Cyberon (series)

The Cyberon, or Cyberons, series was a loosely-defined franchise created by BBV Productions, tied together by the titular Cyberon entities. Although placed by authorial intent in the Doctor Who universe, the series is not in its entirely covered on this Wiki due to the Cyberon concept having debuted in stories with no legal ties to the Doctor Who universe. However, many subsequent releases placed under the Cyberon name saw the alien cyborgs meeting licensed elements from the Doctor Who universe, functioning as crossovers from a legal standpoint if not a narrative one.

History
The Cyberons debuted in the 1998 audio story Cyber-Hunt, but this story was not part of any Cyberon series, instead presenting itself as the first episode of The Wanderer, a series focusing on Nicholas Briggs's "Fred". While the Wanderer series proceeded with a second release not featuring the Cyberons, 2000 saw the release of a second audio drama featuring the Cyberons, Cybergeddon, which was branded on its original cover as belonging to a Cyberons series. The next year saw the release of a direct-to-video live-action film, simply entitled Cyberon. However, writer Lance Parkin flirted with the idea that the "Cyberon" of the film had no narrative connection to the Cyberons of the two prior audio plays, a stance he later abandoned.

In 2020, Arcbeatle Press reached an arrangment with BBV Productions and Lance Parkin to produce an anthology under the name of Cyberon. The book included a retelling of the 2000 movie as well as original prequels and sequels setting it in a wider context of Cyberon history, helping to reconcile the events of the movie with the narrative context of the audio plays. Its release was accompanied by a short CGI webcast prologue, Cyberon is Back!!. All the stories in the book included established elements of the DWU, including Chris Cwej and the Preternatural Research Bureau, reflecting how the Cyberons had "grown up in the Doctor Who world". This paved the way for BBV themselves to release novelisations of the two original audio plays, Cyber-Hunt and Cybergeddon, as part of their nascent Novelisations in Time & Space line, which made use of the now-explicitly-DWU continuity of the Arcbeatle material, most notably the planet Aurichall, established in The Blue Scream of Death as the Cyberon homeworld, and placed within the preexisting Faction Paradox setting of the Amazolian system. A CGI webcast, More Than Human..., was created to advertise the three Cyberon books now in existence.

BBV went on to release BBV's Cyberon: Enhanced Spoken Word of the Novelisation, an audio anthology featuring an audiobook reading of the first three stories in Arcbeatle's Cyberon by Nigel Peever, as well as standalone readings of A Worthy Successor and Silver-Tongued Liars by Bill Baggs. On the updated BBV website, these releases, the two Novelisations, and the original Cyber-Hunt were all classified as part of "the Cyberon series".

Subsequently, some development work was done at BBV Productions on a prose continuation of the Cyberon series. Lupan Evezan was approached, putting together a loose plan for an anthology of Cyberon Vignettes, a direct sequel to the Cyberon novelisation that would form as an interquel between it and Zygon for Lauren Anderson, and a series of Cyber Wars novels set in the far future, featuring the immortal Lauren's adventures in this new setting, inspired by Barnyard of the Cyberons. After these plans fell through, Callum Phillpott was asked to develop a single novel that would act as a direct sequel to Cyber-Hunt. The book, Minalopa, would have featured the Cyberon invasion of a "theme park planet" satirising Disneyland, and also featured the return of the man in black; the novel would remain unproduced after Phillpott decided to cease associating with BBV.

The Cyberons made appearances in the charity Doctor Who Annual 1988 released in May 2022 by Terraqueous Distributors. Although the Annual was otherwise unlicensed, the Cyberons' appearance was endorsed and promoted by BBV Productions. This included appearing on the cover, in a short story where they were encountered by the Sixth Doctor and Mel, and also a non-Doctor Who Cyberon short story written by Chris McAuley, Curse of the Cyberon. This story was a crossover with the Dracula universe, for which McAuley was a regular writer in the context of the "Stokerverse", official continuations of Dracula endorsed and cowritten by Bram Stoker's descendant. The story prominently featured the Cyberon Controller rank, introduced in Arcbeatle's Flight of the Cyberons, and took place during the Cyberon War. Curse of the Cyberons was ultimately adapted into a commercial Cyberon audiobook, performed by Terry Molloy, best-known for playing Davros, and released by BBV on 26 August. It was followed on 11 September by an "official sequel" written by John Peel, The Weapon and the Warrior.

On 15 January 2023, a bundle rerelease of both Dracula crossovers was accompanied by a short digital comic entitled Before the Storm, credited to a "Leopold Agnew". Although acknowledging the Dracula plot point, it was not focused on this phase of the series' timeline, instead illustrating the first day of the Cyberon War. The comic included continuity references to all prior Cyberon releases, and was accompanied by two pages of advertisements for the other entries in the range. There, Cyber-Hunt, Cybergeddon and Cyberon were presented as the "Original Trilogy", while the 2020s releases were described as "the Revival".