Actress Gillian Anderson has revealed that she is working on a series of sci-fi novels to be published by Simon & Schuster. A Vision of Fire, the first volume of Anderson’s EarthEnd Saga, is due in October on Simon451, a new S&S imprint devoted to speculative fiction. The novel’s heroine, Caitlin O’Hara, is a child psychiatrist who works with young people in the aftermath of such psyche-scarring events as natural disasters and war, and now has to work with one particularly troubled girl. Talking to Entertainment Weekly, Anderson says ‘Over the course of spending time and helping her and investigating the origins of the girl’s trauma, Caitlin begins to realize that the girl’s behavior is tied to much greater forces in the universe, and as the story unfolds, she must prevent destruction on a grand scale.’

If the threat of ‘destruction on a grand scale’ tied to ‘greater forces in the universe’ sounds familiar to fans of the erstwhile Agent Dana Scully, Anderson is certainly unafraid to play up her time spent working on The X-Files as a means of qualifying her entry into the world of literary sci-fi: ‘After nine years of living in a semi-science-fictional universe, I think I now have an ingrained knowledge and rhythm for it.’ She also cites Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a reference point and suggests that she is writing with a potential cinematic adaption in mind.

Anderson is co-authoring the novels with publishing lifer Jeff Rovin, whose #Bibliography” target=”_blank”>bibliography makes for deliriously entertaining reading, spanning as it does: unlikely novelisations of stories from other media (films Broken Arrow, Re-Animator and Cliffhanger, Mortal Kombat – the video game, not the movie); work on the Tom Clancy’s Op-Center series; genre efforts like The Transgalactic Guide to Solar System M-17 and Return of the Wolf Man; non-fiction on a huge range of topics including TV Babylon, Country Music Babylon, Sports Babylon, Fascinating Facts from the Bible (which presumably touched on the actual Babylon) and the spectacularly punctuated Mars!; Back to the Batcave, an official biography of Adam West; slightly less official biographies such as Joan Collins: The Unauthorized Biography, Stallone!: A Hero’s Story – An Unauthorized Biography, Julio! (Iglesias) and Ellen DeGeneres Up Close: The Unauthorized Biography of the Hot New Star of ABC’s Ellen; and, under various pen names, humour titles including Don’t Even Think About Telling this Joke at Work, Mother Gooseberg’s Book of Jewish Nursery Rhymes and Dinomite Dinosaur Jokes. If A Vision of Fire is as much fun as his Wikipedia page, Anderson should be fine.