Dying of Paradise: the Trilogy

In print for the first time after four decades, the completed version of the science fiction trilogy that began with Dying of Paradise and continued through The Ice Belt and now reaches its conclusion in The Babylon Run.

"My first professional sale was a audio serial titled The Last Rose of Summer. Made for peanuts with love and joy, it was the spawn of a bunch of TV and radio colleagues and it played at strange hours on commercial radio stations throughout the land. Within the industry it was a groundbreaking project, and in the wider world our timing was good. It was science fiction, and '77 was the summer of Star Wars. I was 23.

"A book sale came right after, a spinoff in the form of a novelisation of the serial scripts. The six half-hours offered a handy mass of foundation material for 70,000 or so words. It wasn't just a matter of putting in the he said/she saids, although I've seen many a book-of-the-film that did little more. The radio serial was followed by another two. The second book was written and there was even a cover designed, but publication was cancelled and the contract was paid off. Hitchhiker's Guide notwithstanding, the radio novelisation was too niche a genre to be commercial.

"Sphere later offered to reprint Last Rose and the unpublished SF titles… but on condition that I used a pseudonym, to avoid crossover with the campaign they were planning for Chimera. Which is how Stephen Couper came into the world.

"By then I was doing this for a living, and I wanted the books to stand on their own. Rather than reprint, I rewrote. Names, incidents, worldbuilding… I can't give you details, it's mists-of-time stuff now. So The Last Rose of Summer became Dying of Paradise and Hunters' Moon became The Ice Belt and The Babylon Run… well, with history repeating itself, The Babylon Run was written but remained unpublished. Until now." Stephen Gallagher