240
e, inchoate desire to write a book of my own, without the Doctor in it. A "real" book, as I thought of it. And the more I researched, the more interested I got. What caught my imagination in particular was the strange confluence of history over the course of a few short years - or, more particularly, of historical characters. Sir Walter Raleigh was the man pushing forward Queen Elizabeth's policy of expansion, which directly led to the creation of the Roanoake colony, but he was doing that at the same time that William Shakespeare was writing plays, that Christopher Marlowe was writing plays and that Galileo Galilei was coming up with his theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not the other way around. It was an era when religion was gradually giving way to rational thought as the driving force in Western minds, and that's a fascinating background to set a story against.
So, I had Shakespeare, Galileo, Marlowe and Raleigh on one side, the Roanoake colony and the Croatoan tribe on the other. How to connect them? And why did the colony vanish?
It was at this point that Virgin Books, in the fair and comely form of Rebecca Levene, asked me to come up with a proposal for a Doctor Who Missing Adventure. I was reluctant at first, but the demands of a mortgage soon swung the decision. Given that I didn't want to write a purely historical story, that meant some aspect of alien civilisations would have to be introduced. I felt strongly - perhaps wrongly, perhaps not - that placing aliens in the rather primitive and arid conditions of colonial America would not achieve very much - log cabins and scrub land would not a memorable book make. So I had to look for a new location. Something flashy, intriguing, rich and ever-changing - if only because it would make the writing so much easier. The point had to be that there would always be something new and interesting to describe for those moments when I ran out of steam on the plot, the dialogue and the characters. Having an interesting background is use
