Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

The next adventure for Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor and Billie Piper’s Rose will be Stewart Pringle and Lauren Mooney’s Cloud Eight, out in February.

When the Doctor takes Rose to the 47th century, they find a world where humanity has left Earth to venture the stars. But not all of them – some remain on Earth, or above it at least, in floating cities among the clouds.

It seems like an idyllic existence, where the citizens lead peaceful lives without any need to work. But the Doctor knows all too well to be suspicious of anywhere claiming to be a paradise.

The Doctor and Rose travel to the 47th century, Earth’s ‘Second Dark Age’, but when they arrive in the floating box city of High High Wycombe, it’s more like a paradise. The residents live an existence of endless leisure, and at night sleep a blissful, dreamless sleep.

 But cracks soon begin to show on its perfect, polished surface, and something terrible is brewing in the mind of teenage Elsa – something ancient and hungry – something that sounds like a nightmare.

The Ninth Doctor Adventures: Cloud Eight guest stars Felicity Cant as the troubled teen Elsa, and Charlie Condou (known for Coronation Street and Doctor Who: The Interstellar Song Contest) as her father Marty. The cast also includes Lawrence Boothman as Oz and Louise Faulkner as Chihiro.

Writer Stewart Pringle said: “For me, Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper will always be the faces of the new series. They brought it back so brilliantly. They’re just the most incredible performers. So to have them back together for a set of stories and get to contribute to that, it’s just a total dream.

“It was a great joy to be doing the first off-world story for this new run. The End of the World is still one of my very favourite Doctor Who stories. So Cloud Eight was our chance to do a bit of that, stepping out onto another world – although this is a world very close to Earth in some ways, it also feels quite distant and quite sinister.”

The episode’s other writer Lauren Mooney further explained the inspiration behind Cloud Eight: “I’m really interested in the relationship between work and sense of self. There’s something fascinating about the paradise of a world without work, which was the starting germ of an idea about a future in which nobody has to work, but everybody’s minds are colonised by data storage.

“We are all in a world where our attention is being clamoured for, and it’s easy to outsource our thinking and our creativity. And it’s tempting to do that, and not to think for ourselves or create for ourselves. And so this story is about the perils of doing that, because we need those things!”

Doctor Who – The Ninth Doctor Adventures: Cloud Eight is now available to pre-order for just £9.99 (download to own) or £11.99 (download to own + collector’s edition CD), exclusively from http://www.bigfinish.com.