Author James Goss has spoken on his next project for BBC Books following his immensely well received City of Death novelisation - The Pirate Planet. Scheduled for release in 2016, The Pirate Planet will be the final Douglas Adams story left to novelise from the writer’s Doctor Who output.
Speaking to SFX Magazine, Goss says his aim with the new novel is to try and make people love The Pirate Planet as much as they do City of Death and Shada, recognising that he has a much harder task this time than with the beloved City:
“The Pirate Planet has that sort of slightly, ‘Oh, maybe we can manage to take seven people in loin cloths out to a quarry in Wales’ feel to it. The script is amazing but you do have this slight feeling that Douglas Adams has ended up in the middle of an episode of Blake’s 7. And it’s a very odd experience watching it. I hope that doesn’t make me sound like I’m slagging off The Pirate Planet but City Of Death is probably the most beautiful-looking the classic series ever managed to pull off. This was Doctor Who being chic and stylish and glamorous. Like everybody has just come in from a Noel Coward play. And it’s just perfect.”
Goss also reveals the exciting news that he’ll seek to reintroduce Douglas Adams original vision for the scripts into his new novelisation:
“The Pirate Planet is very exciting. There’s a brilliant researcher called Jem Roberts, who has written a very good biography of Douglas Adams, and he has access to Douglas Adams’s archive at St John’s College in Cambridge. And I’m hoping he’ll help me get into the archive, because when I was researching the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary coffee table book, every single quote that I managed to find about The Pirate Planet referred to how much more there was of the story before the BBC turned up and went, ‘No, this is too wild a sky for us.’
For more from James Goss, where he speaks on The Pirate Planet and hopes for his finds in the archives, head over to Gamesradar. City of Death meanwhile is available now from all good bookshops and via the Amazon link below.
The Doctor takes Romana for a holiday in Paris - a city which, like a fine wine, has a bouquet all its own. Especially if you visit during one of the vintage years. But the TARDIS takes them to 1979, a table-wine year, a year whose vintage is soured by cracks - not in their wine glasses but in the very fabric of time itself. Soon the Time Lords are embroiled in an audacious alien scheme which encompasses home-made time machines, the theft of the Mona Lisa, the resurrection of the much-feared Jagaroth race, and the beginning (and quite possibly the end) of all life on Earth. Aided by British private detective Duggan, whose speciality is thumping people, the Doctor and Romana must thwart the machinations of the suave, mysterious Count Scarlioni - all twelve of him - if the human race has any chance of survival. But then, the Doctor's holidays tend to turn out a bit like this. Featuring the Fourth Doctor as played by Tom Baker, City of Death is a novel by James Goss based on the 1979 Doctor Who story written by Douglas Adams under the pen-name David Agnew. City of Death is one of the best-loved serials in the show's 50-year history and was watched by over 16 million viewers when first broadcast.
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Ah ha! I always knew @RattoCSN was a supervillian!
Douglas Adams refused to let Target novelise his stories
Are they novelising City of Death too?
It’s been done, Justin.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-City-Death-Dr/dp/1849906750