Inspired by the recent expose in Nothing At The End Of The Lane magazine (followed by Big Finish snapping up the rights for their Lost Stories, natch) that the bloke who created Ice Warriors had pitched half a dozen stories to the production teams over the years - and that they weren't crap ideas either...
3 comments:
I have to say The Aten is my favourite weird thing in history. 'The Aten' was the Egyptian name for the sun itself, which they believed was an instrument controlled by Ra.
For some strange reason the pharaoh Akhenamun decided that The Aten was actually a God, and not only that, the one true God. All others were banned. And he moved the capital to the middle of the desert in a place he named Akhetaten and renamed himself Akhenaten. He seems to have been one of the biggest religious nutters ever, frankly.
In light of this, I find it astonishing that there HASN'T been a story where Akhenaten sees a saucer crash at night, believes it to be the Aten visiting, talks to the aliens and relocates the capital to build a great temple on the crash site (or whatever)
You know, outside of the 1st Doctor PDA I have in my head... but maybe Hayles was thinking along similar lines...
You're so knowledgable. Until recently I just assumed it was about an alien called Aten who strangled people or something.
Ironically, The Hands of Aten is one of three storylines Hayles submitted no one can find anything about (the others are The Nazis and The White Witch, so my covers are all mostly imaginative).
Judging from the stories we DO know about, the "aliens in Egypt" pitch of yours is definitely likely (and probably why it was rejected as they'd just done The Dalek Masterplan and automatically assumed that a two-episode comedy chase scene used up all the potential for a full story there... or they were all too traumatized from making the story to do it).
Personally, I think fandom's too overawed with Pyramids of Mars to do anything about Egyptology. Bar the first Erimem story...
Suspect this is going nowhere but the ether...however - any chance I'd be able to get hold of decent-size files of your wonderful covers for a couple of your 'Hayles' books? I'm putting an essay together on Brian Hayles and would love to include repros of several of the might-have-been covers. Would give all due credit to your good self and send you a pdf of the finished article for sure, if you were able to help?
Post a Comment