Publication History
Between 1991 and 1997, Virgin Publishing had been producing a successful series of spin off novels under the New Adventures and Missing Adventures ranges. However, following the Doctor Who television movie which introduced the Eighth Doctor in 1996, the BBC did not renew Virgin Publishing's license to continue publishing Doctor Who material, instead opting to publish their own range. Virgin's last New Adventures novel, The Dying Days by Lance Parkin, featured the Eighth Doctor.
The first BBC Books release was a novelisation of the television movie (considered a standalone work by some), but the run of original Eighth Doctor Adventures began in 1997 with The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks and continued until 2005. It is unclear if the BBC line was originally intended to be a continuation of the continuity established in the New Adventures. However, as many of the writers for the Eighth Doctor Adventures had also written for the Virgin series, many elements from the New Adventures began to appear in both the EDAs and the PDAs (which replaced the Missing Adventures), and such continuity has been broadly maintained.
Virgin had distinguished the New and Missing Adventures with different cover designs. BBC Books, however, did not differentiate their novels featuring the current and past Doctors in this way, although they were listed separately within the books. Fans continued to distinguish the ongoing story of the Eighth Doctor from the more stand-alone adventures of past Doctors, although some plot elements did cross over both ranges.
With the revival of the television series, BBC Books ceased the regular Eighth Doctor Adventures in favour of a new range (the New Series Adventures), featuring characters from the new series. One further novel featuring the Eighth Doctor (Fear Itself) was published under the Past Doctor Adventures line before it too ceased publication.
In addition to the Eighth Doctor Adventures and the Past Doctor Adventures, the BBC also published three short story collections under the title of Short Trips which feature all eight (at the time of publication) Doctors. These were also inherited from Virgin, a version of their Decalog short story collections, and when the BBC ceased publishing them, a licence to continue was sought by Big Finish Productions, who published some for a while. They now continue to publish their own range of Short Trips collections as audios.
As yet there has been no clear links between the audio, comic strip and book adventures.
These novels all feature the Eighth Doctor, as portrayed in the 1996 television movie by Paul McGann.
Read more about this topic: Eighth Doctor Adventures
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