UFO and Space: 1999 revisited – How new novellas are bringing Gerry Anderson TV classics back to life

The opportunity arose for Swallow after a chance meeting with Gerry's son Jamie Anderson, now head of his late father's company Anderson Entertainment – with the two men sharing an agent, Swallow arranged a meeting with Jamie to express his enthusiasm for Gerry's works.

The conversation eventually turned to the idea of crafting new stories set within the timeline of the original shows, with Swallow keen to explore the worlds of UFO and Space: 1999, two series which had "the strongest impact" on him in the early 1970s.

"Jamie came back to me and said, 'We've got this idea about doing these novellas – would you like to take a crack at it?'" Swallow recalls. "I pretty much bit his hand off.

"It's been a lot of fun for me – It gave me a great excuse to go back and rewatch the shows and kind of steep myself in them again. I tried very hard to make sure that I wrote these new stories in the style of that early 1970s sci-fi.

"I wanted to make it feel like these two manuscripts had been lying in a box somewhere since 1972... so if you love these shows, you could watch the TV show and then pick up the book, and it would feel like a seamless experience."

First aired in 1970-71, UFO – the first wholly live-action show produced by the Andersons following the Supermarionation success of Thunderbirds, Stingray and others – followed the covert efforts of top-secret military agency SHADO to prevent an alien invasion of Earth.

Though a second season never materialised, initial concepts for further episodes eventually formed for the basis for the next show on the slate: Space: 1999 (aired 1975-1977) saw the moon, and the 311 inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, sent hurtling out of Earth's orbit towards the unknown dangers of the galaxy.

Swallow's new efforts, he says, "dovetail with the source material", with the hope being that you "feel like you're reading an episode of the TV show that never got made".

"I tried to do a little more than maybe they could have done on the TV shows, so I've got a few elements in both books which would have blown the budget had it been the television episode," he adds. "But I've got the best budget ever, which is my readers' imagination."

Space: 1999 - The Armageddon Engine sees Commander John Koenig (as played on television by Martin Landau) and the people of Moonbase Alpha face an uncertain fate when a planet-killing alien weapon at the heart of a sinister cloud diverts their lost moon on to a fatal trajectory, while UFO - Shadowplay see SHADO commander-in-chef Ed Straker (played by Ed Bishop in the series) awaken from a coma with missing memories and suffering from strange hallucinations that threaten his grip on reality.

Read more:

• An unmade Gerry Anderson TV series will see light of day as new novel
• How the legend of Gerry Anderson lives on, as fans celebrate life and works of the Thunderbirds creator

In telling these stories, Swallow was allowed to "play with somebody else's toys", but knew he couldn't "leave sticky fingerprints all over them" – and that the continuity of the television shows imposed certain limitations.

"In terms keeping inside the canon, I think that's part and parcel of taking on one of these jobs," he explains.

"You're not going to break it. You're going to work inside the lines. And some people have said to me, you know, isn't that like a straightjacket for you? Isn’t it an intellectually bereft way of writing? And I think the exact opposite is true.

"It's challenging to me working inside the box. My first thought is, how do I push at the edges of that box? How do I kind of work inside the lines but still deliver something that reveals something new about these characters while acting in respect to the core material?"

Could these two books be just the beginning of a range of new adventures? Swallow is certainly hopeful, and suggests there's a hunger among other authors to engage with the worlds of Gerry Anderson.

"I had an absolute blast doing this – sometimes working on these type of projects can be a real pain, if you're working with somebody who's watching every tiny little detail, but there was such great creative freedom here, and it was such a fun bunch of people to work with.

"I would love to do it again, and I've heard from friends of mine who are other writers who are saying, 'Oh, that's a great franchise, we’d love to be part of that.' So I think there's a market for it, there's an audience for it, and there's definitely a love for these stories, so we could tell more."

Given that UFO and Space: 1999 are effectively sister series, albeit a shared continuity was never established between the shows on television, might a crossover story even be on the cards in future?

"I've always thought these two shows feel like they took place in the same world," says Swallow. "If you look at the timeline of it, Ed Straker was running SHADO in 1980 and Moonbase Alpha’s in 1999… maybe these guys knew each other?

"I think that would be fun, to explore the idea of finding some sort of way to connect them... because of course UFO’s story was never brought to a conclusion. You had this ongoing sort of Cold War story with these alien invaders and the show finished after one season and we never found out... were they defeated? What happened? And then Space: 1999 rolls along, [set] a decade later...

"Well, did something happen between the point of those stories? That would be fun to explore, I think."

Though there have been rumblings of screen revivals for both shows over the years – including a UFO film reportedly set to star Joshua Jackson and a series reboot of Space: 1999 – nothing of that sort has materialised, though Swallow believes that both shows "in their DNA are still as strong as they were back in the 1970s".

Given the opportunity, he'd apply "a bit of an X Files-type spin" to a new UFO series. "I think that would be interesting, because you can combine that kind of conspiracy theory storytelling with the action-adventure elements as well. I think that would work, definitely. You could update that to the modern day and you wouldn't really need to change an awful lot."

As for Space: 1999, though he argues you'd need "brush over the scientific elements that were maybe a bit wobbly in the show" – chiefly a nuclear explosion blowing the moon out of Earth's orbit – he adds: "The core concept about a group of people stranded in this satellite moving through space, who have no control where they're going, coming up against danger and meeting people, and finding a way to survive again... that's a compelling idea."

Space: 1999 - The Armageddon Engine and UFO - Shadow Play novellas are available to buy from gerryanderson.com.

Check out more of our Sci-Fi coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.