A couple of my upcoming projects have been announced in different places. The latest issue of the Big Finish magazine Vortex includes a little feature about The Space Race, a story due for release in October this year. It’s the middle instalment of a trilogy of stories set in November 1963, and takes as it inspiration the competition between the USA and the USSR to be the first into space. It’s set at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and I can’t really say any more than that without spoiling any of the surprises. But tonally it’s quite a modern, punchy, hard-science fiction, rather than being an attempt to recreate any previous TV era. So place your orders for that now.
The other thing that’s just been announced is a Tom Baker
story for release in May 2014 (if we’re all still here) called Last of the
Colophon. It also features Louise Jameson as his companion Leela, Gareth Thomas
as Morax, Jessica Martin as Sutton, and Blake Riston as Kellaway, amongst others.
Again, it would probably be unwise to go into too much detail now, it’s over a
year away (and was written over a year ago!) but, well, it’s intended as a kind
of homage to Robert Holmes, an attempt to capture his style. Before writing it,
I not only re-absorbed his Doctor Who works, but got a friend to lend me all
his Blake’s 7 episodes too, not so that I could include references
or repurpose particular lines, but just to pick up a few pointers. So the fact
that it included the actor who played Blake of Blake’s 7 was a pleasing irony.
Unlike The Space Race, it was very much an attempt to recreate that era of Doctor
Who, even down to imagining what the sets would look like and how they would
have been lit had it been made back in 1977. They would probably look much like the one you see above. So place your orders for that now too.
