NateBumber/Sandbox/4
The New Adventures were a series of original, full-length novels published by Virgin Books. They continued the adventures of the Seventh Doctor following on from the TV story, Survival. As the books were geared for an older audience, they included mature themes, strong language, violence and sexual elements. One book in the series, Shakedown, was unique, being a novelisation of the non-BBC spin-off production, Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans, greatly expanded to include the Doctor.
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.
After The Dying Days, which featured the Eighth Doctor and Bernice Summerfield, the books continued with Bernice as the main character (with the exception of Deadfall and Dead Romance, both of which centred on other characters). 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. The range concluded with Twilight of the Gods in December 1999.
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.
Big Finish Productions later obtained the licence for the later New Adventures characters for their own line of audios, novels and short fiction featuring Summerfield and her supporting cast. 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 as the television episodes Human Nature and The Family of Blood.
Although the continuity of the Virgin books were initially ignored by the BBC Books lines, this was eventually relaxed and references to New and Missing Adventures began to appear. In DWM 482, Steven Moffat described the New Adventures as "a separate (and equally valid) continuity" to the BBC Wales television series.
Doctor Who: 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), Roz Forrester and Chris Cwej (debuting in Original Sin) and Wolsey the cat (who debuted in Human Nature).
- 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 death (some years in the future, from the viewpoint of readers when the book first came out) of the Third Doctor's companion, 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
Adaptations
- Birthright and Just War were adapted without the Doctor into two of Big Finish Productions' first Bernice Summerfield audios.
- An adaptation of Human Nature appeared 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 adaptations of The Highest Science, Damaged Goods, Theatre of War, All-Consuming Fire and Original Sin.
Major links to the Virgin Missing Adventures
- 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 his companions with the Seventh Doctor and Roz and Chris Cwej from the New Adventures.
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.
