The Wilderness Years Novels that never were
Feb 19, 2017 0:32:41 GMT
whiskeybrewer, seeley, and 3 more like this
Post by aztec on Feb 19, 2017 0:32:41 GMT
Inspired by nucleusofswarmv2's thread about unmade BF stories, I thought I'd start one about the unmade novels from the wilderness years, again I've found some interesting old threads on Gallifreybase and I thought's I'd post some extracts below (if you aren't a GB member it might worth registering just to be able to search the forums, the actual threads would probably make more sense to read in context rather than reading extracts quoted in random order below):
''The Books that never were'' (this thread dates from August 2009, extracts quoted below:)
gallifreybase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11024
Apologies if that reads as a bit confusing, literally just copied and pasted the most relevant posts from the thread.
There was also this thread 'Rejected Who Novels' which dates from 2012:
gallifreybase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=140546
''The Books that never were'' (this thread dates from August 2009, extracts quoted below:)
gallifreybase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11024
I remember in the past books that were announced but never materialised, such as Rebecca Levene's Freaks.
Well, there was Lance Parkin's Enemy of the Daleks - there was a synopsis printed in a convention booklet a few years back. The Daleks, having only read Alien Bodies, are labouring under the delusion that they're the Enemy fighting the Time Lords in a future Time War. Then the real Enemy turn up and kick their behinds.
The other ones that I always remembered were the two linked NAs that Jim Mortimore and Paul Leonard were going to write. Mortimore's seemed to have become his PDA Eye of Heaven, but what became of Leonard's Conjunction? And what was it about?
Oh - there was Lawrence Miles' There Are Worse Things Than Angels and Valentine's Day. God, I wish they'd done Valentine's Day...
And his insane idea for a linked six-book cycle of non-canonical Doctors - Requiem, I think it was called. And Beneath the Planet of the Spiders - IIRC that was going to be him and Simon Bucher-Jones doing the novel that followed on from the Third Doctor's regeneration in Interference. Though they might've been joking about it!
IIRC, Valentine's Day was going to feature Daleks, and start one day after the Eighth Doctor's 100-year exile on Earth ended, covering the next 100 years - the Doctor withdraws from the universe and begins training up a replacement, but the replacement ends up becoming a dangerous Time's Champion sort, and has to be put down. That bit ended up evolving into Sabbath from The Adventuress of Henrietta Street.
Requiem was... well, here's the man himself to explain it:
(The GB poster quotes from a linked website interview with Lawrence Miles, which appears to be this one: www.curufea.com/doku.php?id=faction:factionfinal&s[]=faction&s[]=final)
Mmmm... most of these were submissions that were rejected for one reason or another though. You got authors bandying about potential future submissions on a monthly basis in TV Zone and DWM in the 90s.
...As far as I can remember the only two I can remember that were announced and then pulled were Campaign and Freaks, the first cancelled because Jim Mortimore didn't write the novel the BBC were expecting, the second because Bex Levene got a far better paying TV gig. Oh, and of course the original So Vile A Sin, which Kate Orman stepped in to complete at the last minute, and then in the Bernice range The Mary-Sue Extrusion, which was a title originally submitted by Kate, but for whatever reason she ended up being unable to write it and so because the title itself had been announced, Dave Stone stepped in with what I understand to be a totally different story under that name.
(Jonathan Blum replied to the above paragraph with the following: Basically yeah -- the way I recall it was something like this:
Virgin: Do you want to do a book in the next batch of Benny books?
Kate: Sure! I've got a vague idea.
Virgin: We'll need a title for the promotional stuff.
Kate: The Mary-Sue Extrusion.
Virgin: Great.
Kate: When do you need the outline?
Virgin: We'll get back to you.
Months pass. In the meantime, "Unnatural History" gets commissioned. (Plus, Kate got sick during the Sydney water scare of '98, and was generally running at half-power for months.) Then:
Virgin: We finally got the go-ahead to commission you for Mary-Sue Extrusion. You've got two months to get it in.
Kate: *emerges from under a heap of half-finished "Unnatural History" pages* WHAT?
I think Dave Stone did a stunning job under those circumstances!
Cheers,
Jon Blum
)
...IIRC Enemy of the Daleks wasn't dropped because its storyline was deficient, though - I think it was a combination of Lance not having the time to write it, and the Nation estate demanding loads of money for the use of the Daleks. A pity, because there were some really neat ideas in there (and one very cruel gag - the Daleks build a robot duplicate of the Eighth Doctor, but because the only time they met him was in the John Peel Dalek novels, he's only able to spout dialogue from those stories - "Obeying evil orders is wrong!").
ISTR back in the day, in DWM's occasional interviews with book authors and editors that Daniel Blythe had a story about privatisation in the pipelineRedemption's Dawn, and Kate Orman had a title for a story, Empty Spaces. Ben Aaronovitch mentioned a story called Nightfall that may or may not have developed into Transit. Ditto Marc Platt with a few never-realised story ideas. Not to mention buzz about eric Saward novelising his dalek stories and working on Robert Holmes' Return of the Autons. *Sigh* Those were the days!
Oh, didn't Jon Blum have a Seventh Doctor PDA in the pipeline called The Why Knot? Always loved that title. {Jon Blum replied: It would have been an eighth Doctor book (the followup on the whole Daniel Joyce thing). And someday it may yet be an original novel -- I just have a couple of other books I've promised to write with other people to get out of the way first!
Cheers,
Jon Blum}
There was going to be a Barry Letts-Terrance Dicks UNIT vs Daleks novel, and a 'biography' of the Daleks in addition to the published Survival Guide.
Oh, and what about Mike Tucker's Dalek PDA, Timeraker? (David A Mcintee later says in the thread: ''None at all (idea what the plot was going to be), other than that there might have been human-Daleks in it (cos when I pitched a story to Justin involving such a thing, he said that was already covered in Timeraker) Hmm, intriguing. Pre-figuring Evolution of the Daleks by quite some time. At a push, I'll wager it was for the 7th Doctor and Ace...?
Actually ISTR some mention of it being a Pertwee story, but I could be wrong. Mine ended up (much, much changed and watered down) as bits of Unregenerate for BF'')
I seem to remember that the second batch of NS novels was meant to have one by Mike Tucker, with the Eccleston/Rose/Jack line-up. "Rain of terror", maybe?
I think it got pulled in favour of Stealers of Dreams though, so can't complain too much! (Another GB member replied: It wasn't so much "pulled in favor of Stealers of Dreams", as it was pulled because Mike Tucker was too busy with his day job (quite possibly working on Doctor Who!) to write the book. Dreams was the replacement, though.)
David A McIntee lists several later in the thread:
Moebius Trip - two universes inside each other, with a psychoreactive semi-sentient planet in the middle. PDE said "think bigger." The Veltrochni were created for that.
30th Anniversary story- Susan returns as a villain, trying to give the Tzun (who were insects in that pitch) time travel.
Getting rid of Ace- A two-Ace time paradox spaghetti western (with Glitz in the role of Tuco) in which good Ace lets badass soldier Ace kill her in a gunfight so she won't become badass soldier Ace (who by this point is working for the bad guys)
5th Doctor story - There was a 5th Doctor story about Street Children in Brazil, in which Turlough gets tortured a lot. This is the one that got the response about an hour after sending it in of "I like this so much that I commissioned Keith to write it last week" - though the actual story is completely different than King Of Terror
Forever In A Day - Actually I might do this one in Shelf Life 2 or 3... Suffice to say involves an infinite number of Doctors. Cos while The Infinity Doctors is a great book I was disappointed that it didn't have infinite Doctors in it. This was a 3rd Doctor PDA... sort of.
(He expands on this later in the thread: Oh you don't know the half of it... Trying not to be too spoilery in case it ends up in a Shelf Life someday, it was set right after The Three Doctors and had a booby trap start an alternate timeline radiating out from the TARDIS is which the Doctor was never force-regenerated in Jon Pertwee and exiled to Earth - but instead of the change creating alternate futures, it creates alternate pasts for the Third Doctor, and as the effect spreads, there are more and more alternates. So you ended up with lots of alternate Third (and later, as some of the thirds have already got themselves killed and regenerated again) Doctors, and an older Second Doctor who had been imprisoned on Shada for centuries and gone stir crazy...)
Cybermen story - Simon Bucher Jones, Simon Forward and I had a couple of emails about Cybermen ideas which might have ended up being two linked books, mine and 8th Doctor and maybe a cowrite with SBJ. There would have been much about whether the Cybermen still had souls, militant Vatican cyber-hunting hit squads, African poverty, and the Cybermen going straight, as it were. Simon Forward was thinking of a 7th and Ace PDA.
The Lost Generation - Also might end up in Shelf Life 2 or 3, and if not it'll become a standalone original novel. Basically, the Doctor meets Anais Nin in 1920s Paris, and faces off against a Lovecraftian take on the Comte St Germain. This was the last DW story I pitched, and got lost (appropriately, given the title) in the void when the PDAs just stopped being commissioned.
There are probably some I'm forgetting, which were just one-line or one-paragraph ideas, but those are the main ones
And later in the thread:
Wasn't there another possible story u were going to do featuring The Fifth Doctor and the Ainley Master at one stage?
Oh, yeah, I forgot that one- Judgement Day. The idea was the Master was going to be executed for a crime he (amazingly) hadn't committed, and Nyssa wanted to get him off because some of her father might still be in there, and Tegan wanted him to fry. So it was companion vs companion. Actually the Master had deliberately framed himself in order to get the Doctor to bring down the justice system on that planet...
Don't remember if that was a book or BF proposal though- probably both. I think it was around the time of pitching The Eleventh Tiger, and that was definitely the preferred option
Iain McLaughlin later comments in the thread: Two books Claire and I did sample chapters and synopses for - and then in each case found that the range was ending so they were never pitched.
A Season 6B novella set in 1942 Stalingrad. Told from the point of view of a woman looking for her husband (an army sergeant) who has gone missing along with her two children. A really nasty horror with carnivorous aliens skulking around the wreckage of the city. This would have been pitched to Telos.
A 5th Doctor/Peri/Erimem historical in the stylee of a Rafael Sabatini adventure with the Doctor becoming a pirate, Erimem becoming a rival pirate captain, Peri becoming a Highwaywoman and all three of them at various points getting engaged to somebody - all of it by accident. It was meant to be fun and feel like an Errol Flynn movie. That would have pitched been for the PDAs. We had a lot of fun with this one.
Suddenly remembered two Kate Orman titles that were mentioned years back too - The Pinocchio Virus and The Empty House (at least I think that's what they were called). Since Kate and Jon post on this here forum, I wondered if they'd be willing to shed any more light on them? I think they were 6th Doctor proposals, which is even more intriguing. (Kate Orman replies: *wanders in*
Pinocchio Virus was a Sixth Doctor and Peri thing with robots gaining freewill. I can't remember off the top of my head what The Empty House was - a Seventh Doctor book, possibly that rubbish thing where he turns into a ghost and everyone thinks he's dead and TNG ended up doing the same idea. Or something.)
Several of the people in the thread mention a rumour Grant Morrison pitched an idea for the EDA's.
Cascade was Craig Hinton's first NA pitch, which would have featured a virus invading the Matrix and forcing the 7th Doctor and the Valeyard to team up and save Gallifrey. About ten years later this eventually evolved into Craig's original outline for Time's Champion, which was mostly retained for the final version I co-wrote (except the 7th Doctor with Ace and possible Benny became with 6th Doctor with Mel).
David, was it you who pitched a Cushing novel to JR, or was it another well established writer? I remember a conversation on the old Forum where one of the writers mentioned that JR had received a number of submissions for Cushing novels, including one from a well established writer from the range. I remembering that writer as being you but I may be mistaken.
McIntee replied: Maybe somebody else did as well, but I certainly discussed Doctor Who And The Crypt Of The Cyber Men with him on email...
He would have "regenerated" halfway through, into the more familiar Holmes/Baron Frankenstein Cushing, but you'd never be sure whether it was a regeneration or he'd just dyed his hair and shaved his moustache...
I remember reading somewhere (DWM?) that one of the NAs was going to end in a cliffhanger - basically a cannonball is shot into the TARDIS console room, destroying part of the console, leaving the reader to wonder for a whole month if one of the TARDIS regulars perished as well.
I think that was Eye of Heaven by Jim Mortimore, and Conjunction by Paul Leonard. The former obviously got reworked into the 4th Doctor PDA, but nothing seems to have come of Leonard's one.
Well, there was Lance Parkin's Enemy of the Daleks - there was a synopsis printed in a convention booklet a few years back. The Daleks, having only read Alien Bodies, are labouring under the delusion that they're the Enemy fighting the Time Lords in a future Time War. Then the real Enemy turn up and kick their behinds.
The other ones that I always remembered were the two linked NAs that Jim Mortimore and Paul Leonard were going to write. Mortimore's seemed to have become his PDA Eye of Heaven, but what became of Leonard's Conjunction? And what was it about?
Oh - there was Lawrence Miles' There Are Worse Things Than Angels and Valentine's Day. God, I wish they'd done Valentine's Day...
And his insane idea for a linked six-book cycle of non-canonical Doctors - Requiem, I think it was called. And Beneath the Planet of the Spiders - IIRC that was going to be him and Simon Bucher-Jones doing the novel that followed on from the Third Doctor's regeneration in Interference. Though they might've been joking about it!
IIRC, Valentine's Day was going to feature Daleks, and start one day after the Eighth Doctor's 100-year exile on Earth ended, covering the next 100 years - the Doctor withdraws from the universe and begins training up a replacement, but the replacement ends up becoming a dangerous Time's Champion sort, and has to be put down. That bit ended up evolving into Sabbath from The Adventuress of Henrietta Street.
Requiem was... well, here's the man himself to explain it:
(The GB poster quotes from a linked website interview with Lawrence Miles, which appears to be this one: www.curufea.com/doku.php?id=faction:factionfinal&s[]=faction&s[]=final)
Mmmm... most of these were submissions that were rejected for one reason or another though. You got authors bandying about potential future submissions on a monthly basis in TV Zone and DWM in the 90s.
...As far as I can remember the only two I can remember that were announced and then pulled were Campaign and Freaks, the first cancelled because Jim Mortimore didn't write the novel the BBC were expecting, the second because Bex Levene got a far better paying TV gig. Oh, and of course the original So Vile A Sin, which Kate Orman stepped in to complete at the last minute, and then in the Bernice range The Mary-Sue Extrusion, which was a title originally submitted by Kate, but for whatever reason she ended up being unable to write it and so because the title itself had been announced, Dave Stone stepped in with what I understand to be a totally different story under that name.
(Jonathan Blum replied to the above paragraph with the following: Basically yeah -- the way I recall it was something like this:
Virgin: Do you want to do a book in the next batch of Benny books?
Kate: Sure! I've got a vague idea.
Virgin: We'll need a title for the promotional stuff.
Kate: The Mary-Sue Extrusion.
Virgin: Great.
Kate: When do you need the outline?
Virgin: We'll get back to you.
Months pass. In the meantime, "Unnatural History" gets commissioned. (Plus, Kate got sick during the Sydney water scare of '98, and was generally running at half-power for months.) Then:
Virgin: We finally got the go-ahead to commission you for Mary-Sue Extrusion. You've got two months to get it in.
Kate: *emerges from under a heap of half-finished "Unnatural History" pages* WHAT?
I think Dave Stone did a stunning job under those circumstances!
Cheers,
Jon Blum
)
...IIRC Enemy of the Daleks wasn't dropped because its storyline was deficient, though - I think it was a combination of Lance not having the time to write it, and the Nation estate demanding loads of money for the use of the Daleks. A pity, because there were some really neat ideas in there (and one very cruel gag - the Daleks build a robot duplicate of the Eighth Doctor, but because the only time they met him was in the John Peel Dalek novels, he's only able to spout dialogue from those stories - "Obeying evil orders is wrong!").
ISTR back in the day, in DWM's occasional interviews with book authors and editors that Daniel Blythe had a story about privatisation in the pipelineRedemption's Dawn, and Kate Orman had a title for a story, Empty Spaces. Ben Aaronovitch mentioned a story called Nightfall that may or may not have developed into Transit. Ditto Marc Platt with a few never-realised story ideas. Not to mention buzz about eric Saward novelising his dalek stories and working on Robert Holmes' Return of the Autons. *Sigh* Those were the days!
Oh, didn't Jon Blum have a Seventh Doctor PDA in the pipeline called The Why Knot? Always loved that title. {Jon Blum replied: It would have been an eighth Doctor book (the followup on the whole Daniel Joyce thing). And someday it may yet be an original novel -- I just have a couple of other books I've promised to write with other people to get out of the way first!
Cheers,
Jon Blum}
There was going to be a Barry Letts-Terrance Dicks UNIT vs Daleks novel, and a 'biography' of the Daleks in addition to the published Survival Guide.
Oh, and what about Mike Tucker's Dalek PDA, Timeraker? (David A Mcintee later says in the thread: ''None at all (idea what the plot was going to be), other than that there might have been human-Daleks in it (cos when I pitched a story to Justin involving such a thing, he said that was already covered in Timeraker) Hmm, intriguing. Pre-figuring Evolution of the Daleks by quite some time. At a push, I'll wager it was for the 7th Doctor and Ace...?
Actually ISTR some mention of it being a Pertwee story, but I could be wrong. Mine ended up (much, much changed and watered down) as bits of Unregenerate for BF'')
I seem to remember that the second batch of NS novels was meant to have one by Mike Tucker, with the Eccleston/Rose/Jack line-up. "Rain of terror", maybe?
I think it got pulled in favour of Stealers of Dreams though, so can't complain too much! (Another GB member replied: It wasn't so much "pulled in favor of Stealers of Dreams", as it was pulled because Mike Tucker was too busy with his day job (quite possibly working on Doctor Who!) to write the book. Dreams was the replacement, though.)
David A McIntee lists several later in the thread:
Moebius Trip - two universes inside each other, with a psychoreactive semi-sentient planet in the middle. PDE said "think bigger." The Veltrochni were created for that.
30th Anniversary story- Susan returns as a villain, trying to give the Tzun (who were insects in that pitch) time travel.
Getting rid of Ace- A two-Ace time paradox spaghetti western (with Glitz in the role of Tuco) in which good Ace lets badass soldier Ace kill her in a gunfight so she won't become badass soldier Ace (who by this point is working for the bad guys)
5th Doctor story - There was a 5th Doctor story about Street Children in Brazil, in which Turlough gets tortured a lot. This is the one that got the response about an hour after sending it in of "I like this so much that I commissioned Keith to write it last week" - though the actual story is completely different than King Of Terror
Forever In A Day - Actually I might do this one in Shelf Life 2 or 3... Suffice to say involves an infinite number of Doctors. Cos while The Infinity Doctors is a great book I was disappointed that it didn't have infinite Doctors in it. This was a 3rd Doctor PDA... sort of.
(He expands on this later in the thread: Oh you don't know the half of it... Trying not to be too spoilery in case it ends up in a Shelf Life someday, it was set right after The Three Doctors and had a booby trap start an alternate timeline radiating out from the TARDIS is which the Doctor was never force-regenerated in Jon Pertwee and exiled to Earth - but instead of the change creating alternate futures, it creates alternate pasts for the Third Doctor, and as the effect spreads, there are more and more alternates. So you ended up with lots of alternate Third (and later, as some of the thirds have already got themselves killed and regenerated again) Doctors, and an older Second Doctor who had been imprisoned on Shada for centuries and gone stir crazy...)
Cybermen story - Simon Bucher Jones, Simon Forward and I had a couple of emails about Cybermen ideas which might have ended up being two linked books, mine and 8th Doctor and maybe a cowrite with SBJ. There would have been much about whether the Cybermen still had souls, militant Vatican cyber-hunting hit squads, African poverty, and the Cybermen going straight, as it were. Simon Forward was thinking of a 7th and Ace PDA.
The Lost Generation - Also might end up in Shelf Life 2 or 3, and if not it'll become a standalone original novel. Basically, the Doctor meets Anais Nin in 1920s Paris, and faces off against a Lovecraftian take on the Comte St Germain. This was the last DW story I pitched, and got lost (appropriately, given the title) in the void when the PDAs just stopped being commissioned.
There are probably some I'm forgetting, which were just one-line or one-paragraph ideas, but those are the main ones
And later in the thread:
Wasn't there another possible story u were going to do featuring The Fifth Doctor and the Ainley Master at one stage?
Oh, yeah, I forgot that one- Judgement Day. The idea was the Master was going to be executed for a crime he (amazingly) hadn't committed, and Nyssa wanted to get him off because some of her father might still be in there, and Tegan wanted him to fry. So it was companion vs companion. Actually the Master had deliberately framed himself in order to get the Doctor to bring down the justice system on that planet...
Don't remember if that was a book or BF proposal though- probably both. I think it was around the time of pitching The Eleventh Tiger, and that was definitely the preferred option
Iain McLaughlin later comments in the thread: Two books Claire and I did sample chapters and synopses for - and then in each case found that the range was ending so they were never pitched.
A Season 6B novella set in 1942 Stalingrad. Told from the point of view of a woman looking for her husband (an army sergeant) who has gone missing along with her two children. A really nasty horror with carnivorous aliens skulking around the wreckage of the city. This would have been pitched to Telos.
A 5th Doctor/Peri/Erimem historical in the stylee of a Rafael Sabatini adventure with the Doctor becoming a pirate, Erimem becoming a rival pirate captain, Peri becoming a Highwaywoman and all three of them at various points getting engaged to somebody - all of it by accident. It was meant to be fun and feel like an Errol Flynn movie. That would have pitched been for the PDAs. We had a lot of fun with this one.
Suddenly remembered two Kate Orman titles that were mentioned years back too - The Pinocchio Virus and The Empty House (at least I think that's what they were called). Since Kate and Jon post on this here forum, I wondered if they'd be willing to shed any more light on them? I think they were 6th Doctor proposals, which is even more intriguing. (Kate Orman replies: *wanders in*
Pinocchio Virus was a Sixth Doctor and Peri thing with robots gaining freewill. I can't remember off the top of my head what The Empty House was - a Seventh Doctor book, possibly that rubbish thing where he turns into a ghost and everyone thinks he's dead and TNG ended up doing the same idea. Or something.)
Several of the people in the thread mention a rumour Grant Morrison pitched an idea for the EDA's.
Cascade was Craig Hinton's first NA pitch, which would have featured a virus invading the Matrix and forcing the 7th Doctor and the Valeyard to team up and save Gallifrey. About ten years later this eventually evolved into Craig's original outline for Time's Champion, which was mostly retained for the final version I co-wrote (except the 7th Doctor with Ace and possible Benny became with 6th Doctor with Mel).
David, was it you who pitched a Cushing novel to JR, or was it another well established writer? I remember a conversation on the old Forum where one of the writers mentioned that JR had received a number of submissions for Cushing novels, including one from a well established writer from the range. I remembering that writer as being you but I may be mistaken.
McIntee replied: Maybe somebody else did as well, but I certainly discussed Doctor Who And The Crypt Of The Cyber Men with him on email...
He would have "regenerated" halfway through, into the more familiar Holmes/Baron Frankenstein Cushing, but you'd never be sure whether it was a regeneration or he'd just dyed his hair and shaved his moustache...
I remember reading somewhere (DWM?) that one of the NAs was going to end in a cliffhanger - basically a cannonball is shot into the TARDIS console room, destroying part of the console, leaving the reader to wonder for a whole month if one of the TARDIS regulars perished as well.
I think that was Eye of Heaven by Jim Mortimore, and Conjunction by Paul Leonard. The former obviously got reworked into the 4th Doctor PDA, but nothing seems to have come of Leonard's one.
There was also this thread 'Rejected Who Novels' which dates from 2012:
gallifreybase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=140546
For one reason or another, there are a whole load of unpublished and rejected Doctor Who books, the majority of which are lost in time, but they fascinate me. Do we know much about these books? Tried to look into it myself, and didn't come up with much, so I bow to your superior knowledge. Thanks!
Lawrence Miles has spoken about a whole slew of rejected ideas. He had a six-book arc planned that would've followed an alternate history of Doctors after the continuity-twisting ending of Interference. He also may have had some plans for a WWII POW-esque book set during the war with the Enemy featuring Mrs Slocumbe from Are You Being Served?... it's hard to tell because it sounds like a joke, but you never know with Miles.
I remember there was also talk of a title called Conjunction that was meant to link in with Jim Mortimore's Eye of Heaven.
Craig Hinton had plans for an NA featuring the Valeyard called Cascade.
Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore's first proposal to Virgin was a novel called Bodyshock, about Ace and the Doctor waking up in the bodies of giant lobsters.
Another one... War of the Daleks was a proposed New Adventure (so it would've featured the 7th Doctor, I assume) before it found a home with BBC books. Peel originally planned it as a television serial for the show, so it was floating around for at least 7 or 8 years before it finally got published.
Also, Original Sin was originally planned as a third doctor MA called Broken Heroes.
Paul Cornell also submitted an NA called Souleye, about UNIT facing off against the Autons alongside the 7th Doctor.
IIRC, Paul Leonard was to be the author of Conjunction
Wow, very interesting ideas, very interested in Craig Hinton's Valeyard story, though I believe Virgin weren't allowed to use the character?
Oh, they were allowed to (he appears in Millenial Rites, sort of), it's just that the authors were discouraged from using him, as he was very problematic.
I also seem to recall that, though it was eventually released as a fifth Doctor MA, The Crystal Bucephalus started out very differently, and was originally intended to be a 7th Doctor NA.
More on Lawrence Miles' rejected stuff, from the man himself:
On the six-book arc he planned...
Quote:
Back in late 1998, while I was still working on INTERFERENCE, I was starting to think about what I might do next, and... I kind of went a bit overboard. I do that, sometimes, I just get horribly over-enthusiastic. I'd been into some bookshop or other, and I'd seen that the poxy Star Trek people were doing this mini-series of interconnected books inside the range, so there's this set of about six titles telling one great big story. Or something. And I was a bit hyper at this stage, so I thought, that's what I can do. I can write a series of half a dozen "maybe" books, about a potential future Doctor and a potential future Gallifrey. War and all. This was before I'd seen THE INFINITY DOCTORS, obviously. I thought, I can pitch them as one big six-book set, and then the BBC can put them out in the PDA slots or something... you can see how I was starting to go a bit funny, can't you?
Anyway, the first story in this cycle was supposed to be called REQUIEM. So it's set on Gallifrey, but it's a version of Gallifrey that knows there's something bad coming, and it's starting to get paranoid and it's putting itself on a war footing. Then what happens is, this enormous artifact materializes in the sky over the Capitol. This huge, black, bone-like thing, which nobody can figure out and none of Gallifrey's people can get into. Everyone assumes it's some kind of enemy warhead, except that it doesn't attack, it just... sits there. Waiting. Then the Doctor arrives, and it turns out he's the only one who can get on board, because the artifact's directly linked to his destiny as well as the future that's bearing down on Gallifrey. Except that what he doesn't realize, until it's too late, is that he's being set up by Faction Paradox. The artifact mission's part of their plans for the Doctor's future, following the damage they did to his biodata in INTERFERENCE. You get the general idea. Stephen didn't respond to the idea very well, though. Probably because of the way I pitched it, I should think. I'm just astonished I was sober at the time.
and some other rejected ones:
Quote:
SECONDS was rejected by Simon [Winstone?] at Virgin because he said it was too similar to CHRISTMAS ON A RATIONAL PLANET. He was wrong, mind you. THERE ARE WORSE THINGS THAN ANGELS was rejected by Nuala Buffini... she was Stephen's predecessor at the BBC... because she said it was "too garphic" for what they thought was going to be a family line, although she did say lots of nice things about it. ENDS was rejected by Stephen because it was supposed to be a sequel to ALIEN BODIES, and he thought it was too cosmic and gave too much away. THE SPECTACULAR AFTERLIFE OF BERNICE SUMMERFIELD was rejected because it was set thirty years in the Virgin series' future and was about Bernice's offspring. See what I mean about pushing my luck? THE WAR was rejected because... actually, I don't know why. Stephen never even bothered sending me a letter. I think he thought I was just taking the piss. And then there was VALENTINE'S DAY. The Dalek one. I think I deserve bonus points for not using the words "of the Daleks".
Simon was wrong about SECONDS, certainly. It was nothing like CHRISTMAS, he'd just missed the point. It would've been a much better book than DOWN, without question, and it also would have been the first appearance of Faction Paradox. It was sort of supposed to be The Italian Job, with the Third Doctor leading this band of criminals on a raid to rob the Matrix tapes from Gallifrey. In the Whomobile. With little hover-pods instead of minis. On the other hand, I think Stephen was right about ENDS. And I'm glad ANGELS got rejected, because if I'd written it then I wouldn't have done ALIEN BODIES and I never would have figured out what I really wanted to do. Similarly, DEAD ROMANCE is probably better than SPECTACULAR AFTERLIFE would have been. But THE WAR would've been fun, I suppose. And I've got to admit, I'm still very sad that Justin turned down VALENTINE'S DAY. I always get very enthusiastic about a book when I start planning it out, but with VALENTINE'S DAY there was just so much I wanted to say, it was... well, I ended up plotting it out page-by-page, that's how stupidly full it would have been. It would've said everything I've ever wanted to say in a Doctor Who novel. But when you look back at your rejections, the worst thing is seeing the books that got commisioned in their place. Whatever Simon thought about SECONDS, surely it would've been better than A DEVICE OF DEATH? And wouldn't ANGELS have been better than THE EIGHT DOCTORS? Or how about ENDS and THE WAGES OF SIN? All I can say is, that book by Colin Brake next February had better be bloody good to beat VALENTINE'S DAY.
The War is the Mrs Slocum one, here's more details:
Quote:
it was supposed to be a story set on Earth during the Big Time Lord War, where history's come unstuck and all these alternate histories are overlapping. So you're never sure whether the Thirteenth Doctor's canonical or not, basically. My thinking was that BBC Worldwide would have the rights to merchandize thousands of old BBC programmes from the '70s and '80s, so what I wanted to do was go through the archives looking for all these old TV characters... most of them from sitcoms... and put them on Earth with the Doctor. There's this big concentration camp where the authorities put strays from other realities, so the Doctor finds herself couped up with all these fallen heroes from the BBC's past, and sharing a cell with Fletcher out of Porridge. The climax of the story was meant to be an assault on the Enemy's base, in which the Doctor and Captain Mainwaring out of Dad's Army lead a suicidal light-brigade assault across the final battlefield. Oh, and that was the other thing I was going to do. You know how in these war stories, one of the main characters is always a traitor working for the enemy army? In THE WAR, the traitor was going to be Mrs. Slocum's Pussy. Because it's a purely conceptual entity, it only exists in her head, and it turns out to be a Shift working for the Enemy. Like in ALIEN BODIES.
(I think this was the same interview cited in the other thread)
Another detail from Craig about Cascade:
"Ask me about the ninja nuns and the gay starship
captain... :-) "
Which is tantalising but (as far as I can find out) nobody did.
Kate Orman had several proposals going including "Faust Forward"-which was set on set aboard the Indian
Pacific, Australia's famous transcontinental train and a Sixth Doctor MA called "The Pinocchio Virus"
Paul Cornell's Souleye (mentioned above) would have also featured Ancelyn and Excalibur from Battlefield. I think he talked about in Starlog 225
Philip Purser-Hallard (of Tales of the City) submitted a NA in the mid 90s which featured a large space battle at the climax, which got as far as a personal letter from Gareth Roberts.
A GB member wrote:
Yeah, Miles was miffed that Stephen Cole (allegedly) stole his ideas and used them without credit. In the interview I've taken these quotes from, Miles claims to have pitched the idea to an uninterested Stephen Cole before The Ancestor Cell came out.
Peter Anghelides replied: I pitched content and ideas that Steve combined with ideas he'd been planning ever since he'd first commissioned Interference. Lawrence certainly never discussed anything with me about his unwritten masterpiece, so I could hardly have "stolen" stuff from him.
Obviously, The Ancestor Cell follows on from a whole load of stuff that was previously published (including Lawrence's DW novels), and a whole load more discussion in a contemporary online group of BBC Books authors (in which LM did not participate). We acknowledge Lawrence along with other influencers on page 287 of The Ancestor Cell.
Sometimes things are a coincidence. I certainly recall thinking at one point that the artefact would be a sort of cancerous excrescence growing in the hills above the Panopticon, but deciding that something further out of reach over the planet was a more compelling alternative. I didn't think about it much at the time, but I was probably inspired to devise the "alien thing hanging over the planet" after seeing Independence Day three years previously. Not only did that appear before Interference, it also appeared before Alien Bodies was published, and in any case was already a familiar trope from decades previously.
i found a copy of the unpublished novel Equilibrium by Simon A forward - printed below is the authors own notes:
Strange to think that Equilibrium was in fact my first Doctor
Who novel, albeit that it remains unpublished. Originally
submitted to Virgin, back in the days when they were
producing their Missing Adventures and I can remember being
at once encouraged and disappointed that their first book in the
range, Paul Cornell’s Goth Opera, was to feature Doctor
Who’s very own Great Vampires. Encouraged, because it
implied that Virgin were willing to explore elements of the
series continuity in (I hoped) fresh and interesting ways; and
disappointed, because I was worried that the fact that
Equilibrium touched on the same area of background would
count against it when it came to being considered for
publication. Of course the very idea of an actual commission
was a pie-in-the-sky pipedream at the time, but as I was driven
by that same dream since a very early age, well, there was
never any question that the book was going to be written, one
way or another.
Now, looking back from the perspective of a published
Doctor Who author, I’m at once better able to see where it
might have been improved and perhaps just as mystified as to
why they didn’t go for it. But, after all, there’s no accounting
for taste! Well, as a matter of fact there is some at least,
because I still have the response letter from Virgin, which
praised my characterisation of the Doctor and Liz, along with
the idea of the time-travelling house, while expressing that the
idea of the temporal eclipse wasn’t original or exciting
enough, that the plot felt loose and unstructured and that it
would have been better if the story had been motivated by
characters rather than a plot device such as a timeslip. All of
which was (as might be expected!) at complete odds with my
own take on the story and indeed how it was crafted, and only
goes to prove the Equilibrium’s core message about opposite
reactions.
Seriously, though, that initial rejection, my subsequent
dusting off the proposal for submission to the BBC and my
eventual preparation of the full MS for the website each
inevitably led to a personal reappraisal of the story, and it was
interesting to re-examine the work in the light of those initial
comments as well as my own evolving views. In submitting
Equilibrium to the BBC as a proposed Past Doctor Adventure,
the aim was to produce a prequel to my EDA, Emotional
Chemistry, but I left the synopsis unaltered for the most part
and, presented to a different editor (Justin Richards), it met
with different comments again – the key problem this time
around being that the BBC range was undergoing a shift
towards eschewing references to other books or past episodes.
And while I would argue that a prequel could safely assume
no prior knowledge of Emotional Chemistry, the bottom line
was that this book was going to remain unpublished.
Never one to waste ideas, I also recognised that I wasn’t
going to be able to retell this particular adventure as a non-
Doctor Who story – I think the fact that it was my first
complete Doctor Who novel meant that it was always going to
remain, at heart, a Doctor Who novel. (Virgin generally
required a synopsis and a 15,000 word set of sample chapters,
and so I had plenty of submissions for which I did that amount
and no more, but Equilibrium was the only one that I just
carried on writing to completion – between preparing all those
numerous other Doctor Who proposals!) So I figured, why not
put it where, at worst, it would only gather e-dust and, at best,
where it might be enjoyed.
In working through it to prepare each chapter for posting
on the web, it was tempting in some respects to perform a
major overhaul, refine and polish it to the nth degree and
eliminate all of its pesky flaws. But in the first place, I realised
that wasn’t practically possible, both because I couldn’t afford
the time and because expecting it to be perfect was expecting
too much; and in the second place, I thought that it would
offer more worthwhile lessons, for myself and for other
interested writers and/or readers out there, if it was posted –
give or take the odd edit or rewritten section (on which, more
in a moment) – in its original form.
It also means people can go easy on it because, like the
author, it’s a little rough around the edges!
So, other than the inevitable typos and the occasional
compulsion, as I worked through it, to groom a sentence here
and there, what was changed?
The most significant change was in one of the central
characters. Although the synopsis had grown to accommodate
Aphrodite and shape Equilibrium into a prequel, the original
manuscript had been completed with a different character in
mind. I won’t say too much about her as, apart from a few
Doctor Who trappings, I have plans to use that same character
in another (non-Doctor Who) project, but suffice to say, in the
context of the original Equilibrium, she was a Time Lady –
albeit a unique and original one. So naturally, her scenes
needed some extensive re-working, although I made efforts to
keep the rewrites to a minimum. As such, for me, in this book,
Aphrodite doesn’t always read quite true, as it wasn’t always
easy to keep myself from visualising the original character in
her place and, besides, some of the lines and actions were
tailored to her replacement, rather than being born of
Aphrodite herself. It’s often a subtle distinction, but one I was
acutely aware of and it will be interesting to see if anyone who
has read both Emotional Chemistry and Equilibrium picks up
on it.
By way of contrast, (Major) Bugayev proved an opposite
case. He had always featured in Equilibrium, but in
approaching his character I had anticipated there being some
degree of rewriting in order to ensure that he came across as a
convincing younger version of the character I painted in
Emotional Chemistry. As luck would have it, I found the gap
in maturity was already there, in terms of how I’d written the
character, and I didn’t really feel any need to tamper with that.
So the fact that I had written him ten years earlier, for my
money, was what painted the prequel-portrait I was after.
Other than that there were a couple of name changes. In
the first place, when I wrote Emotional Chemistry, Justin
Richards pointed out that the name of Grushkin (Bugayev’s
original second in command) was perhaps too akin to Garudin
on the page, so his name was changed to Zhelnin; hence, a
corresponding change had to be made in Equilibrium. Then, in
a similar fashion, I decided that with Aphrodite and Athena
there were already too many A names involved, so I changed
the name of Alisandra to Melisandra. Simple. And, I’m glad to
say, totally insignificant in terms of any impact on the story!
So, what did I think of the story as I read it again?
Well, for one thing, I could see how it might be perceived
as loose and unstructured. The fact is, in terms of how it was
constructed, like everything else I write, it is structured – but
the structure stems purely from character motivation. And
characters are often (we hope!) unpredictable and take on lives
of their own. For me, structuring a plot is like growing house
plants: you can prune it here and there, you can turn it around
so it’ll grow towards the light, but at the end of the day it’s
going to find its own shape, by and large. Of course, I hope
eventually I’ll have more success with my plots than with
houseplants, but the point remains the same.
The difference here, I think, is that two of the characters
are powerful forces and the fact that they can manipulate time
means they can manipulate events to such a degree that
perhaps some of the characters’ actions seem futile. The clash
at the end is going to happen no matter what: that’s what
drives Athena and the Chieftain both, and although all the
behaviour of all the other characters arises from a natural
process of action and reaction, they’re all at the same time
being drawn along towards that point. Ultimately though, I do
feel the Doctor makes the vital difference – as intended – in
establishing the titular equilibrium (if I’m allowed to say
that!).
There are a few indulgences along the way: the timeslip
that enables the Doctor to hail a cab and shake off his OGRON
escort, for instance, but I always felt it was worth it for the
joke. And it’s probably fair to say there’s too much running
around, getting captured and escaping, but I think in writing it
originally I saw that as part of the essence of a Pertwee
adventure. In much the same way as, I suppose, being wrong
on occasion is an essential part of the learning process! It’s
just a question of what works well on screen and what works
well on the page, although I was satisfied with some of the
action sequences in the book, so again it all pretty much
balances out in the end.
The only question that remains, I guess, is what would I
have done differently had the book been commissioned and I
could have devoted a full six months on developing it properly
as a published novel? Hm. Well, I say hm, but actually I have
some very clear ideas of how I might have approached it
differently.
It sort of goes without saying – but I’ll say it anyway –
that I would have taken a good long look at the structure and
developed it anew, examining Aphrodite’s role and
subsequently writing her scenes from scratch.
In this compromise rewrite, there were all manner of
things, like losing the original Time Lady’s TARDIS, that
would have and should have resulted in significant changes to
the plot, and given what I know of the differences between the
characters, I am sure Aphrodite’s thread would have taken a
different direction here and there – rather than her actions
being grafted on in place of the previous character’s. Aspects
of her character do fit the events here, but I would have been
much happier approaching her part in the story anew.
On top of which, I would have liked to have made this
Aphrodite’s introductory story, making this her first meeting
with the Doctor, factoring in her trial at the hands of the
Magellans at the end and introducing us to her homeworld,
Paraiso, for the first time and so on. All of which would have
required a greater word count, of course, but on the other hand
it might have provided a good incentive to trim out some of
the fat.
On the other hand, I would have also liked to have
developed the Kagyrn more, expanded upon their culture and
background etc. As the book stands, they serve well enough as
monsters perhaps, but I had always had them in mind as
something more. They literally arose out of that notion (from
Dracula) of vampires having wolves at their command, but as
usual I did make some effort to develop them as a race in
some detail, very little of which made it into Equilibrium as it
is here. Likewise, word count permitting, it might have been
matched with some measure of greater detail on the Magyar
culture to which they were bound.
It’s less easy to see what might have changed with regard
to the other characters, mostly because their actions all ring
true to me, but it’s reasonable to assume that those key
changes would have had some impact on the actions of others
in the story.
In the case of Liz Shaw, though, I feel fairly sure I would
have kept that ending. Back when I originally wrote
Equilibrium, I’d had all sorts of ambitions to write that crucial
departure scene for Liz: as one of my favourite Doctor Who
companions, I really wanted to be the one to write that for her.
But when it came to writing the story and arriving at the end,
that question – of whether she would leave or continue
travelling a while (via the house) with the Doctor – well, to
leave it unanswered and hanging in the balance just seemed
the right thing to do.
Quite possibly I am completely wrong on that score. But
like I say, being wrong is all part of the learning process, and
one thing this exercise – of revisiting Equilibrium here – has
taught me is that I am definitely still learning.
SAF January 2005
I remember reading about one called Freaks, by Rebecca Levene. Anybody know what happened to that?
[Freaks was dropped as Levene got work on a television series and didn't have the available time to meet the proposed deadline - it was replaced by The Banquo Legacy which was essentially Justin Richards reworking an old story he wrote with Andy Lane.]
Also you could include Gareth Roberts' proposed novelization of Revelation Of The Daleks - dropped and Roberts wrote The Plotters in its place.
Also Paul Leonard was down to write Resurrection Of The Daleks, again replaced by Speed Of Light.
One final entry could be Kim Newman's Dimension In Space, dropped when Telos lost their license to publish DW novellas.
Why did the two Saward Dalek stories never get novelized?
It wasn't because of the JNT fallout. That was why the video for Revelation took so long to be released, rather than the the novel. JNT worked on Doctor Who for BBC Video after 1989. That's also why there are no clips on the JNT produced "Colin Baker Years"
The reason for the lack of Target novelizations was money. In the late 80s Nigel Robinson and Saward discussed novelizing the Dalek stories (when Saward was doing Attack novelization).
The problem was Terry Nation's agent was asking for such a large percentage of Saward's fee that it just didn't seem worth the effort. As Robinson tells it Saward suggested novelizing Revelation but calling Davros "The Great healer", and calling the daleks "The Great healer's servants" throughout!
He then admitted he was clutching at straws.
There are also interesting rumors about when Virgin and Saward tried again in the 90s. Before Leonard and Roberts, Saward was going to write them himself but that fell through. Some say that it was because he was writing it too much like a basic old-school Target novelization when it was felt that the MAs had moved on. Others say the opposite: That he disliked Resurrection so much that he kept adding new ideas and diversions, to the extent that it no longer resembled the televised story at all. We'll never know for sure but I hope it's the latter.
I thought the reason Revelation took so long to come out on VHS was down to the music rights - or so it says on the sleeve notes on the VHS release.
{Someone replied: You may be right about the music rights halting the video, but I'm pretty sure Saward also withheld clips of it from "The Colin Baker Years" because of the JNT bust-up and that neither of these things had anything to do with it not being novelised.
Interesting about Bidmead (can you imagine Graham Williams novelizing his work?) but probably an error
. It's a shame that the Enemy of the Daleks proposal had to be taken out of Time Incorporated (under very strong legal advice) but there was never more than a proposal, not even an outline
. Lance has said that some of the ideas, including the Klade, plus the general tone and thrust of it all went into Father Time. Which is great because Father Time is great.
In much the same way that we would never have got 'Alien Bodies' if 'Worse things than Angels' hadn't been rejected}
On the subject of the 1990s attempt, it seems that Saward was going to novelise Yellow Fever as well, but that fell by the wayside. As a surprising extra, Telos' The Target Book mentions that Graham Williams was going to novelise Chris Bidmead's Pinacotheca {his 'lost' Trial story}, although this may have been a mistake given the occasional confusion between this and The Hollows Of Time, a more likely candidate given the first three stories of the abandoned Season 23 being novelised at around that time.
Enemy of the Daleks by Lance Parkin was just a proposal, not even a plot outline. Roger Hancock (Terry Nation's agent) approved it. But because Lance had other tv commitments it never got any further.
When Lance Parkin's collected writings were to be published in "Time Unincorporated Volume 1" the intention was to include this proposal, but as Lance put it on Jade Pagoda
"... we had, ahem,*very* strong legal advice that we'd get in trouble with it".
I assume because it would be an unlicensed story about Daleks and Davros. So it was removed before the book was published
Racheal G L Redhead: I have 3 rejections, one from Virgin for 'Paper Trail' which looking back was really a mess of a story, it was kind of like Keys of Marinus or The Chase with the 6th Doctor & Peri
and 2 from the BBC for 'The Mystery of Jod' set immediatley after the end of Trial with the 6th Doctor taking Mel back to her correct point in her travels with his future self, in the first version Mel remains locked in the TARDIS for the whole of the story, in the second (and I think better version) Mel escapes and has her own brand new story line which turned out to be far more important than the Doctor's story, alas by then they'd stopped accepting submissions and then they wound down the PDA's.
I did also pitch an audio story to BF featuring the 6th Doctor & Peri, against some psychic mind-eating lobster-like aliens but that was sensibly rejected.
Lawrence Miles has spoken about a whole slew of rejected ideas. He had a six-book arc planned that would've followed an alternate history of Doctors after the continuity-twisting ending of Interference. He also may have had some plans for a WWII POW-esque book set during the war with the Enemy featuring Mrs Slocumbe from Are You Being Served?... it's hard to tell because it sounds like a joke, but you never know with Miles.
I remember there was also talk of a title called Conjunction that was meant to link in with Jim Mortimore's Eye of Heaven.
Craig Hinton had plans for an NA featuring the Valeyard called Cascade.
Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore's first proposal to Virgin was a novel called Bodyshock, about Ace and the Doctor waking up in the bodies of giant lobsters.
Another one... War of the Daleks was a proposed New Adventure (so it would've featured the 7th Doctor, I assume) before it found a home with BBC books. Peel originally planned it as a television serial for the show, so it was floating around for at least 7 or 8 years before it finally got published.
Also, Original Sin was originally planned as a third doctor MA called Broken Heroes.
Paul Cornell also submitted an NA called Souleye, about UNIT facing off against the Autons alongside the 7th Doctor.
IIRC, Paul Leonard was to be the author of Conjunction
Wow, very interesting ideas, very interested in Craig Hinton's Valeyard story, though I believe Virgin weren't allowed to use the character?
Oh, they were allowed to (he appears in Millenial Rites, sort of), it's just that the authors were discouraged from using him, as he was very problematic.
I also seem to recall that, though it was eventually released as a fifth Doctor MA, The Crystal Bucephalus started out very differently, and was originally intended to be a 7th Doctor NA.
More on Lawrence Miles' rejected stuff, from the man himself:
On the six-book arc he planned...
Quote:
Back in late 1998, while I was still working on INTERFERENCE, I was starting to think about what I might do next, and... I kind of went a bit overboard. I do that, sometimes, I just get horribly over-enthusiastic. I'd been into some bookshop or other, and I'd seen that the poxy Star Trek people were doing this mini-series of interconnected books inside the range, so there's this set of about six titles telling one great big story. Or something. And I was a bit hyper at this stage, so I thought, that's what I can do. I can write a series of half a dozen "maybe" books, about a potential future Doctor and a potential future Gallifrey. War and all. This was before I'd seen THE INFINITY DOCTORS, obviously. I thought, I can pitch them as one big six-book set, and then the BBC can put them out in the PDA slots or something... you can see how I was starting to go a bit funny, can't you?
Anyway, the first story in this cycle was supposed to be called REQUIEM. So it's set on Gallifrey, but it's a version of Gallifrey that knows there's something bad coming, and it's starting to get paranoid and it's putting itself on a war footing. Then what happens is, this enormous artifact materializes in the sky over the Capitol. This huge, black, bone-like thing, which nobody can figure out and none of Gallifrey's people can get into. Everyone assumes it's some kind of enemy warhead, except that it doesn't attack, it just... sits there. Waiting. Then the Doctor arrives, and it turns out he's the only one who can get on board, because the artifact's directly linked to his destiny as well as the future that's bearing down on Gallifrey. Except that what he doesn't realize, until it's too late, is that he's being set up by Faction Paradox. The artifact mission's part of their plans for the Doctor's future, following the damage they did to his biodata in INTERFERENCE. You get the general idea. Stephen didn't respond to the idea very well, though. Probably because of the way I pitched it, I should think. I'm just astonished I was sober at the time.
and some other rejected ones:
Quote:
SECONDS was rejected by Simon [Winstone?] at Virgin because he said it was too similar to CHRISTMAS ON A RATIONAL PLANET. He was wrong, mind you. THERE ARE WORSE THINGS THAN ANGELS was rejected by Nuala Buffini... she was Stephen's predecessor at the BBC... because she said it was "too garphic" for what they thought was going to be a family line, although she did say lots of nice things about it. ENDS was rejected by Stephen because it was supposed to be a sequel to ALIEN BODIES, and he thought it was too cosmic and gave too much away. THE SPECTACULAR AFTERLIFE OF BERNICE SUMMERFIELD was rejected because it was set thirty years in the Virgin series' future and was about Bernice's offspring. See what I mean about pushing my luck? THE WAR was rejected because... actually, I don't know why. Stephen never even bothered sending me a letter. I think he thought I was just taking the piss. And then there was VALENTINE'S DAY. The Dalek one. I think I deserve bonus points for not using the words "of the Daleks".
Simon was wrong about SECONDS, certainly. It was nothing like CHRISTMAS, he'd just missed the point. It would've been a much better book than DOWN, without question, and it also would have been the first appearance of Faction Paradox. It was sort of supposed to be The Italian Job, with the Third Doctor leading this band of criminals on a raid to rob the Matrix tapes from Gallifrey. In the Whomobile. With little hover-pods instead of minis. On the other hand, I think Stephen was right about ENDS. And I'm glad ANGELS got rejected, because if I'd written it then I wouldn't have done ALIEN BODIES and I never would have figured out what I really wanted to do. Similarly, DEAD ROMANCE is probably better than SPECTACULAR AFTERLIFE would have been. But THE WAR would've been fun, I suppose. And I've got to admit, I'm still very sad that Justin turned down VALENTINE'S DAY. I always get very enthusiastic about a book when I start planning it out, but with VALENTINE'S DAY there was just so much I wanted to say, it was... well, I ended up plotting it out page-by-page, that's how stupidly full it would have been. It would've said everything I've ever wanted to say in a Doctor Who novel. But when you look back at your rejections, the worst thing is seeing the books that got commisioned in their place. Whatever Simon thought about SECONDS, surely it would've been better than A DEVICE OF DEATH? And wouldn't ANGELS have been better than THE EIGHT DOCTORS? Or how about ENDS and THE WAGES OF SIN? All I can say is, that book by Colin Brake next February had better be bloody good to beat VALENTINE'S DAY.
The War is the Mrs Slocum one, here's more details:
Quote:
it was supposed to be a story set on Earth during the Big Time Lord War, where history's come unstuck and all these alternate histories are overlapping. So you're never sure whether the Thirteenth Doctor's canonical or not, basically. My thinking was that BBC Worldwide would have the rights to merchandize thousands of old BBC programmes from the '70s and '80s, so what I wanted to do was go through the archives looking for all these old TV characters... most of them from sitcoms... and put them on Earth with the Doctor. There's this big concentration camp where the authorities put strays from other realities, so the Doctor finds herself couped up with all these fallen heroes from the BBC's past, and sharing a cell with Fletcher out of Porridge. The climax of the story was meant to be an assault on the Enemy's base, in which the Doctor and Captain Mainwaring out of Dad's Army lead a suicidal light-brigade assault across the final battlefield. Oh, and that was the other thing I was going to do. You know how in these war stories, one of the main characters is always a traitor working for the enemy army? In THE WAR, the traitor was going to be Mrs. Slocum's Pussy. Because it's a purely conceptual entity, it only exists in her head, and it turns out to be a Shift working for the Enemy. Like in ALIEN BODIES.
(I think this was the same interview cited in the other thread)
Another detail from Craig about Cascade:
"Ask me about the ninja nuns and the gay starship
captain... :-) "
Which is tantalising but (as far as I can find out) nobody did.
Kate Orman had several proposals going including "Faust Forward"-which was set on set aboard the Indian
Pacific, Australia's famous transcontinental train and a Sixth Doctor MA called "The Pinocchio Virus"
Paul Cornell's Souleye (mentioned above) would have also featured Ancelyn and Excalibur from Battlefield. I think he talked about in Starlog 225
Philip Purser-Hallard (of Tales of the City) submitted a NA in the mid 90s which featured a large space battle at the climax, which got as far as a personal letter from Gareth Roberts.
A GB member wrote:
Yeah, Miles was miffed that Stephen Cole (allegedly) stole his ideas and used them without credit. In the interview I've taken these quotes from, Miles claims to have pitched the idea to an uninterested Stephen Cole before The Ancestor Cell came out.
Peter Anghelides replied: I pitched content and ideas that Steve combined with ideas he'd been planning ever since he'd first commissioned Interference. Lawrence certainly never discussed anything with me about his unwritten masterpiece, so I could hardly have "stolen" stuff from him.
Obviously, The Ancestor Cell follows on from a whole load of stuff that was previously published (including Lawrence's DW novels), and a whole load more discussion in a contemporary online group of BBC Books authors (in which LM did not participate). We acknowledge Lawrence along with other influencers on page 287 of The Ancestor Cell.
Sometimes things are a coincidence. I certainly recall thinking at one point that the artefact would be a sort of cancerous excrescence growing in the hills above the Panopticon, but deciding that something further out of reach over the planet was a more compelling alternative. I didn't think about it much at the time, but I was probably inspired to devise the "alien thing hanging over the planet" after seeing Independence Day three years previously. Not only did that appear before Interference, it also appeared before Alien Bodies was published, and in any case was already a familiar trope from decades previously.
i found a copy of the unpublished novel Equilibrium by Simon A forward - printed below is the authors own notes:
Strange to think that Equilibrium was in fact my first Doctor
Who novel, albeit that it remains unpublished. Originally
submitted to Virgin, back in the days when they were
producing their Missing Adventures and I can remember being
at once encouraged and disappointed that their first book in the
range, Paul Cornell’s Goth Opera, was to feature Doctor
Who’s very own Great Vampires. Encouraged, because it
implied that Virgin were willing to explore elements of the
series continuity in (I hoped) fresh and interesting ways; and
disappointed, because I was worried that the fact that
Equilibrium touched on the same area of background would
count against it when it came to being considered for
publication. Of course the very idea of an actual commission
was a pie-in-the-sky pipedream at the time, but as I was driven
by that same dream since a very early age, well, there was
never any question that the book was going to be written, one
way or another.
Now, looking back from the perspective of a published
Doctor Who author, I’m at once better able to see where it
might have been improved and perhaps just as mystified as to
why they didn’t go for it. But, after all, there’s no accounting
for taste! Well, as a matter of fact there is some at least,
because I still have the response letter from Virgin, which
praised my characterisation of the Doctor and Liz, along with
the idea of the time-travelling house, while expressing that the
idea of the temporal eclipse wasn’t original or exciting
enough, that the plot felt loose and unstructured and that it
would have been better if the story had been motivated by
characters rather than a plot device such as a timeslip. All of
which was (as might be expected!) at complete odds with my
own take on the story and indeed how it was crafted, and only
goes to prove the Equilibrium’s core message about opposite
reactions.
Seriously, though, that initial rejection, my subsequent
dusting off the proposal for submission to the BBC and my
eventual preparation of the full MS for the website each
inevitably led to a personal reappraisal of the story, and it was
interesting to re-examine the work in the light of those initial
comments as well as my own evolving views. In submitting
Equilibrium to the BBC as a proposed Past Doctor Adventure,
the aim was to produce a prequel to my EDA, Emotional
Chemistry, but I left the synopsis unaltered for the most part
and, presented to a different editor (Justin Richards), it met
with different comments again – the key problem this time
around being that the BBC range was undergoing a shift
towards eschewing references to other books or past episodes.
And while I would argue that a prequel could safely assume
no prior knowledge of Emotional Chemistry, the bottom line
was that this book was going to remain unpublished.
Never one to waste ideas, I also recognised that I wasn’t
going to be able to retell this particular adventure as a non-
Doctor Who story – I think the fact that it was my first
complete Doctor Who novel meant that it was always going to
remain, at heart, a Doctor Who novel. (Virgin generally
required a synopsis and a 15,000 word set of sample chapters,
and so I had plenty of submissions for which I did that amount
and no more, but Equilibrium was the only one that I just
carried on writing to completion – between preparing all those
numerous other Doctor Who proposals!) So I figured, why not
put it where, at worst, it would only gather e-dust and, at best,
where it might be enjoyed.
In working through it to prepare each chapter for posting
on the web, it was tempting in some respects to perform a
major overhaul, refine and polish it to the nth degree and
eliminate all of its pesky flaws. But in the first place, I realised
that wasn’t practically possible, both because I couldn’t afford
the time and because expecting it to be perfect was expecting
too much; and in the second place, I thought that it would
offer more worthwhile lessons, for myself and for other
interested writers and/or readers out there, if it was posted –
give or take the odd edit or rewritten section (on which, more
in a moment) – in its original form.
It also means people can go easy on it because, like the
author, it’s a little rough around the edges!
So, other than the inevitable typos and the occasional
compulsion, as I worked through it, to groom a sentence here
and there, what was changed?
The most significant change was in one of the central
characters. Although the synopsis had grown to accommodate
Aphrodite and shape Equilibrium into a prequel, the original
manuscript had been completed with a different character in
mind. I won’t say too much about her as, apart from a few
Doctor Who trappings, I have plans to use that same character
in another (non-Doctor Who) project, but suffice to say, in the
context of the original Equilibrium, she was a Time Lady –
albeit a unique and original one. So naturally, her scenes
needed some extensive re-working, although I made efforts to
keep the rewrites to a minimum. As such, for me, in this book,
Aphrodite doesn’t always read quite true, as it wasn’t always
easy to keep myself from visualising the original character in
her place and, besides, some of the lines and actions were
tailored to her replacement, rather than being born of
Aphrodite herself. It’s often a subtle distinction, but one I was
acutely aware of and it will be interesting to see if anyone who
has read both Emotional Chemistry and Equilibrium picks up
on it.
By way of contrast, (Major) Bugayev proved an opposite
case. He had always featured in Equilibrium, but in
approaching his character I had anticipated there being some
degree of rewriting in order to ensure that he came across as a
convincing younger version of the character I painted in
Emotional Chemistry. As luck would have it, I found the gap
in maturity was already there, in terms of how I’d written the
character, and I didn’t really feel any need to tamper with that.
So the fact that I had written him ten years earlier, for my
money, was what painted the prequel-portrait I was after.
Other than that there were a couple of name changes. In
the first place, when I wrote Emotional Chemistry, Justin
Richards pointed out that the name of Grushkin (Bugayev’s
original second in command) was perhaps too akin to Garudin
on the page, so his name was changed to Zhelnin; hence, a
corresponding change had to be made in Equilibrium. Then, in
a similar fashion, I decided that with Aphrodite and Athena
there were already too many A names involved, so I changed
the name of Alisandra to Melisandra. Simple. And, I’m glad to
say, totally insignificant in terms of any impact on the story!
So, what did I think of the story as I read it again?
Well, for one thing, I could see how it might be perceived
as loose and unstructured. The fact is, in terms of how it was
constructed, like everything else I write, it is structured – but
the structure stems purely from character motivation. And
characters are often (we hope!) unpredictable and take on lives
of their own. For me, structuring a plot is like growing house
plants: you can prune it here and there, you can turn it around
so it’ll grow towards the light, but at the end of the day it’s
going to find its own shape, by and large. Of course, I hope
eventually I’ll have more success with my plots than with
houseplants, but the point remains the same.
The difference here, I think, is that two of the characters
are powerful forces and the fact that they can manipulate time
means they can manipulate events to such a degree that
perhaps some of the characters’ actions seem futile. The clash
at the end is going to happen no matter what: that’s what
drives Athena and the Chieftain both, and although all the
behaviour of all the other characters arises from a natural
process of action and reaction, they’re all at the same time
being drawn along towards that point. Ultimately though, I do
feel the Doctor makes the vital difference – as intended – in
establishing the titular equilibrium (if I’m allowed to say
that!).
There are a few indulgences along the way: the timeslip
that enables the Doctor to hail a cab and shake off his OGRON
escort, for instance, but I always felt it was worth it for the
joke. And it’s probably fair to say there’s too much running
around, getting captured and escaping, but I think in writing it
originally I saw that as part of the essence of a Pertwee
adventure. In much the same way as, I suppose, being wrong
on occasion is an essential part of the learning process! It’s
just a question of what works well on screen and what works
well on the page, although I was satisfied with some of the
action sequences in the book, so again it all pretty much
balances out in the end.
The only question that remains, I guess, is what would I
have done differently had the book been commissioned and I
could have devoted a full six months on developing it properly
as a published novel? Hm. Well, I say hm, but actually I have
some very clear ideas of how I might have approached it
differently.
It sort of goes without saying – but I’ll say it anyway –
that I would have taken a good long look at the structure and
developed it anew, examining Aphrodite’s role and
subsequently writing her scenes from scratch.
In this compromise rewrite, there were all manner of
things, like losing the original Time Lady’s TARDIS, that
would have and should have resulted in significant changes to
the plot, and given what I know of the differences between the
characters, I am sure Aphrodite’s thread would have taken a
different direction here and there – rather than her actions
being grafted on in place of the previous character’s. Aspects
of her character do fit the events here, but I would have been
much happier approaching her part in the story anew.
On top of which, I would have liked to have made this
Aphrodite’s introductory story, making this her first meeting
with the Doctor, factoring in her trial at the hands of the
Magellans at the end and introducing us to her homeworld,
Paraiso, for the first time and so on. All of which would have
required a greater word count, of course, but on the other hand
it might have provided a good incentive to trim out some of
the fat.
On the other hand, I would have also liked to have
developed the Kagyrn more, expanded upon their culture and
background etc. As the book stands, they serve well enough as
monsters perhaps, but I had always had them in mind as
something more. They literally arose out of that notion (from
Dracula) of vampires having wolves at their command, but as
usual I did make some effort to develop them as a race in
some detail, very little of which made it into Equilibrium as it
is here. Likewise, word count permitting, it might have been
matched with some measure of greater detail on the Magyar
culture to which they were bound.
It’s less easy to see what might have changed with regard
to the other characters, mostly because their actions all ring
true to me, but it’s reasonable to assume that those key
changes would have had some impact on the actions of others
in the story.
In the case of Liz Shaw, though, I feel fairly sure I would
have kept that ending. Back when I originally wrote
Equilibrium, I’d had all sorts of ambitions to write that crucial
departure scene for Liz: as one of my favourite Doctor Who
companions, I really wanted to be the one to write that for her.
But when it came to writing the story and arriving at the end,
that question – of whether she would leave or continue
travelling a while (via the house) with the Doctor – well, to
leave it unanswered and hanging in the balance just seemed
the right thing to do.
Quite possibly I am completely wrong on that score. But
like I say, being wrong is all part of the learning process, and
one thing this exercise – of revisiting Equilibrium here – has
taught me is that I am definitely still learning.
SAF January 2005
I remember reading about one called Freaks, by Rebecca Levene. Anybody know what happened to that?
[Freaks was dropped as Levene got work on a television series and didn't have the available time to meet the proposed deadline - it was replaced by The Banquo Legacy which was essentially Justin Richards reworking an old story he wrote with Andy Lane.]
Also you could include Gareth Roberts' proposed novelization of Revelation Of The Daleks - dropped and Roberts wrote The Plotters in its place.
Also Paul Leonard was down to write Resurrection Of The Daleks, again replaced by Speed Of Light.
One final entry could be Kim Newman's Dimension In Space, dropped when Telos lost their license to publish DW novellas.
Why did the two Saward Dalek stories never get novelized?
It wasn't because of the JNT fallout. That was why the video for Revelation took so long to be released, rather than the the novel. JNT worked on Doctor Who for BBC Video after 1989. That's also why there are no clips on the JNT produced "Colin Baker Years"
The reason for the lack of Target novelizations was money. In the late 80s Nigel Robinson and Saward discussed novelizing the Dalek stories (when Saward was doing Attack novelization).
The problem was Terry Nation's agent was asking for such a large percentage of Saward's fee that it just didn't seem worth the effort. As Robinson tells it Saward suggested novelizing Revelation but calling Davros "The Great healer", and calling the daleks "The Great healer's servants" throughout!
He then admitted he was clutching at straws.
There are also interesting rumors about when Virgin and Saward tried again in the 90s. Before Leonard and Roberts, Saward was going to write them himself but that fell through. Some say that it was because he was writing it too much like a basic old-school Target novelization when it was felt that the MAs had moved on. Others say the opposite: That he disliked Resurrection so much that he kept adding new ideas and diversions, to the extent that it no longer resembled the televised story at all. We'll never know for sure but I hope it's the latter.
I thought the reason Revelation took so long to come out on VHS was down to the music rights - or so it says on the sleeve notes on the VHS release.
{Someone replied: You may be right about the music rights halting the video, but I'm pretty sure Saward also withheld clips of it from "The Colin Baker Years" because of the JNT bust-up and that neither of these things had anything to do with it not being novelised.
Interesting about Bidmead (can you imagine Graham Williams novelizing his work?) but probably an error
. It's a shame that the Enemy of the Daleks proposal had to be taken out of Time Incorporated (under very strong legal advice) but there was never more than a proposal, not even an outline
. Lance has said that some of the ideas, including the Klade, plus the general tone and thrust of it all went into Father Time. Which is great because Father Time is great.
In much the same way that we would never have got 'Alien Bodies' if 'Worse things than Angels' hadn't been rejected}
On the subject of the 1990s attempt, it seems that Saward was going to novelise Yellow Fever as well, but that fell by the wayside. As a surprising extra, Telos' The Target Book mentions that Graham Williams was going to novelise Chris Bidmead's Pinacotheca {his 'lost' Trial story}, although this may have been a mistake given the occasional confusion between this and The Hollows Of Time, a more likely candidate given the first three stories of the abandoned Season 23 being novelised at around that time.
Enemy of the Daleks by Lance Parkin was just a proposal, not even a plot outline. Roger Hancock (Terry Nation's agent) approved it. But because Lance had other tv commitments it never got any further.
When Lance Parkin's collected writings were to be published in "Time Unincorporated Volume 1" the intention was to include this proposal, but as Lance put it on Jade Pagoda
"... we had, ahem,*very* strong legal advice that we'd get in trouble with it".
I assume because it would be an unlicensed story about Daleks and Davros. So it was removed before the book was published
Racheal G L Redhead: I have 3 rejections, one from Virgin for 'Paper Trail' which looking back was really a mess of a story, it was kind of like Keys of Marinus or The Chase with the 6th Doctor & Peri
and 2 from the BBC for 'The Mystery of Jod' set immediatley after the end of Trial with the 6th Doctor taking Mel back to her correct point in her travels with his future self, in the first version Mel remains locked in the TARDIS for the whole of the story, in the second (and I think better version) Mel escapes and has her own brand new story line which turned out to be far more important than the Doctor's story, alas by then they'd stopped accepting submissions and then they wound down the PDA's.
I did also pitch an audio story to BF featuring the 6th Doctor & Peri, against some psychic mind-eating lobster-like aliens but that was sensibly rejected.
