The Tomorrow People - Children of the Evolution
Chinbeard Books/Oak Tree Publishing 2024
John, Elizabeth, Stephen and Mike find themselves facing a deadly attack, the origins of which stretch back decades and reach out beyond Earth.
John is fascinated by a forthcoming exhibition about human evolution at a major London museum, where Professor Marchwood seems to know more than he should. How has Marchwood gone from a derided joke in the scientific community to a genius in such a short time? And why is he so interested in telepaths?
Investigating these questions puts the Tomorrow People in danger and sends them across the planet to the roof of the world where terrors and surprises lie in wait for them... Notes: It is entirely possible that I had the title for this book before I actually had a story. It's a 70s glam rock pun... I worked on comics for 30 years and the 70s was when I first heard music... my brain is wired that way. However... the title did present a lot of questions. The Tomorrow People genuinely are children of the evolution, but that process in itself had a lot of questions baked in to it. Evolution is not an immediate process... it's about mutations that take and continue. That would mean there are mutations that don't take and don't last. And then there's the question of thos who are left behind because they don't have the advantage of the benefits of evolution, and a fear that would come from that. There's a lot of interesting stuff in there for drama, but I also had to remember that this had to fit comfortably and easily among episodes of a 1976 TV series on an ITV kids' show budget. I stretched that in places, but I did write the story as a four part script before novelising round that so that I could be sure the length of episodes was right, the tone was right and it could just about be done in an ITV studio in the mid 1970s. Even the HImalayas were do-able... Basil Brush managed it on a BBC Saturday tea-time budget.
John is fascinated by a forthcoming exhibition about human evolution at a major London museum, where Professor Marchwood seems to know more than he should. How has Marchwood gone from a derided joke in the scientific community to a genius in such a short time? And why is he so interested in telepaths?
Investigating these questions puts the Tomorrow People in danger and sends them across the planet to the roof of the world where terrors and surprises lie in wait for them... Notes: It is entirely possible that I had the title for this book before I actually had a story. It's a 70s glam rock pun... I worked on comics for 30 years and the 70s was when I first heard music... my brain is wired that way. However... the title did present a lot of questions. The Tomorrow People genuinely are children of the evolution, but that process in itself had a lot of questions baked in to it. Evolution is not an immediate process... it's about mutations that take and continue. That would mean there are mutations that don't take and don't last. And then there's the question of thos who are left behind because they don't have the advantage of the benefits of evolution, and a fear that would come from that. There's a lot of interesting stuff in there for drama, but I also had to remember that this had to fit comfortably and easily among episodes of a 1976 TV series on an ITV kids' show budget. I stretched that in places, but I did write the story as a four part script before novelising round that so that I could be sure the length of episodes was right, the tone was right and it could just about be done in an ITV studio in the mid 1970s. Even the HImalayas were do-able... Basil Brush managed it on a BBC Saturday tea-time budget.
THE TOMORROW PEOPLE AND ME...
The Tomorrow People was one of my favourite shows as a kid. Watching them really made my imagination fly. Loved the show. So, I jumped at the chance when I was asked to write for Big Finish's audio series based on the series but BF had the licence pulled before we got into seriously scripting the story. I thought my chance of writing the Tomorrow People had gone... and then the opportunity to write this book came along and I jumped at it. I almost had Hsui Tai in it as well, but there was no real point to her being there.
However, The Devil's Teeth, my novella for the second series of Tomorrow People books certainly did give me the chance to write for Hsui Tai.