Doctor Who Tie-Ins Discussion Thread, Books, Audios, Etc.

So I'm trying to branch out in tie-in fiction. Where should I start with the various lines of Who fiction? What's good? What's bad? Why am I asking so many questions?

Well, your best bet is to start with the BBC Books, as the stuff published by Virgin and Telos is hard to find, and the stuff published by Big Finish is pricey. They do two lines: the Past Doctor Adventures, featuring Doctors 1-7 with no real focus or storyline, and the Eighth Doctor Adventures, which form a continuing saga beginning right after the Telemovie.

The Ninth Doctor Adventures launch in May with three books at once, and the last EDA will be coming out in June, when the eighth Doctor will join the PDA lineup.

PDAs I've read and quite liked:

• Face of the Enemy by David A. McIntee. Set during the third Doctor years, but while he's away from Earth. Features the Brigadier and UNIT taking on the Master with no Time Lord to help them.
• Festival of Death by Jonathan Morris. Set during the fourth Doctor's zany Season 17, this book not only perfectly captures the mood of the show then, but is quite creative and very well plotted.
• Relative Dementias by Mark Michalowski. A seventh Doctor and Ace story that is quiet and small in focus, but very effective.
• The Quantum Archangel by Craig Hinton. A multiverse-spanning epic featuring the sixth Doctor and Mel. Kinda contuity heavy, but justifiably so.

As Michael told you elsewhere, the EDAs are good place to start. There's a lot, but I've just picked up the key ones in the story arcs:

The Faction Paradox

• The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks
• Vampire Science by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman
• Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles
• Seeing I by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman
• Unnatural History by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman
• Interference, Books One and Two by Lawrence Miles
• The Taking of Planet 5 by Simon Bucher-Jones & Mark Clapham
• The Shadows of Avalan by Paul Cornell
• The Ancestor Cell by Peter Angelhides & Stephen Cole

These books did some big stuff with the Whoniverse, and really shook it up. There are other books that fall in between, but they are essentially disposable.

Caught on Earth

• The Burning by Justin Richards
• Casualties of War by Steve Emmerson
• Wolfsbane by Jacqueline Rayner
• The Turing Test by Paul Leonard
• Endgame by Terrance Dicks
• Father Time by Lance Parkin
• Escape Velocity by Colin Brake

These cover over a century in the Doctor's life, as he lives on Earth following the climactic events of Ancestor Cell.

Sabbath Days

• The Adventuress of Henrietta Street by Lawrence Miles
• Anachrophobia by Jonathan Morris
• Camera Obscura by Lloyd Rose
• Time Zero by Justin Richards
• Timeless by Stephen Cole
• Sometime Never... by Justin Richards
• The Gallifrey Chronicles by Lance Parkin

These stories show how the universe has been changed by the events of Ancestor Cell. This isn't all of them, but it is the important ones.

Two great places to visit for info on Doctor Who books are the Doctor Who Ratings Guide, a review archive, and the Doctor Who Novel Rankings.

Thanks, oh Steve. That list is mighty helpful.

It seems that I have most of the Sabbath books. When I finish them I believe I'll try myself at the Faction Paradox arc (assuming I'm able to get my hands on them).

What he said.

Since the Eighth Doctor Adventures are a bit pricey, for right now I've ordered a couple of the past doctor books used from Amazon Marketplace. On your recommendation, I chose Relative Dementias, and I added a Sixth Doctor book from the same seller for a shipping deal.

Well, I hope I can find them too. I've yet to lay my hands on a few of the Faction books or the last two Sabbath books. A couple gaps in the Earth ones as well.

My current strategy for buying Who books is to go into the used bookstore and take whatever they have, since it's usually only two or three.

I have started reading this Relative Dementias thing, and it is interesting thus far. It is an adjustment to encounter DW in novel form, but I think I'm getting over it.

I must say, I love the design and texture of these covers. Really quite spiffing and all that.

Oh, indeed I love the covers. I wish all paperbacks would use that material; it would be really groovy. I think Trek books did it a couple times (Farther Shore, I believe), and it is so nice because it does not smear or anything.

I think the most recent Stargazer book, and possibly one of the Time To entries, had them as well. Heck, the SGZ one was so crisp and smooth that it was almost enough to get me to buy the book.

A Time to Heal.

And didn't Surak's Soul and Exodus use the technique on parts of their covers?

Possibly; I've never seen Surak's Soul, and I got Exodus from the library, so the texture of the cover was obscured.

Surak's Soul did have that, but only partially. It's nice.

I also wouldn't mind a cover without either glossy or matte texture, just like the early TOS novels.

What I absolutely hate is the layer of plastic on book covers like that of the DS9 Companion. My Invasion! omnibus had that as well, but it detached itself from the cover on the edges, and eventually I had to rip it off entirely because it just looked so disgusting (as much as it pained me, it was necessary).

A new post to celebrate the start of Anachrophobia, which I think is a clever title. It's the sort of clever wordplay that I enjoy (i. e. NOT the TrekBBS kind).

Comments may actually be posted if I can be bothered.

I've just returned from Borders, and am happy to report that at least one other Trek novel has the glossy cover:

Titan: Taking Wing.

There will be no essay written tonight.

You don't like the bad pun threads?

Good choice, laddie.

Only in a masochistic sort of way. I tend to groan a lot when reading those.

Isn't that the point?

(Are we off-topic again?)

Yes. But it is a benign off-topicness.

I'll recommend two other books.

The Dying Days, by Lance Parkin, which was the last of the Virgin Doctor Who novels and the first original novel with the Eighth Doctor. It was available for a time (it might still be) on the BBC website to read online. I had a lot of fun reading this book, though that may be, in part, due to the time in which it was published--it was published a year after ID4 and Mars Attacks! hit the theaters, so Parkin was playing with some of the expectations of the genre in those heady days.

Random factoid, tDD takes place after the current run of the EDAs. The Doctor is 1200 here, he's about 1150 at "present."

Also, the Doctor gets it on!

Which also happens in The Infinity Doctors, also by Parkin. (I think Parkin likes the idea of a sexually-active Doctor, because Cold Fusion and Father Time both play with the idea.) tID features an undefined Doctor--it could be Harnell, it could be McGann, it could be someone entirely else. The Doctor lives on Gallifrey, and the universe is ending. This is a funny, romantic, and challenging piece of science fiction. This is Doctor Who at its mythic, at its archetypal.

Oh, and I know Steve already mentioned it, but read Father Time. Transformers! True love! Moral ambiguity! Parkin said this book could have been called "Nightmare in Narnia," and it has a haunting cover that reproduction on the Internet can't capture. It was also a very moving piece of work as the Doctor gains a family and loses a daughter.

And for sheer "What the fuck?" why not read The Book of the War, Lawrence Miles' encyclopedia for the Faction Paradox universe?

Oh, I totally forgot about the free eBooks! Otherwise I would have recommended them. Behold: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/ebooks/

Only if Wolsey somehow survives the entire run of the EDAs without being seen...

The Infinity Doctors and Father Time are both ones I've yet to find/read.

Of the free ones, which ones (if any) would you recommend to someone who knows next-to-nothing about DW? (I'm not willing to start springing money on it, but free I can handle. )

The Dying Days and The Well-Mannered War are probably safe enough.

Human Nature's strength is how different it is from what the Doctor normally does, so probably best to hold off on that.

Lungbarrow is the culmination to seven years of New Adventures, so best not read that one.

The Scales of Injustice and The Sands of Time are both continuity-heavy, so probably not them either.

I've not read Empire of Glass yet.

Of them all, I'd definitely recommend The Dying Days the most. It very much reaches the core of what the Doctor is about.

Okay. I'll deal with downloading The Dying Days later. *mutters vile imprecations about how they put one story up in multiple formats, but not all of them, and don't even have the courtesy to have a single-file download for the others*

I've seen various theories on the subject of how Wolsey survived for two hundred years between Lungbarrow and The Dying Days, ranging from temporal grace to the Doctor kicking him out and then picking him back up two hundred years later. I'm not sure about the temporal grace argument--would that even apply when the TARDIS was rebuilding itself? And doesn't that mean that the two Saudi soldiers are still running around the TARDIS (the two who got stuck in the TARDIS in Interference, that's who I'm talking about)?

On the other hand, I seem to remember a scene, maybe in one of Paul Magrs' novels, in which the companion discovers a heretofore unknown companion in the TARDIS, one that the Doctor had picked up lifetimes ago and then forgotten. I think it might have been in Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

I do know that Parkin's professed interpretation is that tDD comes after the EDAs. He says as much in the author's commentary for tDD and somewhere buried deep in the Gallifrey Chronicles thread at Outpost Gallifrey. He's the writer, I'll take his interpretation.

Speaking of InfiDocs, I had to buy two copies. A woman I hooked up with at the time stole my first copy.

Ouch.

Oh, I was mad at the time, but at least she had the good taste to like Doctor Who. Otherwise, why steal a Doctor Who book?

To piss you off?

I just placed an order for The Gallifrey Chronicles. Oh, the exchange rate these days is horrible, I'd save several dollars if I waited for it to show up on bookstore shelves this side of the pond, but dammit, I just have to know how it all ends.

You should have waited and made use of the Transatlantic Book Exchange.

Relative Dementias is really quite good so far. It makes me want to dig out my 7th Doctor tapes and watch the show.

It took me an embarassingly long time to get the point of the title, though.

Some days ago I acquired a Seventh Doctor book called The Algebra of Ice. I'll read it eventually, but I think I'll finish my EDAs first (I want to get to the end of the Sabbath arc).

Some online bookstore had a copy of The Eight Doctors that was close to reasonably priced, but I managed to resist.

More than halfway through RD; it is still good.

Question for ye who read the books: Justin Richards. Competent, excellent, or crap?

And... are Amazon.co.uk's release dates usually correct? Since they're saying that three Ninth Doctor novels are coming out on 19 May, which doesn't seem quite right....

All three ninth Doctor novels are indeed coming out on the same day, as odd as that may seem.

Justin Richards is... Justin Richards. He's a very strong plotter, usually writing stories with twists and turns that pull you along and keep you interested, but his characters aren't very dimensional. He's good in his own way, but not great.

Heh. I'd originally been asking about him separately because I was going to go on a book-by-book basis. But if they're all coming out at once, of course I have to buy all three.

It is good you resisted--The Eight Doctors can cause irreparable brain damage.

Indeed, I read it, and I've not been right since.

...you were right beforehand?

That's questionable.

Done with Relative Dementias. It was fun. I liked the complexity of the plot, and that it took so long to be completely revealed. I think I even understand all of it. Maybe. The characterization of Ace was entertaining, though I have no idea how accurate it was.

"And I'm not sure Mrs, er, Gale will be so understanding next time she finds you wandering in her back garden at two in the morning in your underpants."

I can't think of any Justin Richards' book I've actively hated.

The one he co-wrote with Andy Lane, The Banquo Legacy, I thought was fantastic. It's a little bit Resident Evil, it's a little bit Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A Victorian zombie story. Great stuff.

I remember that I liked Demontage, but damned if I can remember why. Fitz. It had a lot of Fitz. I don't remember a damned thing about this book.

The one Justin Richards work I didn't especially like was "Time of the Daleks" from Big Finish. Parts of it were derivative of "Evil of the Daleks," and the rest really didn't work for me. Also, I knew who one of the main characters was long before everyone else realized, and that's not a good thing.

Oh! I knew there was a Richards I didn't really like; "Time" was it. Like I said: strong plotting, but this one had pathetic characterizations. Why did everyone do what they did? I dunno. It felt like a first draft; I think it would have been very good with a rewrite or two.

Still, it is great to hear the Daleks recite Shakespeare. "The Daleks venerate Shakespeare!"

I shall have to see if there's any used bookstores around home, allowing me to use the European Book Exchange, or if I'll have to (*shockhorrorgasp*) buy the 9th Doctor books from .co.uk.

And I didn't need to know that they were going to be releasing a 9th Doctor scriptbook in October....

Doesn't Amazon.com have the Ninth Doctor Adventures? I thought it did...

It does, but they aren't listed as being out until June for the first one, and July for the other two.

I'm an impatient bastard, in addition to being a diabolical sadist.

I just started reading Jac Rayner's Wolfsbane yesterday. Fourth Doctor and Sarah. Eighth Doctor and Harry Sullivan.

There's a fantastic passage on page 10 I just have to share.

I really liked Wolfsbane. Far more than either Doctor's, it was Harry Sullivan's novel, and Jac captured him excellently.

Outpost Gallifrey has a two-thousand post thread on The Gallifrey Chronicles, June's Eighth Doctor novel that wraps up the ongoing novel continuity. From a recent post:

Enterprise-finale bashing, can't leave Trek fandom without it.

(By the way, what I've just quoted is not a serious review of the book. It's not out yet, and lately people are posting reviews of the novel based on absolutely nothing. Absurdity seems to be the rule of the day.)

Thanks for the added clarification--that makes much more sense now....

For the first time, I'm reading a Doctor Who book -- Heart of TARDIS. The plot's engaging enough, but all the time the author is poking fun at Doctor Who and sci-fi in general, and that kinda undermines any effect that the book could have.

And maybe I'm reading too much into it, but what the heck posessed him to make those The Simpsons references? "Hi, everybody!" "Hi, Doctor Rick!" Aaargh!

You're starting your journey into Whovian literature with a Dave Stone book...?!?

I blame Stone's drug intake.