If you thought that Doctor
Who had died in 1989 when the TV series came off the air, then you
could not be more incorrect.
Since then, an ever increasing number of novels
featuring the seventh Doctor and his companions Ace, and latterly Bernice, have
been published by Virgin Publishing. These novels, while bearing the name Doctor
Who, are in many respects far removed from the TV series that spawned them. 'Stories too broad and too deep for the small screen' ran the original
publicity, and this approach seems to have paid off, with every new novel
selling as many as 25,000 copies.
To find out more about the range of books, and to meet
some of the authors involved, David J Howe met with
editor-in-chief Peter Darvill-Evans, assistant editor Rebecca Levene and writers
Paul Cornell, Gareth Roberts, Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore.
'Doctor Who The New
Adventures comes out of a long tradition of publishing books that
related to the Doctor Who television series,' explains Peter. 'Virgin Publishing gained permission to publish new novels at about
the same time as Doctor Who ended on television. As it became more and
more apparent that there wouldn't be any more Doctor Who on television,
the New Adventures became more and more important as the
standard bearers of Doctor Who. But it also meant that we were
increasingly able to regard the novels as taking Doctor Who into a
completely new medium, with completely new types of stories and perhaps a
different type of audience.'
To this end, Peter created a lengthy writer's guide
which, as well as giving basic information on how to write, what Virgin's house
style was, and the sort of stories they were after, also contained the concept
of the Time Wyrm - a running theme which was to tie together the first four
books.
Paul Cornell was the first previously unpublished author
to write one of the New Adventures and his book, Revelation,
concluded the first 'season' of books.
'The story which became Revelation was
already there as a six part piece of fan fiction I had written for a fanzine
called Queen Bat,' reveals Paul. 'The story was
absolutely the same. I think that fan fiction has fed the New
Adventures to quite a large degree. Peter has very cleverly tapped in
to that aspect of fandom and has got quite a few of the people who were writing
in that fan fiction boom doing the same kind of things for the New
Adventures today, and that's a very good thing.'
Despite having written a large amount of fan fiction,
Paul found the process of actually writing a novel pretty gruelling. 'I'd never written anything of that length before, I had to teach
myself how to write a novel as I went along. It's a great challenge. I think
this is one of the things that a lot of first time New
Adventures writers have found.'
'I'd never mounted any serious attempt to get
anything published professionally,' laughs Gareth Roberts, another
first-time novelist, 'but the Doctor Who connection is that I
used to fill up exercise books when I was a kid with Doctor Who stories
but they always stopped at around page three when I got bored. Strangely enough
- and this is a confession I have to make - some of the elements in The
Highest Science came from those exercise books.'
One of the unique things about the New
Adventures is the way that they are chosen. Peter revealed that almost
all the manuscripts that they receive are what other publishers would call the
slush pile. In other words, unsolicited submissions which have not come through
literary agents or through Virgin approaching an author. 'We actually
encourage our slush pile,' he exclaims, 'and we read it,
which most publishers don't do. Rebecca will go through all the submissions and
read every one. I then read the ones she recommends. The process of getting a
book published is long and hard but we do our best to work with the authors, to
encourage and suggest, and hopefully to end up with a good book.'
'I've never known any publisher take the amount
of care and lavish the attention that Virgin do on their writers, especially
encouraging new writers,' comments Andy Lane. Andy had, like Paul
written a great deal of fan fiction, but had also branched out into factual
writing, his work appearing regularly in Starburst and many
other genre magazines.
'It's very important in publishing to
encourage new people to come along and then to develop them,' he
states. 'Publishers must encourage the next generation of writers. As
far as I can see Virgin are one of the few who are doing that and all praise to
them for it. If you look at the nearest equivalent to what Virgin are doing
here, to the Star Trek books, it's nowhere near the same. They take
established authors who write standard Star Trek plots. What Peter and
Rebecca are doing is taking new, untried authors with wonderful ideas, giving
them most of the latitude they want, guiding them a little bit along the way
and producing something magical at the end of it, and that's marvellous.'
Paul Cornell agrees with this view: 'If we'd
gone down the same path as the Trek people have then the Doctor Who
series would be of a lot less interest. One of the ways in which this
cultivates new authors is that we're expanding and going with the zeitgeist,
the current trend, the same way as the tv series always used to.'
This willingness to explore the boundaries of fiction
has resulted in a very diverse range of books. There are pure fantasy novels (Witch
Mark), horror novels (Nightshade, White Darkness), science
fiction (Lucifer Rising, Shadowmind), cyberpunk (Love and War,
Transit) and others which embrace any number of combinations of the
above genres.
'It's experimentation,' states Andy. 'We're given the freedom to experiment and just find new ways of
writing these books; I don't think anybody else is given that
freedom.'
Gareth agrees: 'I think where the New
Adventures score over the television series is that the television
series was quite limited. There was a wide, open-ranging format of times and
places but the same kind of plots were coming around a lot of the time. Whereas
in the novels some of the actual stylistic changes are incredible. The jump
between Marc Platt's Time's Crucible and Andrew Cartmel's Warhead
is amazing. You go from Platt's Dostoevsky-esque Doctor Who history
based book to a gritty futuristic cyberpunk thing, which you could never do in
the television series. So that freedom which was always talked about Doctor
Who is actually coming into its own.'
This freedom has only recently extended to featuring old
enemies of the Doctor, and Jim Mortimore's next New
Adventure, Blood Heat, features the return of the Silurians,
first seen on TV back in 1970 and again in 1984.
'The thing that appeals to me most of all
about the chance to write a novel in this sequence of Doctor Who books
is the fact that you don't actually have to write Doctor Who
stories,' explains Jim. 'Part of the brief is to write
science fiction stories. Science fiction has always, when it's been done well,
commented on what's going on socially, politically and emotionally in the
world. That's what appeals to me. By a quirky coincidence, all I've done is
managed to address the sort of things I'd like to address by way of stealing a
very obvious bit of Doctor Who continuity. I kind of smashed together
both worlds really and hopefully the result is quite interesting. Certainly it
wasn't done as an exercise in continuity. Some of the things that I like about
television drama are when you can see reflected what's going on in the world
and I tried to encompass some of that.'
'You can write any story you want to and it
can be a Doctor Who story,' agrees Peter. 'We
briefly touched on the matter of genres, you can write horror, science fiction,
fantasy, crime thriller, historical romance ... all of these can still be Doctor
Who stories. But it's not just a matter of genres. You can also cover any
subject you want to from any angle you want to. Doctor Who itself is an
infinitely flexible subject matter. You can do anything with it.'
'The other thing is that the New
Adventures are character driven,' adds Rebecca. 'Regardless of the actual stories, it's the characters you put in
them and the fact that you can see everything from different viewpoints. Our
characters are very important in the novels. I also think it's interesting to
compare our books to the Star Trek novels. In those books there is a
large and fixed cast and you're stuck with them. You can't introduce many new
characters, you can't even kill the existing ones off. Whereas with the New Adventures you take a small TARDIS crew, you put them in
a strange setting and you have lots of other characters to play with. They are
really the reader's eyes onto a whole new situation and every novel has a whole
new cast who also have viewpoints to be explored.'
As a final comment, Peter stresses that while the New Adventures form an ongoing series, they are very much
designed as a series of one-off novels. 'We do our best to organise
it so that the books tend to contrast with their predecessors and successors so
that although we are publishing in a series we don't get a bland, series feel.
For the regular reader there's a fluctuation of style and content that is
hopefully refreshing in that they don't know what to expect next, but equally
to the person who just comes along, sees a book on the shelf and decides to buy
it, we hope that they're not going to feel totally alienated.'
