Crossing the Rubicon (unproduced novel)

Crossing the Rubicon was an unproduced Cybermen novel pitched by David Bishop to BBC Books in 2002.

It was intended to be a spiritual sequel to PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy focused specifically on the events of TV: The Tenth Planet. Several characters would have lived through the real world events of the Cyberman attack, from the appearance of a strange new planet to worldwide power failure ("Hospitals lose all electricity, patients die on operating tables") and finally street battles worldwide as the Cybermen arrived to abduct people. The pitch referred to the characters being "a priest who has lost his faith", "an investigative journalist undercover with an eschatological religious cult", "a military advisor at the Pentagon searching for his missing daughter among the chaos", and "a scientist willing to sacrifice anything in her quest for knowledge", with a version of the Doctor having to choose whether to intervene.

The pitch was rejected due to the cost of licensing the Cybermen. Bishop reworked the pitch for Big Finish, but it contained too many speaking characters to be viable for audio.

External links

• Vicious Imagery: "Crossing the Rubicon: a forgotten Doctor Who pitch" (2014)
• Who Killed Kennedy Writer's Commentary: "Some final thoughts" (2016)