Author Talk: Justin Richards

Books
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To accompany our Book Club reading I thought it might be fun to discuss the wider writings of The Clockwise Man’s author, Justin Richards.

What are your favourite Justin Richards books? As a writer he has spanned both the Virgin and BBC book eras and is often seen as one of the more traditional authors of those ranges. He was also the BBC ranges consultant and has written the Monster Files webcasts and numerous BF and BBC audios.

Some of Justin’s bibliography:

  • Theatre of War
  • System Shock
  • The Sands of Time
  • Option Lock
  • Demontage
  • The Banquo Legacy
  • The Burning
  • Time Zero
  • Sometime Never…
  • Dreams of Empire
  • Millennium Shock
  • Grave Matter
  • The Shadow in the Glass
  • The Clockwise Man
  • The Deviant Strain
  • The Resurrection Casket
  • Martha in the Mirror
  • Code of the Krillitanes
  • Apollo 23
  • The Angel’s Kiss
  • Devil in the Smoke
  • Plague of the Cybermen
  • Silhouette

I swing back and forth with Richards’ writing. Some of his books I’ve really enjoyed and some I have really disliked.

The Banquo Legacy and The Burning are both excellent but I really did not enjoy The Deviant Strain or Dreams of Empire.

A good one if you enjoy a lot of fanwank is The Sands of Time - a sequel to Pyramids of Mars.

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Sands of Time is good. So is The Shadow in the Glass. Haven’t read Theatre of War, but quite enjoyed the Big Finish novel adaptation.

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He’s also written a lot for Big Finish as well.

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Interesting - I think I remember quite enjoying The Deviant Strain but it was a while ago since I read it. I did used to keep an eye out for his New Who novels when I was following them more closely, I think in general I tend to get on with his writing pretty well (certainly better than some other big names in the novels world, anyway)

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Indeed he has but I thought I’d restrict it to his books for this thread simply because the sheer number of Jago and Litefoot alone could have crashed the forum :smile:

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Should Author Talk get its own tag, or should it be part of book club?

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I actually really enjoy his work! My favourite is probably Theatre of War (his debut) because of how different it was (and still is, in my opinion) to anything else. He also created Braxiatel, a favourite character of mine, so I’m probably a little biased here. At worst, his stories run by and you forget them; he’s a very solid writer and editor, able to come up with Doctor Who stories quickly and get them on the page with meaning. He seems to just know how to do a standard Doctor Who story. Perhaps the consequence is that his stories aren’t always the most emotional or moving, but they’re certainly always fun - Demontage is one of the quickest books I’ve ever read. Whenever I see a Richards book coming up in my book binge, I know I’ll be in safe hands.

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It’s recently been revealed that Justin Richards has retired from writing.

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