Peculiar Lives is the seventh in the series of Time Hunter

Time Hunter

The Time Hunter series of books is published by Telos Publishing Ltd. and features the characters Honoré Lechasseur and Emily Blandish from Daniel O'Mahony's Doctor Who novella The Cabinet of Light...

 novellas and features the characters Honoré Lechasseur

Honoré Lechasseur

Honoré Lechasseur is one of two main characters in the Doctor Who spin-off Time Hunter series published by Telos Publishing Ltd. He is a time sensitive, which means that he possess the ability to see into people's pasts and futures when he is in their vicinity...

 and Emily Blandish

Emily Blandish

Emily Blandish is one of two main characters in the Doctor Who spin-off Time Hunter series published by Telos Publishing Ltd. She is a time channeller, which means that she is able to physically travel along people's timelines when she is working with a time sensitive, such as her friend Honoré...

 from Daniel O'Mahony

Daniel O'Mahony

Daniel O'Mahony is a half-British half-Irish author, born in Croydon. He is the oldest of five children, his siblings including Eoin O'Mahony of the band Hamfatter, and Madeleine O'Mahony, who has designed and made hats for Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.-Biography:O'Mahony's first professionally...

's Doctor Who

Doctor Who

Doctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC. The programme depicts the adventures of a time-travelling humanoid alien known as the Doctor who explores the universe in a sentient time machine called the TARDIS that flies through time and space, whose exterior...

novella

Telos Doctor Who novellas

The Telos Doctor Who novellas were a series of tie-in novellas based on the long-running BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who, officially licensed by the BBC and published by Telos Publishing Ltd...

 The Cabinet of Light

The Cabinet of Light

The Cabinet of Light was the ninth novella published by Telos Publishing Ltd. as part of their Doctor Who novellas series. It was written by Daniel O'Mahony, and was released as a standard edition hardback, and a deluxe edition featuring a frontispiece by John Higgins...

. It is written by Philip Purser-Hallard

Philip Purser-Hallard

Philip Purser-Hallard is an author and scholar whose interests in science fiction and religion have been expressed both in fiction and non-fiction....

, author of the Mad Norwegian Press

Mad Norwegian Press

Mad Norwegian Press is an American publisher of science-fiction guides and novels. The company has worked with authors such as Peter David, Harlan Ellison, Robert Shearman, Lance Parkin, Elizabeth Bear, Mary Robinette Kowal, Seanan McGuire, Jody Lynn Nye, Catherynne M...

 Faction Paradox

Faction Paradox

Faction Paradox is a fictional time travelling cult/rebel group/organized crime syndicate, originally created by the author Lawrence Miles. The Faction's belief-system as portrayed has some similarities to voodoo, and is sometimes described as such...

 novel Of the City of the Saved...

Of the City of the Saved...

Of the City of the Saved... is an original novel by Philip Purser-Hallard set in the Faction Paradox universe. Laura Tobin, who first appeared in the BBC Doctor Who books, is a major character in the novel....

The novella is also available in a limited edition hardback, signed by the author (ISBN 1-903889-48-0).

(The series is not formally connected to the Whoniverse

Whoniverse

Whoniverse, a portmanteau of the words "Who" and "universe", is a word used to describe the fictional setting of the television series Doctor Who, K-9 and Company, Torchwood, The Sarah Jane Adventures and K-9, as well as other related stories...

.)

Themes

Peculiar Lives is written as if by Erik Clevedon, who is based on the real-life author Olaf Stapledon

Olaf Stapledon

William Olaf Stapledon was a British philosopher and author of several influential works of science fiction.-Life:...

. The story draws particularly from Stapledon's novels Last and First Men

Last and First Men

Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future is a "future history" science fiction novel written in 1930 by the British author Olaf Stapledon. A work of unprecedented scale in the genre, it describes the history of humanity from the present onwards across two billion years and eighteen...

(1930), Last Men in London

Last Men in London

Last Men in London is a science fiction novel by Olaf Stapledon.The narrator is the same member of the eighteenth and final human species who purportedly induced Stapledon to write Last and First Men...

(1932), Odd John

Odd John

Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest is a 1935 science fiction novel by the British author Olaf Stapledon. The novel explores the theme of the Übermensch in the character of John Wainwright, whose supernormal human mentality inevitably leads to conflict with normal human society and to the...

(1935) and Sirius

Sirius (novel)

Sirius is a 1944 science fiction novel by the British philosopher and author Olaf Stapledon.Scientist Thomas Trelone creates a super-intelligent dog, named Sirius. He is the only dog to have attained a humanlike intelligence...

(1944). The book also features the characters of Gideon Beech, a fictionalised George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...

, and (briefly) John Cleavis, a fictionalised C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis , commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland...

 character originally created by Paul Magrs

Paul Magrs

Paul Magrs is a writer and lecturer. He was born in Jarrow, Tyne and Wear, England, and now lives in Manchester with his partner, author and lecturer Jeremy Hoad.-Early life:...

. Purser-Hallard studied Stapledon's, Shaw's and Lewis' work in his doctoral thesis, and draws on them for the key themes of Peculiar Lives. These concern eugenics

Eugenics

Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...

 and the evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

 of mankind within an eschatological

Eschatology

Eschatology is a part of theology, philosophy, and futurology concerned with what are believed to be the final events in history, or the ultimate destiny of humanity, commonly referred to as the end of the world or the World to Come...

 context.

Synopsis

Honoré Lechasseur and Emily Blandish become embroiled in the endgame of a plot which began a generation ago, with the birth of the superhuman children known as "the Peculiar". While Emily encounters their chronicler, the elderly science-fiction novelist Erik Clevedon, Honoré is pitched against his will into an unimaginably distant future.

Literary References

John Cleavis first appeared in Paul Magrs' Doctor Who novel Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Mad Dogs and Englishmen (Doctor Who)

Mad Dogs and Englishmen is a BBC Books original novel written by Paul Magrs and based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who...

(2002) and then in the standalone To the Devil — a Diva! (2004). He is included in Peculiar Lives with Magrs' permission. Peculiar Lives also name-checks J. D. Beresford

J. D. Beresford

John Davys Beresford was an English writer, now remembered for his early science fiction and some short stories in the horror story and ghost story genres. His Hampdenshire Wonder was a major influence on Olaf Stapledon. His other science-fiction novels includeThe Riddle of the Tower, about a...

's The Hampdenshire Wonder

The Hampdenshire Wonder

The Hampdenshire Wonder is a 1911 science fiction novel by J. D. Beresford. It is one of the first novels to involve a wunderkind. The child in it is named Victor Stott and he is the son of a famous cricket player. This origin is perhaps a reference to H. G. Wells's father. The novel concerns his...

(1911).

External links

• Online sample chapter
• Telos Publishing - Peculiar Lives
• Author's pages about the book (including essays on the literary contexts of the novella and some additional material)