silurian domination of Earth. Telling a story in 25 minutes on radio rather than a 100 minute movie did means stripping things down to basics but I think it came off rather well. Modest, ain't I? I really like Fury From The Deep. Victor Pemberton wrote a great script there. I liked his LP story The Pescatons, too, and later I got to like his radio play, The Slide. When I was thinking about the writers who might have been available to do scripts for the radio series, Victor Pemberton was high on my list. There was a bit of a watery theme to a lot of his work so I set this one at the beach.
Which brings me to the question of why the books were credited to aliases. Well, that goes back to the first set of books being for Tommy Donbavand. The books were about him, not whoever had written them He was what mattered and I preferred using an alias so that the focus was totally on Tommy.
The background meta narrative for the anthologies was that they were adapting a Dr Who radio series, aired by the BBC in the early 1970s, which had 25 minute episodes and limited casts. The books would novelise multiple stories in the same way the Star Trek and Space 1999 novelisations did back in the 1970s. I thought that would help place these as being from the 70s, and I think it worked.