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Book Details

A Life of Surprises

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890
 Bernice Summerfield*
#7 of 7
Bernice Summerfield*     See series as if on a bookshelf
A series of books from Big Finish Productions featuring the book only companion of Doctor Who named Bernice Summerfield created in the Virgin Publishing New Adventures series..

1) The Dead Men Diaries
2) The Doomsday Manuscript
3) The Gods of the Underworld
4) The Squire's Crystal
5) The Infernal Nexus
6) The Glass Prison
7) A Life of Surprises
None on file
None on file
No comments on file
Extract not on file

 

Added: 06-Jul-2002
Last Updated: 13-Apr-2020

Publications

 01-Sep-2002
Big Finish
Has a cover imageBook Edition Cover
Date Issued:
Cir 01-Sep-2002
Internal ID:
793
Publisher:
ISBN:
1-903-65444-0
ISBN-13:
978-1-903-65444-6
Country:
United Kingdom
Language:
English
A new collection of short stories published to coincide with Benny's tenth anniversary. Each story is set at a different period during Professor Bernice Summerfield's highly eventful life.
Cover:
Book Cover
Notes and Comments:
Image File
01-Sep-2002
Big Finish


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Author(s) Links

Author(s)

 Peter Anghelides
Birth: Cir 01 Jan 1962 Barton, Lancashire

 David Bailey

 Terrance Dicks
Birth: 10 May 1935 East Ham, London, England, UK
Death: 29 Aug 2019

Notes:
From the back of the book Warmonger.

Terrance Dicks joined Doctor Who as junior assistant trainee script editor in 1968, when they were making The Web of Fear and desperately trying to  make a roaring Yeti sound less like a flushing lavatory.  He worked on the show during the end of the Patrick Troughton years, and co-wrote The War Games, Troughton's last show, with Malcolm Hulke.  He stayed on as a script editor for the whole of the Jon Pertwee period, and left to write Robot, the first Tom Baker story.  (This was in accordance with an ancient Who tradition, which he'd just invented, that the departing script editor writes the first show of the next season.)

In the years that followed he wrote a handful of Doctor Who scripts, finishing in 1983 with The Five Doctors, the programmes twentieth anniversary special.

In the early 1970s he was in at the very beginning of the Doctor Who novelisation programme and ended up, more by luck than judgment, writing most of them - seventy something in all.  He has since written a number of Doctor Who 'originals', including Exodus, part of the opening Timewyrm sequence published by Virgin, and The Eight Doctors, the first original novel published by BBC Worldwide.

He has written two Doctor Who stage plays, one a flop d'éstime (great reviews, poor audiences), the other a bit of a pantomime but a modest touring success.  He has also written about a hundred non-Who books, fiction and non-fiction for young adults, but nobody ever asks about them.

In over thirty years with the Doctor he has grown older, fatter, greyer and grumpier.  But not noticeably wiser.

 Paul Ebbs
Notes:
From the back of the book The Book of the Still:

Paul Ebbs has wanted to write a Doctor Who novel since he realised he could pay off some of his debts by doing so.  He is thirty-mumble and has for the last fourteen years worked as a Psychiatric Nurse in some of the least salubrious locations imaginable.  He is currently script editor for BBV, and has written for Big Finish.  He also writes for the BBC1 medi-soap Doctors - and he's really rather happy that it has the word 'Doctor' in the title.  He lives in Essex and wholly wishes he didn't.

You will often find him being scarily load at conventions.

 Stephen Fewell
Birth: Cir 01 Jan 1971

 Nev Fountain
Birth: Stamford, The United Kingdom

 Steve Lyons
Notes:
From the back of the book Crooked World:

Steve Lyons was born and lives in Salford, near Manchester.  He has contributed articles, interviews, short stories and comic strips to many magazines, including Doctor Who Magazine, Starburst, SFX and Dreamwatch.  He has also written X-Men novels, Doctor Who audio plays and books about several TV series, including Doctor Who: The Completely Useless Encyclopedia.  He can hardly believe he's typing this, but Crooked World is his tenth Doctor Who novel!  His favourite cartoon is Scooby-Doo - but then, if you've read this far, you already knew that.

 David A McIntee
Birth: 31 Dec 1968

 Jonathan Morris
Birth: 17 Sep 1973 Taunton, Somerset, England, UK

 Daniel O'Mahony
Birth: 24 Jul 1973 Croydon, London, England, UK

 Kate Orman
Birth: Cir 01 Jan 1968 Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Notes:
Kate Orman was born in 1968 in Sydney, Australia.  Her first novel, The Left-Handed Hummingbird, was published in December 1993 by Virgin for the Doctor Who New Adventures series.  Kate Orman married Jonathan Blum in 1998 and they currently live in Sydney, Australia.

 Lance Parkin
Birth: 03 Sep 1971

 Justin Richards
Birth: 14 Sep 1961 Epping, Essex, United Kingdom
Notes:
From the back of the book Time Zero

Justin Richards has no cat.  He might (or might not) have had a cat when he was a child, but if he did he never ever put it in a box.  He does have two children, but that's not the same thing at all.  Believe me, if you have a cat and you're thinking of trading up for kids, there is a big difference.

When he isn't busy with his children, Justin acts as Creative Consultant to BBC Worldwide's various Doctor Who book ranges as well as doing some writing of his own - novels, audios, television, non fiction and other 'stuff'.  Presumably this is done during the time he would have had to spend with the cat, so given that Justin never has enough time for writing, he's thinking of not getting another one.

 Lloyd Rose
Notes:
From an interview posted at Outpost Gallifrey (used by permission). 
Click here for the full text.

There are authors you love who have no influence on your style at all--mostly because (I'm thinking of Nabokov here) they're geniuses and you're not.  In terms of simple prose style, it always looks to me as if the biggest influences on me are the Sherlock Holmes stories and J.D. Salinger.  In both cases, you have a very cinematic, observed presentation of the action, with a lot of importance given to the dialogue. I can't say who influenced my "subjective" passages, though, or my descriptions, or any of the interior dialogue.  I suspect Raymond Chandler had something to do with the structure.  While I was writing the book, I read "Little Dorrit," which was a big help, though I couldn't say in exactly what way.  Slowed me down, I think.  I kept wanting to get to the point. The book would have been six pages long.

If I had to pin down the most direct influence, I'd say it was comic books: specifically Chris Claremont and John Byrne's "X-Men" of the late 70's and early 80's, and Barry Windsor-Smith's later "Weapon X."   In terms of Who, I'm a Holmes and Hinchcliffe partisan.  Like most Americans, I was introduced to the show in the early 80's via the Tom Baker episodes.

I've seen the complete 7th Doctor series, but only glimpses of the other 5.  Until Christmas of 1998, I didn't even know there were such things as "Doctor Who" novels, other than the old Target TV-adaptations.  I submitted my proposal In September 1999 after spending the summer working it up.  So in the few months between those two periods, I found (thank you, eBay) and read (out of order) all of the NA's plus all the EDA's that were in print and available here (which was up to and including "Unnatural History").  A real crash course.  The NA's were what brought me back to "Doctor Who," what made me want to write a novel, particularly the books of Kate Orman and Paul Cornell, so you're going to see that influence there very strongly.  That said, I'm not sure I could pinpoint exactly what that influence is--again, because I'm in the middle.  The NA's just seemed to me like what Doctor Who books "were" and I wrote accordingly.

 Jim Sangster

 Robert Shearman
Birth: 10 Feb 1970 London, England, UK

 Mark Stevens

 Dave Stone
Birth: 12 Jun 1964
Notes:
From About the Author from the book Citadel of Dreams:

Dave Stone has written any number of things, from comics and radio scripts to full-length novels, which currently include Heart of TARDIS and The Slow Empire for the BBC Worldwide Doctor Who range and Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Infernal Nexus for Big Finish.  This is the first work published in the novella form, as opposed to a short story which didn't know when to stop, and he thought that with the relatively low word count it would be easy!

He thought that, but…

 Nick Walters

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*
  • I try to maintain page numbers for audiobooks even though obviously there aren't any. I do this to keep track of pages read and I try to use the Kindle version page numbers for this.
  • Synopses marked with an asterisk (*) were generated by an AI. There aren't a lot since this is an iffy way to do it - AI seems to make stuff up.
  • When specific publication dates are unknown (ie prefixed with a "Cir"), I try to get the publication date that is closest to the specific printing that I can.
  • When listing chapters, I only list chapters relevant to the story. I will usually leave off Author Notes, Indices, Acknowledgements, etc unless they are relevant to the story or the book is non-fiction.
  • Page numbers on this site are for the end of the main story. I normally do not include appendices, extra material, and other miscellaneous stuff at the end of the book in the page count.






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