Joanne Harris is the latest author to pen a short story for the BBC Books Doctor Who: Time Trips series joining women’s fiction favourites Cecelia Ahern and Jenny Colgan.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller, released tomorrow as an eBook, features the third Doctor, who was portrayed by actor Jon Pertwee on the televised science fiction series from 1970 - 1974. Struggling to get back to UNIT HQ, his body being destroyed by radiation, the short sees the Doctor arriving in the most perfect English village, where everyone is happy. But is he really on Earth, or somewhere far more strange? As his body weakens, the Doctor and the Queen of the village begin to unravel the truth.
Joanne Harris says: “I remember watching Doctor Who from a very early age, from a cushion fort behind the sofa. Even then, with its cardboard sets and viewed on our blurry old black-and-white television, it was both compulsive and terrifying. By the time I was eight or nine, even the sound of the Doctor Who theme music was enough to bring on a Pavlovian thrill of terror and anticipation. ‘My’ Doctor was Jon Pertwee, and I remember feeling a fierce resistance when he was replaced by Tom Baker – though Tom Baker won me round eventually! When the series was revived, I was thrilled to watch its transition into the 21st to this series of stories.”
As ever, it’s great to see female writers publishing brilliant books in what is often still thought of as a male-dominated genre.
The eBooks will be published as a hardback anthology in March 2015.
