Seventh heaven

Big Finish have announced (or in some cases unexpectedly leaked) some Blake’s 7 news today. What I can confirm at the moment is that I’m writing one of the first set of new “enhanced audiobooks”, along with Simon Guerrier and Nigel Fairs.  The script editor is Justin Richards and the producer is David Richardson. David doesn’t have a blog or a website to which I can link, so here is a lovely interview photo of him instead.

I wasn’t expecting the authors to be announced yet, but it seems that if you dig deep enough on this page you can find out who we are.  My story is called “Counterfeit”.

As well as the audiobooks, there will be a series of new original novels published.  And the audio versions of the Trevor Hoyle novels The Way Back (read by Gareth Thomas) and Cygnus Alpha (read by Paul Darrow) are also available (originally released in 2009). No sign of “Project Avalon” or “Scorpio Attack”, alas.

I am of course delighted to be involved in the launch of this series of new stories. Along with Doctor Who, Blake’s 7 has been one of my abiding passions, going back to when my friends and I published a fanzine called “Frontier Worlds” that coincided with the first transmission of the show in 1978/9.  I even wrote a fan novelisation of the final TV episode “Blake” in the 1980s (post transmission, obviously), after my pals and I had the great good fortune to see that episode being recorded at BBC Television Centre.

Come to think of it, our fanzine even published some fiction by a young Blake’s 7 enthusiast called David Richardson. Whatever happened to him?

A note for pedants: the first three audios are set between “Project Avalon” and “Breakdown” in the first series. But as any fule kno, the first series was called “Series A” and not “Series 1”. So perhaps they will have the “production codes” A9.1, A9.2, and A9.3.