In vaguely anachronistic order, I have begun reading BBC Books's Eighth Doctor Adventures from the second half of the 1990's, the medium by which Paul McGann's take as the title part in Doctor Who was to be developed after his planned TV season went bust. (I say "was to be" because there is heated rivalry between those who consider the Doctor Who Magazine comic-strips, the BBC Books Eighth Doctor Adventures, or the Big Finish audioplay Eighth Doctor Adventures the official continuation of the Eighth Doctor's story, being that the three accounts are often as irreconciliable as those things get in Doctor Who.)
The Eight Doctor Adventures have a complicated reputation, but for the moment I don't find them nearly as bad as people say they are. So:
Terrance Dicks's The Eight Doctors is often described as "bad fanfiction". I wouldn't say "bad" — but it's very, very obvious that it is "fanfiction" when compared to the real novels that were to come, the ones with an actual narrative structure, the one with an actual story that isn't just a reflection/"greatest hits compilation" of preexisting episodes. You know what, though? I like fanfiction quite a bit.
What The Eight Doctors does most of all is try to be a sequel to The TV Movie, The Trial of a Time Lord and The Five Doctors simultaneously, and take that opportunity to smooth over continuity issues in those two stories. The way this enterprise is disguised as a story is extremely clunky, yes, but not enough credit is given to the fact that it's a pretty good attempt to make sense of those two stories. I did not believe it was possible to simplify the Valeyard as much as this does.
The characterization is somewhat weaker. The past Doctors are done well enough, with the potential exception of the Seventh, who is sadly in his terminally unfunny Virgin New Adventures incarnation and whose story doesn't really lead anywhere. But… for one thing, it's a truism that no one really knew what to do with Rassilon until the new series recast him as a straight-up villain in The End of Time; he was dangling on the fence between good and evil, not in an interesting sense of moral ambiguity some much as in "the writers themselves aren't sure if he's a villain or not, and therefore try to sound as noncommital as possible". Add to that the even greater confusion on whether he's dead or a god or a ghost or an artificial intelligence or what in Gallifrey's "present-day", and it's no surrpsie that his Deus Ex Machinesque appearance here is nothing if not confusing.
And the Eighth Doctor? A blank slate, very self-consciously. Dicks wipes his memory at the beginning of the story, to make sure he doesn't actually have to do any characterization on him. This is a patently stupid move — you can't have the main character of your new book series as a nonentity in the first book — and if you're going to do it anyway, you definitely shouldn't do it by having him lose his memory again after The TV Movie was already all about an amnesiac Doctor. That's just lazy.
New companion Samantha Jones is not bad, at least. Some people think she's annoying, but not me.
Now there's a novel. Perhaps my favorite of the Who novels I've read so far, Vampire Science actually succeeds in being a sequel (a good sequel) to The TV Movie, even sharing its San Francisco setting. It has all the good parts of that film (chiefly the slightly gothic atmosphere and the Eighth Doctor's character; also a campy-yet-scary villain, though not the same one) and none of the bad parts or occasional clumsiness. Sam is better than ever, the Doctor is fantastic… and it's also a heckuva good vampire story. The worldbuilding and characterization of the story's vampires is excellent; tasteful unique without at all trying to be a radical reimagining.
The "head vampiress", Johanna Harris is a complex and immensely likable presence throughout the story, and the way her plotline plays out is full of twists and turns and unique ideas and defied expectations. After five seasons of Steven Moffat, it's also nice to have a sympatheitc villainess who isn't either koo-koo or trying to shag the Doctor (not that I hate all, or even most, of the various characters of that description; Missy's a fantastic version of the Master, and played to perfection; but it does get tiresome).
Author Jonathan Blum also took the opportunity to canonize his earlier, unlicensed fanfilm Time Rift by having his character from there, Brigadier Kramer, appear in it. I can but applaud this, for Time Rift, terrible picture quality aside, is a very good piece of television, which it is not hard at all to imagine as a real 1980's episode of the series. This despite my apathy to Kramer as a character, who is little more than “the Brigadier, but American and a woman”.
Genocide is another very good novel, very much apiece with Vampire Science (if you like one, I can't see why you wouldn't like the other). The characters are once again quite good overall, though the cast is more uneven; we get another fantastic villainess, in a completely different register from Johanna (variety, Mr Moffat, variety), but her human henchman is very one-note, and I couldn't help but conflate him with the much-despised Krasko in my mind, which… isn't a good thing. The worldbuilding is marvelous, though. Truly marvelous.
It is strangely prescient of things to come (¨cough cough¨ Time War ¨cough cough¨) in the sort of moral dilemmas with which it presents the Eighth Doctor, but somewhat bungles up the delivery thereof. It looks good on paper, but then the detail is added (for urgency) that the timeline will crumble and the universe cease to exist unless the Doctor acts, and thus there's only one real option left, and no moral quandary. Oh well, points for trying.
I like the way this story does australopithecines as characters, also. I feel like this is largely how talking to australophithecines would go.
War of the Daleks gets a lot of hate as another, even more egregious case of "hacky fanfiction" than The Eight Doctors. Not altogether deservedly. Yes, the story exists in part to retcon a bunch of previous ones, chiefly the destruction of Skaro in Remembrance of the Daleks, but, with apologies to all the people who love said event and wish it hadn't been so unceremoniously undone, bugger that. I love Skaro as a setting, and cheered when it became apparent the new televised series had picked up Peel's decision to bring it back. Is the way in which it was brought back a bit clunky? Yeah, but it was always going to be clunky, and Peel at least wrings some decent character moments for the Doctor and Davros out of this.
Yes, did I mention the characters? The first half of War's plot is kind of nonsensical (the Thals' motivations are meandering and daft), but things pick up immensely once we land on the resurrected Skaro and a triplefold battle of wits gets underway between the Eighth Doctor, Davros and the Dalek Emperor. The Dalek Emperor (a hugely magnetic presence in his two only real screen appearances, one of which was yet to come when War was released) has never been better than here; far from just an archetype, he is a fully-realized character, as deep and complex as non-redeemed Daleks get.
All in all, it's not perfect, and its retcons are more or less as clumsy as everyone says they are… but that excepted, this isn't a bad book at all. If you like stories about Daleks as characters with agencies, rather than mindless monsters (and sweet Rassilon I do), this is the one for you.
Paul Magrs's The Scarlet Empress isn't actually as revolutionary and postmodern as it's made out to be. The setting and atmosphere of the planet Hyspero is no different than what the televised story would revisit in The Rings of Akhaten, for one thing. What it is is a slightly absurdist version of Arabian Nights In Space, and that's always fun, innit?
The big attraction of The Scarlet Empress is of course the proper introduction into Doctor Who (the careful phrasing is firstly because she actually began as a solo character elsewhere, and secondly because she had even actually already encountered the Doctor, albeit in a long-forgotten short story) of Iris Wildthyme, the Doctor's timey-wimey old bat of a fellow Gallifreyan. A Time Lady who exists as a shameless, dingy parody of the Doctor, Iris draws her appeal from how very self-conscious she is of the aforementioned fact; she's not quite fourth-wall-aware in this story (she is elsewhere), but her relationship with the Doctor is precisely that of an affectionate parody personified meeting the original. The Doctor is vaguely irritated by her existence, and something keeps nagging at him that's not 'right' about her; she, for her part, keeps criticizing his various flaws, and shamelessly steals and corrupts his trademark features, but she also loves him deeply without daring to say so out loud. It's all very clever.
The plot is kind of meandering, but that's to be expected in an Arabian Nights-esque stories. There are a few other choice meta-moments in the story (such as a merciless satire of "canonicity" as a concept: a Lewis Carrol-esque visit to an alien library whose bigoted librarian insists it contains all the knowledge about th euniverse, which must be read in chronological order or not at all, and who cannot bear to think about "unreal things" without a dozen reminders and qualifiers that they are "imaginary stories"), too, which do get a chuckle.
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