Essential reading.

Mark Gatiss has a bit of a mixed record on Doctor Who. He wrote a few rather ill-regarded stories for the Revived Series, and a few that are generally pretty liked, but not exactly loved. But here, in 1992, he wrote what is in my opinion his greatest contribution to Doctor Who. It is for his work on this that I forgive a couple of his televised duds.

When Tom Baker took on the role of the Doctor, as wonderfully as he did it, he did have a certain "invincible" feeling. The Hinchcliffe/Holmes stories tended to keep him grounded by constantly putting him through the ringer, putting him in intense pain, burdening him, life-or-death situations, gods, monsters... And then in the Graham Williams era that seemed to stop. By the time JNT came on-board and was challenging him again, it felt weird that Tom's Doctor was capable of being vulnerable. (The melancholy vibe Tom had during season 18 certainly helps this; whether you believe this was intentional or not.)
Peter Davison then went on to have it pretty easy for most of his run, and Colin and Sylv had something of a deification going on. Mark Gatiss, it seems, isn't into that sort of approach, despite it being the fashionable tack in the VNA range; Mark wanted to really challenge the Doctor. Really get Sylv's Doctor vulnerable. Like the early Tom days, like Caves of Androzani, like the Troughton era, like Daleks' Master Plan...

And boy, did he succeed.

The most direct precursor to Doctor Who is Quatermass; a trilogy of 6-part science fiction serials broadcast in weekly half-hour parts in the 1950s. (The Quatermass Experiment in 1953, Quatermass II in 1955, and Quatermass And The Pit in 1958/59. There was also a 4-part serial for ITV in 1979, but it wasn't very good.)
Mark Gatiss is a long-time admirer of the creator of Quatermass, Nigel Kneale, and in fact as I write this, it was still pretty recent that Mark took to the stage to play the lead role of Professor Bernard Quatermass in the 70th anniversary rehearsed reading of the complete scripts for 1953's Experiment. (Particularly notable since, like a lot of early Doctor Who, there are no surviving recordings of the last four episodes of Experiment. The latter two serials, however, survive in full.)

Why am I telling you about Quatermass? Well, for one thing, this book is partly a tribute to Quatermass. One of our lead characters, Edmund Trevithick, is essentially a stand-in for if William Hartnell had played Professor Quatermass, and hadn't suffered quite so terribly from arteriosclerosis. He's a somewhat bitter old man, longing for the old days...

Nostalgia.

In a way, that is the villain of Nightshade. There's a plot here to do with an ancient evil (somewhat reminiscent of a Hinchcliffe/Holmes monster), and the monster preys on the wistful, bitter, and painful nostalgia of our principal players. Yes, even the Doctor. The Doctor begins this story in an unusual bout of melancholy, and in a sense, this whole book is about grief, melancholy, a longing for the past, and how this can strangle us, destroy us, and stop us from really living.

Ace gets a great showing in this story, standing on the other side of things to the Doctor. Her past has been traumatic, and from that, she's learned to look forward.

What does all this amount to? A bloody good book, that's what.

Timewyrm Revelation explored what Doctor Who could be with limitless budget and time... You could almost imagine a version of the story presented as a mid-budget TV movie in the '90s, shot on film, co-financed by an American distributor as a show to compete with the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This book, meanwhile, is more interested in running with what Doctor Who for adults looks like. Similar to Warhead, the big draw isn't necessarily the unlimited budget and time (although Warhead certainly would be nigh on impossible to shoot for TV, even today), but rather the draw is for a complex, layered, deep, emotional story. Mark knew this book would only really be read by adults, and older teenagers, so he wrote something for adults.

It's layered, it's sad, it's fun, it's melancholy, it's deep, it's human. It's beautiful.

This may be my favourite of the VNAs so far... It and Revelation stand together, at least, as the two heavy hitters.

Essential background: The Dalek Invasion of Earth (season 2)
Extensive background: Cat's Cradle: Warhead (VNA #6)

In my reviews, particularly of the Virgin New Adventures, I prefer to use a 4-tier system of grading:
Essential reading - If you want to read all the best VNAs, get all the most memorable story arc beats, and generally enjoy the VNAs without having to trudge through the mediocre/bad books, or perhaps even if you just want to pick up a good Doctor Who book with no intention of reading the entire series, look for this rating.
Worthwhile for extensive reading - Not outstanding, but I won't outright tell you to skip it if you want a sense of the VNAs overall. If you're determind to only read the best, skip these, but for a read-through of the series, I wouldn't skip them. They're the worthwhile, good-but-not-amazing books. You'll get a stronger sense of character arcs, story arc beats, and the growth of the VNAs as a range if you read these, but it will also take you a lot longer.
Not recommended - Not very good. If you really want to maximise your experience of the VNAs, you could read this, but it's definitely not advised.
Avoid at all costs - An irredeemable lump of human fecal matter. Do not waste your time with this insult to the franchise.

In addition, I list Recommended background that you may find necessary for understanding the story in full, as well as Extensive background for some additional details you may find interesting.

Not recommended.

I have to admit I didn't actually finish this one. Up to this point I was fairly dedicated to reading all these books, but around here I realised just how difficult that would be. I'd put up with Genesys, Apocalypse, and the slow parts of Time's Crucible, and I was once again in one of the dull books in the early range... And I decided it just wasn't worth my time.

It's not exactly a bad book necessarily, it just doesn't hold one's attention. It's not as extraordinary as Exodus or as revolutionary as Revelation, instead it's just a little forgettable, if you ask me.

One valuable takeaway from this story for me was the conclusion that maybe it's okay to get partway into a book (already a significant time commitment) and decide it's not worth finishing. Even someone as obsessed with Doctor Who as I am doesn't have to dedicate this much time to a kind of crap book.

Recommended background: Time's Crucible (VNA)
Worthwhile background: Logopolis (season 18)

Essential reading.

This is a very unusual one; essentially, it's mostly told as a series of vignettes of how the various people in this world are affected by both it and by the Doctor's presence. It's ambitious, weird, layered, and basically everything I was hoping to find in the VNAs.

Definitely a difficult read in places though. It feels a bit like Torchwood at its best, except not quite as dark or intense as that series tended to get. Certainly, however, it is a rather bleak vision of a scifi future, told in a manner that doesn't exactly make it an easy read, but a very rewarding one.

One of the most fascinating parts of this book is that it's Andrew Cartmel delivering a very pure version of his vision of the Doctor. And yet, we actually don't see him in the book very much. And when we do see him, he sort of wanders into somebody else's story, and often his presence is bad news for them. Very bad news. He's in full Time's Champion mode here; he will always act in the interest of good, but sometimes that means not being a good person. I feel this take would ripple through the rest of the VNAs, and would rather significantly inform Russell T's take on Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor. Less so the Tenth, much less so Ncuti. I think Moffat had it in mind a bit for both of his incarnations. Especially Capaldi.

This book has two direct sequels later on in the range, Warlock and Warchild, neither of which I have read, but both of which I am eagerly looking forward to.

Recommended background: None, really. You ideally need to be familiar with where Ace is at this point, but let's be honest, if you're reading this book, you've probably got that down pat.
Worthwhile background: Remembrance of the Daleks (season 25), Ghost Light (season 26), The Curse of Fenric (season 26)

In my reviews, particularly of the Virgin New Adventures, I prefer to use a 4-tier system of grading:
Essential reading - If you want to read all the best VNAs, get all the most memorable story arc beats, and generally enjoy the VNAs without having to trudge through the mediocre/bad books, or perhaps even if you just want to pick up a good Doctor Who book with no intention of reading the entire series, look for this rating.
Worthwhile for extensive reading - Not outstanding, but I won't outright tell you to skip it if you want a sense of the VNAs overall. If you're determind to only read the best, skip these, but for a read-through of the series, I wouldn't skip them. They're the worthwhile, good-but-not-amazing books. You'll get a stronger sense of character arcs, story arc beats, and the growth of the VNAs as a range if you read these, but it will also take you a lot longer.
Not recommended - Not very good. If you really want to maximise your experience of the VNAs, you could read this, but it's definitely not advised.
Avoid at all costs - An irredeemable lump of human fecal matter. Do not waste your time with this insult to the franchise.

In addition, I list Recommended background that you may find necessary for understanding the story in full, as well as Extensive background for some additional details you may find interesting.

Worthwhile for extensive reading

There's a large stretch of this novel at the end which is rather brilliant, and in general I found the entire last half to be rather gripping. The first half, however, is quite slow, and the whole book is a challenging read. Not challenging like Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, but rather like an overly literal and scholarly translation of an ancient text where you have to look at the footnotes at the end of every sentence...
Part of the problem, if you ask me, is down to the ideas being very visual. The book is adapted from a TV story Marc Platt pitched to Andrew Cartmel that was rejected on budgetary grounds. Honestly, I could see a TV version of this being brilliant, but it just doesn't come across well in prose.

Marc Platt had previously written Ghost Light for televised Doctor Who, a very interesting story that I defy you to understand on your first viewing. It's very dense and clearly it's about a lot of things; what those things are, I'm still not quite sure to this day (but then again, I've not seen the extended version, or read the novelisation, or the shooting script). This novel doesn't suffer from the same time constraints of Ghost Light (quite the opposite—as I noted, the first half feels quite slow), but Platt still isn't interested in dwelling on any idea or explanation for longer than is strictly necessary, so if you do get confused, don't be afraid to look back over what you've read and take a moment to think about it before moving on.

This book is a worthwhile read, despite sometimes being a bit of a challenge. It is quite confusing in places, but at the same time, this is the first time we get any clear insight into Gallifrey's history, and my my, what an insight. We learn a lot about Rassilon and his rise to power, and we get hints at the mysteries surrounding the Doctor that came up during the Sylvester McCoy era of televised Doctor Who, which will continue to play into the VNAs from this point.

I think, really, the biggest flaw with this novel is that it directly followed Timewyrm Revelation. If it hadn't, it would be seen as a revolutionary experiment in what a prose Doctor Who story can be.

That said, I can't honestly imagine a version of the A-plot written as a novel that would have come off particularly great. The Gallifrey-focused B-plot is absolutely riveting every time it comes up, but I don't think that makes up even one sixth of the published book's length.

I can't recommend it as a standout, but its ideas are interesting, and the whole B-plot is glorious.

Recommended background: Remembrance of the Daleks (season 25)
Worthwhile background: An Unearthly Child (season 1; watch Part 1 only), the Edge of Destruction (season 1), the Three Doctors (season 10), the Brain of Morbius (season 13), the Deadly Assassin (season 14), Arc of Infinity (season 20), the Five Doctors (special), Silver Nemesis (season 25), Remembrance of the Daleks (novelisation)

In my reviews, particularly of the Virgin New Adventures, I prefer to use a 4-tier system of grading:
Essential reading - If you want to read all the best VNAs, get all the most memorable story arc beats, and generally enjoy the VNAs without having to trudge through the mediocre/bad books, or perhaps even if you just want to pick up a good Doctor Who book with no intention of reading the entire series, look for this rating.
Worthwhile for extensive reading - Not outstanding, but I won't outright tell you to skip it if you want a sense of the VNAs overall. If you're determind to only read the best, skip these, but for a read-through of the series, I wouldn't skip them. They're the worthwhile, good-but-not-amazing books. You'll get a stronger sense of character arcs, story arc beats, and the growth of the VNAs as a range if you read these, but it will also take you a lot longer.
Not recommended - Not very good. If you really want to maximise your experience of the VNAs, you could read this, but it's definitely not advised.
Avoid at all costs - An irredeemable lump of human fecal matter. Do not waste your time with this insult to the franchise.

In addition, I list Recommended background that you may find necessary for understanding the story in full, as well as Extensive background for some additional details you may find interesting.

Essential reading.

With this book, I wondered whether I should revise my ratings system. It's transcendentally good; even if you have no plans to read the VNAs as a whole, even if you had no interest in reading any of them, this one is a must read if you like Doctor Who. Even casual fans would do well to read this book, it's that good.

There's a small reference to the very first Doctor Who story, which I have excluded from the extensive background for the reason that it's a reference to one line of dialogue. If you're a new series fan, you may still get the reference, since the line was referenced once again in the Moffat era. I think this, and a few moments and ideas across the Davies and Moffat eras of the new series, were in fact due to both showrunners really liking this book.

The first three books of the VNAs were an attempt to do some more Doctor Who, in prose form. This one explored just what Doctor Who could be, if it was free from constraints of budget and time, and did a story that was aimed squarely at the adults in the audience—not by deploying gratuitous sex or violence, but by being a legitimately mature and nuanced piece of science fiction. And it is absolutely goddamn mental.

Essential background: Timewyrm: Exodus (VNA \#2)
Extensive background: The Daleks' Master Plan (season 3 - 9/12 parts missing), Inferno (season 7), Earthshock (season 19), Remembrance of the Daleks (season 25), the Greatest Show in the Galaxy (season 25), Ghost Light (season 26), Survival (season 26)

In my reviews, particularly of the Virgin New Adventures, I prefer to use a 4-tier system of grading:
Essential reading - If you want to read all the best VNAs, get all the most memorable story arc beats, and generally enjoy the VNAs without having to trudge through the mediocre/bad books, or perhaps even if you just want to pick up a good Doctor Who book with no intention of reading the entire series, look for this rating.
Worthwhile for extensive reading - Not outstanding, but I won't outright tell you to skip it if you want a sense of the VNAs overall. If you're determind to only read the best, skip these, but for a read-through of the series, I wouldn't skip them. They're the worthwhile, good-but-not-amazing books. You'll get a stronger sense of character arcs, story arc beats, and the growth of the VNAs as a range if you read these, but it will also take you a lot longer.
Not recommended - Not very good. If you really want to maximise your experience of the VNAs, you could read this, but it's definitely not advised.
Avoid at all costs - An irredeemable lump of human fecal matter. Do not waste your time with this insult to the franchise.

In addition, I list Recommended background that you may find necessary for understanding the story in full, as well as Extensive background for some additional details you may find interesting.

Not recommended.

This one takes a little while to get going; it has some very cool ideas at play, but most of these are presented in the context of a fairly clichéd narrative in the vein of The Krotons, Full Circle, State of Decay, Paradise Towers, and many other TV stories of that mould, and while something like Paradise Towers knows what its strengths are and plays fully to them in a pretty focused 4-part serial, Timewyrm Apocalypse fills out its lengthy pagecount with flavour and detail of story beats and world details we've seen play out many times before, leaving most of the interesting stuff for the very beginning and very end; in this regard, one recalls Full Circle, one of the blander season 18 serials, bogged down by its familiar concepts. And yet, another thing Apocalypse has in common with Full Circle is the fact it is a perfectly okay story, so even though I couldn't recommend seeking this one out, it has its place as a piece of the early evolution of the VNAs.

It's inoffensive. And perhaps that's its greatest weakness.

Essential background: None
Extensive background: The Power of the Daleks (season 4), the War Games (season 6), Logopolis (season 18), Timewyrm: Exodus (VNA #2)

In my reviews, particularly of the Virgin New Adventures, I prefer to use a 4-tier system of grading:
Essential reading - If you want to read all the best VNAs, get all the most memorable story arc beats, and generally enjoy the VNAs without having to trudge through the mediocre/bad books, or perhaps even if you just want to pick up a good Doctor Who book with no intention of reading the entire series, look for this rating.
Worthwhile for extensive reading - Not outstanding, but I won't outright tell you to skip it if you want a sense of the VNAs overall. If you're determind to only read the best, skip these, but for a read-through of the series, I wouldn't skip them. They're the worthwhile, good-but-not-amazing books. You'll get a stronger sense of character arcs, story arc beats, and the growth of the VNAs as a range if you read these, but it will also take you a lot longer.
Not recommended - Not very good. If you really want to maximise your experience of the VNAs, you could read this, but it's definitely not advised.
Avoid at all costs - An irredeemable lump of human fecal matter. Do not waste your time with this insult to the franchise.

In addition, I list Recommended background that you may find necessary for understanding the story in full, as well as Extensive background for some additional details you may find interesting.

Essential reading.

This is how to start the range. Terrance Dicks (a well-loved Classic Who writer/script editor, having written the War Games, Robot, and the Five Doctors) tells an epic tale taking full advantage of the budget-free medium of the written word, and delivers a very good Doctor Who book. It does have some under-the-surface implications about history that make some uncomfortable in the second half, but one can easily read it in a way that dismisses this, and in doing so, you get to enjoy a lot of good in the book itself. That problematic reading aside, a couple of scenes towards the end mischaracterise Ace in my view.

The book's main issue is really that there's an implication that the Nazis only came to power as a result of the scifi interference involved in the book. This can be dismissed with the simple explanation that the interfering scifi element only went to earth because of the events of the previous book, Genesys, and in fact the Doctor himself at various points uses the phrase "getting history back on track." So, logically, this reading doesn't make sense. There are only a couple of lines in the book that really pay any lip service to this reading, and they stood out to me as rather logically nonsensical—as well as being a wrongheaded take on the very human evil of fascism, specifically the racist, nationalist version of it deployed by the Nazis.

The book as a whole is very good, but there are definitely some problematic ideas presented in a few scenes in the early second half. If you can look past that, however, it's a very good read. Personally, I favour the first half of the book over the second—while the second half is something of a historically-based political thriller, the first half is wonderfully fun pulp action in the vein of WWII-era noir films.

Essential background: The War Games (season 6)
Extensive background: The Deadly Assassin (season 14), the Five Doctors (special), the Curse of Fenric (season 26). Technically also Timewyrm Genesys, but frankly that book's so bad it's not worth it.

In my reviews, particularly of the Virgin New Adventures, I prefer to use a 4-tier system of grading:
Essential reading - If you want to read all the best VNAs, get all the most memorable story arc beats, and generally enjoy the VNAs without having to trudge through the mediocre/bad books, or perhaps even if you just want to pick up a good Doctor Who book with no intention of reading the entire series, look for this rating.
Worthwhile for extensive reading - Not outstanding, but I won't outright tell you to skip it if you want a sense of the VNAs overall. If you're determind to only read the best, skip these, but for a read-through of the series, I wouldn't skip them. They're the worthwhile, good-but-not-amazing books. You'll get a stronger sense of character arcs, story arc beats, and the growth of the VNAs as a range if you read these, but it will also take you a lot longer.
Not recommended - Not very good. If you really want to maximise your experience of the VNAs, you could read this, but it's definitely not advised.
Avoid at all costs - An irredeemable lump of human fecal matter. Do not waste your time with this insult to the franchise.

In addition, I list Recommended background that you may find necessary for understanding the story in full, as well as Extensive background for some additional details you may find interesting.

Avoid at all costs.

Let's not beat about the bush, this book is bad. It's very bad. The Doctor and Ace are characterised all wrong, there's some really stupid fanservice towards the end of the book that has no business being there and comes off as incredibly lame, it's boring for long stretches, it's hideously sexist, it handwaves some seriously horrible things (primarily sexual harassment and assault) done by the historic characters as "products of the time". It's an awful, terrible, very bad book, and a horrendous way to start the series. Do not read this. If you're really curious, read a plot summary. Anything else you need to know is more than adequately explained as it comes up in the following three books.

Not only is this book insulting, it's also boring. Do not bother.

Recommended background: None
Worthwhile background: The Invasion of Time (season 15), Ghost Light (season 26)

In my reviews, particularly of the Virgin New Adventures, I prefer to use a 4-tier system of grading:
Essential reading - If you want to read all the best VNAs, get all the most memorable story arc beats, and generally enjoy the VNAs without having to trudge through the mediocre/bad books, or perhaps even if you just want to pick up a good Doctor Who book with no intention of reading the entire series, look for this rating.
Worthwhile for extensive reading - Not outstanding, but I won't outright tell you to skip it if you want a sense of the VNAs overall. If you're determind to only read the best, skip these, but for a read-through of the series, I wouldn't skip them. They're the worthwhile, good-but-not-amazing books. You'll get a stronger sense of character arcs, story arc beats, and the growth of the VNAs as a range if you read these, but it will also take you a lot longer.
Not recommended - Not very good. If you really want to maximise your experience of the VNAs, you could read this, but it's definitely not advised.
Avoid at all costs - An irredeemable lump of human fecal matter. Do not waste your time with this insult to the franchise.

In addition, I list Recommended background that you may find necessary for understanding the story in full, as well as Worthwhile background for some additional details you may find interesting.