Master Switches - An Interview with Greg Maughan

We talk to writer Greg Maughan about his era-crossing Master Switches story 'Night of the Glaring'. There is nothing glaringly obvious about this one... 

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself ?

I live in the North East of England and have been thinking up stories for most of my life. Over the last few years, I’ve been lucky enough to start getting them published by the lovely people at Obverse Books, Arcbeatle Press and Pencil Tip Publishing, amongst others. I’ve even got a website now, which took me much longer to design than looking at it would suggest! You can find that at noonereadthis.wordpress.com and I’m always up for talking to people about writing projects, collaborations or anything else you might want to ask.

What made you want to write a story for Master Switches?

I really enjoyed the first volume – Master Pieces – and was gutted I hadn’t spotted the submission call when it was produced. So, when I heard about Master Switches I knew I had to put something forward for it. Doctor Who has been a fairly major personal obsession for all of my conscious life and its always great fun writing for characters that feel like old friends – or enemies. To be asked to write something for those characters and to get to share it with other people who have a similar relationship with them always feels like a real privilege.

How would you describe your story in a nutshell?

Sometimes the best laid plans can be thrown out of sync with the smallest of miscalculations. What if the Doctor we meet isn’t ready for the trap the Master has laid?

What made you decide which Master and Doctor combo to go with?

I think the most interesting pairings should reveal something about each character that you wouldn’t necessarily see when they interact with each other ‘in order’. It also gives you a chance to compare and contrast different eras of the show and draw out points about the respective ideals, preoccupations and priorities of them. Honestly, I think my pairing is probably the most obvious one to go for in a lot of ways, but I felt like there was something worth exploring there. Also, there was a natural intersection in the timeline of the show where I felt the story could fit. Canon is definitely secondary to story and character in my book, but it’s always an added bonus when everything seems to line up neatly for you.

How did you find the writing process?

I think, probably like all the other contributors to the book, I got the commission in early 2020 and had an idea that I’d be able to get on top of it and get a first draft written as soon as possible as I was really excited about the project. Then, the first lockdown happened and priorities sort of... changed. I’m classed as an ‘essential worker’ and have a pre-school age daughter, so life just became a kind of vague blur for quite a few months. Life’s still nowhere near back to normal and a lot of my other hobbies and interests are still out of reach for a while yet. But, being able to get back on top of my writing was an important part of adapting to what we’ve all been through over the last year. Once that started to happen for me, the story all came quite quickly and it was a pleasure to write.

What aspect of your story are you most proud of?

Definitely thinking up a use for the Tissue Compression Eliminator, as a device it’s the perfect combination of being very silly and utterly horrifying to me. So, I was pleased for it to find an effective place in my story.

What’s your favourite line from your story?

Won’t everyone just answer this with ‘You will obey me!’? I’m pretty sure a big part of the appeal of writing for a character like the Master is being able to lean into that slightly schlocky dialogue. So, yeah, like the first time I wrote a story where I was able to have something appear with a ‘wheezing groaning sound’, getting to unironically type the line ‘You will obey me!’ was a great pleasure. Sometimes, the old ones are the best.

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Master Switches - An Interview with Rachel Redhead

In the latest in our series of Master Switches author interviews, Rachel Redhead talks about her Missy and Fifth Doctor story 'The Empress of Kolkata'. Written in the first person, Missy's reactions to meeting the Doctor with the 'feckless charm' are delightful... 

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I'm an award-avoiding author, I normally write in a style that's a mix of urban fantasy, comedy sci-fi and horror.  I've written some self-published books which I put out via the Twisted Books brand.  I've got a few ideas for fiction books, but nothing has really gelled atm, and I have pitched an idea for a non-fiction book about one of my favourite bands to a publisher.

What made you want to write a story for Master Switches?

I wasn't going to pitch anything at first, but then I had this great idea for a Missy and 5th Doctor story, but one without a companion really involved, as Missy has a habit of killing the Doctor's friends, and 5thy and Turlough occupies a rather narrow gap in 5thy's timeline, which has been overlooked a little by some. 5thy at this point is very settled as a character and makes the perfect foil for the mercurial Missy.

How would you describe your story in a nutshell?

Deranged sociopath seeks celery enthusiast for co-dependant mayhem.

What made you decide which Master and Doctor combo to go with?

They're about as opposite as any iteration of these can be – the fifth Doctor is brave, confident and nice, while Missy is like a pendulum constantly but randomly swinging between hysterical gloating and maniacal murder spree.

How did you find the writing process?

I wanted to do something of a historical setting, as I think 5thy has this Edwardian feel not seen since 2ndy really, so he has this English gentleman abroad quality to his attire, and I love research, especially if it's sciency, so reading up on the geography of the region and the monsoon weather patterns was very rewarding, I knew there was a monsoon season for instance but I had no idea that there were actually several monsoon events within that season in different parts of the whole subcontinent area. I got the initial draft of my story written rather quickly as a result of being so inspired by these ideas, though I found it hard to get Missy right at first. I had to rewatch a few of her telly episodes (not going to complain about that) and find a way to bring her voice to my story, as she's got quite a lot of advantage over such a younger Doctor.

What aspect of your story are you most proud of?

Getting a lot of the research put into the story, I wanted to set the background as correct as I could in the exposition, as the show does have a certain educational element in its make-up and I wanted to put this information into the story but not have it get in the way of the story.

What’s your favourite line from your story?

‘The Rain also brings floods, death and disease but those wonderful things are hardly worth mentioning right now.  The suffocating heat is of course weeding out the weak.  Those tiny people outside my palace weep their little tears, and do go on ever so much.  Why can't they just go somewhere else and die quietly, like they're supposed to?’

(Missy at her sociopathic worst).

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Master Switches - An Interview with Paul Hiscock

For our latest interview, we talk to writer Paul Hiscock about his Master Switches story 'Peacemaker' which revisits an old classic with new characters...

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I’m an author, dad, and website designer, living in Kent (England). A lot of my stories are Sherlock Holmes pastiches, which have appeared in anthologies from MX Publishing and Belanger Books. However, I also write horror stories for Burdizzo Books, and fantasy stories, including a clockpunk version of Sleeping Beauty. Finally, in the extended universes of Doctor Who, I have written a couple of stories for the City of the Saved series from Obverse Books. You can find out more about all of my stories at www.detectivesanddragons.uk.

What made you want to write a story for Master Switches?

It is always fun to write for iconic characters, but one of the interesting things about the Doctor and the Master is the subtle differences that make their various incarnations unique. I liked the idea of pitting different versions of them against each other and seeing how it changed their relationship.

How would you describe your story in a nutshell?

What if it had been the Seventh Doctor dealing with the Draconians and the Master in The Frontier in Space?

What made you decide which Master and Doctor combo to go with?

I love the smooth and sophisticated original Master played by Roger Delgado, so I wanted to include him. As for the Doctor, while I started watching during Peter Davison’s tenure, I really became a fan during the New Adventures era. The Machiavellian Seventh Doctor and Delgado’s  equally manipulative Master have a lot in common, and I decided it would be fun to pit them against one another.

How did you find the writing process?

The voices of my two main characters were already clear in my head, and they both seemed easy to write for. However, since this is a reimagining of The Frontier in Space, I wanted the tone of the story to feel as close to that as possible. Rewatching it helped, but the most useful thing was Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation of his story, particularly when it came to capturing the ritualised behaviours in the Draconian court.

What aspect of your story are you most proud of?

I was particularly pleased to write a story including the Draconians. I have always been surprised they haven’t returned on television. There is so much untapped potential in this race that is not only visually striking, but also not just another evil alien invader. 

What’s your favourite line from your story?

As a Doctor Who fan, there are certain things it will always be exciting to write. One of the highlights was describing how ‘the Master’s TARDIS landed with a vworp, vworp sound’. However, the best thing was including the classic line, ‘I am the Master, and you will obey me.’

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Master Switches - An Interview with Joshua Wanisko

Writer and the first ever Big Finish short-trips winner, Joshua Wanisko talks to Altrix about his Master Piece's story 'The Many Faces of Weng Chiang'. Don't be fooled by the title though, this intoxicating blend of high drama and black humour isn't the story you might be expecting...

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I first encountered Doctor Who more than thirty years ago. It was in the middle of the episode in Full Circle where Romana is infected with the Marshman DNA. I thought ‘This is weird and I don't understand it, but I guess I'll watch it, because it's science fiction.’ I still love Doctor Who, obviously, and I’m an especially big fan of the audio stories by Big Finish.

I live in rural New Jersey, USA with my wife and daughter and a whole bunch of cats.  I have written for Big Finish Productions and Geek Speak and my work has appeared in Time Shadows: Second Nature, Defending Earth, Sockhops & Seances, Pizza Parties and Poltergeists, Unbound Imaginings and the Lovecraft eZine.  If I can ever get past my lockdown malaise, I hope to complete an idiosyncratic time travel trilogy by the end of the year.

What made you want to write a story for Master Switches? 

Because I like the Master and I thought I could tell a story people would enjoy reading. It’s as simple as that. The Classic era Master, and the Geoffrey Beevers Master in particular, though I also have a soft spot for the self-foiling Ainley and Delgado Masters.

How would you describe your story in a nutshell? 

One piece of trivia about The Talons of Weng-Chiang that I find fascinating is that it was originally written with the Master as the villain, but the baddie was revised to be the original creation of Magnus Greel when Philip Hinchcliffe didn’t want to have the Master revealed as the secret villain so soon after The Deadly Assassin. (If only they had exercised this kind of restraint during the Fifth Doctor’s era…)

Once you know this fact, the parallels are very obvious (the time cabinet is a TARDIS, Greel says that Leela will be ‘the first morsel to feed my regeneration’), but I don’t know if I would have ever connected the dots if it hadn’t been pointed out to me.

That’s the aspect of the story that stuck with me. The core of much science fiction is the question of ‘What if?’ and Doctor Who even more so. This story asks the metatextual question, ‘What if the Master arrived to implement his plan and found that someone else has already started it?’

What made you decide which Master and Doctor combo to go with? 

The Master was preordained, because Greel was originally written as the decaying Master and it made sense to use him. Now that I had the Master, I went through each Doctor trying to determine which incarnation would be the most fun to bounce off of the Master. I went with the Eighth, in part as a nod to the McGann recording of Shada, where he fills in for the Fourth Doctor to correct the timeline.

How did you find the writing process?

The brief did present some considerable challenges, but it was entirely my fault. I was extremely proud of the original pitch I had written for the collection. Before I sent it out, I reviewed the guidelines to make sure that I was doing everything properly, and to my horror, I discovered that I had been reading the submission guidelines for Master Pieces, the previous collection of stories about the Master, and my submission was completely at odds with the request. 

I was even happy with the title. Titles always give me trouble.  

‘We're all stories, in the end. Just make MINE a good one.’

Pitch: Our universe holds infinite possibilities. The Land of Fiction encompasses an infinity of universes. The Master has a plan to make it his own.

By writing his memoirs as a work of fiction, but changing some minor details, the Master intends to show that his most humiliating defeats were deliberate misdirection, mere distractions to camouflage the pursuit of his actual goal.

The plan cannot fail. With these words, he will sculpt the clay of creation in his likeness.

He just needs to find a ghost writer.

Summary: The Master has discovered the Land of Fiction. He wants to rewrite his encounters with the Doctor so that what were apparently defeats were actually victories. He'll then take the manuscript to the Land of Fiction, where will become reality. Problem is he can't write worth a damn (‘He’s only good at making anagrams of his name’), so he needs someone to do it for him. He eventually finds a freelancer to ghost write the manuscript, but true to form, he betrays the ghostwriter needlessly. The ghostwriter dies, but not before submitting an earlier version of the manuscript where the Master fails.

Once I was actually working on it, the biggest difficulty was getting it done during lockdown. 2020 took a toll on everyone and finding the focus to see the story through to its conclusion took a great deal of effort.

What aspect of your story are you most proud of? 

The story was informed by Kate Orman’s essay ‘One of us is Yellow’: Doctor Fu Manchu and The Talons of Weng-Chiang from the collection Doctor Who and Race, in particular her observations about Li H’Sen Chang:

‘Of the two chief villains, ‘the crafty Chang’ (as the novelization’s blurb calls him) is by far the more interesting character. While Greel lurches around his lair, bellowing, Chang the illusionist negotiates the surrounding hostile alien culture – brilliantly, by turning its own assumptions against it. Chang, who speaks immaculate English, drops into his stage patter whenever he needs to convince someone he is a harmless and comical ‘Chinee’. At the police station in episode 1, he is debonair: ‘Not at all, Sergeant. I’m always happy to be of service to the police. What can I do for you this time? […] You seem remarkably well-informed, Doctor. Alas, I know nothing of these matters.’ But on stage, Chang plays to his audience’s assumptions and prejudices, speaking stilted English, exaggerating his accent (‘First tlick velly simple!’), and, when the Doctor strolls out of the ‘cabinet of death’, quipping, ‘The bird has flown. One of us is yellow.’ There is sometimes an edge of satire to Chang’s remarks: when the Doctor asks ‘Don’t I know you?’, Chang smilingly answers, ‘I understand we all look the same’.’

My favourite kind of story is a tale of redemption, and as flawed as Talons is on matters of race, it is not without empathy in its portrayal of Li H’Sen Chang. It was that aspect that I chose to emphasise here, that of a man who had been brought to this point by his own decisions, but who was not so far gone that he could not imagine returning to the light.

What’s your favourite line from your story?

‘Wei recoiled. This was not the face of a man. It was the death mask of a living corpse, a monstrosity from Nai Nai's tales of the old country. It was an abomination that should have died in the inferno that scarred it, but lived so that the fact of its existence might blaspheme the natural world. It was a charred skeleton, animated by a vast hatred and a monstrous force of will. It was a walking nightmare. It was fear made flesh. It was…

‘I am the Master,’ it said. ‘And you will obey me.’’

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Master Switches - An Interview with Kenton Hall

In the first in our series of author interviews, we talk to Canadian writer Kenton Hall. His Master Switches story is intriguingly called The Third Knock and includes a truly jaw-dropping twist...

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

My name is actually Kenton Hall, despite that sounding like somewhere you might once have visited on a wet Bank Holiday weekend. I’m a Canadian author, actor, director and musician as I reckoned it was lazy on my part to be unknown and broke in a single medium. And, to fulfil the comedy rule of threes, I am a father of twins. Scribe-wise, I wrote and directed the feature film A Dozen Summers (featuring Colin Baker as the Narrator), authored the book Bisection (a comic memoir of living and parenting with bipolar disorder) and was the editor of Regenerations, a Time War Anthology released by Chinbeard Books in 2020. I have several plates in the air at the moment, which saves on the washing up.

What made you want to write a story for Master Switches?

As a Who collector, I have spent a lot of time hunting down anthologies. The opportunity to tell a story, in good company and for charity was not to be missed. Also, I’d only just finished Seasons of War: Gallifrey when the call for submissions went out, so finding a way of working with Altrix Books was on my mind.

How would you describe your story in a nutshell?

The Doctor, believing himself to be at the end of his long journey, decides to do an old frenemy one final good turn. Needless to say, it goes… awry.

What made you decide which Master and Doctor combo to go with?

I’m fascinated by the relationship between the Doctor and the Master and their history. And also by how similar they are in many ways. The chance to have one of them at the beginning of that journey and one at, he believes, the end, felt like a potent area to explore. I like stories that dig into characters we know well, looking for new little wrinkles.

How did you find the writing process?

I think I faced the usual pitfall inherent in an idea that has fired you up – I wanted to turn it into a novel. So finding the core of the story and boiling it down to its essentials was the greatest challenge.

That and all writing, for me, is equal parts glory and kill it with fire.

Which aspects of your story are you most proud of?

If I’m working in a universe I love, especially Doctor Who, I’m very aware that the story lives and dies on how well you capture the character’s voices. By the final draft, I felt like I’d – to the best of my abilities – paid tribute to the actors and writers who’d brought them to life on TV. Obviously, however, that’s for the readers to judge.

What’s your favourite line from your story?

This will make no sense out of context, but ‘The Retiring Seers of Archon IX, for instance, or Canadians.’  It’s a very me line, not least because I think Canada should appear more frequently in science fiction. (It’s a much weirder place than most people realise.) 

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Book Announcement: Master Switches

 

Coming Soon: Master Switches: More Misadventures in Space and Time.

Altrix Books is delighted to announce that the follow up to 2019's Master Pieces will soon be available for a limited time. As we lead up to publication, we will be running a series of interviews with the writers who have all given up their time for free in order to raise money for The Stroke Association.

But in the meantime, here is the blurb and a sneak peek at Ginger Hoesly's stunning cover art:

After a series of adventures without the Doctor, the many incarnations of the Master are back to doing what they do best: scheming to bring down their greatest adversary. The proverbial thorn in the side has made a hobby out of thwarting the Master’s plans for universal domination. But even the Doctor can’t always be the hero, the victor, and the star. Sometimes, the Master must take the Doctor’s place…

Master Switches is an unofficial charity anthology in aid of The Stroke Association. Featuring stories by Jon Arnold, Andrew Blair, Kara Dennison, Paul Driscoll, Kenton Hall, Stephen Hatcher, Paul Hiscock, Matthew Kresal, Gary J Mack, Greg Maughan, Iain McLaughlin, Ellen Montgomery, Nathan Mullins, Gerard Power, Rachel Redhead, Graham Tedesco-Blair and Joshua Wanisko.

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