Backwards Traveller

There’s a new Essential Doctor Who Magazine special out now. Alongside many fascinating and fact-revealing articles there are two by me; one what happened to the idea of doing ‘sideways’ stories in the William Hartnell era, and one about the Blinovitch Limitation Effect.

Both articles were fun to do. The ‘sideways’ article involved detailed reading of some Doctor Who paperwork (printed in the magazine) and, I think, discusses a ‘sideways’ episode which has hitherto been overlooked, while the Blinovitch article also involved putting aside some received fan wisdoms and casting a fresh-eyed look at how the TV series has referred to this ‘law’ of time travel. It doesn’t work in quite the way I thought it did.

Most fun of all, for the ‘sideways’ article I came up with five stories extrapolated from the ideas in the production paperwork. It’s actually quite tricky to do – I’ve written a couple of other ‘sideways’ stories for the first Doctor, you can even read one of them here.

Anyway, it’s a great magazine, please rush out and buy.