Posts Tagged ‘Jonathan Hibberd’

Recently, we’ve been clearing out a lot of older stuff as we prepare to move. It’s all been stuff that has just sort of accumulated over the years and now, as we realise our next place is probably going to be a bit smaller than this due to the fact that we’re moving back to civilisation, we’ve been attempting to clean out all the random junk that we haven’t looked at in three or four years and probably don’t need.

Whilst going through the cupboard under the stairs, I found, in amongst various Christmas decorations and paperwork relating to previous flats, several boxes of floppy disks. At first, I thought there was nothing really special about them. I don’t really know anyone who uses a disk drive for their PC anymore, in fact I thought the majority of PCs made nowadays don’t actually have disk drives. It wasn’t until I opened up the boxes and found that, in amongst various Commodore Amiga games and creatively titled back up disks named after Diamanda Galas lyrics, that some of these discs were host to creative works dating further back than Love Amongst Strangers.

History Lesson

Many of them appear to feature works relating to the second incarnation of the old Doctor Who fanzine, The Other, that Jonathan Hibberd and myself used to work on, one seems to have an early draft of Do Not Choose to Ask My Name from the days when I imagined the book would have more Heinlein-esque political wrangling about the ‘copyright’ of recorded angel song, but the first disc predates all of them and seems to include writing from long before I’d even left school. I can’t look at the files directly as I have suspicion that the disk is formatted for use on an Amiga but given the title and the shaky pre-teen writing, I’m given to think that what lies upon that disk is another Jonathan Hibberd associated production from sometime after 1988.

The Terrible Trio Rise Again!

In many ways, I’m kind of relieved to not be able to see inside that disk properly because I know that, if I could, I’d have to write an updated tale featuring said characters and I don’t think the world is ready for an army of semi-sentient Green Slimes led by a man with a soup ladle for a hand attempting to defeat three plucky pre-teen adventurers.

However, having completed a sequel to Love Amongst Strangers, I can’t say that the thought isn’t there. I can’t help but wonder if the lives of those three children and the world they existed in, populated by annoying robot sidekicks and semi-divine galactic architects forged from pure light, somehow took a different path from our own. I can’t help but wonder what happened to those children after they grew up.

Yet I’m also scared to find out as I can only assume that my own life and the standards I have settled for fall somehow short of the lofty ideals of children who dared to antagonise demi-gods.

Perhaps one day I’ll have a chance to meet those three kids again and, on that day, perhaps they’ll tell me all about what’s happened to them in the years we’ve been apart. Perhaps they’ll also enlighten me as to the whereabouts of Dinosaur Man and Doctor Dacarack, of Estella Calohan and Jennifer McLain also, and, who knows, perhaps I’ll still have a thing or two to learn from them.