Genesis of a Hero

When I wrote a book about Terry Nation a couple of years back, I obviously spent a chapter talking about his great 1970s post-apocalyptic series Survivors. And within that was a discussion of Nation's novelisation of the story, which was an alternative version of the first season.

What mostly got excluded was the sequel to Nation's novel, Survivors: Genesis of a Hero. This was published in 1977 under the name John Eyres, about whom I could find nothing, though it was obviously a pen-name. More recently, however, I've been in touch with Peter Hill, the man who actually wrote that book and who was also responsible for several other novels in the period under his own name.

And I'm happy to say that Peter Hill is still writing and that his most recent work, a near-future thriller titled Killing Tomorrow, is now available via Kindle.

So I thought I'd take this opportunity to publish the passage, which got cut for reasons of space, about the second Survivors novel from my original text for The Man Who Invented the Daleks...

Survivors: Genesis of a Hero emerged in 1977, though it had no involvement from Nation himself, and was written instead by John Eyres. Unable to use the continuing story from television, he starts at the point that Nation's book had left off, on the beach near Dover, where Peter Grant has just shot his mother, not realising who she was until after he had fired. It then follows Peter as, traumatised by his act of matricide and believing himself to be emotionally dead forever, he rises rapidly through the ranks of the military society being built by the National Unity Force. Discovering a talent for military tactics, and guided by a hazy sense of destiny, he helps suppress rival groups in the west and north and in London, before falling foul of court politics and defecting over the border to Wales, where he finds personal salvation and is transformed into a legendary hero of the survivors.

The main character from the television series to feature in this account is Tom Price, whose path runs in parallel to that of Peter. But there is also a brief cameo by Arthur Wormley, now ensconced in luxury in Windsor Castle as the president of the NUF, until he is assassinated by the head of his secret police. His mistress, who then attaches herself to his successor, is Sarah Boyer (the character known as Anne Tranter in the screen version). The others from Nation's novel - Greg and Jenny and the rest - are presumably making their way south through France, though we never hear of them at all.

In short, Genesis of a Hero has nothing to do with the television series whatsoever. It is, though, something of a neglected gem of 1970s pulp fiction, an entertaining romp through a post-industrial, near-barbaric future, with Peter Grant looking like nothing so much as a prototype for John Connor, the similarly pre-ordained leader of the resistance in James Cameron's film The Terminator (1984) and its sequels and spin-offs. In the final chapters, things take a mystical turn and Peter is welcomed into the New Society by a trio comprising a black priest, an Amazonian warrior who looks like his mother, and a hunchbacked dwarf with the gift of clairvoyance; but even at this point, with the the whole thing threatening to tip over into absurdity, the gleeful rush of the storytelling carries it off.

It is, in some ways, a more enjoyable piece of work than Nation's own novel, accepting its limitations much more happily and concentrating on a tightly focussed, well-paced narrative...

I'd stand by that assessment. It's a great little book and well worth tracking down. The only thing I'd add is that it's also of interest as another of the 1970s works of popular fiction that saw Wales as an escapist refuge - see also, for example, the Hell's Angels novels of Mick Norman.