1996: The Year In Review

It’s not over until Dale’s Ramblings publishes the Year in Review post for a given year.

~ Richard Feynman, or someone else smart, idk

So that’s 1996, folks. It’s been a rather strange year, all told. The first half of the year saw Virgin on top of the world, celebrating fifty books in outrageous style. By December, however, it’s become painfully apparent that the New Adventures’ time as the lone shepherd of the franchise’s destiny is soon to come to an end.

In light of this news, let’s all take a moment to pause and reflect on the fact that this will be the last Year in Review post to solely focus on Virgin’s output. By the time the next one rolls around, BBC Books will have joined the party, and nothing will ever be the same again.

Done reflecting? OK, excellent, because there’s quite a few novels to get through this time around. I mean, there’s actually exactly the same number as there were last year, but I’ve just gotten considerably more wordy in the interim. So without further ado, let’s start by ranking all twelve of…

The New Adventures

12. GodEngine by Craig Hinton

Well, it’s nice to know that the wise old sages were wrong. You can, in point of fact, go home again… if “home” is “a year in which the worst New Adventure is so completely godawful as to obviously and loudly proclaim its worstness for all to see.” Try fitting that one on a postcard.

There’s a reason that “GodEngine? More like GodAwful!” has virtually become a cliché all of its own when talking about Craig Hinton’s final novel-length contribution to Virgin. Shockingly, this reason is actually the fact that the book really isn’t that good at all.

In a way, it’s a crying shame that this book has the absolute audacity to posit itself as something of a “missing link” that follows up on the story threads laid down by Ben Aaronovitch in Transit. Whatever you might think of the content of that book, its ideas were at least uncharted territory for the franchise at that point in time. In contrast, GodEngine really feels like the first point at which all the criticisms of Hinton as an overly indulgent author with a predilection for fanwank – to the point that he allegedly coined the term – are completely justified.

To give Aaronovitch his due, I think that dropping ten F-bombs in a Doctor Who book while doing a weird and wacky cyberpunk pastiche is an idea with far more artistic merit than a lengthy treatise on the specifics of Ice Warrior genitalia, or a riveting discussion of the social status of Martian cooks.

There are moments at which GodEngine manages to gesture at bigger ideas about the 1990s and the end of history, but these glimmers of insight are buried so far under a heap of extraneous nonsense that you really can’t bring yourself to care on anything other than the most abstract and theoretical of levels. If this is a book that can really be said to have any kind of tangible raison d’etre – and that’s honestly still up for debate – it would probably be an attempt to explain exactly how the Daleks planned to pilot the Earth around as a spaceship in The Dalek Invasion of Earth. I feel like that should say it all, really.

It’s precisely the sort of shallow, pandering nonsense that you would expect from science-fiction tie-in literature, and if this were any series other than the New Adventures, that might be enough to pass muster. You’d still have to contend with the sheer, unrelenting tedium of the thing, but that’s just another drawback we kind of expect with this kind of territory.

But to be blunt, the New Adventures have repeatedly proven themselves to be capable of so much more. Even more miserable is the fact that Craig Hinton himself has repeatedly proven to be capable of so much more, but in this one instance I guess he just gave up. If it weren’t for the existence of the thankfully rather good Zeitgeist, this would be a truly unfortunate note on which to bid farewell to the author for the next five years or so.

11. The Death of Art by Simon Bucher-Jones

I feel like there is a good book somewhere at the heart of The Death of Art. For all the novel’s many faults, first-time writer Simon Bucher-Jones has at least managed to prove that he has promise. In its best moments, there’s a certain moody and atmospheric darkness to its evocation of late nineteenth-century Paris that proves rather compelling. There’s even some rather interesting commentary on fin de siècle conservatism that ties in nicely to the broader preoccupations of the Psi Powers arc as a whole, and even if many of those ideas had already been floated by Lawrence Miles in Christmas on a Rational Planet, trying to pull together the arc’s various threads and create a single coherent point is at least a noble cause.

Sadly, a noble cause does not always guarantee a desirable outcome, and The Death of Art‘s attempts at coherence ultimately prove to be spectacularly and fundamentally flawed. If anything, the best that can be said about its role in the Psi Powers arc is that it serves as something of a sin-eater for some of the more bloated and confused impulses of the storyline. Featuring intricate and complex power struggles between no less than four different psychic factions, alongside an incomprehensible and almost Lovecraftian – if rather benign – alien race in the form of the Quoth, the novel’s good attributes are far outweighed by its failings.

On top of everything else, it’s a novel which chooses to sideline Roz for a massive portion of the plot just two stories before the character’s death, which is an utterly boneheaded manoeuvre. With the possible exception of Anton Jarre, the guest cast are also not nearly as memorable as they need to be, and the attempts to implicate the Shadow Directory in the history of the Dreyfus affair feel woefully misguided.

Still, for all that The Death of Art might fall rather short of the mark, it fails in more interesting and nuanced ways than something like GodEngine, and it bears repeating that Bucher-Jones’ writing is occasionally quite lovely. I just wish that it hadn’t been wedded to such an overly complex slog of a plot.

10. Warchild by Andrew Cartmel

Oof, this one kind of hurts.

Let’s make one thing plainly clear here, there’s a pretty large gulf of quality separating Warchild from The Death of Art. At the very least, we’ve crossed over into the “good” realm of the list. Not “very good,” but “good,” and I think that has to count for something. It’s Cartmel, so you still get your usual social commentary mixed in with the continually unfolding saga of the McIlveens and the Wheatons. The action scenes might drag a bit, but at least it’s always pretty clear what’s going on.

Why, then, does Warchild land in tenth place on this twelve-book list? Well, as with so many sequels, it largely comes down to the sheer weight of precedent. Warhead and Warlock were not just “good” or even “very good,” they could make a legitimate claim to being “great,” and they still remain some of the boldest and most confronting pieces of Doctor Who ever to be published. Under those circumstances, having the final instalment of the much-celebrated War trilogy be simply “good” was always going to seem like something of a disappointment.

One of the biggest things holding Warchild back from the classic status attained by its predecessors – apart from the aforementioned drawn-out quality of the action scenes – is the sense that the social commentary is a little muddled. While it was very clear, in the past, what Cartmel wanted to say on such subjects as environmentalism or the War on Drugs, here his attempts to interogate the links between fascism and masculinity stumble a bit.

As ably as Warchild manages to communicate its broad points about the co-option of traditional gender roles by far-right movements, the decision to wrap all of this up in the heavily debunked pseudo-scientific notion of the “alpha male” muddies the waters considerably.

Sure, Doctor Who has a long history of pulling from some dubious-at-best science, but the sheer proliferation of weird alpha male content on the Internet in recent years lands Cartmel in the odd position of critiquing fascism and masculinity while partially falling into some of the same rhetorical traps subsequently employed to unsettling effect by conservative social movements. He obviously could never have anticipated that, but it does mean that the central arguments of the novel are a little confused.

But there’s still plenty to enjoy here. If Vincent’s evil schemes to use Ricky as some kind of fascist mouthpiece fall flat, then the book almost redeems itself in the whole Christian Leemark subplot. It’s a truly chilling snapshot of the rise of American religious fundamentalism, and in moments like Francis Leemark’s brutal assault on Mr. Pangbourne, Cartmel manages to recapture that same sense of clear and burning social consciousness that made those first two novels so striking.

In addition to all of this, the character writing for our recurring players remains as strong as ever. Even if it’s rather unpleasant to spend as much time inside the head of Creed when he’s in full-on “bitter, jealous and spiteful adulterer” mode, it honestly doesn’t feel too unbelievable given what we saw of his marriage’s rather abrupt and emotion-fuelled beginnings in Warlock. It certainly would have been nice if Justine didn’t seem so sidelined, though, given the decision to essentially play much of this book – however ironically – as a weird masculine power struggle between Vincent, Creed and Ricky.

Perhaps that’s a good summary of Warchild, though. Little of it is outright bad in the same way as a GodEngine or a Shadowmind, but there was always this niggling voice in the back of my head that was wishing for more. More depth, more subtlety, more room for events to breathe. More. And I guess that’s the most basic reason for it landing this low on the list, despite generally being a good enough read in the moment.

9. Death and Diplomacy by Dave Stone

Ah, the book which convinced me that there was, in fact, a palpable Dave Stone Effect. Like with Sky Pirates!, there’s plenty of stuff in Death and Diplomacy that I really wouldn’t like in isolation, but throw it all together like this and it works much better than I thought it would.

As the book which sets up Benny’s departure in Happy Endings, Death and Diplomacy pretty much lives and dies off of the relationship between Benny and Jason, and while I’m not usually one for the type of screwball-esque interactions Stone seems to have chosen to run with, there’s enough emotional depth at work that it still feels true to who the characters are.

After all, it really wouldn’t make sense to try and give Benny the standard “companion is swept off her feet by conventionally attractive and dreamy male guest star” exit. By April 1996, the character had spent more than three and a half years developing into a fully-realised member of the regular cast, so trying to take all of that away would have felt woefully ill-advised.

If you’re going to write the character out, and you’re going to have a romance, this is probably the best and most honest way of doing so. Throughout the course of her dalliance with Jason, Benny is forced to contend with the ways in which her habitual sarcasm and quick wit have served as a means of self-protection and emotional repression.

Crucially, however, Stone never really suggests that Benny is at all obligated to abandon those qualities wholesale in order to find a meaningful connection, and there’s just as much attention paid to stressing the point that Jason is wrangling with his own personal airport terminal’s worth of emotional baggage. I’m still not entirely surprised that the writers made the decision to split the couple up just nine books later, but Stone and Cornell both deserve a great deal of credit for continuing to meet the high benchmark for companion exits that had been laid down by Set Piece.

Aside from the Benny and Jason stuff, you’ve got your usual Dave Stone wackiness in the form of the weird and wonderful Dagellan Cluster, through which he’s actually able to provide a pretty decent snapshot of Western foreign policy in the unipolar moment. The presentation of the Doctor as a ludicrously powerful and incomprehensible entity, constantly flitting about the edges of the frame and subtly stage-managing the negotiations between the Three Empires, is great fun too, even if it remains the kind of thing that the series probably can’t support on a long-term basis.

So yeah, Death and Diplomacy is pretty good. If someone could explain to me how it’s supposed to be the middle act of a trilogy, though, that’d be great.

8. Return of the Living Dad by Kate Orman

Return of the Living Dad is really just a light-hearted, fluffy character piece at the end of the day. Yes, it wraps up one of the biggest dangling loose ends in Bernice’s personal history, and there is your usual world-imperilling villain who needs to be stopped, but this is very much a breather novel.

It’s a testament to just how talented Kate Orman is, then, that such a low-key and laid-back work could still be so thoroughly entertaining, and its placement as the lowest of her three entries on this year’s list shouldn’t be taken as a suggestion that this novel is bad by any means.

On the contrary, it’s frequently extremely entertaining, and even if it can’t hold a candle to The Left-Handed Hummingbird or Set Piece in terms of emotional depth or stakes, it more than makes up for it by just being a good time. Four novels in, Orman has got such a firm grasp on the characters of the New Adventures that she could throw them into just about any situation and fireworks would commence.

And as you’d expect, when Orman does decide to interrupt the boisterous antics of all the angst-ridden Navarinos and sentient Nestene spatulas, the emotional beats hit pretty hard. The Doctor’s destruction of the UNIT safehouse in which he was imprisoned in The Left-Handed Hummingbird is striking, and somehow all the more terrifying for its sheer ordinariness when compared to the numerous world-ending actions taken by Seven throughout the New Adventures. Hell, even the Doctor Who Magazine prelude to Orman’s debut novel is incorporated into the narrative in a particularly hard-hitting moment.

It’s not just the Doctor who gets the chance to shine, though, and it’s surprising that Return of the Living Dad never really feels crowded despite having to try and evenly distribute narrative real estate among so many members of the recurring and regular casts. Sure, it helps that some characters like Jason disappear for large chunks of the novel, but it never feels like anyone’s been egregiously overlooked.

Sitting here a few months after the fact, I don’t really have as much to say about this novel as I thought I would, but I don’t think that’s a problem. It was enjoyable, it did what it set out to do, and it managed to prove that Kate Orman is capable of turning even a light-hearted romp into something worthwhile.

7. SLEEPY by Kate Orman

My feelings on SLEEPY and Return of the Living Dad are pretty similar, broadly speaking. To be honest, I wouldn’t necessarily argue with you if you wanted to place the latter ahead of the former. They are, as you can probably guess by the way I’ve placed them so close together, on about the same level in my estimation. Nothing stellar, but certainly nothing bad, and a Kate Orman novel that’s perhaps a little below average still eclipses so many other writers.

Still, I had to make a choice as to which one would come out on top, and I think that SLEEPY manages to ever so slightly edge its way past Return of the Living Dad. Most of that comes down to the fact that it combines the strengths of Orman’s style that we’ve already observed – namely, she understands these characters really damn well – with a superior plot. Which is to say that… there is actually a plot. It might be a pretty archetypal “science fiction disease outbreak” plot, but it’s pulled off so slickly that I really don’t mind.

Even if Orman is tapping into the same strain of disease paranoia that seemed to be gripping Western media in the mid-1990s, there are all sorts of little details to appreciate. The focus on a disease of a more neurological nature speaks to a United Kingdom anxious over the threat of so-called “mad cow disease,” while the Doctor’s bet with Death that he can save the colony on Yemaya and prevent anyone from dying adds some nifty extra tension. Not even the first hints of the ludicrously overcomplicated Psi Powers arc can manage to drag the book down.

So, SLEEPY is another book that might not appear to be that exceptional on the surface, but it does enough things right that it still manages to add up to an enjoyable reading experience. In that way, then, its placement at almost the exact middle of this list feels entirely appropriate.

6. Christmas on a Rational Planet by Lawrence Miles

There are, perhaps, very few contrasts in life that could ever manage to be quite as strange as that which arises when you place two very unassuming, low-stakes novels like Return of the Living Dad and SLEEPY right next to… this. That’s just the magic of Doctor Who, folks.

Now I’ll admit, there was a deep-rooted, instinctive part of my brain that rather consciously and vociferously rebelled at the thought of placing a Lawrence Miles novel above not one, but two separate offerings from Kate Orman, and there are a couple of very good reasons why this is the case.

Firstly, there’s the fact that I do enjoy a lot of the works that I have read from both of these creators. Even if that weren’t true, and I held the most hardened and skeptical view of one or both of their contributions to the wider franchise, I’d still have to make the grudging concession that those contributions are enormously important in appraising how Doctor Who developed in those dark and twilit days of yore when it wasn’t on our television screens.

If that was all this was, mind, then I wouldn’t be commenting on it at all. It’s part and parcel of these Year in Review posts, so it’s not really the type of thing that’s very noteworthy on its own. What isn’t to be expected, however, is the very specific, very personal and, to be perfectly frank, very one-sidedly nasty beef that will eventually come to define the relationship between these two particular authors.

On the one hand, this is all a few years in the future, so I don’t have any sort of hard-and-fast obligation to talk about it whatsoever at this point, but the fact remains that it is important in the overall arcs of both Orman and Miles’ careers. As such, this placement does tend to carry the rather unfortunate implication that I’m staking my claim on Miles’ side of the “battlefield,” so to speak.

But I want to stress that this isn’t the case, as will hopefully become clear in the very next placement – oops, spoilers! – and the reviews to come. Miles’ spectacular fall from grace was pretty much entirely self-engineered, and we’ll talk about that at a more relevant time. For this present moment, however, Christmas on a Rational Planet earns this spot on the list mostly by virtue of arriving at precisely the right point in time. And also, thankfully, by being very good on its own merits.

After the disaster of GodEngine, you might very well be forgiven for thinking that the New Adventures were at risk of backsliding into awfulness after the departure of Bernice Summerfield and the promise of the Paul McGann TV movie. The novels were in desperate need of a new author who could prove that they had big ideas about Doctor Who.

For better or for worse, Lawrence Miles was that author.

Christmas on a Rational Planet is probably not as polished and tight an opening salvo as something like Revelation or The Left-Handed Hummingbird, which is the main reason why it doesn’t rate any higher among its contemporaries. Still, very few debut novels manage to hit those heights, so that shouldn’t be considered too strong a knock against it by any means.

In its best moments, this is a striking whirlwind tour through 1990s Western existential ennui in the ashes of the Cold War, lampooning Fukuyama’s “End of History” in a manner which can only be described as eerily prescient in our post-9/11 world.

As you can probably imagine if you’re familiar with the themes I tend to gravitate towards when it comes to art, this is the type of thing that’s pretty much right up my alley, and I can’t help but find the finished product intensely thematically interesting in spite of its flaws.

And make no mistake, there are flaws, and they’re substantial enough that I could feasibly see myself revising my opinion of the novel with the passage of time. Some of these are relatively easy pickings, like the fact that it’s already obvious, on considering the guest cast, that Miles isn’t likely to claim the title of “Virgin’s best character writer” at any point in the near future.

The most glaring of these issues, however, is probably the decision to so rigidly tie the particulars of the Psi Powers arc – which receive their first proper articulation in this novel, Warchild and SLEEPY having only been retroactively linked to the overarching plotline – to a rather strange and outmoded dichotomy between “masculine” order and “feminine” chaos of the kind which I can only imagine Jordan Peterson himself would rapturously approve of.

It’s not something Miles pulls out of thin air, and it fits with the established mythology of the Virgin novels, but it does already begin to suggest that he might be an author with some pretty large blind spots on issues of gender. Which will, of course, arguably find rather unfortunate expression in his feud with Kate Orman.

Ironically enough for a book which so thoroughly embraces the circularity of history then, Christmas on a Rational Planet seems to already hint that the arc of Miles’ own career will come to resemble nothing so much as a jagged sketch of a flat circle. To give him his due, it’s already equally clear that that sketch is, if nothing else, the product of an intelligent hand. A profoundly messy sort of intelligence, to be sure, but still intelligence.

For now, at least, that’s enough.

5. So Vile a Sin by Ben Aaronovitch and Kate Orman

With the veritable mountain of production issues that afflicted it, So Vile a Sin should theoretically have no business landing this high up on a list of this kind. By rights, it should be a complete and total disaster. But, defying all expectations yet again, Kate Orman’s frenetic rewrite managed to do the impossible and actually turn out a book that is eminently enjoyable.

The book is certainly not without its problems, and they’re not hard to spot. The nature of the book means that the styles of Aaronovitch and Orman have been very hastily and cursorily welded together. The middle third loses a lot of the dramatic impetus found in the opening and the denouement. It’s still not entirely clear what the Brotherhood’s whole deal is on anything but the most superficial of levels.

Even with these flaws, however, the bulk of So Vile a Sin is actually very, very good, to the point where it’s rather difficult to bemoan the loss of what might have been if its publication had been wholly untroubled.

Indeed, some of its strongest aspects actually stem from these uncontrollable production realities. Perhaps the most notable example here is the death of Roz. With the shock of this development having been considerably neutered by the publication of four whole NAs dealing with the lingering fallout, Orman was free to showcase the development at the very start, before rewinding to fill in the gaps. In so doing, the New Adventures were afforded the opportunity to demonstrate just how far they had pushed Doctor Who from the cheap Sawardian spectacle of Earthshock.

The result is a thing of remarkable beauty, with Roz being afforded one of the most dignified and satisfying companion exits to date. It’s certainly the most sensitive treatment of a companion’s death to be found this side of Hell Bent. What could have been a straightforward and unfortunate case of “fridging the woman” becomes something far more nuanced.

More to the point, the pathos-drenched Epilogue offers a pitch perfect showcase of Orman’s writing talents, with the Doctor’s heart attack and subsequent emotional breakdown providing one of the most heartbreaking sequences in the New Adventures.

It’s so good, in fact, that it probably single-handedly dragged the book up a few places in this list. By all accounts, So Vile a Sin has very little business being this good. For it to meet the low expectations engendered by its tumultuous production is, in itself, a phenomenal achievement.

To so thoroughly surpass those expectations? That’s downright miraculous.

4. Bad Therapy by Matthew Jones

Bad Therapy is a bit of a difficult novel to parse, and I strongly suspect that the context of how you read it plays a big role in shaping your ultimate reaction to it, even more so than you usually expect with novels.

Read in December 1996, as an elegiac and mournful reflection on the death of a main character in a book that had yet to be published, it was undoubtedly a bit confusing. Read over a quarter of a century later, in a world in which you can quite easily read the NAs in the way that Virgin originally intended, it’s a far more satisfying experience.

First-time novelist Matthew Jones – who would later go on to write for the 2005 revival of Doctor Who and its spin-off series, Torchwood – gives a truly impressive showing here, especially since I found his debut First Doctor short story in Lost Property to be a bit lacklustre.

Despite being the least experienced author to crop up in these final four post-So Vile a Sin New Adventures, he manages to capture the Seventh Doctor pretty darn well, conveying the sense of a deep well of sadness lurking just underneath the character’s usual jovial, wise-cracking exterior.

Chris also gets a more emotionally substantial plot here than he arguably had in any of the eighteen prior books to feature the character, and his strange relationship with Patsy seems to stretch the narrative logic of his numerous past doomed romances to breaking point.

The presence of a post-Mindwarp Peri also serves to allow the New Adventures an opportunity to directly and explicitly use Roz’s death as a springboard towards acknowledging and remedying the failures of the Saward Era, and the empathetic and frank exploration of homosexuality in 1950s Britain proves that the novels were never afraid to push the franchise forward, even at this late stage of the game.

In conjunction with Damaged Goods, it also serves to hark forward to Jones’ collaboration with Russell T. Davies as the script editor of the controversial Channel 4 drama series Queer as Folk, and thereby unwittingly foreshadows the future of Doctor Who in an even more direct way.

As the final New Adventure to bear the iconic McCoy logo on its front cover, then, Bad Therapy provides the series with one hell of a parting gift, even if it’s a gift whose impact may only be wholly visible in hindsight.

3. Happy Endings by Paul Cornell

Yes, it’s a shameless overindulgence.

Yes, your emotional response to it will entirely depend on your opinion of the New Adventures as a whole.

Yes, it’s not the kind of hard-hitting masterpiece that we know Cornell to be capable of.

And no, I don’t care one jot.

Happy Endings provides a wonderful little snapshot of the New Adventures at the absolute zenith of their relevance within the franchise, celebrating fifty novels with a cutesy, fluffy love letter to everything the books have accomplished in the last five years. In a way, it’s almost poetic that it should arrive in May 1996, right as the McGann TV movie was just about to be broadcast and supplant the NAs as the face of the franchise’s future.

And indeed, that sense of glorious and joyous memories passing into history resonates throughout the book, as you can probably imagine from the title. Barring his brief return to launch the new Bernice Summerfield novels with Oh No It Isn’t! in a year’s time, this is the last full-length Doctor Who novel from Cornell until 2000’s The Shadows of Avalon, and it’s pretty apparent in reading Happy Endings that the writer himself appears to be aware of this fact.

You could perhaps criticise stuff like the Emily Hutchings subplot for being too navel-gazing or self-obsessed, and that might well be true. Certainly, a writer wanting to break away from their most popular work and move on to more serious fare would seem to offer a rather neat and obvious parallel to where Cornell seems to be at in regards to his own relationship with Doctor Who and the New Adventures.

But just this once, I think the indulgence can be pardoned. As I said, this is one of those books where I can totally understand a reader having a different reaction to my own, because so much of this novel is based upon an assumption of goodwill towards the NAs that might not hold true for everyone due to, y’know, individuality and all that boring stuff.

Speaking as someone who’s spent a good quarter of their life writing about these books, and who has thoroughly enjoyed every second of it, however, Happy Endings was nothing short of a fuzzy, light-hearted, silly, frockish joyous bundle of fun. If we had to bid a farewell – however temporary it might have been – to Cornell and Bernice, then this is the way it should have been done. Yes, this is about as low-stakes and light-hearted as it gets, but it’s done so artfully and with such clear passion that I find it next to impossible to complain.

I like fun, go ahead and sue me why don’t ya?

2. Damaged Goods by Russell T. Davies

If this were a list of the most important New Adventures of 1996, then Damaged Goods would win, hands down. This is the Doctor Who debut of Russell T. Davies, and once you say those words, pretty much anything that comes after is destined to be little more than an add-on. It could be absolute garbage and it would still merit a mention in any kind of comprehensive history of the franchise.

As you’re probably able to gather by its high placement on this list, however, it’s not garbage. As a matter of fact, it’s actually rather brilliant. This is the sort of book which serves to vindicate the New Adventures as a worthwhile artistic endeavour, tackling drug use, poverty, gang violence and homophobia in a way that would never have been possible on television.

Even within the books themselves, the approach adopted here is still fresh, with Davies eschewing even the minimal amount of near-future stylistic frills favoured by Andrew Cartmel’s War trilogy in its own treatment of pressing social issues. If we wish to reflect on society’s failings, we need not dream up dystopian cyberpunk hellscapes to do so, as much fun as it might be; Thatcher’s Britain, Damaged Goods argues, is quite sufficient.

Ultimately, however, perhaps the greatest trick Davies manages to pull here is one which cannot possibly have been intentional, relying as it does on a contrast to a portion of his work that he had yet to write.

After all, there is an initial temptation to present Damaged Goods as something of an aberration within the larger body of Davies’ Doctor Who work, a novel which is brilliant in ways wholly divorced from the brilliance of an episode like Rose or Midnight.

Superficially, this argument would seem to hold up. Not only does Davies delve into the sort of subject matter that would never fly on a BBC show in a primetime family slot, but there’s also just the simple fact that this is a very grim and bleak work. The climax sees eleven thousand people die in a single moment as the N-Form manifests itself throughout Britain, in a move which I’m sure had Jim Mortimore positively overflowing with enthusiasm, and which makes Children of Earth seem about as hopeless and miserable as an episode of The Magic Roundabout.

But any serious argument that positions Damaged Goods as a case of Russell T. Davies doing his best Jim Mortimore impression is not an argument that really holds much water. Whatever its surface-level differences when compared to the author’s later contributions, the similarities exhibited by the novel are of a far more meaningful and fundamental stripe.

For all that the death toll might reach some pretty ludicrous heights here, it’s Davies’ uncanny and idiosyncratic knack for humanising the guest cast that helps to ensure that the devastation of the Quadrant has real emotional weight, and isn’t just a piece of hollow, meaningless spectacle.

In so doing, Damaged Goods manages to cement itself as an essential part of the New Adventures, and a damn fine novel to boot. If anyone ever asks you for an explanation of exactly how Doctor Who got from Survival to Rose, this is the book you can point them to.

1. Just War by Lance Parkin

It’s quite rare that the first book of a given year is good enough to remain on top for the full twelve months, but Just War is one such book. Even with every new novel I read and responded to with thoughts along the lines of “Damn, that’s really, really good,” there wasn’t ever a point where I felt that Lance Parkin’s debut novel had been dethroned as the reigning champion.

Having Doctor Who come up against the very real and very horrific atrocities of the Nazis sounds like a recipe for total and abject failure, which perhaps explains why the classic TV series generally kept a respectful distance from the Second World War in any realm beyond the purely allegorical. The simple fact of the matter is that the horrors of the Nazi regime aren’t exactly the type of subject that a family-friendly show like Doctor Who can explore in any great depth.

Even allowing for the New Adventures’ well-established policy of being more open to mature themes, this still seemed like an incredibly risky gambit for Virgin, especially coming from a first-time novelist. In defiance of all the odds, however, Lance Parkin manages to turn in a novel that is so mature and well-considered in its handling of the topics at hand that it almost makes you want to put the kibosh on any future attempts at “Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Nazis.”

Much of Just War‘s success comes from a recognition of its own limitations as a piece of science-fiction, and a willingness to engage in an active conversation with its most obvious antecedent in the NAs, Terrance Dicks’ Exodus. Direct name drops of Hitler, for instance, are conspicuous by their total absence here, and it’s indicative of the general approach that the book takes. If Parkin had just drummed up some high-octane thriller in which the Doctor gets the chance to beat back the bigotry of Germany and save the day, it would probably have come perilously close to cheapening the suffering of the regime’s victims.

Here, the Doctor is consciously separated from the action, with his biggest accomplishment being the theft of a prototypical Nazi superbomber and the prevention of a devastating attack on the UK. Crucially, however, even that small victory was only made necessary by a simple slip of the tongue on his part in conversation with Hartung, underscoring the fact that the character is fundamentally unable to operate in these surroundings.

Even if you know the twist ahead of time, it’s still a positively brutal reveal, particularly when you’ve already sat through the gruelling torture of Benny – where Parkin is constantly treading a delicate tightrope between emotiveness and exploitation, in a microcosm of the balancing act undertaken by the rest of the book – and it manages to give an already excellent novel that extra little push into true classic status.

Just about the only complaint I can conceive of is that it’s perhaps a very wordy novel. Copious space is given over to lengthy monologues on the nature and feasibility of fascism, and you could perhaps argue that it’s all a bit on the nose. Even here, though, I would point out that they at least manage to be very well-written monologues, and the unsettling resurgence of far-right movements in recent years lends an even greater poignance to these passages than they would have had originally.

Just War is a classic, and even if my decision to crown it the best New Adventure of 1996 might be slightly cliché, I still think it’s well-deserving of such a placement. I certainly couldn’t argue if someone wanted to substitute Damaged Goods, say, in its place, but for now I think it belongs pretty comfortably in the #1 spot.

The Missing Adventures

12. Twilight of the Gods by Christopher Bulis

Twilight of the Gods might just be the best Second Doctor novel to date. Unfortunately, that largely just serves to illustrate how dire a state the incarnation’s books have been in so far, rather than suggesting any actual level of quality on the part of this particular story. Because really, this just isn’t very good at all, and it’s pretty handily Bulis’ worst book since Shadowmind.

The idea of doing a sequel to The Web Planet feels rather thin on the ground from the very beginning. What could possibly be added to the original beyond offering up more baffling insect fight scenes, or half-heartedly aping the same sort of strange, otherworldly tone that made Strutton’s script so distinctive? Sure, you could perhaps argue that the non-visual medium is a better place in which to realise Vortis’ alienating and ethereal nature than the ropey sets of a 1960s British sci-fi serial, but if that’s all that you’re looking for from a prose version of The Web Planet, well, Doctor Who and the Zarbi is right over there.

These problems aren’t helped any by Bulis’ inherent traditionalism. It’s one of his qualities which can sometimes be a virtue, if not exactly in a “Sing his praises from the rooftops!” kind of way, but in the case of Twilight of the Gods it mainly translates into a grafted-on plotline about two rival alien factions.

There are no surprises to be found in the Rhumon conflict, with all the guest players feeling totally interchangeable with one another – a problem which also afflicts the Menoptera, mind you – and it’s mostly just there to allow Bulis the chance to indulge in the type of Tesco value Star Trek militarism that he proved so fond of in Shadowmind and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Yes, there’s an attempt at a grand moral about the tragedy and folly of war, and how we should just try and get along because we’re more similar than we are different, but that’s so shallow as to basically feel like the literary equivalent of “Live Laugh Love.”

All of this might have been somewhat forgiveable if the attempts at expanding on The Web Planet were at least interesting or creative, but they aren’t, and it isn’t. The depth of Bulis’ contributions to the source material is basically just to reveal that the planet is actually a hollowed out experiment by a bunch of God-Like Beings – and here the Star Trek influence shines through yet again – with a crust composed of a super mineral which is responsible for bestowing the ability of flight upon the Menoptera, and which the Animus wants to seize in order to pilot Vortis around like one big space-convertible.

(Which actually makes me realise that both of the year’s worst novels seem disturbingly preoccupied with explaining or replicating the mechanics of the Dalek plot from The Dalek Invasion of Earth… hmm.)

So it’s safe to say that Twilight of the Gods offers very little for me to latch onto and analyse in any real depth, nor does it even offer me enough of a reason to care enough to attempt to do so. The sheer length of the thing doesn’t do Bulis any favours, and I had mentally checked out long before I turned the final page. This is probably the nadirof the plague of sequels that gripped the MAs in the second half of the year.

Closely followed by…

11. The Shadow of Weng-Chiang by David A. McIntee

Where Twilight of the Gods felt aggressively phoned in and lifeless, The Shadow of Weng-Chiang is clearly the product of a little more thought and effort. Coming in at #11, you can probably tell that I don’t think that these qualities were enough to save it from slipping into the realm of tedium, but the effort is appreciated nevertheless.

It goes without saying that doing a sequel to The Talons of Weng-Chiang was always going to be a rather dicey affair, made all the more dicey by the adamant refusal from certain segments of Doctor Who to so much as admit said diceyness.

Still, McIntee takes a fair enough stab at trying to work through the issues, and his ostensible solution – relocating the action from the East End of 1880s London to 1930s Shanghai in the weeks before the Japanese invasion – is probably the cleverest trick in the novel’s arsenal. It recasts the Doctor and his companion from enjoying the support of local law enforcement to being viewed with suspicion as apparent representatives of European imperialism.

The biggest problem with The Shadow of Weng-Chiang, then, is that McIntee can’t really bring himself to go too far beyond that, and the novel ends up exhibiting a strange and unresolved tension between its deference to the original source material and its desire to call something of a mulligan on that source material. We don’t get prominent guest characters like Litefoot who wilfully and uncritically use slurs, and Romana never refers to Hsien-Ko as “the Yellow One” in the way that Leela did in the case of Chang.

And yet there’s a sense that the novel still wants to cling perhaps a bit too much to the oft-parroted fan defence that “It’s ironic, man! The characters are racist in an ironic way!”, with the Doctor making a number of remarks about China and Chinese people that can’t help but seem uncomfortable in light of the original.

All of this culminates in a truly bizarre moment in which McIntee stops to give our two lead characters a rambling and incoherent diatribe against the horrors of rampant political correctness, which can’t help but feel like I’ve stepped into a bizarro universe in which I can watch the full, unedited horror of Doctor Who as envisioned by someone like Andrew Bolt or Laurence Fox.

(Hey, I already made the dig at Roberts in the original, I need to update my references.)

Much like Twilight of the Gods, however, the book’s true undoing is just how unremittingly boring it is. The third act spends far too much time on violent, gory descriptions of Mr. Sin’s brutality, while vaguely interesting characters like Li get lost in the shuffle and undergo some kind of brain transplant where they seemingly become totally different individuals.

It’s kind of surprising that McIntee would bungle this attempt at a redemptive reading of The Talons of Weng-Chiang, but did considerably better in his handling of Lovecraft in White Darkness. In the end, that seems to validate something that I suspected going into this novel, which is that the Doctor Who fandom of 1996 might have just been completely unequipped to employ the necessary critical distance to truly move forward from Talons.

They should have been equipped to do it, but then again they should be equipped to do it in 2023, and you’ll still find sects of fandom that go to bat for the original. It’s telling, however, that McIntee’s novel seems to have been consigned to the mists of time, and while it might be a little mean of me, I’m tempted to say that that’s exactly where it belongs.

(Also, conceding that it’s a rather minor detail in the grand scheme of things, I still remain completely unable to fathom why you would try and keep Mr. Sin’s presence a secret without apparently telling Alister Pearson not to give him pride of place on the front cover.)

10. Speed of Flight by Paul Leonard

I feel I was rather lenient on Speed of Flight in my initial review, but in attempting to cross all the Ts and dot all the Is, even I am forced to concede that it doesn’t really have that much to recommend it. It falls prey to all the complaints that you should be familiar with by now thanks to the last two books in the list, with guest characters who can most charitably be described as “shallow” and a plot that jettisons any pretenses of deeper commentary in favour of a runaround.

And yet, this probably still stands as Paul Leonard’s most consistent novel to date. Of course, “most consistent” does not necessarily translate to “best.” Nothing here manages to be as pointed as the exploration of postcolonial Africa and the establishment politics of the UNIT era in the first half of Dancing the Code, nor can it match the emotive evocation of interwar Europe found in Toy Soldiers.

With all of that being said, I think Speed of Flight does manage to avoid the grievous self-sabotaging streak that seems to run throughout the back halves of many of Leonard’s works – dubbed, perhaps a little callously, by Stacey Smith? and Anthony Wilson of the Cloister Library as the “Paul Leonard brain haemorrhage” – to the Epilogue, and that surely has to count for something, no? Historical precedent shows us that books like Dancing the Code succumbed to mediocrity much earlier in their run, so it’s nice to see that the ratio of “enjoyable to tedious” is at least improving, I suppose.

The strongest point counting in Leonard’s favour here, though, and the thing that ultimately prevents Speed of Flight from landing among the bitter dregs of this year for me, is that it’s just nowhere near as long as some of the really unbearable novels. Yes, this prevents it from making much in the way of a lasting impression – writing about it now, a little over a month later, I remember pretty much sod-all about what actually happened in the book – but it also means that it never has time to linger or fester.

(For more, see the entry marked “faint praise, damning with.”)

There are some cursory attempts to use the alien world of Nooma – which actually goes unnamed within the text of the novel itself, come to think of it – as a springboard to explore some generalised 1990s anxieties about the looming spectre of industrialisation and technological encroachment, but it never really gels together.

Ultimately, Speed of Flight is the type of book that I find it very hard to give an opinion on one way or the other. It’s certainly much too generic and humdrum to count as some unsung classic of the Missing Adventures, but it never really sticks around long enough for its presence to become unwelcome.

It just sort of… is.

9. Downtime by Marc Platt

We’re getting steadily better, but we’re still in the realms of the unextraodinary. Much like the attendant spin-off video of which it is a novelisation, Downtime is mostly notable as an eccentric curio and a relic of the weird copyright limbo in which Doctor Who found itself lingering for most of the Wilderness Years.

Indeed, it’s kind of debatable whether this sort of story really warrants the novelisation treatment. Part of the appeal of the original Reeltime Pictures film was the ability to see Doctor Who mainstays like Nicholas Courtney, Elisabeth Sladen and Deborah Watling interacting in an all-new adventure. It might have been an exceedingly naff runaround filmed on the campus of a brutalist university in Norwich, but that’s just the kind of thing fans had to content themselves with in the 1990s.

By novelising it in this fashion, however, it must be conceded that you will automatically lose a lot of those aspects that made the original an appealing prospect. If that was true in January 1996, when we were still four months away from an abortive attempt to revive Doctor Who, it’s only become all the more pressing from the standpoint of a world in which we’ve had regularly airing Doctor Who on our screens for the better part of twenty years.

It’s perhaps telling that, when Virgin reached out to Wartime writer and subsequent New Adventures stalwart Andy Lane to give the same treatment to his own script for Reeltime, he declined the offer. Ironically enough, that film eventually got a novelisation from Telos Publishing earlier this very year, but it only stretched to a mere 101 pages. Even if Wartime is considerably shorter than Downtime ever was, it feels like that might be a more appropriate length for a book like this, being more in line with the Target novelisations of days gone by.

Certainly, Downtime‘s attempts at fleshing out the film to better fit the long-form setting of the Missing Adventures seem to suggest that there isn’t really enough material here to warrant a repeat performance of the trick.

For all that Platt’s newfound freedom from budgetary constraints allows him to insert elaborate action scenes involving the Brigadier, there’s also a sense that he’s chosen to fill the page count through the judicious application of padding. Victoria’s journey to Tibet, which constituted a whopping four minutes of the original film, is here expanded to form an opening chapter that takes up the first 20% of the novel. Such indulgences might be forgiven if it weren’t for the fact that substantial issues with the script, like Sarah Jane’s comparative lack of involvement, still remain completely unaddressed.

This isn’t to suggest that there’s nothing worthwhile to be found in Downtime. The stuff with the Brigadier is rather touching, but even here I’d much rather watch the version that has the added benefit of being performed by Courtney himself.

Without the presence of any recognisable actors, and bereft of any ability to create visual spectacle, Downtime ends up floundering in a tangled World Wide Web of reheated techno thriller plotting that was much more appetising when packaged under names like System Shock or Millennial Rites. If you absolutely must experience it, just watch the original film.

8. The Eye of the Giant by Christopher Bulis

The Eye of the Giant is pretty much what you’d expect from a Bulis novel. It’s nothing exceptional, seeming content to offer up a reasonably fun and solid pastiche of old-timey adventure serials. In a way, it feels like a conscious effort to do a follow-up to his imitation of Tolkien-esque fantasy in 1995’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which was apparently critically acclaimed at the time despite me not caring all that much for it.

(Indeed, I literally went back to my Year in Review post for 1995 in order to check where it landed, and it actually ended up in the #8 spot as well. History never repeats, but it is quasi self-similar, as they say.)

Still, even if neither of these books set the world on fire, I’d much sooner have more stories in this vein from Bulis than whatever the hell Twilight of the Gods was supposed to be. It helps that this is probably the first Third Doctor novel to be halfway decent throughout the entirety of its length, and it’s almost surprising that it took Bulis this long to do a story with the UNIT family, given the more militaristic bent a lot of his novels tend to have. I guess his interest wanes a bit if the military in question isn’t heavily futuristic in character…

It’s nice to see Liz being given the chance for some post-Inferno adventures, especially since I wasn’t a huge fan of either of her Decalog appearances in The Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back and Prisoners of the Sun. We’d still have to wait a good three months to get a book that actually gave her something substantial to do as a companion, but it’s nice to see that the effort is there.

The biggest flaw I can really point to in the novel is the rather dated characterisation of Nancy Grover as a one-dimensional gold digger. I get that it’s not exactly uncommon for such a trope to appear in the films that The Eye of the Giant is emulating, but it feels rather short-sighted to so uncritically port over 1930s gender roles into a book released in the mid-1990s. With that being said, the Nancy plotline does at least give us a final battle between the UNIT family and some mad, laser-firing nuns in St Paul’s Cathedral, so it surely can’t be all bad, I suppose.

I don’t really have much more to say about The Eye of the Giant. It does what it sets out to do well enough, and it’s certainly a step in the right direction for the Third Doctor novels. It does have the bad fortune to be published in the same month as Who Killed Kennedy – not featured on this list since it’s very difficult to consider it a regular MA, or any other kind of easily categorisable Doctor Who novel – which is more of a full-on leap in the right direction, but for what it is, this is fine.

7. The Scales of Injustice by Gary Russell

Hey, it’s a Gary Russell novel that I actually kind of liked.

Admittedly, this is another case of the Third Doctor novels being vastly overshadowed by Who Killed Kennedy. There’s a lot of creative cross-pollination between the two books, and in any kind of serious comparison between the two writers, Bishop is pretty much always going to top Russell at this stage in the game.

None of this makes The Scales of Injustice completely worthless, mind you. It is, as I say, the best regular Third Doctor adventure Virgin have given us to date, and light-years ahead of Russell’s earlier work in novels like Legacy or Invasion of the Cat-People. It’s all the more impressive when you consider the fact that he was splitting his time between this book and his novelisation of the Paul McGann TV movie.

Yes, there’s the usual liberal application of continuity that tends to get on my nerves, and the book probably only exists to plug an apparent continuity error in Warriors of the Deep, but these are the kinds of things that you just have to accept with the territory of reading a Gary Russell novel. If nothing else, zeroing in on a single line in Time-Flight about C19 and spinning it out into a vast conspiracy at least feels like an honest extrapolation of the themes of Malcolm Hulke’s own work, so there’s a sense of a greater thematic purpose motivating all the fanwank to be found here, more than you usually get.

Building off of The Eye of the Giant, Liz actually gets given a meaningful character arc that seeks to provide her with the departure story she was never given on screen, and it honestly works pretty well. Add in some good character work with the Brigadier’s failing marriage and you almost don’t notice that the Doctor spends half the book in captivity.

The Scales of Injustice isn’t especially deep, but it’s a lot of great fun, and one of the better outings in this weird rash of late MA sequelitis. As one of the few Virgin books to have seen a relatively recent reprinting, I feel pretty confident in recommending you give it a shot if you’re curious.

6. The Plotters by Gareth Roberts

Ooh, controversial.

Look, here’s the thing about The Plotters, which won’t surprise you at all if you actually read my review of the book, where I barely reviewed it at all and mostly just tiptoed around it to talk about other shit. The Plotters is a fine novel. In a lot of ways, it’s a very good novel, maybe even a great one. Reading it is also perhaps the single most exhausting and unenjoyable experience I’ve ever had in the course of running this blog.

You can throw all the usual “Separate the art from the artist!” talking points at me about how I’m just letting my dislike for Gareth Roberts’ politics of transphobia cloud my judgement, to which I say… yeah no shit, buddy. It is probably very petty of me to place The Plotters this low for such personal reasons that have little to do with the book itself, but I’d argue that they have everything to do with the book itself.

Even before you get to the whole cross-dressing villain stuff – which, as I said so eloquently on my Twitter, has aged like milk mixed with piss given Roberts’ current political outlook – the fact remains that I’m just finding it increasingly hard to have a good time in reading Roberts’ books. That’s a problem when his place in the franchise’s pool of writers was always defined as “the one who writes the stories that are a bit silly.”

I had a few laughs when reading The Plotters, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of my time was just spent wanting it to be over with. The best part of the experience was imagining Alan Cumming in the role of King James, and that’s only something gleaned from a TV story written more than twenty years later by a completely different writer, so I can’t really credit Roberts for that one.

I don’t enjoy being so exhausted with Roberts. Despite what people like him might like to write in their little reactionary tabloid columns, “cancelling” writers whose work you once respected is not a fun experience. Hell, I wouldn’t even say I want Roberts to be “cancelled.” He’s had ample opportunities to just listen to people, but it’s been four years since I posted my review of The Highest Science, and I am just so profoundly tired of his schtick at this point.

So this is the end result of that. A book I might have once enjoyed, that ended up feeling like a chore instead. Tell me again how we on the left-leaning side of the political spectrum are supposed to enjoy this whole cancellation business?

5. The Sands of Time by Justin Richards

The Sands of Time is a welcome return to form for Richards after the middling sophomore effort of System Shock. It’s got archaeology, it’s got a mystery with more twists and turns than you can shake a particularly extravagantly designed Formula One track at, and some genuinely heartfelt scenes for the regular cast.

If Twilight of the Gods represented the nadir of the sequelitis approach, and we crossed over into the realm of decent sequels with The Scales of Injustice, then this is probably as good as it gets. Not only does The Sands of Time deliver on all the familiar aspects of Pyramids of Mars, but there’s also a sense that Richards is actively trying to update some of the more troubling aspects of the original, turning a story with some uncomfortable racial overtones into a more firmly anti-imperialist text. It’s probably not perfect, but it’s certainly a much better stab at the redemptive reading than McIntee was willing to commit to.

The guest cast – Atkins aside – suffer from a distinct lack of definition, but the Doctor and Tegan are captured brilliantly. It’s quite a shame that the plot of the novel really cements the hints we got in Goth Opera that Nyssa’s role in this particular TARDIS team will be “the one who is reduced to a passive victim of a hideous transformation,” but the scene between Tegan and Nyssa’s funeral casket is so good that it almost makes up for it.

I don’t have too much more to say about The Sands of Time, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. This isn’t a novel with the boldest or most groundbreaking ideas ever, but very few Missing Adventures are. What it is is a pretty entertaining sequel to a beloved classic that still isn’t afraid to recognise the flaws in its source material, and that’s enough to put it above quite a few of its contemporaries.

4. The English Way of Death by Gareth Roberts

Given my thoughts on The Plotters, I’m honestly quite surprised that The English Way of Death landed this high. If anything, I think the fact that I had a more enjoyable experience is simply reflective of my having read this a good six months or so before The Plotters.

But, alas, I do also think that it reflects the fact that Roberts was a very talented writer. On the whole, the jokes hit much harder than they did in The Plotters, perhaps due to the fact that Season 17 is self-admittedly Roberts’ native wheelhouse and he therefore seems much more comfortable playing with the characters of the Doctor, Romana and K-9. As with The Romance of Crime, it’s a worthy successor to the sense of humour embodied by Douglas Adams’ brief tenure as script editor, while also managing to combine that comedy with a decent plot.

There’s also a sense of a rather pointed satire taking aim at British exceptionalism and the tendency of certain people in the nation to bog themselves down and refuse to change with the times. Which would have, y’know, aged much better if it was coming from literally any other author but the one who has most prominently decided to bog down and refuse to change with the times, but I’ll take what I can get, I suppose.

It’s for that reason that my feelings on The English Way of Death are ultimately rather mixed, despite its high placement overall. This was the point at which I really began to feel like reviewing Roberts’ work wasn’t leaving me with a sense of enjoyment and levity so much as anger and sadness at the trajectory of his career. In this case, there was enough quality writing to distract me from those feelings, but it was definitely a foreshock of the general sea change in attitude that I’ve undergone since reading the middling Fegovy.

3. The Man in the Velvet Mask by Daniel O’Mahony

First things first, I fully recognise that placing this book so high is bound to be a little contentious, especially when I’m placing it above a number of well-respected classics like The Plotters or The English Way of Death. With its copious amounts of sax and violins, it’s no big surprise that Daniel O’Mahony’s sophomore novel has become such a lodestone of controversy among those wishing to point to the Virgin years as being needlessly edgy and puerile.

While I can understand that viewpoint, I do ultimately think that this is a pretty good novel. It’s very clearly the product of the same mind that gave us Falls the Shadow back in 1994, while reining in some of the more self-indulgent excesses of that book with regards to its length. This renders a lot of O’Mahony’s ideas into a much more coherent form – well, I use “much” a bit loosely, I’ll admit – the second time around, and there’s a stunning level of imagination here.

Even the Dodo stuff, while certainly a little salacious, never feels quite as exploitative or horrible as a lot of folks make it out to be. I definitely understand why it sits ill at ease with folks, especially given the awful treatment the character suffers in subsequent novels, but in this instance it doesn’t feel like the boat has been pushed out too far. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Underneath all of this, there’s a very timely air to the whole project. Although the whole “This is about Holocaust denial, actually” reading I gave in my original review might be one of the more outlandish takes I’ve ever given on Dale’s Ramblings, I do still stand by it. In that regard, The Man in the Velvet Mask is a book which is almost as confronting as Just War, but in a totally different way, and I think that Doctor Who as a whole is richer for having published it.

2. Cold Fusion by Lance Parkin

Cold Fusion is a meticulously crafted piece of work, with Lance Parkin practically revelling in the chance to play around with the structure of the multi-Doctor story. To be honest, I had actually initially pegged it as the best Missing Adventure of the year, but the plot is still a little bit too simplistic, and its guest characters a little too flat, for it to truly claim the crown.

The fact that I was almost willing to totally overlook that fact, however, speaks volumes to how enjoyable much of Parkin’s work here is. It’s filled with cheeky jokes, from a gentle needling of Tegan’s dubious status as an authentic representation of Australia to a not-so-subtly hidden reference to an infamous Nicholas Courtney anecdote – although the latter does cost the book some points on originality, with Parkin having already trodden this territory before in Just War.

Even beyond that, the idea of so explicitly crossing over Virgin’s two lines of fiction is such a clever idea that it’s a wonder it apparently took this long to think of, barring the loose connections between Blood Harvest and Goth Opera. At the same time, there’s a funereal atmosphere to the way in which Cold Fusion goes about its task which feels perfectly in tune with the mood of Doctor Who fandom at the very end of 1996, to the point where it seems difficult to imagine it ever being quite as successful a trick at any earlier point.

All the regulars are on fine form, with even the much-maligned – and rarely-featured – Adric being at least tolerable for much of the novel’s length. Even more impressive is that Parkin manages to find a role for Nyssa that doesn’t involve her turning into a monster.

All told, Cold Fusion is an excellent way for Virgin to bid farewell to the Fifth Doctor and close off 1996. I said in my recent review of the novel that it’s probably a much better final book than the second half of the year deserved, and I’ll reiterate that once again. It’s a little telling that only one other Missing Adventure from the period of July to December 1996 made it into the top half of this list, but it just serves as a further demonstration of the ways in which Cold Fusion stands out from the crowd.

1. Killing Ground by Steve Lyons

This is perhaps the strangest and most unexpected pick I’ve ever made for “best novel of the year” in one of these lists, but I really do think it merits the crown. Killing Ground is a perfect send-off for Steve Lyons, who remains one of the most quietly influential writers that Virgin has ever had. On top of that, however, it’s just a damn good Cyberman story that far outshines the New Adventures’ earlier attempt in Iceberg.

(Which is a little ironic when you consider exactly who wrote that one, but nevertheless…)

This is the kind of story that the metal men from Mondas were made for, but which they were so rarely used in on television. It’s an uncomfortable, violent tale which successfully reworks one of the series’ most iconic monsters as an analogue for fascism without ever losing sight of the unique horror that they represent. Along the way, Lyons also treats the audience to some juicy, if slightly well-worn, debates about the moral and ethical lines of anti-fascist resistance, without ever feeling the need to hold the audience’s hand too much and patronisingly moralise to them.

Couple this with some wonderfully nuanced character work for the best companion-that-never-was, Grant Markham, and an arc for the Sixth Doctor that sees him pushed to the very brink of his capacity and desire to help those around him, and the result is something rather special.

It’s a damned shame that fandom seems to have largely forgotten this book, and while some of that might be down to the fact that Lyons is using a much more traditionalist and straightforward structure than he does in his other novels for Virgin, I think there’s more than enough emotional heft here to prove that using a tried-and-tested model by no means precludes an author from constructing a gem of a novel.

Final Thoughts

Well, that was the year that was. Or something.

Honestly, it’s quite surreal to know that I’m now so much closer to the end of Virgin’s output than I am to the start. Thankfully, having to cut back and forth between the Virgin and BBC lines over the next few years should postpone our final goodbye to the New Adventures, but it still drives home how much time I’ve invested in this project.

As for how 1996 stacks up to previous years overall? Well, I’d say it’s a little weaker than 1995, but that’s true of a lot of years in Doctor Who‘s history. The Missing Adventures were especially off their game this year, though their spell of mediocrity only really seemed to hit in full force in the second half. Even the worst MAs were only “so bad they’re boring” rather than “so bad they’re trainwrecks,” which is arguably worse in a way, and is definitely a lot less entertaining.

The New Adventures, however, were largely going from strength to strength. Sure, you still had your clunkers like GodEngine and The Death of Art, but these were set against a number of very good to outright great instalments, and even some of the less stellar novels were still executed with a certain level of slick professionalism. In retrospect, knowing how turbulent the coming BBC Books years would be for the franchise, it’s a damn shame that the vagaries of copyright law killed a series like the NAs that was still very firmly in the prime of its life.

But all of that is for another time. For now, I’m just glad to have gotten through a whole ninety books, and I hope to still be doing this for some time yet. I’m probably going to hold off on jumping into 1997 until I can get my hands on a copy of Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story, which does unfortunately mean waiting for eBay to ship it from the UK to Australia and, yes, will definitely cost me a frankly upsetting amount of money.

Once that gets here, and I have a chance to read it for a bit, we’ll get back to the fray with Jim Mortimore’s Eternity Weeps as promised, however. Until next time, then…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper