Doctor Who novels

I have always thought that among visual medias, the tv-series is best at telling a story. Because of its length, it has time to develop both plot-line and characters in a way that a film never can. But at times it's just not enough. Some tv-series leave me wanting more. Sometimes it's because the world it has built up is so huge and intricate that the series doesn't have time to explore all of its own possibilities. At other times, I want to learn more about characters, to get into their heads and hear their thoughts. I want more stories than television can ever provide. The answer to this is spin-off novels, and to my mind, no tv-series has better spin-off novels than Doctor Who.

2013 is a good year to be a Whovian. Among all the other celebrations of the 50th anniversary, from the upcoming anniversary TV episode to Penguin's publication of eleven newly written short stories, BBC Books has decided to republish one novel for each Doctor. For the Eighth Doctor, they have chosen the novel EarthWorld (by Jacqueline Rayner, 2001), where the Doctor and his companions Fitz and Anji come to a world so obsessed with Earth that they have converted parts of their planet into a theme park, based on dodgy historical records.

The Eighth Doctor is the perfect example of where a story needs fleshing out. His only onscreen appearance, superbly portrayed by Paul McGann, is confined to the television movie from 1996, the first installment on screen since the cancellation of the tv-series in 1989. The movie was meant as a pilot, but it was not thought successful enough and the idea was dropped. For ardent Whovians, the Eighth Doctor Adventures (often abbreviated EDAs) became the remedy for their dashed hopes. Starting in 1997, BBC Books published roughly one book a month during the next seven and a half years, breaching the gap between the TV movie and the new revived series from 2005 with as many as seventy-three books.

The Eighth Doctor Adventures are engaging and clever, at times funny, at others heart-rending (for those of you who have read the last arc of the EDAs: pun intended). At their very best, they are as literary as they are true to the series. Many of them are not just spin-off novels, but novels in their own right. The Adventuress of Henrietta Street (by Lawrence Miles, 2001) is written in the form of a work of non-fiction, where the author takes the persona of a scholar wading through documents, letters and diaries relating to curious events around a London brothel in 1782. Throughout, he is torn between believing the mysterious Doctor's claims of being an alien with two hearts, and writing him off as a charlatan who makes these claims to seem interesting. The Turing Test (by Paul Leonard, 2000), consists solely of accounts written by three historical persons - Alan Turing, Graham Greene and Joseph Heller - something which makes the story completely subjective. By the end of the novel, nothing feels certain, not even the Doctor's intentions. Camera Obscura (Lloyd Rose, 2002) is a wonderful adventure in Victorian London, spiced with subtle references to famous works of nineteenth century literature, often indiscernible to those who have not read the books in question. The Blue Angel (Paul Magrs and Jeremy Hoad, 1999), which is partly set in an alternative universe where the Doctor is not a time-travelling alien but a schizophrenic human with a rare heart-condition, experiments with postmodernist narrative techniques, and adds a splash of magical realism.

Because books do not need budgets, the events in them are only constrained by the imagination of the author and the reader. The Year of Intelligent Tigers (by Kate Orman, 2001) features a space colony almost entirely populated by musicians and an alien race which resemble tigers. The Ancestor Cell (by Paul Anghelides and Stephen Cole) deals in complex paradoxes and - an event which will sound familiar to fans of the 2005 Doctor Who series - the destruction of Gallifrey. But books can also to go into the really small details, by sneaking inside characters' heads and watching them react to situations and to each other. As the narrative is not confined within less than an hour, where trains of thought can be difficult to convey unless they are vocalised, the reader gets to see companions' reactions to the new, strange world the Doctor opens up to them, as well as their opinions of the Doctor himself. Sometimes we even find ourselves inside the Doctor's head, which does not make him any less mysterious, but often makes events more unsettling. When even the Doctor is terrified, what should the rest of us be?

Unfortunately most of the Eighth Doctor Adventures are out-of-print, but a handful have been released for Kindle, and most novels are possible to get hold of second-hand. Hopefully the reprinting of EarthWorld, which is one of several good starting-points in the series, will lead to more people discovering the books. (Another common suggestion of first book to read is The Taint by Michael Collier, which, like EarthWorld, introduces a new companion.) If you crave more of the Eighth Doctor, if the wait between episodes feels too long or if you just want to broaden your Whovian horizons, the Eighth Doctor Adventures come warmly recommended.