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The New Adventures were a series of original, full-length novels published by Virgin Books. The first novel, published in 1991, continued the adventures of the Seventh Doctor and Ace after the TV story Survival; later novels introduced new companions like Bernice Summerfield, who became the range's main protagonist in 1997 when BBC Books took over the license for publishing original Doctor Who fiction. As the New Adventures were geared for an older audience than the TV show, they included mature themes, strong language, violence, and sexual elements.
Virgin launched two spin-off lines following the initial success of the New Adventures line: the Decalogs, a series of five short story collections, and the Missing Adventures, chronicling the adventures of the first six Doctors.
The New Adventures concluded with Twilight of the Gods in December 1999, but Big Finish Productions obtained the licence for the later New Adventures characters and continued telling stories with Bernice Summerfield, Jason Kane, and Irving Braxiatel in their own line of audios, novels, and short stories.
From 1999 onward, Big Finish adapted several novels for audio by Big Finish, either directly or altered to omit the Doctor and focus on Summerfield. In 2007, the New Adventures novel Human Nature was adapted into as the television episodes Human Nature and The Family of Blood.
Although several authors initially attempted to separate the Virgin Books and BBC Books continuities, the separation was eventually relaxed, and references to New and Missing Adventures began to appear in the Eighth Doctor and Past Doctor Adventures. In DWM 482, Steven Moffat said that he considered the New Adventures to be "a separate (and equally valid) continuity" to the BBC Wales television series.
The New Adventures
Notes
Continuity
- The New Adventures introduced a few new companions into the life of the Doctor: Bernice Summerfield (debuting in Love and War), Wolsey the cat (debuting in Human Nature), and Roz Forrester and Chris Cwej (debuting in Original Sin).
- Ace was written out in Love and War and left the Doctor before reuniting with him in Deceit. During the intervening three years, she changed considerably. Ace left a second time, permanently, in Set Piece. Ace's character development and departure were contradicted by later media.
- Apart from the novels, a few of the comics and audios take place specifically in the New Adventures continuity. These feature the Seventh Doctor, Bernice, and the older version of Ace.
- Eternity Weeps portrays the future death of Liz Shaw.
- Several novels of the New Adventures featured old foes from the TV series, including:
- Timewyrm: Exodus - The War Chief
- Iceberg - Cybermen and the Cyber-Controller
- Blood Heat - Silurians and Sea Devils
- No Future - The Monk and the Vardans
- Blood Harvest - Great Vampires
- First Frontier - The Master
- Toy Soldiers - Ogrons (cameo only)
- Head Games - Valeyard (illusion only)
- Shakedown - Sontarans and the Rutan Host
- GodEngine - Daleks (cameo only)
- The Dying Days - Ice Warriors
- Dead Romance - Daleks (cameo only)
- The New Adventures were majorly linked to Virgin's Missing Adventures and Decalog lines.
- A story strand which originated in Blood Harvest continued into the first Missing Adventure Goth Opera in an effort to get readers to buy both books.
- Shakedown and Lords of the Storm both featured the Sontarans in the same month.
- The Missing Adventure Cold Fusion featured both the Fifth Doctor and the Seventh Doctor alongside Roz, Chris Cwej, and the Fifth Doctor's companions.
- The short story collection Decalog 5: Wonders includes the first Bernice Summerfield short story, The Judgement of Solomon by Lawrence Miles.
Adaptations
- The novel Shakedown was itself an adaptation of the Reeltime Pictures production Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans, greatly expanded to include the Doctor.
- In Big Finish Productions' Bernice Summerfield series, six New Adventures were adapted into audio: Oh No It Isn't!, Beyond the Sun, Walking to Babylon, Birthright, Just War, and Dragons' Wrath. Birthright and Just War were modified to remove Doctor Who elements to which Big Finish did not yet have the rights.
- The novel Human Nature was adapted into the two-part story Human Nature/The Family of Blood in Series 3 of BBC Wales' Doctor Who.
- Love and War was directly adapted by Big Finish into an audio drama in 2012. This was followed by The Highest Science, Damaged Goods, Theatre of War, All-Consuming Fire, Original Sin, and Cold Fusion.
Production notes
- So Vile a Sin was the final book to be published featuring the Doctor, but it was published out of narrative sequence due to delays preventing its completion. The death of a major character in that book was meant to be a surprise, but because of the production delay this was no longer possible, and the novel was adapted accordingly: its prologue began with the funeral for the character, and the event was made an intrinsic part of the narrative, rather than a shock conclusion.
- Following the broadcast of the 1996 TV movie, BBC Books took over the license for publishing original Doctor Who fiction, but there was an overlap of more than a year to allow Virgin to publish its contracted novels. As a result, the book line changed its branding, moving the Doctor Who logo off the front cover to the spine beginning with the publication of Bad Therapy.
- The cover design changed again with Another Girl, Another Planet, which removed the "New Adventures" identifier from the front cover and introduced a new title-lettering style.