^You really think any random people would know who Neil Gaiman is? I mean Joe Bloggs on the street, not the people posting on these boards or going to conventions...
Lock Up Your Eyeballs - Chibnall's Back!
- Thread starter StCoop
- Start date
As long as he doesn't do for Amy what Warmonger did for Peri, perhaps.
Telos published Doctor Who spin-offs, but they didn't have a license to publish official Doctor Who fiction. Big Finish did have a license to publish Doctor Who prose anthologies, but they let that lapse. The money just wasn't there for them.
The only game in town, insofar as Doctor Who fiction is concerned right now, is BBC Books. I'm sorry to say that, but it's true.
IDW has the North American comics rights. (For that reason, I was fairly certain that Justin Richards' graphic novel wouldn't have been available over here. The BBC cancelled it, so no we'll never know.)
Could IDW hire Gaiman to write a Doctor Who mini-series/graphic novel? Sure. Could they pay him what he's worth? I doubt it. DC couldn't pay Gaiman what he wanted for a 20th-anniversary Sandman story; that's why we got P. Craig Russell's adaptation of The Dream Hunters, instead.
The money's just not there in the comics industry anymore.
Target didn't "cough up the money" to Douglas Adams for novelizations of his Who scripts. Or to Eric Saward for his Dalek stories, for that matter.
It's nice to think that. I'd like to think that. But I'm doubtful. BBC Books thought that Dalek novels would sell appreciably better to justify the higher cost of business (i.e., the Nation estate), but they didn't. It would be nice to think that Gaiman's name on the front cover would sell the book. I want to think that, too. But I'm doubtful.
I almost think BBC Books would have to do something similar to what was done with Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone -- do a book in the standard small-size hardcover with a Photoshopped cover, and do a larger-size hardcover with a dust jacket for adults -- if they were to commission a Gaiman Doctor Who novel.
As I said, I want to think that you're right. I think history is against you, however.
Actually, I'm condemning the idea of Moore as a Who writer on the basis of some things he's said about the show. I don't get the impression that he has any interest in it at all.
His daughter, on the other hand, wrote a very good 10th Doctor one-shot for IDW.
Moore, based on past work, would be very good at writing a literary celebrity historical.
No I wouldn't.
Not a snowball's chance in hell Gaiman is that well-known in America. I don't know about Canada, but you'd get equal numbers of blank stares if you asked those questions in the U.S.
Multi replies...
Neil Gaiman isn't famous on the streets, but he is among people who go into book shops. Enough to keep his books in print, and get them actually made into fiolms. That makes him pricier than most TV writers - and more importantly, possibly already contracted to give his next book to his regular publisher (which was another part of the problem with Douglas Adams novelising his scripts).
Terrance Dicks is past 70 and has said in a bunch of interviews that he reckons he's had its turn, and it's up to his 'children' (ie, the people who read his novelisations) to take over now. After all, they're older now than he was when he got the script editor's job on Who!
Telos did have an official licence to do novels, but it got cancelled at the first opportunity once the new series came along, so they can't do anything now.
Neil Gaiman isn't famous on the streets, but he is among people who go into book shops. Enough to keep his books in print, and get them actually made into fiolms. That makes him pricier than most TV writers - and more importantly, possibly already contracted to give his next book to his regular publisher (which was another part of the problem with Douglas Adams novelising his scripts).
Terrance Dicks is past 70 and has said in a bunch of interviews that he reckons he's had its turn, and it's up to his 'children' (ie, the people who read his novelisations) to take over now. After all, they're older now than he was when he got the script editor's job on Who!
Telos did have an official licence to do novels, but it got cancelled at the first opportunity once the new series came along, so they can't do anything now.
Considering the pig's breakfast he made of Torchwood S1, in addition to his solid but not particularly amazing output in the following season of TW and his middle of the road DW episode, "42", Chris Chibnal is the equivalent of Kenneth Biller from Voyager.
He has a long and successful writing career behind him, but he is less cut out to write sci-fi than Russell T. Davies (who while messes up on a lot of sci-fi, won over most people through his charm, grand spectacles and character work).
I'll give him a benefit of a doubt, Steven Moffat will reign him in and rewrite the scripting, and Helen Raynor improved dramatically in S4 as well.
"Named" sci-fi writers I'd like to see penning scripts for NuWho is Iain Banks and Alastair Reynolds.
He has a long and successful writing career behind him, but he is less cut out to write sci-fi than Russell T. Davies (who while messes up on a lot of sci-fi, won over most people through his charm, grand spectacles and character work).
I'll give him a benefit of a doubt, Steven Moffat will reign him in and rewrite the scripting, and Helen Raynor improved dramatically in S4 as well.
"Named" sci-fi writers I'd like to see penning scripts for NuWho is Iain Banks and Alastair Reynolds.
^RTD is still in charge of the spin offs.
Neither of whom has ever written a script, rather than a book. Closest that's come was Stephen Baxter writing a Big Finish CD, but that hasn't arrived, which is ominous.
All three are great writers, but books and scripts are different disciplines, and they don't always transfer smoothly.
Well said.
A year and a half ago, roughly, novelist Lawrence Miles, full of piss and vinegar, announced on his blog that he was going to write a Doctor Who script, set in a library, in a week to show that he could do what Steven Moffat does, only better.
What he produced was interesting...
...and also completely useless.
Screenplays have a specific structure and format. If you could take Miles' script and reformat it as a standard screenplay, it would have come in way too long. (The rule of thumb is one page of script to one minute on-screen.) It was also horribly overwritten, with too much given over to directions and staging, things that are up to the director, not the writer.
I look at what he wrote as an interesting novella in an unconventional form, which is typical of Miles' oeuvre. I don't look upon it as a genuine, authentic screenplay, however.
From what I can tell from his blog, Lawrence Miles is pretty much the definition of an incompetent douche bag.
Lawrence Miles is a keyboard warrior that has become a minor celebrity and he has a history of genuine mental problems. I agree with some of Miles opinions and actually his subjective attitude towards NuWho and RTD is almost normal in comparison to the other pretentious cranks elsewhere (like some posters on Stardestroyer.Net).
And, within the environment of the New Adventures and the following BBC 8th Doctor books, he did come up with some startling 'WHAT AN IDEA!!!" work... even if he then continually failed to follow it up, like throwing in an 'idea bomb' and forgetting to deal with the resulting chaos before grumbling about how other authors went about it in his absence...
I don't know that I'd generalize Miles' attitude in that way.
He praised Orman and Blum's use of Faction Paradox in Unnatural History.
He had a story in mind for dealing with the Faction once and for all, but BBC Books went with The Ancestor Cell instead. (Miles' review of the book is hilarious, however; it gives off the impression of grudging respect, while at the same time he's stating that, "No, I wouldn't have done it this way!")
On the other hand, he disagreed with the development of Compassion, and he thought that no one really understood Sabbath. (I think that Justin Richards wrote the best non-Miles Sabbath in Sometime Never..., but that may be because Richards understood better where Miles was coming from, having been there at the character's birth.)
I would love to see Miles write a Torchwood novel, though until Children of Earth he despised the series. There are things in Interference that strike me as being proto-Torchwood. (Of course, there are things in Warren Ellis' Planetary that likewise strike me as being proto-Torchwood.) Who is definitely better off with Miles than without; just a perusal through the first five volumes of About Time will tell you that.
I like the idea of letting Warren Ellis have a shot at an episode.
I can't believe they still need a Doctor-lite episode. I'd like to trade workload with these guys who can't do 13 eps a year.
I can't believe they still need a Doctor-lite episode. I'd like to trade workload with these guys who can't do 13 eps a year.
It's the in-built inefficiencies of British television production. What an American series can do in eight days, it takes a British production fourteen or more.
I'm waiting for Doctor Who to lose three or four episodes in a season due to an industrial action.
Personally, I like most "Doctor-lite" episodes. I think the very idea of them is fascinating -- tell a story about the Doctor without the Doctor being the main character. So, for my money, they help expand the Whoniverse and keep it interesting instead of always having everything revolve directly around the Doctor.
It's the in-built inefficiencies of British television production. What an American series can do in eight days, it takes a British production fourteen or more.
I'm waiting for Doctor Who to lose three or four episodes in a season due to an industrial action.
Or... the inbuilt inefficiencies of having a core cast of two, not seven?
Supernatural manages, The X-Files managed. I think a lot of it is to do with how much filming is done on location, probably something to do with our labour laws too.It's the in-built inefficiencies of British television production. What an American series can do in eight days, it takes a British production fourteen or more.
I'm waiting for Doctor Who to lose three or four episodes in a season due to an industrial action.
Or... the inbuilt inefficiencies of having a core cast of two, not seven?