The Merchandise Guide
Novelisations
Novels Guide
Compiled by Martin Willey

John Rankine

Douglas Rankine Mason was born in 1918 and died in 2103. He wrote under the names Douglas Mason and John Rankine. He was a teacher in Wallasey Village, near Liverpool until 1978. His first full length novel was Interstellar Two-Five in 1966, the first of the Dag Fletcher series which continued to 1973. He also wrote stand alone novels and numerous short stories for the magazines New Writings in SF, Impulse and Galaxy. In the 1980s he stopped writing, concentrating on local politics.

In 1976 he wrote a novelisation of another TV script for Futura, Johnny Byrne's Into Infinity. The show did not get picked up as a series, and Futura decided not a publish; the manuscript was lost.

Title	Author(s)	First Publication
Moon Odyssey	John Rankine	1975
Lunar Attack	John Rankine	1975
Astral Quest	John Rankine	1975
Android Planet	John Rankine	1976
Phoenix Of Megaron	John Rankine	1976
Space 1999 Year One	E C Tubb, John Rankine, Brian Ball	2020

In addition, Rankine prepared an "ideas bank" document (pdf) of story ideas for "second series" stories.

• The Thinking Mountain
• The Invaders
• The Seeds of Time
• The Grove of Lorcal
• The Age of Methuselah
• The Moon of Tragasus
• The Stranger within the Gate
• Who will guard the guardians?
• A question of focus

This was followed by a synopses for a single book (pdf), taking some of the above ideas as four "episodes" each of 4 chapters.

• The Thinking Mountain
• Koenig's Ark
• The Invaders
• The Mutiny

• Golden Apple profile (by his son, John Mason)
• Wikipedia
• ISFDB