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Hi, all, Let's talk about transformation. One of Doctor Who's fundamental cornerstones relies on the concept. The main lead, due to illness, accident or even the demands of simple pragmatism can be spurred into a metamorphosis. Divergent Wordsmiths has been much the same. Over its five-year lifespan, our catalogue has expanded to include half-a-dozen Anthologies releases, two Novels releases featuring a revived Doctor/companion team not seen since 1987, and numerous uncollected materials grouped across the website. We've accomplished a lot. The time has come for another change. Following Doctor Who's 60th anniversary in 2023, A Sparkle of Doctors will be one of our last Anthologies for quite some time. This has not been for a lack of skilled, talented and eager contributors. On the contrary. We've found a consistent abundance of content creators willing to provide for new stories aboard the TARDIS. The dreaded problem, unfortunately, has been the rising cost of living. A pressure I'm sure many can empathise with. As Divergent Wordsmiths is volunteer-led and volunteer-run, it's become clear over 2022 that it's necessary to change our approach. Our mission statement at Divergent Wordsmiths has always been to provide our Doctor Who content for free. That remains our constant. We believe that, however the media landscape shifts, fans should be able to access something of the Doctor's adventures with no financial barrier. We will not alter that. To maintain that statement, however, we will be shifting towards the Novels range as our primary focus. Active since 2020, that currently features two releases starring the Sixth Doctor, Peri Brown and Frobisher:
It's far from being all over. Best wishes, Alan Camlann Publisher for Divergent Wordsmiths  Artwork by Caroline Tankersley Did you know that you can listen to Eden By Annihilation with music? Rare soundtracks selected from Doctor Who composer, Peter Howell! Check out the back of the novel for more! EDEN BY ANNIHILATION On the edge of space lies Natasia Tor, a sargasso of dead spacecraft, through which members of the Affiliation of Outer Free Worlds and the Tyrikan Resurgence are forbidden to travel. When the TARDIS materialises in the eighty-second century, the Doctor, Peri and Frobisher discover the region to be far from unoccupied. At the heart of the mausoleum in space, something vast and terrible has begun to wake. Who are the Vaisyan Lonewatch and their opponents? What links the mysterious object with a planet known as Trailblazer Prime? And can the Doctor and his friends escape a violent and bloody fate from a war set to ignite the Galaxy?
It’s no underestimation to say that this trio has had an unerring ability to get under my skin in the best way possible. Despite the brevity of their tenure, there was a good sense of camaraderie to the three in the vein of the best Doctor/companion teams. Here were a trio that could be picnicking one moment and zapping Cybermen the next and yet, they weren’t terribly well explored in the twenty/thirty years of expanded universe media. Frobisher, the ever-faithful whifferdill, has still had cameos to this very day in comics, audio and novel, but this unerring link between comic strip and videotape remained as it ever was. Incomplete. As open-ended as the vanishing of Liz Shaw or the musing farewell of the Seventh Doctor and Ace.
As a writer, that’s difficult to resist, but where to begin? I wouldn’t be able to do justice to it in a directly visual follow-up to John Ridgway’s full-motion panoramas. My medium was the written word. The same words you're reading now. It would have to be in prose. Better, it would have to be a novel. A good challenge and a possibility to flex those creative neurons. The World Shapers, the final illustrated voyage of the trio, concluded in October 1987, almost a full year after the Sixth Doctor’s exeunt from his trial on television. In that borrowed time, the TARDIS had visited slavers on the hijacked Mayflower, the contrapuntal motion of Raygun Gothic Zazz, an old man’s gentle respite in Scotland and a mythology-cracking development on the planet Marinus. As steady an array of worlds as those visited before (and during) the '86 hiatus. I knew where I wanted to go next, a neat little place on Trailblazer Prime, but something caught the Doctor’s eye in Natasia Tor. The story itself is one steeped in the headlines and pop culture of 1987. One year after, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Aliens debuted in cinemas. One year after, NASA’s Challenger shuttle has exploded on a clear blue day and Chernobyl’s radiation cloud has fallen over Ukraine. It’s a bitterly Cold War at the present. Everything has an urbane formality, almost a chill, to it. But, nevertheless, the characters themselves refused to stay confined to that box (bless 'em). Over time, they've become a halfway-house rendition of how they appeared in Doctor Who Magazine and where they ended up at Big Finish. This is a Sixth Doctor of passion who’s been pitted against both the mad Astrolabus and obsessive Toymaker, a Peri who's negotiated both the Elohim of Paradise 5 and the dungeons of Sylvaniar, and a Frobisher who became both bounty hunter and worshipped as a living god (oops). Life returns to the Doctor, Peri and Frobisher after 33 years in stasis and one which has, so far, endured the test of time in the big ("They seek him here, they seek him there...") and small (who knew the Doctor's fourth self was also a fan of Winnie-the-Pooh?). That was a well and truly worthwhile experience and, best of all, it's a way for others to get into Doctor Who books that doesn't cost a mazuma. With more to come, alongside Divergent Wordsmiths' other projects, in the future." Vworp, vworp~! Alan Camlann |
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