RICHARD FREEMAN WRITES...

The legendary cult SF author Michael Moorcock is turning his had to Dr Who and has been officaly contracted to write a Dr Who novel to hit our shelves in about a years time.

As yet we don't know if it will feature the new Doctor (Matt Smith) or one of his previous incarnations. I for one am over the moon (Delta Three in fact) that the man who brought us charcaters like Lord Mongrove and Elric of Melniboné is adding to the Dr Who universe.
On his own fourum the great man says...

Hmmm. I couldn't get to the Gallifrey site but I can answer the odd question here:

1) I've been watching Dr Who since it began. Haven't liked all the doctors and after Peter Davison stopped watching regularly until the new BBC Wales series.
2) Since the Tom Baker series, a lot of my ideas crept into the stories and so in many ways I'll be writing a story which already echoes my own work.
3)I do have to submit it to editors so they can make sure it fits into the canon and this, of course, is understandable. By saying it wasn't a tie-in I did, of course, mean that it would be an original novel, not one which was linked to previous stories.

I share an enthusiasm for the current Dr Who broadcasts with quite a few friends who are 'literary' novelists and I sense in some of the Gallifrey remarks a suspicion of the 'outsider' which you used to get when someone with a reputation as a non-sf writer would decide to write an sf novel. All I can answer to this is 'wait and see'. I'm certainly not a non-watcher! Neither am I someone who ascribes a kind of religiosity to an enthusiasm. This phenomenon crops up a lot, these days associated with sf/fantasy, LOTR, H.Potter, Twilight and so on. I hate these presumptions of exclusivity either in my own corner of the literary world or elsewhere. Mike Kustow, once director of the Royal Shakespeare Co, described this as 'the anxious ownership syndrome', when faced with his first confrontation with sf fandom in Brighton 1968. He'd found the same sort of expression with Shakespeare fans when someone from 'outside' showed an interest.

I've been asked to write Dr Who scripts or stories almost since the series began, because I was known to enjoy Dr Who. Only recently did the time feel right to me to do one. I'm going to enjoy that, too.