List of Doctor Who Novelisations

List Of Doctor Who Novelisations

This is a list of Doctor Who novelisations, in order of publication.

The first three Doctor Who serials to be novelised were the William Hartnell stories The Daleks (as Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks by David Whitaker), The Web Planet (Doctor Who and the Zarbi by Bill Strutton) and The Crusade (Doctor Who and the Crusaders by Whitaker). They were published in hardback by Frederick Muller Ltd; the first was also published in paperback, by Armada.

Between 1973 and 1991, Target Books published almost every Doctor Who television serial as a novelisation, starting with new editions of the Frederick Muller books. When Target was taken over by Virgin Books in 1991, three further serials - The Power of the Daleks and The Evil of the Daleks by John Peel and the radio serial The Paradise of Death by Barry Letts - were added to the range.

The only serials from the original 1963-1989 run of the show never to have been officially novelised by Target and its related companies are The Pirate Planet, City of Death, Shada (published in March 2012 by BBC Books), Resurrection of the Daleks, and Revelation of the Daleks, due to licensing issues with the original scriptwriters. (Unofficial fan novelisations were published by the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club between 1989 and 2000.) The Children in Need special Dimensions in Time and the Comic Relief spoof Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death have also not been novelised.

BBC Books published a novelisation of the 1996 Doctor Who television movie by Gary Russell. There are currently no plans to novelise episodes of the revived series with Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor, David Tennant's Tenth Doctor or Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor. However, in late 2007 unofficial fan-produced novelisations of the first two 2005 episodes were published as ebooks. They were quickly removed from the website following threat of legal action by the BBC's Brand Protection Team.

In addition to the television serials, three scripts from the cancelled Season 23 - The Nightmare Fair, The Ultimate Evil and Mission to Magnus - were novelised. A short series entitled The Companions of Doctor Who comprised the novelisation of K-9 and Company along with the original works Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma and Harry Sullivan's War.

Besides The Paradise of Death, Target also novelised two additional non-televised stories: the radio play Slipback and the audio story The Pescatons.

A novelisation by Barry Letts of a further radio drama, The Ghosts of N-Space, was published as part of the Virgin Missing Adventures range in 1995, as was the novelisation of the independent spin-off Downtime; in the same year, the Virgin New Adventures range published a novelisation of Shakedown: The Return of the Sontarans. The most recent novelisation to be published was an adaptation of the unfinished TV story Shada, published by BBC Books in 2012.

In 2005, BBC Audio released unabridged audiobook versions of the first three Frederick Muller novelisations, read by actor William Russell (who played Ian Chesterton). Beginning in September 2007, they began releasing further unabridged audiobooks of the Target novelisations at a rate of approximately two every two months; the books themselves remain officially out of print. BBC Books began reprinting selected titles starting in July 2011.