33) The Doctor Who Storybook 2007, edited by Clayton Hickman
34) The Doctor Who Storybook 2008, edited by Clayton Hickman

Great fun for the Who fan of any age. Each of these features seven lavishly illustrated text stories and a comic strip, perhaps particularly aimed at the 9-13 age group; authors in both books include Gareth Roberts, Tom MacRae, Robert Shearman, Nicholas Briggs, Justin Richards and Jonathan Morris, with Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss in the 2007 volume and Paul Magrs and Nicholas Pegg in the 2008 one. The 2007 volume features Rose in all the stories, the 2008 volume has Martha in most of them.

The two best stories are the top and tail of the 2007 volume, by Gatiss and Moffat respectively. The first is a standard enough plot of the child central character getting involved in the Doctor's adventure, but Gatiss has given Jason a convincing narrative voice in his diary. The other is a particularly creepy Moffat tale told ostensibly as an IM conversation, with a twist at the end which raises it to a higher level.

Two minor points that grated a little with both books. First, several of the stories, as noted above, feature a child getting involved with the Doctor for the duration of the story. The child is always a boy. I know that this is not invariably the case, as with Sally Sparrow from the 2006 book (which I haven't otherwise read), and of course you have Martha or Rose as senior kickass females, but it just struck me. Second, the artwork is sometimes a little wobbly - particularly Billie Piper's features seem difficult to capture. On the other hand Brian Williamson's art is particularly good, as in this illustration from Robert Shearman's 2007 story, "Untitled".

( proof )

21) Time and Relative, by Kim Newman

This was the first of the run of Doctor Who novellas published by Telos, set immediately before the events of the first TV series, in London in early 1963. It's written in diary form, with Susan, the Doctor's granddaughter, as the narrator. She and her grandfather are exiles from their home planet, and can't quite remember why; as she tries to fit in at school, she comes top in Maths and Science, but loses out in Geography as she can't remember what the various cities and countries are called this century.

As typical with Telos there is an irritatingly self-congratulatory blurb (this time by Justin Richards) detailing just how wonderful this particular novella is. However, in this case it is close to being justified. For one thing, Newman gives Susan her own voice - in the series, she was rather the archetype of the screaming girl companion, to the dismay of Carole Anne Ford who had taken the role believing that she would have alien kung-fu type skills and whose favourite memory is when she turned violent in The Edge of Destruction. Newman's Susan isn't Buffy - apart from lacking physical fighting skills, she is less lucky in her choice of friends - but she is her own person, plaing not just at being grownup like her friends but also at being human - and it all makes sense.

Newman's other success is that his First Doctor comes closer than any other written version I have seen to capturing the essence of Hartnell's performance. This is helped by the first-person narrative from Susan's point of view: her grandfather is familiar but not central for most of the story. He catches the alienness of the Doctor's motivation and manner very well.

The actual story hardly matters in all of this, but the plot of a monster based on Cold, awakened by drilling experiments and taking over the earth starting with London, is true to many a Who story and also to the horror tradition which Newman is rooted in, so he does it pretty confidently. There are of course pleasing nods to continuity: Ian and Barbara are glimpsed on a date at the cinema, there is a hint that Susan's own people may be sending a man with a beard after her and her grandfather, and more subtly her friends at school are John and Gillian (probably most Telos readers are sufficiently up in obscure Who lore to get that particular in-joke).

Anyway, based on this, one would be encouraged to get the rest of the series of Telos novellas. Unfortunately, I have read two of the others and they don't come up to the same mark (one of them is definitely the worst Who fiction I have read in hard copy). Still, it was a good start.

17) The Glittering Storm, by Shaun Lyon
18) The Thirteenth Stone, by Justin Richards

These two audiobooks are both based on the recent TV Sarah Jane Adventures, and are read by Elizabeth Sladen. I have a particular concept of what I rate as a book for the bookblog and what I don't. I'm counting these two because they are described as "audiobooks" and, crucially, feature only one reader doing the text. I listed the audio autobiographies of Tom Baker and Nicholas Courtney on last year's bookblog on the same basis. The Big Finish Companion Chronicles, by contrast, have two actors each, so I reckon that makes them plays rather than books.

Yet all the Big Finish plays are listed separately on LibraryThing, so I've posted all my reviews of them there, even though they are not tagged as bookblog entries here. An argument could be made that if it has an ISBN number, it's a book, or at least a review of it is fair game for one's bookblogging. Another argument can be made that it's my blog and doesn't have to satisfy anyone except me. I expect I will come back to this fascinating topic some time.

The Glittering Storm ( isn't as good as The Thirteenth Stone )

The Thirteenth Stone ( is better than The Glittering Storm )

12) Decalog 3: Consequences, edited by Justin Richards and Andy Lane

One of the early collections of "authorised" Doctor Who short stories from Virgin Publishing. I bought it because two of the ten stories had been flagged up to me in different ways in the last couple of weeks, and neither of them disappointed: Peter Anghelides' "Moving On", a bittersweet bridging narrative for Sarah Jane Smith between K9 and Company and School Reunion (or the Big Finish version if you prefer), and Steven Moffat's first published Doctor Who story, "Continuity Errors", which has the Seventh Doctor and Bernice Summerfield meddling in the time stream pretty comprehensively.Unexpected bonuses were Guy Clapperton's "Tarnished Image" featuring the First Doctor and Dodo Chaplet, and kradical's "UNITed We Fall", bringing the Fourth Doctor and the Brigadier to UN headquarters in New York for an audit. But none of the others was bad.

5) The Clockwise Man, by Justin Richards
6) The Monsters Inside, by Stephen Cole

( a brief history of Doctor Who novels )

So the BBC decided last year to publish original fiction featuring Nine and Ten, and I have read the first two this week. Neither is exactly brilliant literature (and of course they have completely dropped the more adult themes introduced by Virgin), but they are not total mind-candy either.

( The Clockwise Man )

( The Monsters Inside )

Anyway, I will not expend huge resources of time and money looking for the books in this series, but I'll certainly pick them up if I get the chance.