Have you bought Doctor Who: Voyage To Venus from Big Finish yet? If not, I urge you to do so. Not only is it an excellent story, featuring the sixth Doctor, Colin Baker, facing the fearsome fauna of an alien jungle, not only does it feature Professor George Litefoot and Henry Gordon Jago, portrayed by Trevor Baxter and Christopher Benjamin, not only does it guest-star Juliet Aubrey out of Primeval, and not only did I write it, but – until the end of the year – it’s available for only £1 for download or £5 for the download and a physical CD. Any cheaper and Big Finish would be paying you to take it off their hands. It’s part of a sort of market-test, to see if lowering prices will reduce internet piracy and increase sales; so if you want Big Finish to do more low-priced releases, then you should buy this one to show support. And then buy Doctor Who: Voyage To The New World too.
Reading the preview for it in Doctor Who Magazine, Matthew
Sweet, the writer of Voyage To The New World, comments that both the stories
play on ideas of colonialism, which struck me as being typically astute of him. As I
wrote Voyage To Venus so long ago* I’d actually forgotten this aspect of it,
but it was a conscious theme; having our heroes consider laying a claim to
Venus under a union jack; the relationship with the ‘colonial’ Venusians and
the native Thraskins (used as servants, or ‘Wallahs’); the way that hunting treats
an environment as a place of entertainment for a governing elite, with the
collection of trophies; the visit to the native swami. This also draws on the
works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, where Mars and Venus are exotic climes which are
basically analogues of Africa, telling Boy’s Own adventure stories with an obvious colonial mindset.
As I recall, around the time I was writing it I read CS Lewis’ Out Of The Silent Planet, which bored me rigid and so was not a great influence, and Olaf Stapledon’s Last And First Men, which I enjoyed greatly and found very inspiring. I also had in mind HG Wells’ The Time Machine, and the idea of humanity evolving into two distinct species along class lines, the Eloi and the Morlocks. In Voyage To Venus, a race has (artificially) evolved along lines of gender, which felt like an original idea when it occurred to me, even if it’s been done before. There’s also some Jules Verne in there, as well as some Proper Science.
Of course, the story also has the normal thrills and spills
you’d expect from a Doctor Who story, and various in-jokes, including an
allusion to a memorable cover of Doctor Who Weekly. This sort of thing amuses
me greatly so hopefully it will amuse you too. It's also a bit of a 'Christmas Special'. So, please, download today,
without delay!
(I previously blogged about Voyage To Venus earlier, here)
(I previously blogged about Voyage To Venus earlier, here)