Books Connected To TV Series
In the 1980s he wrote an officially-sanctioned spin-off novel from the popular 1960s television series The Avengers, entitled Too Many Targets. He is also known for his various books connected to the BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who. He has also written novels based upon Star Trek making him possibly the only author to have written officially licensed continuation novels based upon both the Doctor Who and Star Trek franchises.
A friend of the writer Terry Nation, he wrote novelisations of several Doctor Who stories featuring Nation's Daleks for Target Books, reportedly one of the few writers willing to do so due to the large percentage of the author's fee Nation's agents demanded for the rights to use the Daleks. For similar reasons, Peel is one of the few novelists to have used the Daleks in full-length original Doctor Who novels, writing War of the Daleks and Legacy of the Daleks in the Eighth Doctor Adventures range for BBC Books in 1997 and 1998 respectively. Neither novel was particularly well received by fans of the series, due in part to Peel's rewriting of Dalek history as had been seen on screen in the television series (in particular the destruction of Skaro in Remembrance of the Daleks), to bring their story more in line with Nation's wishes than with how television writers subsequent to Nation had depicted them.
Peel was in fact the first writer ever to have penned a full-length Doctor Who novel featuring the Doctor not to be based upon a televised or radio script, Timewyrm: Genesys, when he was chosen by range editor Peter Darvill-Evans to launch the New Adventures range, carrying on from where the then-cancelled television series had left off, in 1991. He later wrote the novel Evolution for their sister range, the Missing Adventures (set during the programme's run with previous Doctors and companions), and also The Gallifrey Chronicles (not to be confused with the final book in Eighth Doctor Adventures series), a compendium detailing the history of the Doctor's home planet.
Peel has also written several original novels based upon Star Trek, and under the pseudonym "John Vincent" wrote a series of novels based upon the TV series James Bond Jr..
Read more about this topic: John Peel (writer)
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