First of all, a very Merry Christmas to all my readers. I hope you all get a chance to spend the festive time with your loved ones, get some lovely presents (including many books!) and have a most awesome New Year!
Over at Type 40, the Doctor Who blog run by me on behalf of Candy Jar Books, we’ve arranged a very special Christmas gift for fans of Sir Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart and The Web of Fear; an exclusive interview with Hannah Haisman, the Executor of Mervyn Haisman’s Estate and the licensor of the Lethbridge-Stewart book series.
Speaking of the series. Plans are gathering apace; we have a special gift coming early next year to precede the release of the first novel, although I can’t say what it is at this time, but I think it’s something a lot of long-time Who fans will truly love. We’ve also got five books planned for 2016 — yup, we’re planning on moving up to five books a year, although the fifth book of 2016 will be a special event that fans will be able to interact with. More news on that coming late 2015! Of the four novels planned for 2016 we’ve got three of the four authors confirmed, with the fourth confirmation imminent. As per our forthcoming 2015 series, it will feature three names well known to Who fans, bringing back authors who’ve been missing from Who prose for way too long. These authors will probably be announced in the summer of 2015, when the writing of our 2016 season begins. As well as the three ‘big names’, we’ll have a brand new name to Who prose, although this author has form, with novels published elsewhere. Part of our mandate is to introduce new authors, not only new to Who (although possibly established elsewhere) but giving new authors their first published work. It’s something Doctor Who has been doing since 1988, and it’s a tradition we intend to keep up. Without such a policy the world may never have experienced the works of such names as Paul Cornell or Ben Aaronovitch. We’re also mindful of the limited number of female writers in the worlds of Doctor Who, and so we hope, with our increase to five novels a year from 2017, we’ll have more opportunities to vary our author selection to include established names, first-time authors, and bring more female authors to the series. On top of all that, very provisional plans are being made and storylines discussed with authors for the 2017 and 2018 seasons – assuming, of course, the series continues that long. I choose to believe it will. 😉
In other news, the end of the current series of Space: 1889 & Beyond has been officially announced in a somewhat unplanned way on Facebook (the first I knew was when I happened across the post two days ago). This statement was made by Jay Hartman of Untreed Reads: ‘Dear Space: 1889 & Beyond Readers: Due to various reasons, Untreed Reads will not be releasing new titles in the series moving forward. However, this does not mean the series will be ending altogether! Stay tuned to this page as things continue to develop. Thanks so much for your support over the last few years!’ One day I will go into these ‘various reasons’, but for now all I will say that it was a mutual decision made by all the authors of the series following a long period of dissatisfaction with the lack of marketing and promotion for the series, which ultimately affected sales in a detrimental way. The Facebook page has been shut down for now, although it will be re-activated at some point in the near future. As intimated above, none of this means the series as a whole is over… Plans are, tentatively, afoot for a print run of the series, which will lead to the eventual continuation of the mission of HMAS Sovereign and her gallant crew as they traverse the aether beyond the asteroid belt. As well as these we hope to release a series of stand-alone novels set elsewhere in the fictional universe of Space: 1889 & Beyond, making the property more accessible to those unwilling to commit to a serialised set of novels. Alas, until these plans are confirmed and the legal side of things sorted out (which could take a while – red tape being what it is!), it could be a while before the series is taken out of the limbo it has found itself in. Until then, the series continues to remain on sale in digital form, which allows everybody a chance to catch up. 🙂
So, the year ends with a bit of a mixed bag. As one series of novels ends (for now) I find myself moving from one range to another, with the arrival of Lethbridge-Stewart. It’s sad that Space: 1889 & Beyond has temporarily ended like this, as we all spent a lot of time and effort on that series, and I feel we created some really good stories and made some nice in-roads with great themes and characters. But, the future looks bright for me as I guide a legend of Doctor Who and get to work with some authors who inspired me back in the ’90s and I get the joy of bringing back some of the best Who authors out there, some of which have been sadly neglected by Doctor Who prose since 2005.
See you in the New Year!
Andy Frankham-Allen 😀
The Welsh-Londoner's Literary Adventures 