The Time Traveler’s Chronicle, Season One
The Time Traveler’s Chronicle, Season One
The further adventures of H.G. Wells’ nameless TIME TRAVELER, with his associates, Heart and Diamond, mysterious twins gifted with sarcasm and superpowers. Season One chronicles five adventures of the Traveler, as he encounters an alien blancmange trying to go home, teams up with Sigmund Freud, tries to solve the murder of a giant frog, flees an extra-dimensional parasite and fights Morlocks on an alternate Earth doomed to destruction. With nothing more than keen intelligence, compassion, a dash of humor and his associates superpowers, the Time Traveler arrives to try and save the day, with mixed results. Featuring:
The Monster of Ness– A community is plagued by an invasion of Lizard Men, who turn out to be regular humans in really bad costumes. But this is only the beginning of the confusion, as each new clue creates an even more impossible mystery.
Vienna 1913 – Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky and Josef Tito are all living within a few square miles of each other in the city of Vienna in the summer of 1913. As the Archduke goes about his business, these four men become embroiled in an alien plot to bring on a war to destroy humanity.
The Clone Soldiers– The Traveler is summoned to Citadel Prime, the world of the Clone Troopers, where everyone looks and thinks exactly the same, but somehow, secrets and conspiracies abound. Can the Traveler figure out what’s really going on and save himself and his Associates?
Time Parasite – The Traveler and his associates find themselves on a famous derelict ghost ship of the Clone Troopers, the Emploder, lost in space for centuries. But they’re not alone, something hungry waits, even as the ship teeters on the edge of the universe.
Volcano– Cast into an alternate universe where a fascist government rules England, the Traveler and his friends struggle to save the planet from impending doom and an invasion of Morlocks. Meanwhile, in a mausoleum, a sinister Dracula-like figure watches and plots its escape.
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Well, this is book #26. Like all good books. There’s a story, this one more complicated than most.
I’m a Doctor Who nerd. Not exactly a secret. I’ve written books about it. It’s an imperfect show, it stumbles about a lot. But fundamentally, it’s message is about human decency and compassion. You can’t go wrong with that, at least not to me.
Now, back in 1989, the show gets cancelled. Except the BBC had tried to cancel it back in 1985 and there’d been this huge wave of outrage that forced them to do an about face. So this time, they got sneaky. They cancelled it, but refused to say so. Instead, the show was having a little lie down. It could come back at any time.
So fans were left in this indeterminate schrodinger’s cat state – It was gone, it wasn’t gone, it could be back. There was a kind of fever pitch of excitement, an indeterminacy that left everyone fascinated, and that lead to a frantic rumour mill where every slip of information or suggestion was front page news. Around this time, the BBC was privatizing, there were rumours a license to produce the show was available. Everyone was coming up with their own project, trying to pitch the BBC to get a license – Verity Lambert, Terry Nation, Graeme Harper, Adrian Riggleford Steven Spielberg, it seemed everyone had a proposal. On top of that, groups were making their own films in the Doctor Who universe, Downtime, Shakedown, The Stranger series, through loopholes in copyright, and fan groups such as Timebase were producing professional quality fan films like Phase Four or Regenesis. Other groups, like Nick Scovell were producing Doctor Who stage plays.
So during this period of frantic activity, along comes David Burton in 1991, driving a car emblazoned with, among other things “The New Doctor Who.” Well, the rumour mill went wild. This might be it! After all, who else was advertising that they actually had the show! The media was all over it.
Burton told the story of making a pilot under hush hush conditions, with co-stars, location work, and a red British phone booth in place of the Police Box. Burton did have a connection, to the show, sort of – He’d worked in a play directed by Paul Bernard, who had been a television Director for the show – it was one of those ‘six degrees of separation’ things. Although there were elements of plausibility, he could never provide a bit of proof, not even a script or photographs, no other cast or crew came forward. No part of Burton’s story was ever verified, and it’s widely assumed to be a hoax.
Basically, a local actor naively polished up his resume with a fake credit about a dead Children’s show. I don’t have it in my heart to be mean to hm.
Fast forward to me, 2014. I run across the David Berton story, and its intriguing. What if it had been real? What if his mysterious crew had actually succeeded and pulled it off. There was opportunity here to tell a story.
So I wrote “The New Doctor.” It was a series of shorts and posts centering around a quirky little meta-fanfiction about a group of unqualified, untrained people with nothing in common who somehow got a license to produce the show and then plunged into disaster. They go in with the best of intentions and they ended up in over their hads. It was a fun idea.
In 2018, I took that little meta-fiction and made a novel out of it. A quirky, oddball of a novel, but a novel nevertheless. I’d grown up working at a Drive-In on a diet of B-movies, I’d read extensively about low budget movie and television production and the shenanigans there, I’d worked on short films, I’d spent years working on books about Lexx and Starlost and fan films. If there was ever a person to write a comedy about a ship of fools stumbling about making a no-budget TV show, that was me. I had a lot of fun doing it.
Now, one of the things that really interested me was the interaction between what goes on backstage, and what’s on the screen. So often what we see on screen is the result, not of divine plans and brilliant inspirations, but of disasters, compromises, unplanned opportunities, personality conflicts, sometimes good, sometimes bad. A production can literally turn on a dime, or go off a cliff.
So in writing my novel, I actually had to write the television series episodes, or at least a detailed enough synopsis or outline to give the flavour of what would have been seen, and to ground the disaster.
Here’s an example: The pilot episode ‘Monsters of Ness’ is supposed to be a simple run-around, Lizard men come out of the lake and terrorize the unhappy inhabitants of a Scottish village, disposed of by dumping lye in the water or something else really stupid.’ Standard B movie plot, circa 1950, just the thing for a bunch of neophytes re-inventing the wheel. So they set about, booking caves, location shooting, dressing sets, rehearsing, putting in an order for Monster Lizard Men costumes. Then the costumes arrive.
They’re crap! They’re ridiculously bad. They’re unusable, no one could possibly be fooled. The audience will just laugh, or throw things at the telly. They’re boned – they’re on the edge of principal photography, there’s no time, no way to fix it.
Desperation forces a rewrite – Now the costumes are deliberately bad, no one in the story is taken in on them. Instead, there’s a plague of men in really bad lizard suits behaving badly. We’ve gone Scooby Doo. But now, they need to explain why men are running around in bad lizard suits, who is behind it, what’s the purpose. And literally, they’re desperately rewriting as they’re shooting, trying to figure out if there are any usable pages, anything usable from the original script, making it up as they go.
Every episode, practically, goes off the rails in some bizarre way. In the end, I came up with five stories as part of the novel, 15,000 out of some 75,000 words. In the end, it’s a good novel, and I’m currently revising it, stripping out the BBC owned stuff, in order to publish. I think that there’s an interesting, funny story in there that’s not really dependent on anyone’s intellectual property. That’s in process now.
Fast forward to 2020. That’s when a guy named Ewen Campion-Clarke, pseudonym James Kyle, runs across my novel, and he looks at synopsis/outlines stories, and he’s inspired to turn them into full length scripts. Yikes!
What a tribute! What an honour! To have your throwaway story ideas, picked up and embraced like that. And his scripts were brilliant. Loved them to pieces. We became online friends.
Ewen didn’t stop there. He kept on writing more adventures, more scripts. I’d always intended my novel to close, and it did. But inspired by his dedication, we extended the story.
While he was writing away, in March 2021, his father died of Cancer. My father had passed away of Cancer a few years earlier. I felt a bond with him. We never met, but we shared the same grief.
He kept on writing. In 2024 he came down with cancer, still a young man. He put up a good fight, but there was a lot of tragedy to his slow decline, his cat died, his laptop fried, he was in and out of coma. It wasn’t a good death when it came in July, 2025. By that time I was in the hospital myself. We’d fallen out of touch, I didn’t hear about it until December.
Ewen had always wanted to be a writer, like me. He had unpublished novels, a lot of fan fiction, he’d submitted to Big Finish, but never got in. That was his dream. In the end, much of his life’s work is buried on a fried hard drive and the archives of fan sites. I feel that’s unfair. He was a good writer, and he deserved to be remembered. So I tracked down Ewen’s mom, and asked her permission, then I gathered up Ewen’s New Doctor tales.
They’re good stories, all I needed to do was fix them – strip out all the BBC copyright stuff, replace and rewrite the elements into workable substitutes. Instead of the Doctor, the protagonist becomes H.G. Well’s Time Traveler, monsters become Morlocks, BBC aliens are replaced by distinctly different aliens with their own backstory and history, serving in the plot. Honestly, this isn’t the first time a Doctor Who script or a fan-fiction of some sort has been repurposed into something commercial. Look up ‘Aliens in the Blood.’ Or Stefanie Meyer.
Actually, it turned into a shitload of work. There was a lot of adaptation to be done, and a lot of fine tuning of Ewen’s particular script format. Left to myself, I might not have bothered. But Ewen, I think, deserves to be remembered. He deserves to have a book out there with his name on it.
My name is on it too? Well, I did write the original stories/treatments/outlines synopsis, to the tune of over 15,000 words of material and god knows how much background. And I have done all the back end work of repurposing, writing new backstories and characters. So I’m in there, legitimately. Of course, Ewen kept on writing, so I’ll do a couple more volumes, and he’ll get solo credit for thos. But this first one? I felt it was legitimate to call it a collaboration.
Ewen kept on writing, he wrote almost up to the end, so there’s at least four or five volumes of his work to publish. I did a second volume, solo credit to him. I think eventually, I’ll get three or four volumes out for him. They’re a lot of work. But he deserves to be remembered. In the meantime He kept on writing, almost to the end, I think that’s inspirational.
Anyway, that’s the story.
Ewen, you left the party too soon. We all miss you, bud.
Available on Amazon
D.G. Valdron 
