Flaming Thunderbolts! Terrahawks, Volume Two!

My commutes to Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona from my home in New Mexico give me great opportunities to listen to podcasts, audio dramas, and audiobooks. Recently, I listened to the second volume of Big Finish’s audio revival of Terrahawks, one of the puppet shows helmed by the the late Gerry Anderson. Like many of Anderson’s shows, Terrahawks told the story of the Earth threatened by an alien menace. In this case the alien menace comes in the form of a group of alien androids under the command of the witch-like Zelda. She has a “family” of androids including her son, Yung-star, her sister Cy-star, and Cy-star’s sometimes-son/sometimes-daughter, It-star. The titular Terrahawks were the organization that stood in the aliens’ way. They’re under the command of Tiger Ninestein and his first officer Mary Falconer. Other members of the team are Hawkeye and pop-star Kate Kestrel. The Terrahawks are ably assisted by an army of spherical robots known as Zeroids, whose personality drive Ninestein crazy. Like many of Gerry Anderson’s TV series, the show was performed with puppets, although the Terrahawks and their opponents were “glove” puppets rather than the more familiar marionettes of other shows. What’s more, while most of Gerry Anderson’s puppet shows were made for an audience of children, most were played “straight” and told serious adventure stories. Terrahawks took a more tongue-in-cheek approach to the material. The TV series ran for three seasons from 1983 to 1986.

The audio revivals were produced between 2015 and 2017 by Gerry Anderson’s son, Jamie Anderson. Freed from the constraint of visuals, he both ramps up the speculative elements and the humor, and overall, it works well. Volume 2 gives us eight new episodes of Terrahawks. The set opens with “Sale of the Galaxy” in which both Zelda and Ninestein are invited to appear on a deadly game show. The host is played by famous British host Nicholas Parsons, who was also the real-life husband of Denise Bryer, the actress who gave voice to Zelda and Mary Falconer. Jeremy Hitchens reprises his role as Ninestein from the TV series, including his signature exclamation, “Flaming Thunderbolts!” The second episode, penned by Chris Dale, is “The Trouble with Toy Boys” and it imagines a creepy ventriloquist dummy named Timmy who bears no small resemblance to one of Gerry Anderson’s original puppet stars, Torchy the Battery Boy. In “Return to Sender” we get a romance story for Sergeant Major Zero of the Zeroids as the robots contend with a NASA probe that has returned to Earth and isn’t all it seems to be. “Renta-Hawks” parodies perhaps the most famous Anderson puppet show by imagining the Terrahawks in competition with a team of handsome young men in rescue vehicles. Unlike the young men of the Thunderbirds, this global rescue organization charges for its services and the Earth government would like the Terrahawks to follow suit.

In the second half of the series, Zelda has gone missing and the Terrahawks are under the gun to cut their budget. When a probe lands deep in the heart of Texas, Mary and Kate are sent on a quest to deal with it. In “Lights, Camera, Disaster” by David Hirsch, It-Star hatches a plot to make the androids look good. He’ll write a movie with the androids as the heroes fighting the villainous Terrahawks. It all looks like ti might work until the producers get their hands on the script and start making changes! In “Count Anaconda’s Magnificent Orbiting Circus” Tiger and Mary are invited to a show only to find this is a circus you would rather run away from.

The set finishes with an epic hour-long finale, which is arguably the best episode of the set, “My Enemy’s Enemy” by Jamie Anderson. The Terrahawks learn Zelda’s location and learn that both Earth and Zelda’s family are under threat from a common enemy, Prince Zegar of Guk, who’s descended from Zelda’s creator. During the course of the story, we learn the backstory of Zelda, Cy-star, and Yung-star. After that, we’re treated to an epic space battle that will change the Terrahawks going forward.

Volume 1 of Terrahawks on audio felt like a continuation of the series. Volume 2 gave us more of a story arc. If you enjoy light-hearted science fiction where you care enough about the characters to feel invested in them, it’s well worth checking out the Terrahawks audio series. I look forward to seeing what they do with the third and final volume. You can find the second volume of Terrahawks for download at: https://shop.gerryanderson.com/collections/terrahawks/products/terrahawks-audio-drama-series-volume-two-download

Also, just a friendly reminder that May 4 is the last day you can get the Sci-Fi Exploration Storybundle with my novel Firebrandt’s Legacy along with nine other great books. Get all the details at: https://www.storybundle.com/exploration

The Night Whispers

My mom was a soap opera fan. When I would come home from school, I’d usually find her parked in front of the television to watch her “stories.” I would occasionally watch with her for a time while waiting to claim the TV from her so I could watch afternoon cartoons on a local independent station before starting any homework I might have. While romance is a natural part of life and it’s likely to find its way into many stories regardless of genre, I suspect her love of soap operas and being exposed to them made me a little more open to including romance in my early writing, especially when I was most focused on hard science fiction.

One soap opera that has always intrigued me is Dark Shadows, which ran from 1967 to 1971. I don’t believe my mom watched Dark Shadows during its original run, but I’m not entirely sure, since I would have been rather young during its run. Still, my interest in vampires and supernatural stories has led me to seek out a few episodes and the 1970 movie House of Dark Shadows. The show was centered around the Collins family of Collinsport, Maine, where a number of supernatural occurrences took place. One of the most memorable characters on the show was the vampire Barnabas Collins played by Jonathan Frid. After the show ended, Frid turned down several offers to reprise the role. The one exception was when Big Finish Productions asked him to play the part for a story called “The Night Whispers” in 2010, just two years before he passed away.

As stories based on a soap opera go, this is a fairly simple one. On a stormy night, some time after Barnabas has been freed of his vampire curse, he is sitting with his grounds keeper and servant, Willie Loomis, portrayed by John Karlen, who played the role in the series. A spirit from the past, played by horror legend Barbara Steele, insists on being heard. Steele plays the spirit of Celeste, a servant girl from the Caribbean Island of Martinique. Steele’s role is fairly short, since her spirit possesses Willie and begins to speak through him. As the story progresses we learn that in Barnabas’s mortal days, his visited Martinique with other wealthy, young men. One of those men forced themselves on the young servant woman and she died, but not before cursing the party. To avoid the curse, Barnabas takes terrible action.

Now, some two centuries after young Barnabas visited Martinique, Celeste is back to tell her story and make Barnabas pay for his role in what had been done to her. Through the telling, we get much of what I like about vampire stories. Barnabas reflects on the morality of past actions from the lens of a long and terrible history. The tale also looks at the way the rich have treated those who work for them. Is Willie just one in a long line of people who have given their loves to serve the Collins family, or have Barnabas’s attitudes to those he employs evolved over time?

I enjoyed Frid and Karlen performing a dramatic dialog. The story had a nice Gothic flavor and, as a casual fan of Dark Shadows, it took me back to that world for an enjoyable hour. If you’d like to give it a listen, this is a nice, affordable download from Big Finish at: https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/dark-shadows-the-night-whispers-147

Another area where my mom’s love of soap operas has served me well is juggling the large cast of characters in Ordeal of the Scarlet Order, which I’m working on now. As in a soap opera, I’m following several different sets of characters in several different sets of locations. I’ve always enjoyed this kind of storytelling because I feel like no story happens in isolation. The actions of friends and enemies across town or across the country can have an impact on a story and I enjoy weaving the tapestry of complex stories through most of my worlds. You can explore my fiction at: http://www.davidleesummers.com/

UFO: Destruct Positive!

I remember when I was quite young, possibly in the first or second grade, I went to say “good night” to my brother while he was watching TV. I remember space ships with large missiles on the front launching from a base on the moon. It looked very cool and my brother told me the show was called UFO. He let me watch for a while. I was captivated by the space ships and the moonbase action, but didn’t understand much of the actual plot. A few days later, I was in the toy department of a local store and saw the space ships from UFO, only the ones on the store shelf were green instead of white. I couldn’t help but wonder why that was the case. I wouldn’t learn until later that the toy company, Dinky, often made bright and colorful interpretations of the space ships from British TV series.

In the years after that, I occasionally stumbled on the show on a local independent channel when looking for something to watch. Unfortunately, I usually caught episodes a little more than halfway through, which makes it hard to follow the story. Finally, a couple of years ago, I finally decided to seek out and watch a few episodes. I was soon hooked and watched the entire one-season series. UFO was the first entirely live-action series by Gerry Anderson of Thunderbirds and Space: 1999 fame. It told the story of SHADO, a secret organization hidden underneath a movie studio which fought aliens coming to Earth to abduct humans. SHADO had a base on the moon and a small space ship fleet. It also had a set of armored cars called mobiles and a submarine capable of launching a plane called Skydiver 1. American actor Ed Bishop played the commander, Ed Straker. Ably assisting Straker were Colonel Alec Freeman played by George Sewell and Colonel Virginia Lake played by Wanda Ventham. In most episodes Lieutenant Gay Ellis played by Gabrielle Drake commanded the moon base. For some reason, the women assigned to the moon base wore purple wigs while on duty. The show tended to imagine that in 1980 men would wear Nehru jackets while women would wear cat suits.

Wardrobe choices aside, UFO told some rather compelling stories. Ed Straker had been through a divorce which affected him. Many characters were put into positions where they had to make difficult life and death decisions in their fight against the UFOs. What’s more, SHADO didn’t always win the day. Many episodes had something of a downbeat ending. Over the course of the series, we learn the aliens are abducting humans to harvest their organs. In the general, the aliens are silent, menacing and even a little tragic, which made them more effective than more cackling evil villains you might find in other shows of the period.

So, where did this top-secret alien-fighting organization come from? That’s where Big Finish Productions recent release UFO: Destruct Positive! comes in. Set in 1975, we meet Ed Straker, now played by Barnaby Kay, as an American test pilot in Nevada. He’s flying an experimental plane called SD-1 when a UFO strafes him with energy beams and he crashes in the desert. He’s swept into a secret part of the base where he finds himself questioned by Colonel Lake played by Jeany Spark and the target of an assassination attempt by alien agents. He escapes the medical facility and arranges a meeting with Colonel Lake, where he ultimately learns about a worldwide organization fighting the aliens called the Alien Defense Organization or ADO. Lake and her superior, General Henderson, are so impressed with Straker that they offer him a job in ADO’s leadership. One of his first actions is to establish a Supreme Headquarters for the ADO, transforming it into SHADO.

The second part of the story opens with Straker putting SHADO forces through their paces. After the exercises, he’s called to a meeting of all of SHADO’s top brass. There, he learns about plans to build a new headquarters underneath an abandoned movie studio and use the studio itself as cover for the operations. During the meeting, a UFO beaches SHADO’s defenses and abducts a young man. Straker, Freeman, and Lake go out to hunt down the UFO and learn the aliens may have a mission beyond abducting one young man. In the final episode on the disk, Straker inspects Skydiver 1 as it prepares for test runs. He learns the plane SD-1 he piloted at the beginning was the prototype for Skydiver’s plane.

As with all Big Finish productions, I was impressed with the storytelling and acting. Writer Andy Lane eschews the more dated elements of the series and focuses on the human drama. We see Straker fighting to save his marriage as he works to organize his new command. Meanwhile, we also see him building working relationships with the SHADO team. UFO: Destruct Positive! is available at: https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/ufo-destruct-positive-2635

Listening to Nine to Eternity

One of the things I love about contributing to anthologies is reading all the contributions by other authors. Unfortunately, sometimes life gets busy and by the time I receive a contributor copy, I don’t have the time to read the anthology right away and it ends up added to my to-read stack. That was what happened when Nine to Eternity came out in 2020 while I was hard at work on my novella Breaking the Code and Kitt Peak National Observatory was preparing to reopen for science. As it turns out, Nine to Eternity is one of the rare anthologies which has been published as an audiobook, so I was able to give it a listen during a recent commute to Kitt Peak.

Nine To Eternity: A Science Fiction Anthology began when the editor, M. Christian, reached out to the authors to invite them to submit “a personal favorite story: one that also, sadly, didn’t get the love they’d put into it.” The anthology is also a sequel of sorts to M. Christian’s anthology Five to the Future: All New Novelettes of Tomorrow and Beyond. Christian invited all the original authors back, and then asked each of them to invite a friend to submit a story for the new anthology. That’s how I became connected to the book.

The audio edition is read by Gordon MacCathay who has a wonderful, deep voice. He also has great vocal control and was able to give each character in each story a distinctive voice. I was able to follow the events without any difficulty.

The anthology opens with the story “Skin Deep” by Emily Devenport. It tells the story of a woman on the planet Moasai who enters her dog, Puke, in the Ugliest Pet in the Galaxy contest. But before she can win the contest, she must resolve a dispute over the dog’s ownership.This was a fun tale with a nice romantic sub-plot.

Next up is “Spitzkov Red” by Jody Scott. Raik is a young man nearing graduation from the military academy. For his final test, he must face the hologram of a famous ancestor and learn about his family’s true nature. It takes a thoughtful look at the nature of comradeship and service while also delivering a poignant twist ending.

In Ralph Greco Jr.’s “Bombastic Christ”, Jesus is cloned from DNA taken from the Shroud of Turin. Agents plan to capture the clone. However, the growth agent used by the university researchers behind the project goes wrong, creating a giant toddler Jesus who goes on a rampage through the university.

The story I knew best besides my own was Ernest Hogan’s “The Great Mars-a-Go-Go Mexican Standoff” because I was the first person to publish the story in Tales of the Talisman Magazine. What’s more, Ernest is the friend who recommended me to M. Christian for this anthology. This is a rollicking tale of a detective hired by a model’s head to find out who stole her body and is holding it for ransom.

From the introduction, I gather Arthur Byron Cover wrote “A Murder” to help process the loss of friends to murder. I can’t honestly say I “enjoyed” this tale because Cover is so effective at getting inside the head of both the misogynistic murderer and his terrified victim. Still, it’s well written and worth reading, if nothing else for its reflections on how casually writers of popular fiction often treat the subject of violent death.

Cynthia Ward gives us a breezy steampunk tale set in London’s East End. Lucy Harker is a woman who has gained great strength and skill through her life experiences and seeks to end a mass murderer’s career. Her efforts bring her to the attention of a certain consulting detective’s older brother who sits near the seat of British government.

My story about the discovery of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth comes next. In this case, it was fun to just sit back and hear how Gordon MacCathay interpreted Professors Jerry Auchincloss and Bethany Lange, along with Auchincloss’s assistant Roy Talbot. I enjoyed hearing the story read back to me and only caught a couple of places where I might have said something a little differently if I ever had another chance to edit the story.

The penultimate story in the anthology is “In the Canal Zone” by Jean Marie Stine. It imagines a sort-of inter-dimensional way station where people might flee dangers in their home dimension. In this case, a young girl befriends one such person and helps her elude pursuit. As with many tales in this book, it gives us a nice twist ending.

M. Christian closes the anthology with a whimsical story he wrote in his early days learning the craft of writing. He tells a tale of humans living in a near paradise where they have everything they need until a force is unleashed that causes the humans to begin disappearing, which then leads them to build the first skyscraper.

Listening to this anthology felt like spending time with old friends. I’m fortunate to be acquainted with Ernest Hogan, Emily Devenport, and Cynthia Ward in real life. I’ve also had the pleasure of publishing one of Ralph Greco, Jr.’s stories in Tales of the Talisman. If you haven’t discovered this anthology, I encourage you to give it a read or a listen.

The Kindle edition is available at: https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Eternity-Science-Fiction-Anthology-ebook/dp/B08JHBGTJS/

The Audible edition is available at: https://www.audible.com/pd/Nine-to-Eternity-Audiobook/B08VNF8Q4Y

You can also find the audio book at iTunes and Amazon.

Doctor Who: Connections

Near the end of November, I discussed Big Finish’s Doctor Who story “What Lies Inside?” featuring Paul McGann as the Doctor, Nicola Walker as Liv Chenka, and Hattie Morahan as Helen Sinclair. One of the things I like about Big Finish is that they frequently have deals on their website or via their newsletter. When I bought “What Lies Inside?” I bought a bundle that included an additional set of three adventures called “Connections.” That second set has been released and my family and I were able to give it a listen during a recent road trip.

Back in my university days, before the World Wide Web, I subscribed to message boards on Usenet. One of those message boards discussed all things Doctor Who. One character who would spark much discussion on the message board was an old school chum of the Doctor’s from the planet Galifrey named Drax. Now, Drax only appeared in a couple of episodes of serial “The Armageddon Factor” which was part of a longer arc where the Doctor, played by Tom Baker, and his companion Romana, played by Mary Tamm, seek out pieces of something called the Key to Time, which will is needed for god-like entities to put the universe back into balance. Drax used to come up for so much discussion because he was not only one of the few people from Galifrey who seemed to actively like the Doctor, he also referred to the Doctor by the name: Theta Sigma. Was Theta Sigma really the Doctor’s name? Was it a nickname? Was it a fraternity they belonged to? These were all questions bandied about on the message board. None of which were ever definitively answered then and none of which are definitively answered in the new audio episode, “Here Lies Drax.” That said, it was great fun to hear a new episode with Drax. Or, does it really have Drax? The episode opens with the Doctor receiving a parcel from Drax for safekeeping. Soon after, they receive an invitation to Drax’s funeral! Once they get to the funeral, they discover Drax had made a lot of enemies over his lifetime, and that’s just how things get going. We soon get a rollicking mystery where the Doctor has to figure out whether there really is any value to the things in the parcel, while he figures out what happened to his old friend.

The second episode of “Connections” is titled “The Love Vampires” and felt like an appropriate listen while I’m working on a vampire novel of my own. In this episode, the Doctor, Helen, and Liv arrive at a space station orbiting a dying star. However, the crew of the station are apparently being killed off by vampires. Now, these aren’t your ordinary run-of-the-mill bloodsucking vampires These vampires take you back to memories of your first love and feed off the emotions generated. Energy and emotion vampires are nothing new to the genre, but the writers cleverly use this concept to explore the characters of Helen, Liv, and the Doctor through their memories of their first loves. We get some nice background on both Helen and Liv. Right from the beginning of the television series, it was established that the Doctor has a granddaughter and Big Finish’s audio dramas have reinforced the idea that Susan is a biological granddaughter. She doesn’t just call him “Grandfather” as a term of affection. In fact, there are several great Big Finish productions where Susan, played by Carole Ann Ford, is teamed up with Paul McGann’s Doctor. So, one figures, the Doctor must have had at least one love in his life, or at least a liaison. Who did the Doctor have a child with? What was their relationship like? This episode suggests some possibilities, but like Drax in “The Armageddon Factor” it may raise more questions than it answers.

The final episode of the “Connections” set moves the focus from the Doctor to Helen. In this case, the Doctor, Helen, and Liv land in modern-day London to investigate a time anomaly. Helen soon discovers one of the Weeping Angels in the back of an old record shop. These are villains who look like statues of angels and only move when you’re not looking at them. When you blink, they can jump on you and transport you back in time. In “Albie’s Angels” this happens to Helen and she’s transported back to the 1960s and is reunited with her long lost brother Albie. She never knew what became of her brother and she learns that her father and brother had a falling out because Albie was gay. It felt quite appropriate to listen to this episode while on a family trip, since it reminds us why families shouldn’t let themselves be torn apart by different lifestyles and viewpoints. The story itself involves the Doctor and Liv trying to find out where Helen has gone while Helen tries to help her brother find his own path in life. Without spoilers, this episode proved to be a bittersweet and poignant tale with connections to other characters in the Doctor Who canon.

You can find “Connections” at https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/doctor-who-the-eighth-doctor-adventures-connections-2523 and while you’re there, you can sign up for the Big Finish newsletter if you choose. I’m just a fan of Big Finish and this isn’t an affiliate link of any kind.

Meanwhile, if you want to get ready for my forthcoming vampire novel and meet a set of characters with their own special abilities, check out my Scarlet Order vampire novels at: http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#scarlet_order

The Last Adventure

Jodie Whittaker’s final Doctor Who adventure debuted at the end of October 2022. Throughout the series, the episode where a Doctor regenerates is often of the most powerful of that actor’s tenure. “The Power of the Doctor” was a great case in point, giving the Doctor an opportunity to confront her past and bringing back several companions Doctor Who’s classic era. Unfortunately, in Doctor Who history, there was one actor who was never given a proper final episode and that was the sixth Doctor, played by Colin Baker.

Colin Baker’s era on Doctor Who was plagued by several related problems. The top people at the BBC had lost interest in Doctor Who. Because of that, the show runner, John Nathan-Turner, was spending more time fighting to keep the show on the air than actually running the show. When I go back and watch Colin Baker’s episodes, I get the sense that the writers had a lot of talent but were writers who really needed strong editorial guidance. Unfortunately, because of the issues with the BBC, that guidance really wasn’t there and Doctor Who is a show that needs top notch writing and a good editorial vision to work. In the end, the BBC dictated changes in the show, which included a change of lead actor. Colin Baker basically decided he wouldn’t come back for a few minutes of screen time before his regeneration began. So, after Colin Baker’s last season, we start the next season with the Doctor in mid-regeneration and suddenly the Sylvester McCoy era began.

Colin Baker’s Doctor could be irascible, prickly and childish. The only problem is that the TV writers of his era tended to overplay those tendencies making him a challenging Doctor to like. Fortunately, Big Finish productions came along and gave us more adventures for the sixth Doctor. Stronger writers showed “Old Sixie” could also be heroic, fiercely loyal, and determined. In many ways, because of the episodes produced by Big Finish, the sixth Doctor’s era has become one of my favorites. In 2015, Big Finish decided to tackle one of the biggest challenges and write a fitting finale for the sixth Doctor. The result was “The Last Adventure.”

Title notwithstanding, “The Last Adventure” is actually four stories set at different times in the sixth Doctor’s tenure. Each adventure features a different companion. In “The End of the Line” the Doctor and Constance Clark find a train lost in the fog. When they attempt to find help, they find the same train at a different point in time. They soon find someone is breaking down the barriers between parallel universes. In “The Red House,” the Doctor and Charley Pollard end up on a world populated by werewolves. Except they really aren’t werewolves. These creatures are normally wolves who take on human aspects at certain times. In “Stage Fright,” the Doctor and Flip Jackson arrive in Victorian London only to find that a director is putting on plays about the Doctor’s regenerations. Finally, “The Brink of Death” brings us to the Doctor’s final days as he teams up with Melanie Bush only to find himself trapped in the Time Lord Matrix. The common denominator in all of these stories is that the Valeyard is involved.

We met the Valeyard in the sixth Doctor’s final TV season and we learn that he’s the amalgamation of all the Doctor’s darker tendencies all merged into one being sometime between his penultimate and final incarnation. The idea is that the Valeyard is playing a long game and in each story, the Doctor gets another piece of the puzzle until their final confrontation in “The Brink of Death.” I remember at the time “Trial of a Time Lord” was on TV, there were many fan discussions of how the Valeyard came to be. This story gives us an answer and without spoiling it, I thought it was a lovely bit of minimalist writing in that it gives us an answer in one sentence. It’s a great example of how something can be explained without pages of exposition.

I’m a big fan of the Seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy. While there were some rough moments in his first season, I generally loved his tenure from the moment he’s captured by the Rani until he walks off in the sunset with Ace, and then has his amazing regeneration into Paul McGann in the TV movie. Still, I choked up a bit as it came time for “Old Sixie” to go. He met his end showing his best qualities. If you want to know the end of Colin Baker’s story, or even if you just want to sample him in stories from different eras of the Big Finish run, “The Last Adventure” is a great place to go. You can find it at: https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/doctor-who-the-last-adventure-1212