Shadow novelisation

The success of my 1985 Blake novelisation prompted me and my pals to consider publishing further Blake’s 7 TV adaptations. Chris Boucher had been very helpful by allowing us to adapt his script for the series finale, and kindly agreed we could publish a similar not-for-profit version of his Season B story Shadow.

David Tulley (pictured here in 1985) was a contributor to the Frontier Worlds fanzine. And like me, Peter, and Tony, he was a student when the TV series aired. We were pleased when David said it was one of his favourite stories, and that he’d like to write the novel.

Andrew Martin provided a splendid cover featuring Cally and Orac, and we once again used Tony Clark’s new logo.

Three decades later, the publication is long out of print. Thanks to the wonders of eBay and a half-decent scanner, I can now make Shadow available here for free, with David’s permission.

I was amused to see that there’s also an Amazon page for the fanzine. So if you enjoy reading David’s book, you can add a review there!

There was a third novelisation planned… I may blog about that another time.

Blake novelisation

In 1981 I went with my pals Peter and Tony to BBC Television Centre London, where we saw the final episode of Blake’s 7 being recorded. I’ve blogged about that elsewhere on this blog. Subsequently, I documented the visit in our fanzine Frontier Worlds.

Alongside the set report, I also included snippets from the scenes we had seen recorded in studio or  film excerpts that we spotted on the production gallery monitors. Our fanzine readers seemed to like them, and so a few years later in 1985  I wrote up the rest of the story as a novelisation.

We published it as a not-for-profit Frontier Worlds special edition – with the kind permission of the story’s original script writer, Chris Boucher. Andrew Martin drew a cover, and Tony Clark created a new Blake’s 7 logo for us.

It’s been out of print for decades, though it occasionally turns up on eBay. I thought it was a shame not to make it available, as a sort of historical curiosity. So you can now read it for free here.

Almost thirty years later, I was able to novelise my own Blake’s 7 script. You can still get that as an e-book for the bargain price of £2.99 If you like the idea of getting my Blake novel for free, why not spend a few quid buying my officially-licensed book, Warship, from Big Finish Productions? You can do that here.