Lance Parkin

Coming soon:

The fourth edition of Ahistory: An Unauthorized History of the Doctor Who Universe is coming … in three volumes. See here for more details.

Recently released:

My unauthorised biography of Gene Roddenberry, The Impossible Has Happened, is out now in paperback.

Big Finish’s full cast adaptation of my Doctor Who novel Cold Fusion, adapted by me and featuring the Peter Davison and Sylvester McCoy Doctors.

A paperback version of Third Person, an academic book which opens with a contribution from me: Truths Universally Acknowledged: How the “Rules” of Doctor Who Affect the Writing.

Unhistory, a supplement to the long-running Doctor Who chronology Ahistory, which features a timeline of obscure, apocryphal and downright nonsensical stories from the Doctor Who universe.

Whoniverse, an unofficial Doctor Who coffee table book that’s a guide to the planets and other locales of Doctor Who.

Everything links to everything else, and old visions of the future are new again. In the past few decades, we’ve seen remakes of remakes, reboots and repurposing of everything from long-running series like Doctor Who to Star Trek to classic literature. Digital technology has made some things instantly and abundantly accessible, but this has had the effect of obscuring the paths used to get here – the history, the changes in fashion, the nature of the fight, how events looked at the time. A common theme in what I write, fiction and non fiction, is rooting out a spikier, hidden history. I’m always trying to find a slightly sly angle, one that takes big and complicated things and maps them out for a new audience, but which represents a new way of looking at those things even for people who are utterly familiar with them.

Authors are often asked which of their books would be the best place to start. Of course, the author is generally a terrible judge of that … but for me, my favourite is almost certainly the Alan Moore biography, Magic Words. That’s one where the many strands of my writing career come together, biography, science fiction, some pretty hefty research and the narrative history of a genre as a whole.

For Doctor Who … well, the increasingly insane Ahistory provides surprising details that even the hardest of the hardcore will appreciate. If you’re a fan of the new series, I’m proud of my tenth Doctor novel The Eyeless. I think, on balance, my favourite ‘classic’ Doctor Who novel, at least to recommend to a relatively casual reader, is Father Time.

I’ve a soft spot for Warlords of Utopia, a science fiction novel about every parallel universe where Rome never fell going to war with every parallel universe where Hitler won. The book is nominally part of the Faction Paradox universe, but if you don’t know the series, no prior knowledge is necessary. Dive in and have fun; who doesn’t wonder about utopian warmongering?

I’ve had about thirty books published – the exact number varies depending on how you count new editions, and how you count a book that was co-written. That breaks down pretty evenly between fiction and non-fiction. For fans of long and unwieldy lists, there’s a year-by-year timeline of everything here. For the rest, see the recent releases on the ‘Out Now‘ page, and my blog for news about upcoming projects.