Virgin Books’ Doctor Who: New Adventures series was, back in the day, meant to provide fans of Doctor Who the thing they wanted after the show was put on indefinite hiatus after the serial Survival. Time’s Crucible is the 6th book in the series, part of a pair of thematically linked stories under the heading of “Cat’s Cradle”.

The story involves the TARDIS basically having a temporal collision with an early prototype Time Ship from Gallifrey from just before the rise of Rassilon. This gets into material that doctors from Tom Baker on had explored directly, but which Sylvester McCoy’s doctor had only explored obliquely – the history of the Time Lords.

Conceptually, telling the story as a novel lets you do some stuff that would be really hard to do in live-action television. The mixed up TARDIS interior is described with a weird surrealistic and claustrophobic interior that you could do with comics or animation (as was demonstrated by the anime Id:Invaded), but would be very difficult to do with a TV budget for the time (even modern Doctor Who might stumble a bit with that).

Additionally, the book puts Ace at the forefront in some interesting ways – she’s always been an active character in Doctor Who stories, but here for 3/4th of the book she’s the driving force of the resolution of the plot.

The book’s not without some real problems though. The elements of the plot with time folding in on itself and alternative versions of characters from different places in their timelines running into each other works very awkwardly in prose. By the end of the book I’ve completely lost track of some of these characters timelines. This, on the other hand, is something that a visual presentation would work strongly with – through showing the same character in different physical states to indicate where they are in their life and their timeline (or timelines).

Additionally, the opening portions of this book are something of a slog – when the book gets going, it really gets going. It’s just that it takes almost a quarter of the book to get there.

(This book review originally appeared on my blog) ( )

It was either this one or Deceit that was the first of the New Doctor Who Adventures that I read, and I cannot really say that they got me addicted to them, they really did not, but I did decide that I would include books from this series on my reading list, if I was able to get my hands on them. Some I did buy new, but a number I simply scoured second-hand bookshops for. In particular I tried (and succeeded) in getting my hands on the four Timewyrm books and the three Cat's Cradle books, though the ones after them did not really get my attention all that much (that is until I discovered that one of my friends also had a collection of them).
The Timewyrm books seemed to run like a novelised Doctor Who serial, however come the Cat's Cradle trilogy, the writers seemed to begin to try to experiment with the style of writing and the story that would eventually evolve. The original serialised Doctor Who stories nominally consisted of four 20 minute episodes each of which would end in a cliff hanger. They were always science-fiction, and while there was no over arching story arch (as has come about in the more recent TV series) there was at least some attempt at continuity. However, like these books, the TV series were written by different writers, so there would need to be some collaboration somewhere.
This story goes back to Ancient Gallifrey, but is also set on an alien planet that is ruled by a huge sea-urchin like monster called The Process. This second aspect of the story seems to follow on from the style of story from the original series, however it appears that the authors and the publishers are wanting to develop some of the history of Gallifrey. In this particular book it involves the development of time travel and the first journey. Somehow the Doctor is involved, but I cannot remember how.
I did keep on reading other books in this series (and some of the other series) however it was difficult breaking away from what I expected from the classic Doctor Who (the TV series began to decline in quality near the end of the Peter Davidson era, and had pretty much collapsed with the introduction of Colin Baker). In many ways I was looking back to the hey days of Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee, but unfortunately, they are gone, never to return (I loved Bessie, the Doctor's car). ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1381420.html

It's actually rather fascinating, just after watching The End of Time, to experience a completely different reinterpretation of the Time Lords and Gallifrey, the combination of Cartmel Masterplan and Marc Platt's imagination which culminates in Lungbarrow (which is itself mentioned here as a concept for the first time). Like a lot of Platt's writing it is eerie and confusing, early Gallifreyans and peculiar deserted cities, but with some fascinating insights and ideas, and some decent character development for Ace who has to carry most of the plot with the Doctor being in cold storage for much of the book. I do wish I'd been picking these up when they first came out in 1992. ( )