Doctor Who at 50: The Fourth Doctor (1974-81)

Tom Baker (1934-  ) played the Fourth Doctor in 172 episodes and 41 serials, airing over seven seasons. He had eight companions (counting the two models of K-9 as two, but the two actresses who played Romana as one). His era is notable for introducing the Zygons and Davros as recurring enemies. His era also introduced the character of Borusa, the White and Black Guardians, and expanded greatly on the mythos of Gallifrey and the Time Lords. Baker was briefly married to his co-star Lalla Ward, who later went on to marry scientist Richard Dawkins.

The Fourth Doctor: Tom Baker (1974-81)

The arrival of the Fourth Doctor in 1974 marked the end of an era. Long-term producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks both left along with Jon Pertwee and Philip Hinchcliffe took over as producer, with Robert Holmes as script editor. Holmes had already written several scripts under the old regime but they were constantly being toned down, with scary or disturbing elements removed or reduced. Hinchcliffe was firmly of the opinion that the show was rarely truly scary any more and wanted to ramp up these elements, giving Holmes freer reign. The Hinchcliffe/Holmes era, encompassing Season 12 to Season 14, is sometimes regarded as the show's 'gothic horror' period. This period is highly-praised for featuring several of the most critically-lauded Doctor Whostories of all time (The Ark in Space, Genesis of the Daleks, Pyramids of Mars, The Brain of Morbius, The Deadly Assassin, The Robots of Deathand The Talons of Weng-Chiang), but is also controversial for episodes featuring material deemed too horrific for young children to watch.

The incoming new Doctor, Tom Baker, was a relative unknown. Originally the producers had been thinking of casting an older actor and new companion Harry Sullivan, played by Ian Marter, was introduced to take on more of the action elements. Baker was younger than the producers had been anticipating and more able to actively participate in action storylines, so they wrote Harry Sullivan out in Season 13. Later, they admitted this was a mistake, as the chemistry and contrast between the stiff-upper-lipped, old-school Harry and the feminist, independent Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) was extremely popular with fans. Most surprising was the speed with which Baker made the role his own. He had the iconic scarf and coat sorted out pretty quickly and soon the writers were relishing giving him speeches and iconic lines other Doctors couldn't have sold:

"Homo sapiens. What an inventive, invincible species. It's only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds! They've survived flood, famine and plague. They've survived cosmic wars and holocausts. And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life. Ready to outsit eternity. They're indomitable."

The new team soon moved away from the UNIT format, keener to get the Doctor back out to alien worlds and battling strange alien menaces which they felt was more at the heart of what the show was about. Season 13's Terror of the Zygonsmarked the final appearance of the Brigadier for seven seasons and UNIT itself bowed out after The Seeds of Doom, not to reappear for a full thirteen years. Season 13 also marked the departure of Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. Having played the role in three and a half seasons, Sarah Jane Smith was the longest-running companion to date (though not the most frequently-appearing, due to the lower number of episodes per season compared to Fraser Hines's run as Jamie) and her departure occasioned the sort of press coverage normally reserved for the departure of Doctors. Sladen would return to the role in a pilot for a never-commissioned spin-off series, K9 and Company, before reappearing during the David Tennant era. She finally got her own ongoing series, The Sarah Jane Adventures, in 2008, which ran for four seasons before Sladen's tragic death in 2011.

The next serial, The Deadly Assassin, was a hugely important story in the history of the show. It was the first serial portraying the Doctor without a companion and was set mostly on the Doctor's homeworld of Gallifrey. It introduced a huge amount of lore about the Time Lords, revealing that the founder of Time Lord society was called Rassilon and that Time Lords could only regenerate twelve times before dying. It introduced elements such as the Matrix, the huge computer network that keeps track of Time Lord activity (and, quite a few years pre-cyberpunk, features a VR interface). Most importantly, it brought back the Master for the first time since Roger Delgado's tragic death four years earlier. The new Master, played by Peter Pratt under a not-really-convincing mask, was his fourteenth incarnation, a near-impossibility. The Master had tried to regenerate anyway at the end of his life and became trapped in his own body, a dying husk. His attempts to find a new body and a new set of regenerations would inform much of the rest of his storyline in the show.

The Sontarans invade and briefly occupy Gallifrey in The Invasion of Time, probably the most embarrassing defeat ever suffered by the Time Lords. Later on, the Sontarans couldn't even get an invite to the Time War.

Hinchliffe and Holmes both departed at the end of Season 14, though Holmes was convinced to stay on for a few more episodes into Season 15. They had introduced a new companion, Leela, a 'savage' warrior-woman played by Louise Jameson. Just before his departure, Holmes hit upon the idea of introducing a robotic companion, possibly influenced by the droids in the first Star Wars film. Star Wars (as it was then titled) had debuted aired in the USA between Seasons 14 and 15, though it didn't reach the UK until 1978. K-9, a robotic dog, was introduced in The Invisible Enemy and became a recurring character.

Incoming new producer Graham Williams wanted to explore the more comic side of Doctor Who and his tenure became controversial, with much fewer inarguable classics than the Hinchcliffe one and more of a focus on laughs. Williams later blamed this shift on BBC management, keen to avoid the controversies of the Hinchcliffe era. Apparently the directive filtered down to star Tom Baker, who was extremely keen to adopt a more active role creatively in the show. He now felt able to insert ad-libbed lines into scripts and come up with jokes and puns, some of which made their way into the final edit.

Anthony Read took over as script-editor and suggested a format change to shake things up a bit: the sixteenth season could be one huge storyline rather than lots of little ones. After some discussions they decided to compromise on having six stories as usual, but these stories would share a common thread in the hunt for the 'Key to Time'. Wanting to also bring in some new blood, Read commissioned several ideas from up-and-coming writer Douglas Adams. Adams had actually already written The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a radio play (it had been transmitted in early 1978) by the time he started work on Doctor Who and arguably his attention was diverted in several different directions. When Read left at the end of Season 16, Adams replaced him.

City of Death is both the Doctor Who serial with the highest-ever audience figures and also one of its most critically-acclaimed stories.

The resulting seventeenth season features several of what some fans consider to be the very worst Doctor Who stories of all time (Destiny of the Daleks and The Horns of Nimon) as well as what is often considered to be the very best, or at least the funniest: City of Death took advantage of the show's burgeoning popularity abroad (particularly in America, where it had started airing on PBS) to fund an overseas shoot in Paris. Douglas Adams turned in his best script for the show, with significant collaboration from Williams and others, and Tom Baker gave his finest comic performance on the show. The result was a tremendously entertaining serial, topped off with a cameo from Monty Python star John Cleese. When it aired, the rival ITV network was off-air due to a strike, so City of Death ran off with the ratings, scoring a record 16 million viewers. The rest of the season was not as accomplished and ended disastrously, when an electricians' strike saw the final serial, Shada, left incomplete.

Williams, apparently weary of criticisms directed against him, departed the show at the end of Season 17. Adams also stepped down as script editor to concentrate on The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which had turned into a major SF franchise of its own. Christopher Bidmead replaced Adams as script editor and was keen to bring elements of actual science fiction into the show. One of Williams's deputies, John Nathan-Turner, was promoted to head producer. Although no-one knew it at the time (Nathan-Turner least of all), he would be the classic series' final producer.

The new title sequence for Season 18. In 1981, this was cutting-edge.

Though Nathan-Turner later become a criticised and much-hated figure by Who fandom (perhaps, as in the case of his Star Trekcounterpart Rick Berman, not entirely fairly with regards to the creative elements of the show), he started out his tenure with several goals. He wanted to bring the show more up to date with more advanced visual effects and more futuristic music and a new, contemporary title sequence. He and Bidmead agreed that Tom Baker's comic excesses needed to be reigned in as well. Previous attempts to do so had been handicapped by the fact that the BBC did not want to lose the popular Baker from the show, but Nathan-Turner was less-inclined to indulge him. As to be expected, Baker was apparently unhappy with his influence on the show being curbed and ultimately decided to leave at the end of the eighteenth season.

Baker's final season is notable for its more futuristic (from the point of view of 1981) vibe and its greater attention to continuity. The serials Full Circle, State of Decay and Warriors' Gate form a trilogy with the TARDIS trapped in 'E-space', a parallel universe. Soon afterwards the Master reappeared and stole the body of Councillor Tremas of Traken (played by Anthony Ainley), finally giving him a more active role to play in future storylines. Tom Baker's final story, Logopolis, was a complex SF story involving the TARDIS apparently materialising inside itself, causing dimensional chaos; it being revealed that the universe had passed the point of natural heat death and the portals into E-space had been created to vent the excess heat; and the Doctor's 'death' when he fell from a radio telescope.

Tom Baker had spent seven years as the Doctor, the longest run ever by any actor spent in the role. Later he would struggle to find acting work and acknowledged the dangers of being typecast. However, Baker also presided over both the critical and popular high-water marks of the series. Whilst behind the scenes he may have become too powerful, his departure was greeted with much sadness by fans and viewers. But the new production team were keen to usher in a new era and, controversial at the time as it would be thirty years later with Matt Smith, they cast an actor still in his twenties as the new Doctor: Peter Davison.

Review ratings are only given for complete serials I have seen, which isn't very many. Those looking for an in-depth and unusual review of the entire series are directed to Adventures with the Wife in Space, in which a committed Doctor Who fan exposes his wife to the series and records her reactions.

Season 12: 28/12/74-10/5/75 (20 episodes)

4A: Robot (4 episodes)

4C: The Ark in Space (4 episodes) *****

4B: The Sontaran Experiment (2 episodes)

4E: Genesis of the Daleks (6 episodes) *****

4D: Revenge of the Cybermen (4 episodes) ***

Season 13: 30/8/75-6/3/76 (26 episodes)

4F: Terror of the Zygons (4 episodes) ****

4H: Planet of Evil (4 episodes)

4G: Pyramids of Mars (4 episodes)

4J: The Android Invasion (4 episodes)

4K: The Brain of Morbius (4 episodes)

4L: The Seeds of Doom (6 episodes)

Season 14: 4/9/76-2/4/77 (26 episodes)

4M: The Masque of Mandragora (4 episodes)

4N: The Hand of Fear (4 episodes)

4P: The Deadly Assassin (4 episodes)

4Q: The Face of Evil (4 episodes)

4R: The Robots of Death (4 episodes) ****

4S: The Talons of Weng-Chiang (6 episodes)

Season 15: 3/9/77-11/3/78 (26 episodes)

4V: The Horror of Fang Rock (4 episodes)

4T: The Invisible Enemy (4 episodes)

4X: Image of the Fendahl (4 episodes)

4W: The Sun Makers (4 episodes)

4Y: Underworld (4 episodes)

4Z: The Invasion of Time (6 episodes)

Season 16: 2/9/78-24/2/79 (26 episodes) - The Key to Time

5A: The Ribos Operation (4 episodes)

5B: The Pirate Planet (4 episodes)

5C: The Stones of Blood (4 episodes)

5D: The Androids of Tara (4 episodes)

5E: The Power of Kroll (4 episodes)

5F: The Armageddon Factor (6 episodes)

Season 17: 1/9/79-12/1/80 (20 episodes)

5J: Destiny of the Daleks (4 episodes)

5H: City of Death (4 episodes) *****

5G: The Creature From the Pit (4 episodes)

5K: Nightmare of Eden (4 episodes)

5L: The Horns of Nimon (4 episodes)

5M: Shada (6 episodes, incomplete)

Season 18: 30/8/80-21/3/81 (28 episodes)

5N: The Leisure Hive (4 episodes)

5Q: Meglos (4 episodes)

5R: Full Circle (4 episodes)

5P: State of Decay (4 episodes)

5S: Warriors' Gate (4 episodes)

5T: The Keeper of Traken (4 episodes)

5V: Logopolis (4 episodes) ****

The Fourth Doctor regenerated at the end of the serial Logopolis, having been pushed off the top of a radio telescope by the Master.

The Fourth Doctor's Companions and Recurring Allies

Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen): Seasons 12-14 (4A-4N)

Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter): Seasons 12-13 (4A-4F, 4J)

Leela (Louise Jameson): Seasons 14-15 (4Q-4Z)

K-9 Mk. I (John Leeson): Season 15 (4T-4Z)

K-9 Mk. II (John Leeson, David Brierly): Seasons 16-18 (5A-5S)

Romana - first incarnation (Mary Tamm): Season 16 (5A-5F)

Romana - second incarnation (Lalla Ward): Seasons 17-18 (5J-5S)

Adric (Matthew Waterhouse): Season 18- (5R- )

Nyssa (Sarah Sutton): Season 18- (5T- )

Tegan Jovanka (Janet Fielding): Season 18- (5V- )

Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney): 4A, 4F

Warrant Officer Benton (John Leven): 4A, 4F, 4J

Borusa - first incarnation (Angus MacKay): 4P

Borusa - second incarnation (John Arnatt): 4Z

Steven Erikson to publish SF novel in 2014

There's been a bit of a change-around in Steven Erikson's schedule for 2014. In a Tor.com Q&A last week he confirmed he's still very early in the writing of Fall of Light, the second novel in the Kharkanas Trilogy, and is still wrestling with a major structural issue which he isn't fully sure how to resolve yet. This has led to the expectation that Fall of Light won't make its June 2014 release date and may instead fall later in the year or even 2015.

However, Erikson will still be publishing a novel next year. Willfull Child (its unclear if the incorrect spelling is deliberate or not) is a comic SF novel that riffs on Star Trek. The blurb is as follows:

These are the voyages of the starship, A.S.F. Willful Child. Its ongoing mission: to seek out strange new worlds on which to plant the Terran flag, to subjugate and if necessary obliterate new life life-forms, to boldly blow the...

And so we join the not-terribly-bright but exceedingly cock-sure Captain Hadrian Sawback - a kind of James T Kirk crossed with 'American Dad' - and his motley crew on board the Starship Willful Child for a series of devil-may-care, near-calamitous and downright chaotic adventures through 'the infinite vastness of interstellar space'...

The bestselling author of the acclaimed Malazan Book of the Fallen sequence has taken his life-long passion for 'Star Trek' and transformed it into a smart, inventive and hugely entertaining spoof on the whole mankind-exploring-space-for-the-good-of-all-species-but-trashing-stuff-with-a-lot-of-hi-tech-kit-along-the-way type over-blown adventure. The result is this smart. inventive, occasionally wildly OTT and often very funny novel that deftly parodies the genre while also paying fond homage to it.

The novel has a listed release date of 5 June 2014 and an estimated page-count of somewhere around 300 pages. Erikson published a longer excerpt from the book on Tor last year.

RIP Ann C. Crispin

Sad news emerged this morning that science fiction and fantasy author Ann C. Crispin has passed away from cancer at the age of 63.

Crispin, who published most of her work under the moniker 'A.C. Crispin', is best-known for her contributions to several shared universes. She wrote six Star Trek novels, beginning with her first published novel, Yesterday's Son (1983). She also wrote in Andre Norton's Witch World universe as well as penning three tie-in novels for the V mini-series and later regular series. She also wrote the novelisation of the film Alien Resurrection. In 1989 she began writing her own series, Starbridge, which eventually expanded to seven volumes.

In the late 1990s she penned a series of Star Wars novels detailing the backstory of Han Solo. This material became the canonical origin story of Han Solo in the Expanded Universe (though it is expected that the rumoured Han Solo Star Wars spin-off will ignore the Expanded Universe altogether).

In 2011, impressed by her work on the Star Wars novels, Disney commissioned her to write the 'origin story' of Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean films, resulting in the 600-page novel The Price of Freedom. This was her last-published work.

As well as writing, Crispin was active in SFF fandom. She served as the Eastern Region Director and later Vice-President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. In 1998 Crispin also co-founded 'Writers Beware', an organisation dedicated to exposing scam agents, editors and publishers. In April 2013 she was named Grandmaster by the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers.

I read Crispin's Star Trek novels when I was young and found them to be among the best of the tie-in novels from that franchise. Crispin's skill was adding background and layers to characters readers believed they were already very familiar with, and she was not particularly interested in being restricted by concerns over canon. The result were novels that might not 'count' in the official histories of those franchises, but were still well-written and fascinating for the different perspectives on established characters. Her work on the Writers Beware program is also highly laudable, given the number of scam artists out there trying to take advantage of young and up-and-coming authors desperate to get published. Cory Doctorow has a brief obituary to her here.

The Shadowed Sun by N.K. Jemisin

The city of Gujaareh chafes under the rule of the Kisuans, who lack respect for the traditions of the city and its priesthood. When a son of the previous, deranged prince emerges as a warleader of a fierce barbarian tribe, the inhabitants of Gujaareh prepare for a rebellion...until a mysterious plague begins striking at the populace through their dreams.

The Shadowed Sun is the second and concluding volume of the Dreamblood duology, following up on The Killing Moon. This book sees N.K. Jemisin shifting gears from the first volume, which was focused more on investigations and conspiracies within the city. This second book is more about politics, the gathering of armies and, well, perhaps what can be described more as 'traditional epic fantasy guff'. However, Jemisin's take on traditional epic fantasy guff is refreshing, with the narrative never caving in to cliche and with widely-diverse storylines converging in unexpected and unpredictable ways.

As before, this is a character-based fantasy. The surviving characters from the first book take a back seat: Sunandi only gets a few scenes and Nijiri is in a supporting role only. The focus is on Hanani, the first woman to join the priesthood of Hananja, and Wanahomen, the exiled prince-in-waiting. Jemisin handles these characters with impressive skill: Hanani is inexperienced but rapidly learns the ways of the world and proves more resourceful than she was expecting. The usual learning-and-growing stuff, sure, but depicted with some interesting twists. In particular, Hanani's success in navigating the shoals of the culture of the Banbarra tribe is down to intelligence and being able to adapt to changing circumstances. Wanahomen is presented initially as a very unlikable character, which is an interesting choice for one of the major protagonists. His own character evolution, which involves learning the art of dream-magic and discovering the true nature of his father, is successfully depicted.

Other characters swirl around this central duo, though they risk feeling under-developed in comparison due to a lack of page-time. This does have the benefit of keeping a tight focus on our two main characters which the book does benefit from, but several fascinating side-characters (like Tiaanet, Nijiri, Sunandi and the Kisuan Protectors) do feel a little sold short as a result.

The thematic idea from the first novel - of people trapped in rigid and small world-views who have those views changed through a widening of their experience - is pursued and if anything is explored more intriguingly in this second volume. Wanahomen's world-view is restricted by him believing that his father was murdered and that the priesthood of Hananja is an enemy that must be punished. His own experiences in the dreaming world and his experiences with Hanani change that in a very plausible fashion. Jemisin tackles a wide variety of issues related to sexuality, abuse, gender politics and religion in the book, but never in a preachy way. Instead, she organically lets thematic elements arise from the story and characters to form a very satisfying and well-written whole.

The Shadowed Sun (****½) matches its forebear in quality and is available now in the UK and USA.

GAME OF THRONES beats DOCTOR WHO to a Hugo Award

In a surprise result, Game of Thrones proved victorious at Worldcon at the weekend. It seized the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), an award that traditionally goes to Doctor Who. Doctor Who has won the award in six of the previous seven years (missing out in 2009 only to Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog) and was widely expected to win again this year.

Doctor Who's failure to win can be ascribed to a lower number of episodes overall, the fact that those episodes were largely awful, or to the radical increase in the popularity of Game of Thrones, which has swelled to become one of the biggest shows on television (whilst Who has been in a modest ratings decline in the UK). Whilst the second season of Thrones did not win as much critical approval as the first (or third), it was still well-regarded. The episode that won, Blackwater, is also widely-acknowledged as the finest episode of the series to date.

George R.R. Martin wrote the episode that won the award, making this his sixth Hugo Award overall and the third for A Song of Ice and Fire, following the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1997 for Blood of the Dragon and the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) for Season 1 of Game of Thrones (shared with the writers and producers) last year. George R.R. Martin accepted the award along with Rory McCann, who plays Sandor 'The Hound' Clegane in the TV series.

THE EXPANSE optioned for television

The Expanse, the six-volume space opera series written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck under the pen-name James S.A. Corey, has been optioned for television by Alcon Television Group.

The Expanse consists of the published novels Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War and Abaddon's Gate, with three more books projected. Set in the 22nd Century, it depicts tensions in a colonised Solar system that are heading to war. Government and corporate conspiracies abound, as does the possible discovery of alien life.

Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby will be writing the pilot episode and will co-produce. They are best known for writing the script for the original Iron Man film, as one of the drafts of the film Children of Men.

Alcon Television Group is developing the series internally before shopping it to networks. It remains to be seen which ones will be interested. This is obviously great news for Daniel and Ty, and it'll be interesting to see how it develops.

New HOMEWORLD game confirmed

Gearbox and Blackbird Interactive have announced a deal to bring out a new title in the Homeworld series of space-based real-time strategy games. Blackbird (founded by many of the team who made the original Homeworld games) are re-purposing their in-development game Hardware: Shipbreakers - which they had been already treating as a 'spiritual prequel' - as a an actual prequel to the original Homeworld. Gearbox also confirmed that they would be releasing both 'straight' versions of the original Homeworld and Homeworld 2 and HD remakes on PC and other devices, including tablets.

Homeworld was developed by Relic, published by Sierra/Vivendi and released in 1999. It broke new ground for the real-time strategy genre, with a persistent military force that you built up from mission to mission, as well as resources you kept between missions. The game allowed full 3D movement of spacecraft, from lumbering dreadnoughts and carriers to small, nimble fighters and bombers. The game was noted for its fantastic music (a mixture of original tunes and classical music), its sombre atmosphere and its rich storyline.

The game, set in the Whirlpool Galaxy and not involving Earth at all, opened with the people of the desert planet Kharak discovering the wreck of an ancient starship, the Khar-Toba. Inside the ship they found an intact Hyperspace Core, allowing them to travel faster than light, and also a guidestone showing a route across the galaxy to another planet. The people of Kharak realised they were descended from settlers from another planet, Hiigara, their true homeworld. They constructed a massive Mothership to find Hiigara but during its testing run Kharak was obliterated in an alien attack. With the population reduced to half a million settlers (most of them in cryo-sleep), the crew of the Mothership had to guide the survivors of their race to their true home, discovering all sorts of secrets about the galaxy along the way.

A stand-alone expansion, Homeworld: Cataclysm (developed by Barking Dog Studios) was released in 2000. The game, set 15 years after Homeworld, saw a small mining clan forced into a desperate battle with an alien force called the Beast. The game was even more critically acclaimed than its forebear. Sadly, Homeworld: Cataclysm's source code has apparently been lost for good, making a re-release or HD remake unlikely.

A capital ship blowing up in Homeworld 2, yesterday. Or, more accurately, ten years ago.

Homeworld 2, released in 2003, was set 100 years after the events of Cataclysm. A new Mothership, the Pride of Hiigara, has been built to defend against an encroaching alien threat and locate two other missing Hyperspace Cores. If the three Cores can be reunited, it will allegedly usher in a new golden age for the galaxy. However, the alien Vaygr are also after the Cores.

After Homeworld 2's release, Relic was sold to THQ and developed the Dawn of War and Company of Heroes franchises. THQ bought the Homeworld IP from Vivendi in 2007, but failed to do anything with it. Around this time a number of personnel left Relic and set up Blackbird Interactive. In 2010 Blackbird began developing Hardware: Shipbreakers, a spiritual prequel to Homeworld using much of the same art style, music style and even voice actors and fonts. Blackbird apparently hoped to turn the game into a Homeworld prequel early on, and made approaches to THQ which were apparently ignored. They continued development of the game as a separate and new IP.

Earlier this year, THQ went bust and its assets were sold off. Relic were sold to Sega whilst Gearbox, best-known for creating the Brothers in Arms and Borderlands franchises, bought the Homeworld IP rights. Blackbird had made an offer for the IP but it was too low. After the sale Blackbird congratulated Gearbox and worked with them to recover the assets to the Homeworld games to allow them to be re-released. With two new games in development for next-gen systems and no expertise in the RTS genre, Gearbox realised they needed some expertise to make a new Homeworld game and entered negotiations with Blackbird. The deal was signed live on-stage at PAX Dev last month. As well as publishing the new game and allowing it to be set in the Homeworld universe, Gearbox will co-fund and help publish the game.

Hardware: Shipbreakers was formerly set on a desert planet called LM-27 and saw a number of mercenary groups competing to loot crashed spaceships from the planet's surface. It was originally a free-to-play, multiplayer-focused game, but Blackbird had hinted that there would be a narrative. A gameplay footage demo released earlier this year showed some of this and also demonstrated the game's very Homeworld-esque aesthetics in action.

The transition into being a Homeworld game seems to be pretty straightforward. LM-27 will probably now become Kharak, the desert planet the Hiigarans have been exiled to, and it's likely the game will now focus on different kiith (clans/ethnic groups) fighting one another for resources. Whether these will remain the many crashed spaceships of Hardware remains to be seen. It is likely that the new game will culminate in the discovery of the Khar-Toba and the Hyperspace Core that leads to the construction of the Mothership in the original Homeworld. I also suspect that, if successful, a 'proper' Homeworld 3 will follow at a later date.

This is excellent news, though some elements need to be clarified. In particular, if the free-to-play, multiplayer aspect which was extremely lukewarmly received will now be joined by a proper single-player campaign (the previous core of the Homeworld experience).