Top Ten (in no particular order) cool Villian quotes by Owen A. Stinger 10/6/99
The Ten Best Monsters in Doctor Who by Mike Morris 14/6/99
*- Denotes that the monster looks a bit naughty.
**- Denotes that the monster looks blatantly, hilariously,
snot-dribblingly naughty.
The ten silliest things the Sixth Doctor ever said by Mike Morris 21/6/99
I like Colin Baker's portrayal of the Doctor, actually. It's not his fault he got saddled with dodgy scripts, overly-violent productions and a producer and script editor who hated each other's guts. But, having said that, his Doctor didn't half say some stupid things...
My Top 20 NAs by Robert Smith? 23/6/99
It's very easy to complain about the things you don't like. It's a lot harder to discuss the things you do like. In an effort to do so, however, I recently had a look through my (quite impressive) bookshelves and tried to pick out my top twenty (in chronological order only) New Adventures. The cream of the cream. In, of course, my opinion.
Delightful, utterly delightful. Terrance surprised absolutely everyone by turning out a novel that was so much more than just another Target novelisation. It has its own grand plot and story to tell, with some truly haunting images, but also captures the seventh Doctor and Ace really well and really effortlessly in the way that only Terrance can.
Utterly fantastic. The first novel to suggest that Doctor Who really did have no limits. It's a rollercoaster ride of characterisation and what it means to be a Doctor Who fan and set the tone of almost every NA to follow it.
Dense and complex, it suffered only from being published next to Revelation. It covers so much ground and does it in such an intelligent and complex was that never, ever talks down to the reader. Treats Doctor Who as something intelligent and clever and absolutely refuses to patronise anyone. Contains some amazingly haunting images and sets up so many little details that you can read and reread and still find stuff.
This book is an amazing con trick. It takes every single set piece from Time's Crucible and reproduces them... and does it so well almost nobody noticed, complaining instead that the books in this series were too different! Cartmel's writing is amazing and his ability to sketch the familiar in a new light is utterly incredible. His Doctor is a great one, being the height of the shadowy, mysterious Doctor - whose elaborate plan completely fails to work at the end, requiring desperate improvisation. His description of the TARDIS was so convincing that it completely baffled Anthony Brown in DWB who could only work out that the Doctor travels "by more mysterious and magical means." Cartmel had always wanted to put the magic and the mystery back into Doctor Who and here he succeeds like no one else ever has.
This one is dense and complex and not very appealing the first time round. I reread it a few years ago and was completely amazed. The second time round, this seems like a completely different book. It's so complex and so dense that it took me at least two reads to even work out what it was about. But I'm really glad I did so.
The whole book is an amazing acid trip. Written like wildfire and totally unputdownable, it probes really deeply into both Doctor Who and especially the seventh Doctor's era. Emotion-tugging and extremely involving, it's the single best first novel I've ever read.
Very, very clever. It's slow, but that works to the book's advantage as it uses the pacing to build up a real sense of what's going on - and then completely subverts that. It's got an amazing Benny, who feels like she's actually being used as a character for the first time in ages (as opposed to being tacked onto other people's Ace submissions) and the ending is just mind-blowing.
This will appear on no one else's top 20, not even Jim Mortimore's but I adore it. It's bleak and unrelenting and painful, which is why so many people hate it, but for the power and the ability to hit nerves it's a very strong book. And it stands up to rereading as well, much to my surprise. I still can't believe what happens to the Doctor in this!
A very bold move, writing a sequel to Warhead, made even bolder by hardly using the Doctor. At the time this upset a lot of people, but I found it so heart wrenching and involving that I really didn't notice. And anyway, the real star of the book is Chick. Scenes from the animals' POV would have been ridiculous had anyone else tried them. Oh and the hints about the Doctor's past are superb. I converted a devout nonfan with this book.
Kate's second book is done with considerable style. The first two chapters are glorious and NewAce finally gets to be a real character. The Doctor is really well done in this and the story's direction and misdirections are fabulous.
A wonderful parable about what it means to be human that's so fragile it hurts. The setting really works to the book's advantage, contrasting the simple struggle of Dr Smith with the suffering and pain of war on a grand scale. This tale of a simple man who wants nothing more than a little happiness and perhaps a chance to love, is so touching and beautiful and tragic that it touches my emotions in a way that few books ever have.
It's astounding just how well Ben Aaronovitch can write. This is a book that is grand and simple and only the Doctor would go on holiday in somewhere as magnificent and awe-inspiring as the Worldsphere. All the characters are done really well, especially Roz and there's a real sense of importance to the goings on. There's also a great new take on the seventh Doctor and a real rarity - humour in an NA that is actually funny! Using this as a template for the Benny books was inspired.
Wow. This is the book that could have been so corny and cliched and got turned into something amazing simply by being so well thought out. The treatment of Benny is a real turning point in her character and the simple power of the story manages to sustain it far better than it has any right to.
The New Adventure you'd give to a nonfan. Written so wonderfully it glows, this pulls no punches with the characters or the readers. What looked like being another oddball Hummer ripoff turned out to be fantastic. It's got a wonderful take on the Doctor as well and seeing the way he just can't quite cope with the sheer ordinariness of the Quadrant is brilliant.
Doctor Who does the epic. Taking the 'broad' in the New Adventures manifesto to new extremes, this book covers multiple dimensions, a dying Doctor, the collapse of the Earth Empire and the most beautiful death scene for a companion ever.
It's funny how Jim Mortimore is so anti-continuity and yet this book has defined much of what the Benny books have become. It's got the Doctor as a force of nature, whose minimal appearances serve to make this book even stronger. It's written so well and is so involved that you really don't mind this featuring other main characters, paving the way for the Benny NAs to live and grow without the Doctor.
Ahhhh! When did Gallifrey get this good? When Marc Platt's writing for it, that's when. This is superb, an amazing finish to the seventh Doctor's era. Really well written, yet more accessible than Time's Crucible, it still manages to be the solution to a mystery that seems more mysterious than the original question. It's a brilliant statement on who and what the Doctor is and should be.
Where Lungbarrow turned and gazed into the past, this book gives us glimpses of the future - and it's a future that breathes new life into the Who mythos. Well written, amusing and thought-provoking, it works even better for being the eighth Doctor.
Effortless and well told, this is a story that tries and succeeds to be nothing more or less than exactly that. It's got an amazing Bernice and an involving story that is so beautiful it sings. Very, very human and absolutely clear in what it's trying to do.
The most amazing Doctor Who story to come out in a very, very long time - which works even better for not featuring the character. Written so well that it hurts, plotted like a dream and featuring the second stage in the war begun in Alien Bodies, this shows precisely why Doctor Who is as magnificent as it is - and just how lacking in scope most Doctor Who books actually are. The characterisation of Cwej is simultaneously brilliant and disturbing and every single thing falls so neatly into place that you just want to weep for joy.