Information and opinions about
Doctor Who original literary fiction

March 2002

Contents

About the novels

Virgin Publishing

The BBC canceled Doctor Who in 1989. The reasons for this seemed to change depending upon who was speaking, and none of them made any sense.

But in 1991, the BBC sold Virgin Publishing a license to produce a range of original novels which would continue the Doctor's adventures from a point at which the television show ended. These novels have white spines and are called the New Adventures (NA's, for short), and they feature the 7th Doctor as played by Sylvester McCoy. They are mostly meant to be read in order, especially the earlier ones.

The novels were so successful that Virgin launched a new range two years later called the Missing Adventures (MA's). These novels had black spines with the diamond logo at the top, and they were original fiction designed to slide in between the television stories. Virgin had a policy of releasing at least one novel for each past Doctor during the calendar year.

A range of regular contributing authors quickly established itself, and these authors have become much sought-after convention guests. Each range saw the release of one novel per month, and Virgin published 61 NA's and 33 MA's.

One NA, Shakedown by Terrance Dicks, was a novelization of the Dreamwatch Doctor Who spinoff movie of the same name.

One of the MA's, Downtime by Marc Platt, was the novelization of a Reeltime Doctor Who spinoff movie, and another, The Ghosts of N-Space, was a novelization of a Doctor Who radio play by Barry Letts. (The Ghosts of N-Space is the sequel of another radio play called The Paradise of Death, also by Barry Letts. But that radio play was novelized by Target Books, which is related to Virgin Publishing in some way I'm not quite clear on.)

The two ranges actually crossed direct paths twice. In order to launch the Missing Adventures, Virgin decided that the first MA would be a sequel of that month's NA. So the events within the New Adventure Blood Harvest by Terrance Dicks, experienced by the 7th Doctor, led into the events in the Missing Adventure Goth Opera by Paul Cornell, experienced by the 5th Doctor. When you time-travel, you can do stories like that.

In the second instance, the two ranges met literally. The Missing Adventure Cold Fusion by Lance Parkin features the 5th Doctor, Adric, Nyssa and Tegan. But the 7th Doctor, along with his companions Roz and Chris, also appear in lesser -- but pivotal -- roles. From the 7th Doctor's point of view, the events in Cold Fusion take place between the NA's Return of the Living Dad by Kate Orman and The Death of Art by Simon Bucher-Jones.

Virgin published four other works of Doctor Who fiction in addition to these two ranges. They put out three volumes of short-story anthologies, called Decalog, Decalog 2 and Decalog 3. The fourth was a strange but entertaining book called Who Killed Kennedy by David Bishop.

Virgin's license expired shortly after the 1996 TV movie starring Paul McGann, and the final NA, The Dying Days by Lance Parkin, features the 8th Doctor. It is the only NA which takes place after the TV movie.

When Virgin's license expired, the BBC evidently took a look at the profits Virgin was pulling in and decided that they would have a bit o' that, especially since they were banking hugely on the success of the TV movie. So instead of renewing the license, the BBC launched their own range of novels.

This didn't stop Virgin, however. Paul Cornell had created an immensely popular companion in the form of Bernice Summerfield, and many readers had grown to like her a lot over a stretch of about 50 novels. Lance Parkin wrote her out of the series in The Dying Days (because the BBC wanted to start with fresh storylines), and while the BBC went on to produce even more literary Who, Virgin continued with a range of novels featuring Bernice Summerfield having solo adventures. These, confusingly, are also called The New Adventures, still with the white spines.

Bernice Summerfield is such a popular character that when Big Finish Productions obtained the license to produce Doctor Who audio adventures, they cast the lovely actress Lisa Bowerman as the character and feature her regularly -- sometimes as the star of the story, without the Doctor.

I myself do not follow the Bernice-only stories, either on audio or in novel form, so I can't say any more about them.

Today, some of the most popular Virgin novels are extremely rare, and sell for as much as $100 on Ebay (and yours truly made quite a profit by buying a second copy of one of them off the shelf for $7.50 and selling it for $65.00). Top sellers are Cold Fusion by Lance Parkin, So Vile a Sin by Ben Aaronovitch and Kate Orman, and by far the top seller, Timewyrm: Revelation by Paul Cornell.

The BBC Novels

Like Virgin, the BBC decided to publish two sets of novels -- one series which would continue the adventures of the 8th Doctor after the TV movie, and another series featuring stories set between television episodes. But the BBC doesn't refer to them as two separate series. The BBC wants all the novels identified together by the reading public, so they are simply referred to as BBC Doctor Who novels. (Fans, however, refer to them as EDA's and PDA's -- Eighth-Doctor Adventures and Past-Doctor Adventures.)

Furthermore, the BBC is afraid to number the EDA's, despite the fact that fans could then keep track of them more easily, because that might scare off potentially new readers who might be intimidated by joining a series mid-stream.

The BBC novel spines have different colors, but always dark-toned except on very rare occasions, with the 1996 TV movie logo at the top.

Despite the fact that the good Doctor's adventures were coming from a different company, the same range of authors still produced the stories (and in one case, an author wrote a BBC novel which was a direct sequel to one of his Virgin novels), and the guidelines were very similar to what Virgin had used. As of this writing, the novels have been scaled down from 24 a year to 12 a year -- presumably 6 PDA's and 6 EDA's.

Also as of this writing, the BBC has published three short-story anthologies: Short Trips, More Short Trips and Short Trips and Side Steps.

To launch their new range, the first BBC Doctor Who novel was The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks. This story picks up right where the TV movie left off and gives the 8th Doctor a new companion, Samantha Jones -- thus completely ignoring The Dying Days by Lance Parkin, which was set a few hours / days after the TV movie but had no character named Samantha. So The Dying Days must be an adventure the 8th Doctor had on his own while Sam was elsewhere, shortly after he had just met her.

This means that the final book of the New Adventures takes place after the first book of the BBC's Eighth-Doctor Adventures.

Any reader wanting to store the novels on his or her shelf in chronological order of the Doctor's lifetime (regardless of publishing company) would have a mix of Virgin Missing Adventures and BBC Past-Doctor Adventures, followed by the Virgin New Adeventures, followed by the BBC Eighth-Doctor Adventures.

Telos Publishing

David J. Howe, a very prolific author of factual Doctor Who books, has also gotten into the publishing business. In 2001, he started Telos Publishing ("Telos" being the name of the planet in the 1967 TV story The Tomb of the Cybermen).

David felt that there was no real place for authors to write novellas -- the BBC novels were too long and almost everything in the anthologies were short stories. So Telos Publishing specifically produces four novellas a year, in hardback only. (Readers can choose between the regular edition and the prestige-format autographed edition of each story.) David plans to ask high-profile mainstream science fiction authors outside the Who regulars to contribute to the range.

Other Who, non-literary

BBV, Big Finish and Reeltime are three companies producing original Doctor Who and Doctor Who-related fiction, in the form of spin-off video projects and original audio adventures. Additionally, the BBC has started an original audio adventure available only through their official website. With all this fictional output and competition (along with the monthly publication Doctor Who Magazine) it's almost impossible for any fan of Doctor Who to buy, read, see and listen to everything.

As much as I wish I could win the lottery, quit my job and buy every Who-related piece of fiction and lock myself in my house until I absorb it all and become a living mushroom, I cannot. For now, I concentrate solely on the written form of fiction. It is the medium with which I am most comfortable, and I can read a book anywhere but cannot do the same with a CD or DVD. I have neither the time nor money for anything more. Yet.

How I'm catching up on the novels

I started buying the Virgin books very late in the range, and it was many months after they had stopped publishing that I completed my collection (and I could only do so by dedicating some big bucks on Ebay). I decided to read the New Adventures in order until I reached a gap in my collection, at which point I switched to the Missing Adventures until the gap was filled and I could switch back.

I managed to read every single Missing Adventure and all the anthologies. But when the BBC started publishing, I realized I was so far behind the New Adventures that I was never going to be able to keep up with the rest of Doctor Who fandom. So except for the monumental must-read stories like Happy Endings, Lungbarrow and The Dying Days, I decided to abandon the New Adventures altogether -- for now -- and simply start anew with the BBC books.

So now my priority is to read the Eighth-Doctor Adventures in order. When I reach a gap in the series or become current, I switch to the Past-Doctor Adventures and the anthologies. If I ever catch up with both series entirely (which will never happen), or if there's still a gap (all too possible since the BBC doesn't seem to understand the meaning of the phrase product distribution), I will then switch back to Virgin's New Adventures in a hopeless attempt to finish them off. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the next NA in line is Toy Soldiers by Paul Leonard.

My opinions

Favorite authors

My literary tastes seem to be in the minority with regards to Whovians around the world. Most of my fellow Whovians adore the work of Gareth Roberts, Lance Parkin and Kate Orman, and so do I. Beyond that, though, I pretty much diverge from popular opinion. Oh me, oh my.

Let's go ahead and get the big shocker out of the way -- I adore the work of Lawrence Miles! He is a writing god, as far as I'm concerned. He should be chained to a computer (without the internet so that he can't ask for anyone to rescue him) and forced to produce Doctor Who output for the rest of his days.

I am thoroughly baffled as to why my fellow Whovians slammed his work so much. The EDA's were about as exciting as watching grass grow until Lawrence came along with Alien Bodies and single-handedly kicked that range into high gear. That novel was so clever it knocked me sideways twice over. He didn't just take Doctor Who to the next level, he skipped a few levels and took up about five levels, all in one go.

Why do I think this? Consider:

Lawrence's characterization of the 8th Doctor was more realistic and easier to visualize than any before or since (witness the Doctor coming back to consciousness in front of everyone early in the book, or the way Sam describes him as thinking he looks powerful when he really doesn't, or the way he slowly backs Quixotl up the stairs while confronting him). It was mind-expanding, thought-provoking, and hilarious. The character of Quixotl was adorable, and I want to see more of him. The characters drove the action, and yet responded to the action in very definable and three-dimensional ways. Each character became very realistic in a short space of time, and all their personalities interacted with the story instead of watching it like lumps on a log. Lawrence included many things in the novel as subtext, without drawing overt attention to them, allowing the intelligent reader to spot things for him- or herself. Very few other Who authors do the same, and only Kate Orman can possibly do it with the same subtlety. His concept of a time-traveling cult which worships the nature of paradox is brilliant science fiction (as was the Shift and the Celestis) and provides an archenemy for the Doctor a million times better than the Daleks, and the concept of a walking, talking TARDIS was inspired. The Doctor defeats the various (that's right -- more than one!) bad guys in ways that are truly ingenious, not just mildly foreseeable as in other stories, and Lawrence shows the Doctor being truly brilliant by having him notice and remember things that the reader doesn't -- a mark of a great author. In a range of fiction which has been producing alien-invasion stories for over 30 years (in many cases, the same stupid story over and over), Alien Bodies was refreshingly different yet true to the character who is the Doctor. In short, Alien Bodies kicked ass and showed how it could be done.

I didn't think Lawrence could top it until I read Interference.

It's about time someone wrote a multi-novel time-travelling epic. We finally got one, it was brilliant in about five dozen ways, and Doctor Who fans slammed it, too. Why? I can't understand it. I was so jazzed by Interference I gushed the whole plot to a friend of mine (who doesn't read Who), excitedly telling him all about the neat things I'd just read. A Time Lord living each regeneration through the same events and never remembering them, and the concept of Foreman's World.

Lawrence has the ability to skip needless scenes. In Interference Part 2, we never actually read about the 3rd Doctor getting captured by the town's gatekeeper, because we didn't need to. No other Who author would have omitted that scene! If any other author had written the same story, he or she would have written a section about the Doctor looking this way, the Doctor looking that way, and then the Doctor getting prodded in the back with a gun and being told to raise his hands. Lawrence didn't bother with that dead wood, he cut right to the scene in which the Doctor is being held prisoner, thus getting on with the action, as always. Why can't my fellow Whovians see this man's story-telling brilliance like I can?!?!

I also adored the science fiction concept of an alien race which attempts to take over the Earth by utilizing their obsession with the media (and can change their minds on a whim), and the way Lawrence used this concept to point out flaws in our own society was fantastic. His word usage while showing how Sam sees the world through their eyes was exciting and crisp. I adored the concept of an Ogron befriending Sarah Jane and the way the people of Earth called the Doctor to help them ("There really is only one of me." "Then why do we have to keep making ID cards for you?" "That's the purpose of regeneration, to disrupt the bureaucratic process.") The jokes were fantastic, the Doctor's characterization was spot-on (witness the way he wobbles on the pile of junk and waves his arms around to keep balance because he feels too awkward to address the issue of Sam leaving). Sam's thoughts at the beginning of Part 1, in which she feels like a Big Person watching a bunch of Little People, are touching and beautiful. This is a novel in which Lots of Things are going on, and that takes talent.

So there you have it. My favorite Who novelist and the reason I like him so much. I was extremely disappointed by the reception these novels received, and the fact that the Faction Paradox storyline was ruthlessly crushed as soon as possible and thrown away. Justin Richards wanted to answer the demands of the fans, and the majority didn't like the Faction Paradox storyline, so I can't blame him. But that storyline made me feel like a kid again. It got me excited about Doctor Who in a way I haven't been since The Five Doctors thrilled me when I was 14 years old.

In case you're wondering, I haven't yet read The Adventuress of Henrietta Street because I've never seen a copy of Slow Empire and I refuse to read the books out of order.

Other authors I like, as a general rule and in roughly this order, are:

Lance Parkin. He's got such a subtle, easy-to-read style and he comes up with fantastic concepts. The Infinity Doctors was almost superb.

Gareth Roberts. Pure brilliance. The final chapters of The Well-Mannered War pulled the rug out from under my feet in spectacular fashion. He writes the 4th Doctor and Romana so well it's as if we're watching them on the screen. Very clever and very funny.

David A. McIntee. Another one my fellow fans seem not to like, but he comes up with clever ideas and executes them pretty darn well. Along with Christopher Bulis, David's ideas are sharp and they're the ones which make me yell "Neat!" when I read them, and I'm impressed with the research he does when placing his books in various times and settings. I especially liked the mind-expanding plot and chutzpah of The Shadow of Weng-Chiang. He wrote a credible 4th Doctor and a superb Romana. I also really liked The Face of the Enemy, with the Master, Ian, Barbara and UNIT. I had a few quibbles with that one, but it was still entertaining and it definitely fell into the "Way cool" category of fannish ideas.

Christopher Bulis. No one else but me seems to like Christopher's stories. That's the impression I get at conventions, anyway. But Christopher is prolific -- he has written at least one story for every Doctor, and I think only David A. McIntee comes close to that achievement -- and like David, his ideas are clever. When I read a Christopher Bulis novel, I fully expect there to be about five surprises in the last three chapters. A reader expects one or two, but with Christopher they just keep coming, and I like that, especially since they make sense and explain the various mysteries he has set up. He can have five or six puzzles and subplots, and he takes pains to eloquently and neatly tie up each and every single one before the final word, and there are refreshingly few editing mistakes (too many Who books are speed-written near the end as the author approaches deadline, and it shows (see Boucher, Chris), but not Christopher's). On at least two occasions he has written plots which use time travel to come full circle (Imperial Moon and Vanderdeken's Children), and I like well-conceived time plots such as these. My favorite Christopher Bulis novels are The Sorcerer's Apprentice and A Device of Death (an entire novel to explain the loose end of the Doctor's failure to achieve his mission in Destiny of the Daleks, and to explain why his coat disappeared in the transmat beam, deserves recognition for these continuity brushstrokes alone).

Kate Orman. Excellent when writing solo, not so good when hubby Jonathon Blum tries to help. She also does excellent research and detail for stories set in foreign times and places, and she doesn't waste space with excess verbiage -- she cuts the dead words from her text, pulls the emotion out of the characters in a way that makes the reader gasp, and gets on with powerful stories. The scene in which Ace is counting down to the moment when she'll shoot the Doctor in a mercy-killing in Set Piece is one of the most powerful in Doctor Who, ever. It made me cry.

Paul Cornell. Paul writes the best prose of any Who author (just read Timewyrm: Revelation), and I didn't see the Doctor's clever use of Rassilon's ring coming in Goth Opera. He's also tremendously funny, and I enjoyed parts of Happy Endings. But his beautiful prose serves as fantastic window dressing for plot holes. (The 7th Doctor took 190 pages in Love and War to maneuver Jan into position to destroy the Hoothi -- even though no one ever told the Doctor that Jan was capable of making fire (it's true, reread the book) -- when a burning arrow launched from the city walls would have done the same trick in about a paragraph. Very needless.) Still, Paul manages to have the Doctor save the day with his wits and intelligence instead of guns, and his understanding of the Doctor as the great protector of people who are hurt and vulnerable is second to none. The 5th Doctor's mannerisms in Goth Opera were so perfect it was frightening.

Other authors whose work I like, but not love, are Stephen Cole, Nick Walters, Simon Bucher-Jones, and Dave Stone. Most works by authors not mentioned above I can take or leave, with notable exceptions. I actually adore The Taking of Planet 5 by Simon Bucher-Jones, but since he hasn't written much beyond that (that I've read, anyway), I can't really say that he's great consistently or not. I sure hope he is.

Before I move on, I need to give special mention to a Who author who has never written a Who novel but earned a place in my heart for all time, and that's Steven Moffat. I've tried on several occasions to find the words to describe what the Doctor means to me as a character, usually plastering a thousand words onto a document and never quite getting it right, and then Steven comes along with the short story "Continuity Errors" in Decalog 3 and sums it all up in one word. This story works on many different levels -- it's light-hearted and serious at the same time, and that's difficult to achieve. It slowly teases the reader, building, adding new dimensions to the very fabric of the Doctor Who mythos instead of merely telling a story, and when the Doctor appears out of the darkness to answer the question "Who do monsters have nightmares about?" I burst into tears. Speaking only in terms of story construction, it is one of the most perfectly-constructed short stories I have ever read, tied with Ray Bradbury's "Getting Through Sunday Somehow" for first place. Speaking only in terms of sheer emotion, and what touches me as a person, it is the most beautiful story I have ever read, anywhere, hands down.

Not-so-favorite authors

At the other end of the scale are authors whose work I read only because I'm so sadly devoted to Doctor Who that I'll read or see any BBC-officially-produced fiction, but I don't look forward to it.

Paul Magrs is the only author to grace the Doctor Who range with such badly-written work that I was tempted to skip Verdigris, thus making it the first Who BBC story in 25 years I would have purposefully avoided. But I slogged through it anyway.

I'm puzzled as to what other people see in Paul's work. The biggest literary crime a Who author can do, in my opinion, is to relegate the Doctor to the background as a character who watches the plot unfold alongside the rest of the audience without actually doing anything to alter it or to advance it. (Prime example: Revelation of the Daleks. I challenge anyone to tell me what the Doctor did in that story besides kicking a gun to Orcini across the floor in part 4. Other than that, every single thing would have happened in exactly the same way, even if he hadn't been there.) The Doctor should be the star of a Doctor Who story, unless he's not present or otherwise absent for artistic reasons. Writing something non-Who and then sticking it into a Doctor Who book is wrong, the fact that the editor of the range accepts such work doubly so.

The Scarlet Empress is the novel that really first turned me off to Paul's work -- for precisely the reason mentioned above -- and I haven't read anything by him to change my opinion. His fiction just doesn't fit into the Who universe, somehow. He needs to write the same stories with different characters and take them elsewhere. I absolutely, unequivocally cannot stand Iris Wildthyme. The name and the character are so pretentious that it gags me (Paul might as well write a Mary Sue story and be done with it), and then the character herself is so nauseating she gags me a second time! Iris is like the disgusting woman next door you want to keep your kids away from. If I were asked to remove one author from the range, Paul Magrs would be the one.

Another literary crime an author can commit is to describe a fast-paced battle with slow, plodding words. First the author will say something like, "The beasties swarmed down onto our heroes so swift as to almost be a blur," and then painfully describe action in which each character seems to have ample time to run away, fight a single one of the creatures in hand-to-hand combat while nothing else is apparently going on and none of its fellows help, etc. The timing is so bad that I can't visualize the battle and I just fall asleep, because the author sounds as if he's fallen asleep, too.

The Waro attack in Russia in The Devil Goblins From Neptune is a great example. I have a hard time slogging through anything written by Martin Day -- Keith Topping is a much better author, he shouldn't team with Martin so much. More solo works from Keith, please, for I liked The King of Terror! Another example of this same problem is the monsters attacking the crowd in the art gallery in Demontage by Justin Richards (although I sometimes like Justin's work), and yet another great example is the Krill attacking the island in Storm Harvest by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry.

Ah, the writing team of Mike Tucker and Robert Perry, who don't know that any other characters than the 7th Doctor and Ace exist. They are the cure for insomnia. I have read every single novel by them and I am not exaggerating when I say that I don't remember what they were about! SNORE!

Daniel O'Mahony doesn't seem to be writing any more Who, for which I'm thankful. Barry Letts was a far better producer than a writer, and Chris Boucher was a far better television script-writer than a novelist.

Andrew Cartmel is a better novelist than he was a script editor, and that's a very sad measure, indeed. Andrew has an amazing ability to describe the physical setting and to make it sound very poignant, but since that's all he's capable of, he should write poetry. Case in point: Cat's Cradle: Warhead. Andrew took 257 pages for the Doctor to maneuver two gifted people into position so that their contact would blow up the villains' base! Perhaps I'm naive, but wouldn't the TARDIS's ability to materialize and a crate of nitro-9 done the same thing in about one paragraph? Sorry to sound harsh, but I believe Andrew's poor understanding of fiction was an integral part of the downfall of the show, so his work is the only work that upsets me. He didn't understand the meaning of the word plot when he was script editor, and he didn't understand it when he was writing New Adventures. Come back, Robert Holmes.

Favorite novels

Some novels I'm so jazzed about I remember them for months or years. Others I like because of a certain scene or the power of the author's prose. (And remember, I haven't yet read all the New Adventures -- I'm looking forward to reading Return of the Living Dad and The Room with No Doors by Kate Orman, and Christmas on a Rational Planet by Lawrence Miles.) So out of around 200 novels, in some semblance of order, but not perfectly so, and regardless of range or publishing company, my favorite Doctor Who novels so far are:

1. Alien Bodies, Lawrence Miles

2. Interference, Parts 1 and 2, Lawrence Miles

3. The Well-Mannered War, Gareth Roberts

4. The Infinity Doctors, Lance Parkin

5. The Taking of Planet 5, Simon Bucher-Jones

6. Set Piece, Kate Orman

7. Timewrym: Revelation, Paul Cornell

8. Father Time, Lance Parkin

9. The Romance of Crime, Gareth Roberts

10. The English Way of Death, Gareth Roberts

11. The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Christopher Bulis

12. Festival of Death, Jonathon Morris

13. The Left-Handed Hummingbird, Kate Orman

14. The Sands of Time, Justin Richards

15. The Dying Days, Lance Parkin

16. Happy Endings, Paul Cornell

17. The Shadow of Weng-Chiang, David A. McIntee

18. A Device of Death, Christopher Bulis

19. Cold Fusion, Lance Parkin

20. Unnatural History, Jonathon Blum and Kate Orman

21. The Face of the Enemy, David A. McIntee

22. Millenium Shock, Justin Richards

23. Dominion, Nick Walters

24. Coldheart, Trevor Baxendale

25. The Fall of Yquatine, Nick Walters

26. Imperial Moon, Christopher Bulis

27. Frontier Worlds, Peter Anghelides

28. Eye of Heaven, Jim Mortimore

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