Tales from The Early Years – Zen and the Art of Starship Maintainance
Zen - cover artwork
It’s October 2007, and I’m at the Cult TV Weekender convention with my colleagues from B7M, there to expound to attendees about our new audio drama re-imagining of Blake’s 7. The whole event is taking place on a big estate that looks like it belongs to Lady Penelope, and while we rub shoulders with telly superstars like Huggy Bear and Gene Hunt over dinner, conversation turns to our the next phase of our project.
Throwing ideas around - James Swallow and Ben Aaronovich
Producer Andrew Sewell wants to tell a series of “early years” stories about our cast of characters – flashback tales to pivotal events in their past that will build up back-story and highlight the key moments that made them the people they are. It’s a great idea, perfectly suited to the intimacy that audio drama brings. As the Gene Genie asks me to pass him the butter, story editor Ben Aaronovich and I start throwing around some ideas. I plant my flag on the Travis story, and by the end of the conversation we’ve discussed all of our heroes and villains, and what we might say about them.
All but one, that is; I casually suggest that if we’re looking into the pasts of our characters, why not think about the past of the most mysterious one of all? This is science fiction, after all – our characters don’t even need to be human…
Eighteen months later; we’re seven stories into the Early Years series and it’s going well. Vila, Gan, Avon, Travis, Cally and Jenna have all been given the flashback treatment, and now we’re setting our sights on Blake and Servalan. But the ghost of that idea I had over the bread rolls a year and a half ago won’t go away.
One of the things in the classic B7 series that captivated me right away was the Liberator, and I’ve never quite let that magnificent ship go. I always wondered what catastrophe had set it adrift and left it broken and derelict for Blake and company to find. How did the ship’s original crew perish? What made Zen turn rogue? I know I want to tell that story, and so Escape Velocity is born.
I had the main beats of the script already scoped out – a story showing Zen before he was Zen, back when he was still part of the alien System, all of it through the eyes of a human pilot who had lost her past and was searching, like the ship, for an identity. By the end of Summer, the script is done, preliminary – and very cool – cover art has been created, and we’re into casting and final revisions. Recording dates are set, actors are contracted. Set course for studio, Standard by Seven…
James Swallow
Tags: Blake's 7, James Swallow, Zen
