My love of Agent Dana Scully is real, and noted, and highly transferable to Gillian Anderson. I follow her work, often from a distance (I have not yet had the chance to watch The Fall), but with keen interest.

So I was delighted to hear about the upcoming sci-fi novel series to be penned by Ms Anderson, EarthEnd Saga. The title brings about a fond recollection to Ursula Le Guin’s EarthSea Trilogy, which is just an added mental-bonus. EarthEnd Saga will be co-authord by Jeff Rovin, whose bibliography shows some pretty remarkable diversity.

The series, according to EW and Anderson, will feature a female protagonist, a world-traveling child psychiatrist who specializes in treating kids who’ve suffered trauma from natural disasters and war”, and will distinctly avoid horror. The note about horror is welcome, frankly, as popular sci-fi has of late become too closely married to horror and superheros, in my opinion. (I love horror and superheroes, but it’s always a pleasure to see high-concept sci-fi stand alone).

EW has more on Anderson’s journey to the writing life:

Anderson – whose favorite authors include Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Strout, and George Saunders – said she knew what she didn’t want as much as she knew what she wanted. “It was a very clear to me that I didn’t want to enter into the horror realm. That doesn’t interest me,” she says. “I also wanted a very strong female character, around my age. I would want to read something like that and I think other women would like to read.” She adds that the nature of the storytelling world is such that future books “can go into many different directions, and follow different characters in different age groups the people can hook into.”

Asked about her sci-fi influences, Anderson says her touchstones run cinematic. “I don’t think I realized or even admitted to myself how much I like science fiction films, which literally began with Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” she says. The books are being written with an eye toward possible film adaptation. “Not to get ahead of ourselves,” she says with a laugh. “Our goal is to write a great series of books. But the opportunity is quite large, and hopefully we can create something that translates well into other media. I tend to act in more heady stuff. Period films, dramatic, tortured heroine things. So this could be something interesting and fun that can be added to the mix of things I do.”

Interesting to hear Anderson’s personal revelation of her love of sci-fi cinema, as she’s an icon of the genre herself from one of best sci-fi television shows of all time. And though writing books with film adaptations in mind rarely results in high-literary achievements, until we see what might come of the EarthEnd Saga, there’s little reason to let skepticism ruin my excitement.

The first book in the series, A Vision of Fire, and will be released this October by Simon451, a new Simon and Shuster imprint “devoted to literary and speculative fiction across all genres.”