Here’s great news for fans of the Series 6 episode The Doctor’s Wife – Neil Gaiman has spoken about the possibility of novelizing the story in the past, and thanks to a recent “annual thought leadership symposium” sponsored by the Financial Times and Jaguar, we now know that this is something he is discussing with the BBC!
Apparently the event was “an invitation only annual ideas conference held in New York, designed to bring together the key players and thinkers across politics, business, media, culture, academia and technology to discuss and debate what individuality in a mass age means” – but more importantly and with more relevance to Doctor Who fans, the topic apparently arose in an interview with Neil Gaiman by John Hodgman.
Pretty cool, huh?
It will certainly make a great addition to any collection of Doctor Who books, and perhaps even kickstart the range of nuWho adaptations that we have all been waiting for!
The nicest thing would be novelizing it would hopefully expand the story as I felt it was very rushed in the regular episode. In novel form, he could hopefully explore the relationship between the Doctor and Idris more closely, and expend several other areas as well.
I really hope this happens.
And what a fantastic story to launch a potential Nu Who adaptation range.
It would be a great novel. I’d like to see the story expanded to include a few other time lords who got suckered and Idris before she got brain wiped. And Nephew being the patch-up mutant he’s meant to be and not an Ood!
What an awesome idea, and an awesome piece of news! I hope it comes to pass…………….
I have always understood the rationale for not novelising nuWho up to now: the novelisations of old were from an era when episodes were not at one’s beck and call online or DVD, and reruns were rare. Plus there were many lost stories, and the novelisations were the only way to truly recreate them. But today, they aren’t needed.
However, there are exceptions, and I think having a top fantasy novelist willing to expand his story – a story already acknowledged as having been cut down considerably for TV – is one of those exceptions. Having a Neil Gaiman Doctor Who novel would be a tremendous feather in the cap, and for it to be an expansion of a beloved episode, then fans win both ways. We’ve heard it said that it’s unlikely we’ll ever see “Sexy” or “Idris” or whatever you want to call her again – not without watering down what Gaiman accomplished. So this is a way for us to learn more about her and her relationship with the Doctor.
I’m all for it. I was quite disappointed in Moorcock’s DW novel (I still haven’t been able to get past the first 50 pages) so hopefully Gaiman’s will do it proud.