DOCTOR WHO: SINGULARITY

Doctor Who

Singularity is my first Doctor Who audio drama.

Singularity cover art DOCTOR WHO: SINGULARITY

As a writer, it's been my good fortune to tackle several tie-in projects that have strong personal resonance with me; I grew up with the James Bond movies, with the original Star Trek series and the Star Wars saga, and to greater or lesser degrees I've been able to write for or about these and other universes. But one character that kept eluding me was a quintessential British SF hero; Doctor Who.

I came to the series at the end of Tom Baker's tenure and the start of Peter Davison's, and growing up the timelord was firmly part of my TV landscape. The Doctor's uniqueness made me want to write for him, but I always seemed to be doomed to narrowly miss the opportunity. I pitched to BBC books, but never made the cut; I was hired to consult on a Doctor Who PC game that was never produced; I even had a script treatment optioned by BBCi for their Ninth Doctor webcast series starring Richard E. Grant, but the return of the "real" series scuppered that. Fate conspired against me...until Big Finish's Gary Russell offered me the chance to write for the Doctor Who audio drama line.

At this point, I'd already written three audios for BF's Judge Dredd series (Click Here to learn more about those stories) and with the doors being flung open to proposals for Doctor Who, I got to work on the story that would become Singularity. I knew that this might be my only chance to tell a tale with the Doctor, and so I wrote something shades away from my previous Dredds; something dark and intense, a story that could only ever be a Doctor Who adventure. When Gary gave me the go-ahead, I got a fanboy headrush; at last, I was going to tell a Who story...

Singularity takes place in Moscow, although it wasn't always so. I vowed that I'd write an Earthbound story set somewhere other than the UK, and to begin with, when I'd initially conceived Singularity as a Seventh Doctor & Ace story, it was set in Vancouver. When Gary asked me to develop the script, he wanted me to change it to suit a different pairing - the Fifth Doctor and Turlough - and as the writing shifted to reflect those characters so did the locale. I considered having Berlin join London, Paris and Amsterdam as cities where the Doctor had ventured, but in the end I took the action to a near-future Moscow, inspired by a vision of the TARDIS parked in Red Square and the underlying narrative idea of endurance against all odds.

Of course, it wouldn't be one of my scripts if I didn't drop some references in there... Although it isn't explicitly mentioned in the dialogue, Singularity takes place sometime around 2030, and chronologically it occurs after the events of the audio drama Loups Garoux and before the TV story Planet of Fire. Loups... (and its werewolf storyline) is obliquely referenced in one of Lena's lines to Turlough, while Turlough's comments about travelling somewhere warm and girls with bikinis reflect the forthcoming trip to Lanzarote in Planet...; other Doctor Who nods include The Abominable Snowmen, The Enemy of the World and Resurrection of the Daleks. As well as those militant pepperpots, there's also mention of the Cybermen and an allusion to the Ice Warriors. The title, I hasten to stress, has nothing to do with the 'singularity' mentioned by the timelord Omega.

There are references to Kate Bush's 'Hounds of Love' and David Lee Roth's 'Land's Edge', Star Trek's City on the Edge of Forever, La Femme Nikita, Ghostbusters and Blake's 7. A character cut from the script was Pushkin's partner in the Somnus Foundation, Professor Ernst Vernor; Vernor's name came from science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who first posited the concept of the singularity in SF. A nod to Vinge's prototypical cyberpunk novel True Names remains in the final draft.

Singularity went through a lot of evolutions along the way from it's earliest incarnations, and lastly I have to give props to author and all-around good egg Keith Topping for his comments on the initial versions of the story. I'm also grateful to John Ainsworth for the good example he set directing my Judge Dredd and Space 1889 scripts; and of course, thanks to Gary, to Steve Foxon, to Toby and company at the Moat Studios and the cast who made Singularity come alive. I'm still a little dazzled that (finally!) I got to write a Who, and it's been a most rewarding experience.

To order a copy of Doctor Who: Singularity, Click Here

To listen to the trailer, Click Here

To visit Big Finish's Doctor Who audio dramas website, Click Here

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