San Francisco 1967. A place of love and peace as the hippy movement is in full swing and everyone is looking forward to the ultimate festival: the human be-in.

Summer, however, has lost her boyfriend, and fears him dead, destroyed by a new type of drug nicknamed Blue Moonbeam. Her only friends are three English tourists: Ben and Polly, and their mysterious guardian and friend the Doctor.

But will any of them help Summer, and what is the strange threat posed by the Blue Moonbeams?

Background information:

Telos Publishing presents the seventh in our series of original Doctor Who Novellas, Wonderland, a story featuring the Second Doctor, with companions Ben and Polly, and written by Mark Chadbourn.

Mark maintains an online journal (www.markchadbourn.net) and here are a couple of entries relating to Wonderland:

 

October 29, 2002

WHO...???

Doctor Who, that is. I've just completed a novella about the Time Lord called Wonderland that will see publication in March next year. Now you may wonder why I'm writing about somebody else's characters..? Have I run out of my own ideas? (No.) Do I need the money? (Yes - who doesn't? - but that's not the reason.) Am I a closet Doctor Who fan? (Not really - I haven't seen the show since I was a little kid, but there's certainly a nostalgic attraction...)

When I was first approached by the publisher to do a Doctor Who story, my initial reaction was to turn it down. But then I started to think... Regular readers will know I'm interested in myths and archetypes... iconic characters and powerful images... and how iconic is Doctor Who? There's a very good reason he's survived for forty years (first broadcast the day after President Kennedy was assassinated) - most people know who he is, even if they've never seen the show.

If I was given the freedom to bring my own style and concerns to the character, it could be very interesting indeed. And, strangely, that was just what the publisher wanted... a Mark Chadbourn story with the Doctor, not a Doctor Who adventure by Mark Chadbourn. It felt like they'd given up the keys to the toybox.

So... Wonderland . It's 1967 in Haight-Ashbury, the spiritual home of the Counterculture on the eve of the Summer of Love. It's the Second Doctor (the Patrick Troughton one), one of the few outsiders who'd fit into that crazy place. There's the Grateful Dead, Timothy Leary, the Beat poets, psychedelia and all the other touchstones of that era... and a young woman progressing into the dark heart of that Wonderland. It's about myth, wonder, loss, despair, redemption, politics and why the young should always rebel, and oddly it's a companion piece to The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke. You don't even have to like Doctor Who to enjoy it.

It's going to be one of those limited edition novellas, which give a kick to the wallet and look beautiful on the bookshelf, and it's published by Telos (www.telos.co.uk) so you can order it from their website, from Amazon or any other good bookshop. And it'll be signed by me, Graham Joyce who wrote the introduction, and the as-yet-unidentified artist.

Now, I wonder if they'll let me have a go at Batman...?

December 19, 2002

Signing and Talking

I've just finished signing what seems like a million frontspieces for the forthcoming Doctor Who novella I've written for Telos publishers. There were only a few hundred, but I can't express how tedious it is to scrawl your name over and over until your hand feels like it's going to fall off. Anyway, they've now gone off to Graham Joyce so he can suffer - I like to spread my misery around. Graham has written a great introduction for Wonderland (though I'm sure he agreed to it before he realised he had to sign all the frontspieces too).

For those who don't know, Graham is the top-notch author of several critically-acclaimed novels that skate the strange land between SF, horror and the real world. His latest book, The Facts of Life, has just come out from Gollancz and is highly-recommended. I went along to his launch party at the new Borders aircraft-hanger-cum-shop just outside Leicester the other night, where we spent several hours arguing over who had the best leather jacket. Naturally, it was me, but Graham is one of those people who just can't see sense.

I also managed to fit in time to do an interview with the witty and surprisingly-charming-for-a-journalist Andy Hedgecock for The Third Alternative (TTApress.com), out now. TTA is a great magazine that you should all go out and buy. It has new fiction by great writers, lots of reviews and interviews, and treats its genre subject matter in a very intelligent way (unlike some news-stand SF magazines). The article also debuts some new photos of me, including one of me with an axe, which is bizarre but a big step forward from the one of me sitting in a deckchair that my publishers freakishly thought made a good publicity snap. However, it did get me a gig on Brighton Pier...

And I have a column in the forthcoming issue of The Edge where I rant in a shocking and uncivilised manner about many topics, but in particular how people no longer believe in things enough to fight for them.

Which takes me back to my Doctor Who novella, Wonderland , and the hippie protest movement in San Francisco...

 

The book was available in two superb editions: a standard hardback with cloth-effect cover and foil-stamped logo and title; and a signed and numbered limited edition deluxe hardback.

Both editions featured a foreword by award-winning author Graham Joyce, the deluxe edition included a specially commissioned frontispiece illustration by Dominic Harman.

All copies of the limited edition deluxe version came individually signed by the author, frontispiece artist and foreword writer.

Wonderland was published on the 24th of April 2003