Interview: Stephen Cole

Author of Timeless, and the destroyer of Gallifrey.

What's your new book, Timeless, all about?

Timeless is a story about taking choices and living with consequences. It's largely set on contemporary Earth, but there are deviations into some very odd places... An awful lot happens in Timeless - the TARDIS comes back to Real Earth, Trix is revealed, Sabbath's plan is discovered at last, Anji departs - it was good fun to be moving things along into the last, definite stages of the arc.

Timeless answers a lot of questions as well as asking others which will lead the range onwards - which is healthy, I hope.

How are you handling new companion Trix in the book?

Trix is the con-woman first introduced in Time Zero sometime back, and in Timeless we get to see her act more 'as herself' - or as close to being herself as she gets. It seems to me companions broadly fit into two camps.¹[There are] ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances that you come to care for (Sarah-Jane, Jo etc.), and 'concept' companions who are often less obviously likeable and who come with specific agendas designed to shake things up a bit (Turlough, Leela).

[The latter] are great, but trickier to develop once you get a few stories down the line, as the thing that makes them different from the norm actually ends up [being] massively restraining when trying to tell a Doctor Who story, and fatigues the audience because really your crew should be broadly happy together and pulling in the same direction.

Justin decided he wanted a new female companion quite some time back. He developed an outline for Trix and ran it past me, and I offered him some of my thoughts. Trix has bags of potential I think, because her 'concept' allows her to be of great use to the Doctor's aims while not betraying her own.

And it's great fun to present sides of her which seem at odds with what we think we know so the reader can speculate if this is really her, or just another tactic. That means she plays off Fitz really nicely - and keeps the Doctor on his toes too.

The plot of Timeless affords her a whole range of situations, from the ruminative to the clever con-woman at work to the life-or-death struggle. Simon Forward read Timeless to help with his own characterisation, and Justin's handling the next one himself, so she'll stay consistent - consistently unpredictable, I should imagine!

Do you like working on the big story arcs? Has it been easy coming up with ideas that didn't clash with anyone elses?

Justin asked me some time ago - when I was writing Vanishing Point, I think - if I fancied tying up the planned Sabbath story arc at some point in the future. The challenge with that kind of brief is working out a plot that can work within the parameters you are set, and which remains a book readable in its own right.

It can be a restrictive exercise, but post-Time Zero Justin and I had conspired together on some of the whys and hows and whats of the arc as it progressed, and so I wasn't just handed a prescriptive brief of where to start and where to finish; I had already played a small part in working that out.

For all that, I'd like to stress that Timeless can be read with no former knowledge required of the arc; important points are recapped, and it's in no way a continuity-fest. I really enjoyed doing Timeless, and think it's probably the best Who novel I've written.

What can we expect when Colin Baker meets Katy Manning in upcoming audio play The Wormery?

Utter madness! It's set in a cabaret in 1930s Berlin, with creepy things lurking downstairs in the shadows and, in classic Who style, Things Are Not Always What They Seem...

I was present at the recording one day, and everyone seemed to be having a ball.

There are some great performances, and Katy gets to sing, cry and even get drunk once or twice. I have to say, her performance as Iris is cracking, she really sparkles with Colin Baker, who's 100% brilliant throughout. I love writing for Colin.

As well as co-writing it with Paul Magrs I got to produce the music with Jason Loborik, a very talented pianist, so there's lots of incidentals and even some Noel Coward pastiches, which should hopefully add another layer. It's taken a lot of time on the writing side, so now I'm just looking forward to hearing the end product.

Any other projects in the pipeline that we can look forward to?

I like to think there's the possibility of another Who at some point. It's nice to feel still involved in the range even after all this time. Outside of Who, the first in a trilogy of horror thrillers I've written for young adults is published in October by Bloomsbury; the series is called The Wereling and the first book is called Wounded.

Being a former editor of the Doctor Who books range, how does it affect the way you approach your own submissions to current editor Justin Richards?

Justin and I approach submissions in a similar way - we tend to request detailed synopses once we've okayed initial ideas or outlines.

With Ten Little Aliens, to be sure I could make it work I had to have it clear in my own mind. I turned in a very detailed synopsis, which altered very little when I came to write the novel. It's kinder to the editor - no surprises!

Ten Little Aliens seems to be an unexpected combination of very modern, cinematic space adventure - and William Hartnell... What were its origins?

When I was writing the initial outline, I didn't have a particular team in mind, except it needed to be the Doctor and two companions.

Making it a Troughton would've been too obvious I think (isolated place under siege etc.) so I used the Eighth, Fitz and Anji for the outline, but deliberately, no-one's role was very defined.

Justin suggested the First Doctor and I thought that was a cool idea. As you say, with the setting it's an unexpected combination, and I like that. I'm all for making the past Doctor stories of their eras to an extent, but it's no fun if you don't push that a bit. And the Hartnell stories were constantly pushing the envelope of narrative in all sorts of directions.

It was almost an anti-style, you never knew what was coming next. So, Hartnell and Sigourney Weaver together? It made me laugh, and I wanted to give it a try.

Tell us a bit about your reasons behind creating the 'make your own adventure' style section of the book with its huge reading permutations.

It ties in with the experimental nature of Hartnell stories, and I was thinking how you could mirror that in a book.

The section is quite short relative to the rest of the book, about 12,000 words out of 84,000, and it's really multiple-angle rather than choose your own adventure. You can get a handle on events without necessarily reading them all should you be in a hurry, or you can take the time to get in everyone's head and see different people's reactions to the same events.

I wanted to demonstrate the idea of the unreliable narrator ¼ the way we think and feel, our desires and our fears, all this colours the way we view the world. On top of that, it was meant to be some fun. But it turned out to be a total swine to write, check and cross-reference - a real rod for my own back.

Probably more mental than experimental, but at least I'll know for next time. I'm very grateful to Peter Anghelides for putting together a spreadsheet for me to show the different routes through that section!

How did VFX expect Mike Tucker get involved in designing the Shirr creature for the cover, and was it what you envisaged?

Mike, being a brilliant mate, offered as far back as Parallel 59 to design something for one of my covers ¼ I think it was his way of saying thanks for me blacking up my eyes and dressing up as a Fleshsmith for the cover of his book Prime Time.

When I came up with the Schirr and told him about them he thought it would be a laugh to design them for me - I was thrilled. He duly modelled it, we went through a couple of designs, and then I went along to the actual shoot, and saw the latex Schirr head in all his glory.

Mike let me keep him afterwards! It's a slightly macabre experience, carrying a severed alien head round London in a carrier bag. I sometimes leave it lying around the house to scare my wife!

The Apocalypse Element featured the Daleks invading Gallifrey and destroying an entire galaxy. Would you describe yourself as someone who likes to write adventures bigger in scope than the TV series...?

For that one, since I'd been assigned the task of depicting a Dalek invasion of Gallifrey, I concluded that to take on the Time Lords they'd need a plan that was very far-reaching. To have the arrogance to use the Time Lords as pawns in their game, it needs to be big.

So size was essential with the Apocalypse Element. I wouldn't say I was trying to go 'one better' than the TV show - quite often the fate of the whole universe has hung by a thread ¼ Logopolis, Terminus, The Daleks' Master Plan etc etc.

What do you think is the right balance to aim for when trying to think epic but keeping it true to the spirit of Doctor Who

I don't believe every book should be seeking to evoke Doctor Who just as it was on television. You should take the core concepts and characters and use them for the story that you want to tell ¼ Doctor Who is a uniquely flexible and accommodating format for anything you want to do.

You took control of the books quite soon after they returned to the BBC from Virgin. What was your aim with the range? Were you keen to take it in a new direction, or build upon what had gone before?

This is a tricky one to answer. The Virgin New Adventures had carved their own path, had a clear idea of what they were doing, partly signposted by the series itself in the characterisation of the Seventh Doctor. That wasn't a path necessarily enjoyed by absolutely everyone, but it was a very strong one, it had cohesion and the support of not just a loyal readership, but also so many writers to whom it had given a break.

There was a lot of talent there that had been allowed to create a new direction for Doctor Who, who were hungry for it. When the BBC took back the books it caused a lot of anger and resentment in factions of both fandom and writers - even though largely the same writers were still there and writing for it.

I think the BBC books would've got off to a stronger start if they'd had a completely new set of writers in place for the first stretch, or else a different approach to the two strands Virgin had developed - just to allay criticisms that Virgin had done all the work and set up this great series of books, and the BBC had just steamed in and taken it away - but were now doing it less well, because they didn't 'get it'. But the framework was already in place by the time I arrived, the first five months' worth commissioned.

The good thing about it is that it opened up Doctor Who to all fandom again, it was a new jumping on point. Certainly the Eight Doctors, whatever its failings as a novel, was a commercial success, selling far more than any other book in the BBC range - and sales of the other books picked up too.

So I would've liked to have brought something new to the whole set up; developed a new range, or at least add-ons like shorter, serial adventures, separate mini-series to explore more extreme story arcs, etc. But the BBC's attitude, once the series was up and running and defined, and a new series was no longer on the cards, was to leave it as it was, not to meddle - not to bother with it, in fact, which was enormously frustrating.

I had no choice other than to try to build on what had gone before just as it was, and weather criticisms of being 'Virgin Lite'. But I think that during my tenure there were still some wonderful books in both ranges ¼ Alien Bodies, Seeing I, Dreams of Empire, The Scarlet Empress, Storm Harvest, The Witch Hunters - and many more.

The unpredictable nature of the books was what I enjoyed, the idea that you never knew what you'd get when you picked up the next book ¼ and sales held up, so others must have enjoyed that too. To borrow an allusion, I think perhaps Virgin were Monty Python and my time at the BBC was The Goodies. We weren't as consistently brilliant but our highs were easily as high and our lows probably less low than theirs.

You've edited several Short Trips Doctor Who anthologies. What makes for a good Doctor Who short story?

A good, clear idea in the hands of a good writer. And not writing it with a particular set length in mind.

Without embarrassing anyone who might be reading, what was the most unusable submission you ever received as editor?

I wish I could tell you a few of them, but I mustn't. Precisely because they may well be reading!

Do you feel more self-conscious putting the Doctor into an odd situation that, for example, Peter Davison, actually has to perform for an audio, rather than having him endure all kinds of strangeness in a novel?

Oh no. It's great watching them act their way out of it. My only sorrow for them is that they have to spout the jargon I script for them.

What's your favourite original creation for the books or CD's, either as a writer or editor.

Fitz. As someone with a lot of input into his creation and development, I'm very pleased he's still around and proven so popular.

What can we expect from The Plague Herds of Excelis, being a Benny CD? What are your feelings about the character? Benny's great to write for ¼ I did one of the Big Finish Benny books ¼ and Lisa Bowerman and I get on well socially, so that's doubly fun to do an audio and put words in her mouth!

Plague Herds is the closing chapter in the Excelis series, bringing the Benny range and the Doctor Who range together (with Paul Magrs' brilliant creation Iris Wildthyme, played by Katy Manning, adding cohesion).

It's a bit mad - I'm looking forward to hearing how it's been realised - you know, disease-ridden cow carcasses catapulted over city walls to squelch down in the town square, screaming villagers, etc.

Where next for Stephen Cole? We hear that you now oversee the UK range of Buffy books to some extent. Any plans to write for the Slayer?

Alas, not true! Just as I arrived at my job, which indeed would've included watching over the Slayer, they took her out of children's and into adult books - A shame!

As for where next, I've been lucky enough to be able to combine editing and writing in my career; so far this year I've written books tying in to Thunderbirds, Mr Bean, a new BBC children's sci-fi series... and hopefully there'll be more stuff coming along in the second half of the year.

There's also some more Doctor Who in the offing. It's odd, if I'm not doing Doctor Who in some capacity, I end up missing it. It's a difficult thing to say goodbye to.

• Stephen Cole
  

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