| BENJAMIN ADAMS’s first encounter with the Doctor was in 1975, when at the tender age of nine he saw The Claws of Axos on KCET-TV Los Angeles. He’s never been the same since. His work appears in anthologies such as Short Trips: The Centenarian, Miskatonic University, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories and 100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories. He was co-editor (with John Pelan) of the Del Rey Books anthology Children of Cthulhu, a Bram Stoker Award finalist for Best Horror Anthology. JOHN DAVIES’s first story for Big Finish (Dear John in Short Trips: The Centenarian) was described by Doctor Who Magazine as ‘captivatingly charming’ and by SFX as ‘the joy of Doctor Who in a nutshell’, so, understandably, he felt no pressure whatsoever in writing this story. Recently, he contributed a review of the 2006 Doctor Who episodes Army of Ghosts and Doomsday for online fanzine Shockeye’s Kitchen. BRIAN DOOLEY has written sketches for Monkey Dust, The Sketch Show and The Griff Rhys Jones Radio Show, among others, and dramas for Radio 4. His BBC sitcom, The Smoking Room, won him the New Writer BAFTA in 2005. More impressively, he once won the Crazy Caption Competition in Doctor Who Magazine. Endless scribbled stories in school notebooks aside, this is his first attempt at writing a Doctor Who story and he is very nervous about following in the footsteps of all those talented men and women who inspired him to write in the first place. Originally from Liverpool, Brian now lives in London. NIGEL FAIRS has had 26 of his theatre plays produced, including In Conversation with an Acid Bath Murderer, based on the true story of John Haigh (Norwich), My Mother was an Alien - is that why I’m gay?, about a depressive sci-fi fan (London fringe), the musical Oedipus the Queen (Brighton) and post-nuclear children’s play The Severed Branch (Horsham). His work for Big Finish includes writing eight Tomorrow People audio dramas, four for their Sapphire and Steel range and a Doctor Who audio called The Blue Tooth. Other writing work includes book reviews and articles for a variety of magazines, and a short story about an unhinged kids’ entertainer, Direst Cruelty, in GMP’s Death Comes Easy collection. He has also worked as an actor, composer, clown and psychodynamic counsellor. IAN FARRINGTON has compiled four Short Trips collections - Past Tense, Monsters, A Day in the Life and The Centenarian - and is the range editor of the series. He has also written for A Day in the Life, Short Trips: Life Science, Short Trips: Dalek Empire, and two anthologies in the Professor Bernice Summerfield range. He’s edited numerous other novels, short-story collections, script books and factual titles. Ian co-produced Big Finish’s UNIT audio series, and was the assistant producer of the company’s Doctor Who range from 2002 until 2006. He has also contributed to Doctor Who Magazine and is currently the sub editor of All About Soap. ANDY FRANKHAM-ALLEN has written for two previous Short Trips anthologies, as well as co-authoring a play for the short-lived Space 1889 series produced by Noise Monster Productions. With his successful ezine, Pantechnicon, Andy is pretty happy with how things are looking for the present. And, indeed, the future. JAMES GOSS has edited the BBC’s Doctor Who website, as well as writing for the torchwood.org.uk site. He’s the co-adapter of the stage version of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (‘wordy, overly complex’, Variety). SIMON GUERRIER has written six audio plays for Big Finish, including Doctor Who: The Settling and Sapphire and Steel: The School. He is the producer of Big Finish’s Bernice Summerfield range and has edited many anthologies, including Short Trips: The History of Christmas and Short Trips: Time Signature. His award-winning Doctor Who novel, The Time Travellers, was published by the BBC in 2005. SCOTT HANDCOCK has written three audio plays for Big Finish, contributing two instalments to the first season of Dark Shadows (The Book of Temptation and The Christmas Presence), whilst also pitting Benny Summerfield against The Oracle of Delphi. Since then, he has appeared behind the microphone in series such as Bernice Summerfield and I, Davros, and is currently working in Cardiff as part of the Doctor Who Confidential production team. COLIN HARVEY is a writer and part-time academic living in South London with his partner and two small children. Colin was the winner of SFX magazine’s inaugural Pulp Idol award in 2006 for his short story The Stinker. He has previously worked as a video game story designer for Sony. Colin’s journalism has appeared in The Guardian, Edge, Retrogamer, Develop and ScriptWriter, while for two years he wrote the regular Trivial Pursuit column for the website PopMatters. His academic monograph Grand Theft Auto: Motion-Emotion was published in Italian in 2005 by Ludologica. Colin is currently writing a science fantasy novel, provisionally entitled The Evolutionaries. LIZZIE HOPLEY is a RADA-trained actress and writer. Her radio plays include The Elizabethan Beauty Law (starring Annette Badland as Elizabeth I) and The Cenci Family (which was short-listed for a Sony Award and a First Play Award) - both for Radio 4 - and Salome for Radio 3 (starring Florence Hoath). Her sci-fi screenplay, The Revenant Code, was also shortlisted for a Sony Award by the British Film Council in 2004. For the theatre, Lizzie has written Pramface, a horror-revenge tragedy about celebrity and chavs, which won the Plat de Jour in Edinburgh in 2005, has toured the UK and which provided the inspiration for her story in this collection. Lizzie’s first contribution to Big Finish’s Doctor Who: Short Trips series was for The Centenarian. Her acting work includes voicing the Mantasphid Queen in a new animated series, The Infinite Quest for BBC1’s Totally Doctor Who. Big Finish work include roles in Doctor Who: Night Thoughts, The Tomorrow People: A Plague of Dreams, and the Cyberman and I, Davros miniseries. In her Big Finish debut, she played Gemma Griffin, the Doctor’s companion, in Joseph Lidster’s Terror Firma. Notable TV and film work includes Pierrepoint with Timothy Spall (Granada Films) and Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased): Whatever Possessed You? (BBC). JOSEPH LIDSTER (editor) has written extensively for Big Finish’s series of Doctor Who audio dramas as well as contributing scripts for their Sapphire & Steel, Professor Bernice Summerfield, UNIT and Tomorrow People ranges. He’s also written a number of short stories and a novella for the same company. In 2006, Joseph wrote fictional content for the BBC’s Doctor Who and Torchwood spin-off websites. He recently abridged the Torchwood novels for audio. PAUL MAGRS was born in 1969 in the north-east of England. He has published novels for children, teens, adults and Doctor Who fans. His most recent novel is Never the Bride, published by Headline. STUART MANNING is a graphic designer and writer. In addition to designing Doctor Who Magazine, he has produced a number of cover designs for Big Finish, including for this anthology. He is the producer of Big Finish’s Dark Shadows audio dramas and wrote the first CD, The House of Despair. He also contributed a story to Short Trips: Solar System in 2005. GARY OWEN is a playwright. His work has been produced in the UK by the Royal National Theatre, Paines Plough, Sgript Cymru, the Sherman, the Theatre Royal Plymouth, the Watford Palace Theatre and Theatre 503. He’s won the Meyer Whitworth Award, the Pearson Best Play Award, the George Devine Award and a Fringe First from the Edinburgh Festival. Overseas his work has been produced in New York, Philadelphia, Ottawa, Reykjavik, Oslo, Stockholm, Maastricht, Dresden, Nuremberg, Athens, Tokyo, Sydney and Melbourne. His plays are published by Methuen, and he lives in Splott. STEL PAVLOU makes stuff up for a living. So far he’s made up two novels, Decipher and Gene; a movie, The 51st State; some short stories; and a collection of other noodlings. This is the third time he’s made something up for Doctor Who. You’d think they’d know better by now. Stel is currently adapting Rendezvous With Rama for Morgan Freeman and David Fincher. HELEN RAYNOR was a script editor on the first three series of the new television production of Doctor Who. She also wrote a two-part story for series three and the episode Ghost Machine for Torchwood. She contributed to the BBC1 daytime drama strand Brief Encounters and wrote the play Running Away with the Hairdresser for BBC Radio 4. Previously, Helen worked in theatre as a director and is currently under commission as a writer for several theatre companies. EDDIE ROBSON is the author of the Doctor Who plays Human Resources, Phobos, Memory Lane, I.D. and Urgent Calls, and the Bernice Summerfield plays The Empire State and Freedom of Information. He has also written books about film noir and the Coen brothers; walkthrough guides to computer games; reviews, features and news for SFX, Starburst and Cult Times; and scripts for the comics anthologies FutureQuake, Alien Safeword and Just 1 Page. This is his seventh Short Trip. He lives in Lancaster. GARY RUSSELL is a script editor for BBC Drama in Cardiff, working on Doctor Who and Torchwood. He recently wrote Doctor Who: The Inside Story for BBC Books and has written a number of fiction and non-fiction books over the past 12 years. Until recently, he was also an audio producer at Big Finish, and before that his jobs have included magazine editor, publicity officer and a spot of acting. STEVEN SAVILE has edited a number of critically acclaimed anthologies and collections, including Short Trips: Destination Prague, Redbrick Eden and, most recently, Elementals for Tor Books in the US, as well as Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions and Black Gondolier and Other Stories, the collected horror stories of Fritz Leiber. Steven is also the author of the Von Carstein Vampire trilogy, Inheritance, Dominion and Retribution, set in Games Workshop’s popular Warhammer world, and has re-imagined the blood-thirsty celtic barbarian Slaine from 2000 AD in a new trilogy of novels for Black Flame. Steven has written for Star Wars and Jurassic Park as well as his own novels and short stories, including Houdini’s Last Illusion (Telos) and Angel Road (Elastic Press). In his copious spare time, Steven… erm… writes… He was a runner up in the British Fantasy Awards, and a winner of a Writers of the Future Award in 2002. JAMES SWALLOW is a novelist and scriptwriter, creator of the Sundowners series of streampunk westerns and the only British writer to have worked on a Star Trek television series. His credits include the Doctor Who audio drama Singularity, the 2000 AD plays Dreddline, Jihad, Grud is Dead and Space 1889: The Steppes of Thoth. His short fiction appears in the Short Trips collections Dalek Empire and Snapshots, and the Bernice Summerfield anthologies Something Changed and Collected Works. |