BBC Books have announced details of a novelisation of the 1978 story, The Pirate Planet, originally written by Douglas Adams and now adapted by James Goss.

Featuring Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor, The Pirate Planet is a novel based on a long-forgotten draft of the script found in the Douglas Adams archive in Cambridge.

Unseen for 40 years and vastly different from the classic TV show, this is a work by The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author that no-one has ever read…

Pre-order The Pirate Planet here.

The hugely powerful Key to Time has been split into six segments, all of which have been disguised and hidden throughout time and space. Now the even more powerful White Guardian wants the Doctor to find the pieces.

With the first segment successfully retrieved, the Doctor, Romana and K-9 trace the second segment of the Key to the planet Calufrax. But when they arrive at exactly the right point in space, they find themselves on exactly the wrong planet – Zanak.

Ruled by the mysterious ‘Captain’, Zanak is a happy and prosperous planet. Mostly. If the mines run out of valuable minerals and gems then the Captain merely announces a New Golden Age and they fill up again. It’s an economic miracle – so obviously something’s very wrong…