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.
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 described the New Adventures as "a separate (and equally valid) continuity" to the BBC Wales television series.
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.
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 1996TV 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.
