Philip Reeve, author of the Mortal Engines series, has written a new Doctor Who story, focusing on the fourth Doctor and Leela and the dangers of an immense tree space station, known as the Heligan Structure, that has been asleep for centuries, dreaming of vengeance against a man in a blue box. Read an extract from the story Guardian children's site member Patrick interviewed him about the story and his Doctor Who memories

In your introductory video online you spoke at length of how you weren't always into Doctor Who. When did you first start to watch the show?

The first story I remember watching was the one where Leela was introduced, which Wikipedia tells me was aired in 1977. I had made a few attempts before then, but it always looked way too scary! As a child I always steered clear of science fiction, but in the autumn of 1977 the bow-wave of publicity for the first Star Wars movie had already reached me, so I was eager for anything science fictional. (Oddly, when I looked up the transmission date, I noticed that that first Leela story was called The Face of Evil, so perhaps that's where I got The Roots of Evil from. But they were all called the Something of Evil, I think!)



How much research did you do for The Roots of Evil? Did you find any stories that you drew inspiration from? What's your favourite story from that era?

I went almost entirely on my own memories, which I found were surprisingly detailed. There's a story called The Sun Makers which I could remember almost word for word - bizarrely, when you consider that I've only seen it once, more than 30 years ago. That was set in a futuristic society on Pluto, and there aren't really any monsters in it (there's a strange little dwarvish alien tyrant, but he's not really a monster in the usual Doctor Who sense) so I think that's what made me think of doing something with a spacey, futuristic setting - and originally I wasn't going to have any monsters either, but then some turned up, which is probably a good thing! I did rewatch The Sun Makers, by way of research, also one called City of Death, which is excellent. The one I remember most fondly is the Victorian-set adventure called The Talons of Weng Chiang - which I notice a lot of people claim as a favourite - but I haven't had a chance to see that again yet, so I don't know how well it stands up.

You write for all sorts of genres, in some parts historical, some parts futuristic. Why did you choose to write this in the future and not in the past?

I used to be very fascinated by Victorian stuff, and my best known books, the Mortal Engines series, have a sort of retro, Victorian vibe, despite being set in the far future. But I seem to have worked all that 19th century stuff out of my system, and while it might have been interesting to throw the Doctor into another historical era (Ancient Egypt? Rome?) I was drawn to an outer space setting. Also, although I had no idea who the other writers were going to be (and still don't know who will be doing Doctors 5 - 11) I suspected that a lot of them would go for historical or present-day settings - but I may be proved completely wrong about that.

One of your most famous novels, Mortal Engines, is being transformed into a movie and the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings' Peter Jackson is lined up to direct. Is there anything you could tell us about it and the process of having your book turned into a movie?

You clearly know much more about this than I do! It's literally years since I heard anything about a Mortal Engines movie. I don't think there's even a script. There are just these rumours rumbling around in the echo-chambers of the internet...

If you had a TARDIS, where would you travel to, and what monster would you fight when you got there?

Well I wouldn't want to fight ANY monsters! Are you MAD? I'd want to go somewhere with NO MONSTERS AT ALL! (That's why I'd make a very bad Doctor Who, even though I've got the outfit and everything.)

What was your favourite novel when you were young?

I was fascinated by The Lord of the Rings from about the age of eight and that lasted well into my teens. I also loved Rosemary Sutcliff's historical tales (The Eagle of the Ninth is the best known nowadays). Later, as a teenager, I read a lot of SF.

Is there any piece of advice you could give to young, aspiring writers?

Read a lot, and write every day.



Where is the weirdest place you've been to? What did you do there?

I don't travel much, I just stay at home and imagine weird places. I went to Welwyn Garden City recently, that's quite weird: towns in Britain have usually just grown up higgledy-piggledy over the centuries, but this one was planned: the streets are all laid out on a grid, all the houses are from the same period, and it's almost unnaturally clean and quiet and tidy. It was like stepping into some bizarre parallel universe, a 1920s suburb haunted by dreams of a future which never quite arrived. There's a community centre where David Bowie played one of his first gigs, which I found myself looking at rather as an Ancient Greek might have looked at a temple where Apollo or Dionysus had once appeared. I liked it immensely!

And lastly if you had to travel with one companion from Doctor Who, who would you choose?

I only remember three of them - Leela, and the two Romanas. Leela looks more fun, but Romana was a Time Lord (or Time Lady?) so she'd probably be able to steer the TARDIS and so forth, which would be useful... I can't even drive a car, let alone an inter-dimensional phone box. But I had a bit of a crush on Lalla Ward Romana when I was about 13, so that would be embarrassing: I'd have to go for Mary Tamm Romana!