Lethbridge-Stewart - United Nations
Candy Jar Books has announced the third title in its final series of Lethbridge-Stewart novels.
United Nations
Written by Jonathan Blum
It was impossible that the public could ever have missed seeing the giant alien spaceship. But somehow, everyone did.
The US and USSR both want to know how the UK covered the incident up. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart would quite like to know who actually did cover it up. Old allies from both sides of the Iron Curtain are chasing the answer – but each with their own agenda. Everyone wants the power to make inconvenient secrets disappear.
The search leads Lethbridge-Stewart to the single most normal man on the Isle of Man, and what happens to the world around him when he dies. Lethbridge-Stewart faces death by coincidence, as probability gets turned upside-down.
And as the attacks get closer and closer to home, so does the political fallout. His career, his dream of uniting the worlds’ nations against alien threats, even his family could pay the ultimate price.
United Nations is written by Jonathan Blum, his first Lethbridge-Stewart novel, but by no means his first foray into Doctor Who fiction. During the 1990s he penned several Doctor Who novels with his partner, Kate Orman, for BBC Books, including Vampire Science and Seeing I. Outside of books, he also wrote the seminal Big Finish audio, The Fearmonger.
Range Editor Andy Frankham-Allen said:
I’ve long wanted to work with Jon Blum, having been an admirer of his work since I first read Vampire Science in 1997. It took a while to work out, since Jon is a busy chap and we needed a window that would work for him. A such, his first Lethbridge-Stewart novel comes at the end of the range, and has taken something of a lengthy gestation period. For these last few novels, starting with Spheres of Influence and It Came from the Isle of Man, I made sure the authors worked closely together to build up an ongoing situation, worthy of such a big event as the creation of UNIT.
Blum said:
Setting up UNIT is a large part of these final books. Frankham-Allen continued:
Blum explained:
We were most of the way through the story, when suddenly Flux established that UNIT was being set up years before Lethbridge-Stewart even came on board [despite countless previous references to his importance in the founding of UNIT]. But then if you look at what actually happens in Flux, it turns out there’s a very good reason why the original UNIT was strangled at birth, and needed our heroes to breathe life into it. And suddenly we see some things the Brigadier’s superiors did earlier in the book series in a rather different light…
Thirty years ago now, I made my student film Time Rift, and Marsha Twitty played Adrienne Kramer, commander of UNIT USA. And her part kept getting bigger, because her performance really jumped off the screen. Marsha became a lifelong friend, and Kate and I wrote General Kramer into our Eighth Doctor novels. Then the Lethbridge-Stewart team asked if they could feature a younger Kramer in their series (Times Squared). But when Marsha passed away in 2019, I decided I wanted to write for her once more as a tribute. Somehow that snowballed into being the big founding-of-UNIT story! I talked with Marsha’s friends, her mother and her boyfriend, and really tried to dig into the truth of what it would be like for a young Black woman officer working at the UN in those days. She was a joy to write for – a take-charge woman who’s also really good at keeping things to herself, and having more up her sleeve than you think. And we see very different sides to her in these books. Even after all these years, she was still able to surprise me!
The final two books in this Lethbridge-Stewart series will be Intelligence Taskforce by Jonathan Blum, and the series epilogue, The Lost Son by Andy Frankham-Allen.
You can order United Nations from the Candy Jar website, and it is part of any subscription to the book range.
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