The Virgin New Adventures: Luciferian Blood and Rising Heat

The story so far: after the Timewyrm arc established the Virgin New Adventures and the Cat’s Cradle arc saw them leaning into their more experimental side, the run of novels from Nightshade to Deceit saw Ace leave the TARDIS, 26th Century archaeologist Bernice “Benny” Summerfield joining, and Ace coming back again after spending some time in the 26th Century becoming a catsuited warrior badass. The next tranche of novels would explore the “new normal”, in which in a departure from his televised appearances the Seventh Doctor would be accompanied by two companions at once. (OK, sure, there was Dragonfire which had Mel and Ace in it, but Ace doesn’t officially sign on as a companion there until Mel says “I’m interested in Glitz so I’m calling it quits.”) This would be an important test of the concept; stories like The Highest Science had shown that Bernice could work very well as a solo companion, but now the chemistry between the Doctor, Benny, and new-Ace must be tested. Let’s see how that goes…

Lucifer Rising by Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore

The first journey of the Doctor-Benny-Ace trifecta takes them to the gas giant Lucifer and its moons, Moloch and Belial. It’s the 2150s, and Earth Central has set up a research programme – Project Eden – with the goal of examining the mysteries of this system, such as the space elevator connecting the two moons (in a manner which makes a nonsense of everything physics tells us about how gravitational orbits work, the hollow world within Moloch full of vegetation, the weird artifacts concealed in Belial, and the utterly strange aliens, dubbed the Angels, that live in the atmosphere of the gas giant itself. The ultimate goal is to establish communication with the Angels in order to gain their co-operation in extracting rare materials from the core of the gas giant – materials which could be useful to Earth’s ever-growing requirements for energy.

In her own time, Benny knows this as an archaeological oddity; records showed that some fruitful research had happened here, only for the whole thing to shut down under mysterious circumstances. The Doctor’s fascinated too, and Ace seems to be taking an interest as well, despite her grumpier attitude and her deeper commitment to violence. Perhaps Ace’s skills will be of use – for within a few weeks of the TARDIS crew ingratiating their way into Project Eden, Paula Engado dies. Paula, daughter of Project Coordinator Miles Engado, ended up suffering a malfunction in her starsuit – an advanced spacesuit with significant self-propulsion capabilities – and fell into Lucifer’s atmosphere, the extreme pressure rupturing her starsuit and killing her. Adjudicator Bishop has arrived to investigate the case, and everyone is a suspect – including the Doctor.

Bishop is right to be suspicious. The ultimate value of Project Eden, from Earth’s perspective, are those sweet sweet anomalous materials in the gas giants, not the research – and that means powerful interests are paying attention to Project Eden. That includes IMC – the dodgy mining corporation from Colony In Space – who’ll stop at nothing to take control of things. With the Project staff on edge and off their game thanks to the shock of Paula’s death, the IMC’s spy could end up with a fairly free hand. It’s a good thing that the Doctor, Benny, and Ace are all carefully keeping an eye on things… or it would be, if there wasn’t a dangerous, manipulative chess game being played with time travel here. And this time, it’s not the Doctor who’s playing. For back in the 2500s, Ace made her own deal with IMC…

The Virgin New Adventures: Nightshade To Deceit

The story so far: after kicking off with the Timewyrm saga in 1991, the Virgin New Adventures novel line spent early 1992 with the Cat’s Cradle trilogy, in which the TARDIS was damaged due to a crash with an early Gallifreyan time machine. At the end of Witch Mark, the final Cat’s Cradle novel, the repairs were completed using demonic protoplasm – causing the TARDIS to become corrupted, with consequences for the Doctor due to his symbiotic relationship with it. By the end of the chunk of novels I’m going to cover here, that problem will be resolved. Will this new plot arc turn out to actually be prominently relevant over these six novels, developed according to a consistent and thought-out plan? Or will authors just pay lip service to it whilst writing the book they want to write anyway, like they did with the previous seven books? Place your bets now…

Nightshade by Mark Gatiss

With the TARDIS mended, you’d expect everything would be fine – but just as a speck of contamination has made its way into the fabric of the machine, a kernel of discontent is nagging at the Doctor’s psyche. In fact, he’s outright snappish and irritable, to the point where Ace is shaken by one of his moments of bad temper. The Doctor realises it’s high time he and Ace slow down and did some mental stocktaking, so he lands the TARDIS in December 1968, near the sleepy Yorkshire village of Crook Marsham; elsewhere the Sixties are getting really exciting, but here they’ve almost entirely passed the village by. As they take in the surroundings, the Doctor discloses to Ace that he’s feeling his age, and badly misses the people from his past (when he loses his temper at Ace it’s because she’s messing with some of Susan’s stuff), and he’s seriously contemplating retirement. (He will, of course, eventually get around to acting on that in The Giggle.)

Meanwhile, Edmund Trevithick is trying to make the best of his own retirement. With his wife having died and his daughter having dropped out of society, Edmund now resides in the local old folks’ home. From 1953 to 1958, Trevithick was known up and down the country as Professor Nightshade, star of the science fiction show Nightshade – a Quatermass-like affair in which the heroic Professor investigated strange enigmas and thwarted alien monstrosities. With a chap from the BBC coming up to interview him in conjunction with the repeats currently airing, Trevithick is quite enjoying being back in the limelight again. What he doesn’t enjoy is people breaking his window late at night – people who call him by the name of Nightshade…

Trevithick is not the only local to be haunted by the ghosts of the past right now – nor, for that matter, is the Doctor with his maudlin thoughts of Susan and the other companions he’s left behind. And with these ghost encounters turning fatal, it’s clear that there’s something here for the Doctor and Ace to look into. The only prior association the village has with ghosts hails from strange stories about the old tumbledown Norman castle that used to loom over the village – long since destroyed in the Civil War, in a story which has its own peculiarities. Yet the site of the castle has now become home to a large radio telescope – and the research group there, led by Dr. Christine Cooper, has started receiving readings which they cannot make head or tail of. Clearly, the Doctor’s going to head down to the radio telescope (brushing aside his Post-Logopolis Stress Disorder) and get involved again – and perhaps this time he’ll be able to count on Professor Nightshade’s help!

The Virgin New Adventures: Cat’s Cradle – Prophets, Seers, and Sages

The story so far: the Virgin New Adventures have kicked off with a bang with the Timewyrm tetralogy. Though a bit hit and miss – what with the first book involving John Peel being extremely skeevy about young teenage girls and the third book being pretty bland and unambitious – it did at least offer up a pretty good Terrance Dicks story about the Doctor and Ace foiling the Nazis, and it also offered Revelation by Paul Cornell, a radically experimental book which demonstrated now the New Adventures format and ethos could really push the bounds of Doctor Who. As 1992 came around, line editor Peter Darvill-Evans was tasked with continuing the series, and he did so by inaugurating a new named story arc: Cat’s Cradle…

Before I go into that, however, I’d better explain a bit about how I’m planning on tackling the New Adventures going forwards. Like I said at the end of my review of Season 26, the best way to approach Doctor Who tie-in media (and, quite possibly, the actual show itself) is to not worry too much about being completist but to instead cherry-pick appropriately, concentrating on what interests you and skipping over the bits which don’t work for you. That’s certainly how I intend to tackle these books. I’ll make a game attempt to read at least a representative portion of each one, but I reserve the right to give up after the first few chapters if a book doesn’t grab me. If a book seems to be good, I’ll read it, and if it seems to be bad in an amusing or interesting way, I may keep going, but if it simply doesn’t engage my interest then I’ll just skip straight over it and move on to the next. Life’s too short, you know?

Time’s Crucible by Marc Platt

The Doctor and Ace have stopped over in Perivale for a cup of tea and a fry-up at the greasy spoon in the wake of the Timewyrm saga. Bizarre temporal phenomena break out, and they hustle back to the TARDIS – which is, in fact, the cause of the problem. As the Doctor takes it into the time vortex, so if necessary he can purge it of contaminating matter without polluting London, it becomes apparent that something nasty has infiltrated it, and the Doctor and Ace become separated as the Time Lord heads out to look for the intruder whilst Ace keeps an eye on things in the control room. Meanwhile, aeons ago, ancient Gallifrey rules over a vast space empire. Yet space is not the final frontier to the Gallifreyans; now they are undertaking their first tentative experiments in time travel. A prototype ship – a Time Scaphe – undertakes the most ambitious time expedition yet, only to crash headlong into the TARDIS…

After the collision, Ace awakens in a strange world-city, ruled over by an alien entity known as the Process – the thing which infiltrated the TARDIS – and occupied by the crew of the Time Scaphe. Vael, one of the latter, has become the Process’s henchman, and the Doctor is nowhere to be found. What is going on? Where is the Doctor? Where, for that matter is this city? And can Ace and the crew of the Time Scaphe beat the Process? The answers may lie with a bizarre silver cat…

The Virgin New Adventures: Timewyrm – From Genesys To Revelation

Although the Doctor Who wilderness years of 1989-2005 produced a few chunks of new content directly made or co-produced by the BBC – the TV movie, the two 1990s audio dramas featuring the Third Doctor, and charity skits like Dimensions In Time or The Curse of Fatal Death, plus a trickle of webcasts – it can be argued that the really important developments were happening elsewhere. When Russell T. Davies brought the show back in 2005, he correctly realised that a new approach was needed, and precedents for that approach had arisen not in the bosom of the BBC television production process, but in the various licensed tie-in materials produced during the era.

Perhaps the most seminal of these were the Virgin New Adventures. Virgin Books had bought out Target – the publishers of official Doctor Who novelisations – and had retired the Target branding in favour of their own in the early 1990s. By this point, the editorship of the Target range had been taken up by Peter Darvill-Evans – readers of my RPG blog might remember him as the author of several Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, namely Beneath Nightmare Castle, Portal of Evil, and Spectral Stalkers. Darvill-Evans had a problem on his hands: after the classic show was cancelled in 1989, the flow of new Doctor Who TV stories to novelise was drying up, and even a left turn into novelising unproduced stories (like the scripts written for Season 23, before they were all shitcanned in favour of The Trial of a Time Lord) could only delay the inevitable cliff-edge. For the Doctor Who book line to continue, it would need to start producing wholly original material.

Supplications were made to the BBC, and permission was granted to inaugurate the New Adventures – billed as a series of fresh Doctor Who adventures running to longer page counts than typical Target novelisations did and aimed at a more mature audience, Virgin shrewdly calculating that, given that the show was off the air and viewership figures for the last few seasons were lousy, their primary audience was going to be aging fans, not kids newly hooked on the show (and youngsters had the entire Target range to enjoy anyway).

Debuting in 1991 (along with Time Lord, a Doctor Who RPG co-authored by Darvill-Evans), the New Adventures focused on the Seventh Doctor as the current incumbent; eventually a Missing Adventures line would start up to provide a haven for stories about previous Doctors. After the TV movie, the BBC decided to revoke the licence, assigning production of subsequent Doctor Who novels to BBC Books, but their Eighth Doctor Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures lines would be fairly clearly modelled, both in terms of page count and contributing authors, on the work previously done by Virgin on the New and Missing Adventures.

These new novel lines in turn would be wrapped up after the revived series began, as part of a new approach to make sure new Doctor Who books were tied more closely to the ethos of the TV show and were aimed at the same audience – but by that point, the New Adventures had spread their DNA far and wide. As well as being influential on those other novel lines, they’d also be key to the foundation of Big Finish; the company made its start producing audio adventures inspired by the New Adventure novels which Virgin put out after they lost the licence, which weren’t able to touch Doctor Who canon but could make use of Dr. Bernice Summerfield, a companion introduced in the novel line who’d become something of a breakout character. It was only subsequent to this that they got the Doctor Who licence – but of course their early Doctor Who adventures made use of the knowhow and infrastructure they’d developed producing Bernice Summerfield audio stories, meaning that the New Adventures inevitably shaped them.

Between them the New Adventures, Missing Adventures, Eighth Doctor Adventures, Past Doctor Adventures, and Big Finish audio dramas constituted a massive body of new Doctor Who material produced during the wilderness years, and if you were contributing to this morass of tie-in fiction, chances are you were being influenced by the New Adventures. And when RTD was reformulating the show he didn’t focus on the classic series, he didn’t follow the lead of the TV movie, and he didn’t seem to pay much attention to the Third Doctor audios – it was to this hive of creative activity he looked for his new ingredients. Not only did RTD cherry-pick talent from this scene to help him out with the revived show – figures like Mark Gatiss, Nicholas Briggs, Paul Cornell, and even Steven Moffat – but he also was a contributor, writing the New Adventures novel Damaged Goods.

That’s a pretty significant legacy – but the origins of the New Adventures lie in the first four novels of the series, forming a connected series known as Timewyrm. And this, it turns out, is definition of a rough start…