Why you should read the novels

Background

As eventually knows, Doctor Who was canceled at the end of 1989.

Virgin Books, the publishers of the Target novelizations, had obtained the rights to write "side" books that weren't direct novelizations of TV stories, and they decided to use these rights to carry on the story of the Seventh Doctor and Ace (and, later, other companions). While they could have published the usual unambitious tie-in books that most TV and movie series go with, the editors instead decided to aim their books at an older audience, and to try to tell stories that were "too big for the small screen." After a rocky start, Virgin found their tone, and their audience, and most of the 61 NA books were deep, riveting stories that deserved to carry the mantle of Doctor Who.

Then came the TV movie, and with it an anticipated reboot of the TV series. BBC canceled Virgin's licensed (although they continued to publish New Adventures novels with the Doctor's last companion, Benny) and began publishing their own Eighth Doctor Adventures. Initially, the plan was to make them completely separate from the Virgin novels, and watered down for a more mainstream audience. But after the new show failed to materialize, and most of the Virgin writers became BBC writers, the EDAs too became serious sci-fi/fantasy rather than just hack novels.

The EDAs ended with the resurrection of the TV series in 2005, when the BBC began publishing the New Series Adventures, as mass-market tie-in books.

As excellent as the NA and EDA novels are, there are countless fans who refuse to read them. Many of these fans have read thousands of pages of forum threads, blog posts, and so on about Doctor Who. The simple fact is that Larry Miles, Paul Cornell, etc. are better writers than most of the fan base, and they're writing fiction that's meant to entertain and/or illuminate rather than forum posts meant to argue, so it's almost certain far more interesting to read them.

Why you should read them

First, many of the novels are great stories. Alien Bodies is one of the best science fantasy books ever written; even if it weren't a Doctor Who story, it would be worth reading.

And, more to the point, they're great Doctor Who stories. There are plots, themes, and characters worth reading. There are insights into the history and workings of the Whoniverse, and into the characters you already know, and into the events you've already seen. Even if (just as with the TV show) some of those insights are later contradicted by later stories, you've still been given a new way of looking at everything you've seen. If you're really a fan of Doctor Who, why wouldn't you want that?

Finally, the novels have clearly inspired Steven Moffat. You don't have to know anything about Fitz to follow Rory's story, but you'll get more out of both stories if you've experienced both.

So, why don't people read the novels?

There's too much to read

This objection was stated by none other than Stephen Moffat. He claims that he originally followed the novels, but a dozen new full-length Doctor Who novels a year was just way too much to keep up with, compared to the 4 or so serials the TV series used to deliver.

Moffat has a point. You also don't have to read them all at once, any more than you have to watch all 26 seasons of the classic series. Read a couple of them and see what you think. If you decide it's not worth it, you've wasted a few hours of time. If you decide you want to read more, you can. Even if you decide you need to read absolutely everything, well, you've got a whole lifetime to catch up.

There's too much continuity

It's true that the novels were always more closely connected than the TV show. You can watch the rest of season 26 without having seen Battlefield and you're not missing anything except for Battlefield itself; if you read the early Benny books without having read Love and War, they won't be as good, and you may even be confused.

But again, you still don't have to read everything. Read the best and most important books, and read the summaries on the Discontinuity Guide for the ones you skip.

The novels also have a lot more continuity references to the TV show, and you probably haven't seen all 26 seasons. But if you just watch the first episode, The Invasion of Time, Remembrance of the Daleks, The Curse of Fenric, and Survival, you've pretty much got enough to follow everything that happens in the novels. You'll miss out on some clever references and inside jokes, but who cares?

The novels are just fan fiction

I don't know what this is even supposed to mean. The novels were commercially published books sold by Virgin Books and BBC Books. By definition, they're not fan fiction. The ranges had editors who solicited writers, reviewed unsolicited submissions, and worked with the writers. And of course they're licensed by the BBC In every possible sense, they're professional fiction, not fan fiction.

Meanwhile, it's true that some of the novels were written by people who had never published professional fiction beforehand. But so what? Yes, RTD and Paul Cornell had only written for TV; Larry Miles had only published non-fiction; Mark Gatiss hadn't done any professional writing. But they turned out to be great writers. You're not picking from a random slush pile or a blog somewhere; for the most part, the novels that were published were the good ones, by writers who went on to become professional writers, if they weren't already.

Of course there are some that aren't as good as the others, but you can always skip those. (In a few cases, the plots of the weaker novels are important to later stories, but in that case there's always sites like the  to give you detailed overviews of the novels you want to skip.)

But the novels aren't "real" Doctor Who

Says who? They were intended to be "real" Doctor Who. And, except for a handful of truly oddball books, most people who read them take even the worst of them as fitting into the universe, themes, and stories of the franchise. Sure, they're different stories than what you saw on TV, but then Series 7 and Season 1 are even more different, and you wouldn't claim either of them doesn't count as "real" Doctor Who. These are stories of the Doctor, his companions, his TARDIS, and his adventures in saving the universe.

But the novels didn't really happen

Who says?

RTD never said that the events of the novels were out of continuity or canon. And he certainly knew the novels, having written one of them himself, and argued at length about others, and if you watched Confidential, you saw the full set of NAs on the bookshelf in his office. When directly asked whether the novels were still in continuity, he always avoided answering. But there's a reason he had Gary Russell on staff as a continuity adviser.

Moffat, meanwhile, hasn't been afraid to answer. If you ask him whether the books are in continuity, he'll tell you that it's a stupid question, because there is no linear continuity to a show about time travelers changing the past. Everything you saw in Turn Left was on a timeline outside of normal continuity. The end of Last of the Time Lords erased everything that happened after the Toclafane arrived. The events of other stories, like Journey's End, were removed from history by the cracks in time. Hell, everything before The Big Bang happened in a different universe, before the new one was created in part out of the memories of Amy rather than actual history. Does that mean all of those  stories aren't worth watching anymore?

The EDAs, like the Moffat-era TV series, were constantly changing history as they went along, and were clearly on a path toward undoing most of what happened in the second half of the series. Nobody at the time complained that they'd wasted their time reading Unnatural History because it turned out that much of what happened in that novel ended up not in the main timeline; it was worth reading because it was worth reading, not because it was source material for filling out a chronological history of the Doctor's travels. So, if the EDAs as a whole were somehow officially removed from continuity, it still wouldn't make any difference to whether they were readable.

Whether the Doctor or Clara or whoever remembers those events or not, you will remember them, just as Moffat does, and that's all that matters.

A lot of fans are resistant to the idea that history can and does change, no matter how much Moffat (and the Doctor, with Moffat's words in his mouth) tries to hammer it home. Frankly, I have no idea why those people are watching the show. But anyone who can accept Turn Left or the Cracks storyline should have no problem accepting the novels.

What about the Looms?

This one always comes up. If you don't know the story:

In one of the early NAs, Time's Crucible, we learn that in the time of Rassilon, the pre-scientific leaders of Gallifrey cursed their successors in some way. Rassilon dealt with that by replacing natural childbirth with the Looms. A couple of later novels follow up on this idea, and Lungbarrow explicitly tells us that no Time Lord except possibly the Doctor and a few other exceptions has been born naturally from Rassilon's time up to the end of that novel.

Many fans never liked the idea of the Looms. They make the Time Lords alien in exactly the wrong way. The idea of these people who sprang to life as fully formed adults and then spent decades in bizarre Gormenghast-like isolated Houses but somehow ended up as human as Drax or Rodan is just implausible to the point of silliness. 

This is one of the few major plot points from the books that the TV series explicitly contradicted, and RTD even directly said that the Looms never happened as far as he's concerned.

So, does this mean the books are irrelevant? Of course not. It means that RTD has changed one element of Time Lord history that was established in the books. And that means even less when you consider that the same element of history had also been contradicted in later books. In Unnatural History, it's made pretty clear that the Doctor had 17 different and contradictory pasts, and only 1 of them involved been Loomed. If that didn't make the previous novels somehow irrelevant and unworthy of reading, why should RTD's proclamation make any difference?

Also, as silly as the Looms may have been initially, some later authors used them more interestingly, as part of making the Time Lords as alien as they were originally intended to be (before The Invasion of Time).

Finally, the Looms are hardly the only silly thing about the Whoniverse that anyone ever invented. The classic series, and even the new series, is chock full of silly ideas, some of which were ignored, others used as the germ to make more interesting stories later.

What about Human Nature, etc.?

Yes, the novel Human Nature was adapted into a different TV story, and it seems unlikely that the Doctor went through such similar events twice.

But it's hard to see why this makes a difference. Again, it doesn't matter which stories are still in the current, ever-changing continuity. Human Nature is a great novel, and having both read the book and seen the episodes makes both of them better. You don't have to pick one or the other.

If you're worried about being "spoiled", well, the stories are different enough from each other that you don't really know the story, and neither version relies too heavily on surprise anyway, but if you really want to skip this novel, nobody's stopping you; that doesn't affect the others in any way.

Why not the audios or comics or other novels instead?

This one is the best objection there is.

You've got 26 classic seasons, 7 new seasons (plus the shorts and animated episodes), the Adventure Games and other games designed to be in-universe, hundreds of books, over 100 audios, 50 years of comic strips and books, plays, etc., not to mention spinoffs like the Torchwood TV series, the Faction Paradox books, the BBV videos, and the Kaldor City audios. Why put your time into the NA and EDA novels instead of any of the other sources?

To some extent, this is just a matter of personal preference. I think the NA and EDA novels (along with a handful of Virgin Missing Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures) are the best version of Doctor Who outside of the TV series, and add the most to the TV series. Also, the fact that the novel editors and writers really believed they were carrying forward the main storyline of the franchise makes a difference.

But not everyone agrees.

Some of the Big Finish audios, in particular, occupy a ground halfway between the novels and the TV series. Besides the format being half-way to video, they're also typically half-way between the two in terms of accessibility and scope. And of course they feature the actors you know and love from TV. And Big Finish shares a lot of authors with the novels, so it's not like the stories are written by useless hacks. And they do an even better job of trying to keep their continuity together than the novel ranges did.

The comics, meanwhile, started off as childish stories that made no attempt to be consistent with anything, and progressed to typical Marvel youth-oriented fare, but they began to improve around the time of the Sixth Doctor's hiatus on TV, and after end of the classic series, the writers (including the show's final script editor Andrew Cartmel—who also wrote some NA novels) were taking them seriously as a continuation of the story of the Seventh Doctor, and produced some great stories. While they're not quite as deep or adult-oriented as the novels or audios, that also means they sometimes fit the tone of the TV series even better. The biggest problem with the comics is that they're just harder to get hold of (at least legally—I'm pretty sure you can torrent everything if you want to).

Also, the BBC animated webcasts, if you can find them, are worth watching. (If you're worried about figuring out which stories are part of continuity, Death Comes to Time should make you give up and just start enjoying yourself; if it doesn't, there's no hope for you.)

As for the various spinoffs, definitely go watch Torchwood, and the Sarah Jane Adventures, if you haven't. But skip their tie-in books. Faction Paradox, Iris Wildthyme, and the Benny New Adventures have some great books, but you'll do better to start off with their predecessors in the NA and EDA lines. For example, Faction Paradox is more fun if you've read Christmas on a Rational Planet, Alien Bodies, and Interference. And all of the rest are fun, but amateurish; it's not as easy to produce compelling video on a shoestring budget as compelling novels.

But really, try a bit of everything, and see what you enjoy most? If you disagree with me and decide to start buying all the Big Finish audios you can and skip the novels, I've got no problem with that.

What's wrong with the past-Doctor and New Series stories?

I'm guessing the Seventh and Eighth Doctors aren't your favorite, or most familiar, incarnations. And there were as many books written about the other Doctors as about them. So, why read the NAs and EDAs instead of those other books?

The first past-Doctor stories were the Virgin Missing Adventures, published as an adjunct to the NAs. They were written by many of the same writers, and some of them were pretty good (and a couple of them fit closely into the NA storylines). But the need to fit the stories into established gaps in the timeline, and to avoid doing anything memorable enough that we'd expect the Doctor and companions to have commented on the events at some point on TV, was very restrictive. Also, there was only 1/6th as much experience writing for each of the past Doctors as for the Seventh—and, unlike the NAs, many of the writers saw the MAs as a less-important diversion, a fun chance to get to play with characters they didn't really control. And of course there was no continuing storyline to build up. Finally, many of them were written with the explicit intention of retconning some troubling bit of continuity or "redeeming" some unpopular character. So, while the MAs may have been as much professionally-published fiction as the NAs, they often feel a little bit like fan fiction. The BBC Past Doctor Adventures were basically the same, only by that time the writers knew that everyone expected less from a PDA than an EDA.

The Telos novellas, on the other hand, are mostly great stories—and there aren't too many of them, and they're short—so if you want to read about your favorite past Doctors, maybe start there.

The Short Trips short story collections (both the original Virgin collections and the later Big Finish ones) also have some great stories about past Doctors; most of the books have a few real clunkers, but you can always skip over those.

Meanwhile, the New Series Adventures, on top of having all of the problems of the MA/PDA books in trying to fit into an existing story instead of building a new story, were explicitly aimed more at mass appeal. Instead of encouraging the writers to push the boundaries of what a Doctor Who story could be, they encouraged them to write the kinds of stories TV viewers would expect. Of course they ended up with many of the same writers, and some of them produced some pretty good books, but the NSAs never lived up to the standards of the NA and EDA lines.

What order?

Unless you're really ready to commit to reading 100+ novels, don't worry about that yet. Pick up a couple of the best-regarded books, maybe skipping over the ones that are too tied to a specific story arc (which, sadly, rules out some of the best ones…), and see what you think. I'd recommend Love and War, Alien Bodies, The Also People, The Scarlet Empress, Damaged Goods, Vampire Science, Just War, The Taking of Planet 5, Conundrum, Blood Heat, The Tomorrow Windows, and Sky Pirates!

The Doctor's Wife

The Doctor's Wife was originally described as the ultimate TARDIS runaround episode, but of course it turned out to be much more than that.

The TARDIS Runaround

The TARDIS interior is discussed more in the post about Journey to the Center of the TARDIS. However, it's worth pointing out that this episode follows the Logopolis/Castrovalva tradition just as much as that one follows the Invasion of Time tradition: Most of the TARDIS is made up of rooms and corridors that look similar to the console room. Logopolis also introduced the Architectural Configuration System, which (among other things) allowed the Doctor or the TARDIS herself to adjust the configuration of rooms, create new rooms, or jettison rooms (which could be used for "ballast" or "thrust"), which shows up here again.

In this episode, we learn that the Architectural Configuration System contains console rooms that have been jettisoned, and even rooms that haven't been created yet—which is cool, but not a shocking addition to the TARDIS mythology. We also learn that time can behave oddly inside the TARDIS, something the NAs and EDAs both covered but which hasn't yet been seen on TV.

Idris

The real point of the story, of course, is Idris, a woman who gets the TARDIS matrix dumped into her head.

The idea of a humanoid TARDIS is not new, it permeates the EDA novels—although Gaiman may not have known that.

Alien Bodies introduces Marie, a humanoid TARDIS from the future (in a timeline that ended up never happening), who became stuck in the form of a women's police constable after visiting London in 1963. We learn that in the future, as part of their War effort, the Time Lords began breeding TARDISes that can take humanoid (well, Gallifreyanoid) form because it makes them more effective. Besides being able to walk around and talk to people, they can directly see how the abstract block transfer computations they run on interact with the world their pilots have to live in. We get a bit more of that in other novels, like The Taking of Planet Five.

But it's in Interference where things start to get interesting. The Doctor picks up a new companion named Compassion, who's a member of the Remote. The Remote are a colony of humans created by Faction Paradox, who connect directly to their media signals at a subconscious level. They're also are effectively immortal, but in a very odd way—when one dies, a new body is grown in the Remembrance Tanks, based on the memories of all of the living people who interacted with her—so eventually, everyone becomes their own public personas. The Compassion the Doctor meets is on her sixth life.

Over the next few novels, Compassion becomes increasing dysfunctional, being separated from her culture's media signals, and she begins picking up stray signals from the TARDIS instead. The Doctor tries to encourage her to interact more with human society (and with her fellow companion Fitz, although he has his own remote-and-TARDIS-related issues), but she withdraws further. A complicated sequence of events over multiple novels culminates in Shadows of Avalon: the Doctor's TARDIS is destroyed, but Compassion becomes a TARDIS.

This is a unique event, with almost no hope of anyone ever recreating it; the Time Lords realize that the only way they're going to get the humanoid TARDISes they need for the War (and know they will have during the War) is to kidnap Compassion and force her to breed.

Meanwhile, over the subsequent novels, the Doctor is able to interact with Compassion both as a TARDIS (e.g., the way she controls her interior) and as a humanoid. He learns, for example, that the randomizers that he's installed into his TARDIS in the past to avoid detection by the Time Lords are not only painful, but feel like a violation, in an almost rapey way. He's forced to reconsider the entire pilot-TARDIS relationship.

The story has two different endings. In The Ancestor Cell, we learn that the Doctor's TARDIS hasn't really been destroyed, but has become linked to Gallifrey and the War in a complicated way, which is only resolved when the Doctor destroys Gallifrey. Compassion sets his TARDIS to regrow (although will take over a century to complete), and leaves him for a TARDIS mechanic, someone who loves her like a man loves a car rather than with the Doctor's complex relationship to his TARDIS. Later in the EDAs, the Doctor runs into Compassion, who's apparently checking in on him to see if he's ready for the next stage of her plan, but we never get to see how that turns out. Meanwhile, the Faction Paradox spinoff series is set in a timeline where Ancestor never happened, the War wasn't averted, and Compassion becomes a major player in a game that may be even greater than the War, until she ultimately turns herself into the City of the Saved, which is another huge story not relevant here (but definitely worth reading).

Obviously this isn't at all the same story. In fact, in many ways, it's the exact opposite. Compassion is a human who has to come to terms with being a TARDIS; Idris is a TARDIS who has to come to terms with being a human. Compassion is a new TARDIS, something the Doctor hasn't dealt with in centuries; Idris is the Doctor's own TARDIS. The Doctor's love for his TARDIS is played off as a bittersweet and touching relationship in Idris's eyes (although it's also played for laughs in Amy's), but it looks deeply disturbing from Compassion's. Most importantly, the Doctor and his TARDIS have always been equal companions, while Compassion was a companion who often found herself as a spectator in events beyond her control, comprehension, or interest, until suddenly she became the most important thing in the universe and saw the Doctor as little more than a pawn.

Also, because the EDAs had the Doctor and Compassion interacting for a half dozen novels instead of one 45-minute episode, there was ample room both for more depth, and for long stretches where the core themes were basically ignored and Compassion was just another companion or just a TARDIS.

Still, both stories serve to let us—and the Doctor—look at the pilot-TARDIS relationship from a new angle, primarily because he can finally talk to the TARDIS. While Journey to the Center of the TARDIS lets us see the TARDIS as a machine, and as a world, The Doctor's Wife lets us see the TARDIS as a character.

Also, in both the post-Ancestor Cell novels and the post-Doctor's Wife episodes, the TARDIS often seems a little dark and threatening; after being forced to see just how big, how powerful, and most of all, how alien a TARDIS is, even when in human form, it's hard to take it for granted as just a magical box for adventures. Ancestor and The Name of the Doctor both had a dying TARDIS looming over the proceedings; The Gallifrey Chronicles and Journey had a damaged and dangerous and largely unknown TARDIS for part of the setting. Multiple stories in both ranges show the TARDIS accomplishing things that we'd never seen before, with no real explanation, reinforcing the idea that the TARDIS is far beyond our comprehension, and the little time we had getting to know her wasn't nearly enough. These stories wouldn't have worked nearly as well without Shadows of Avalon and The Doctor's Wife. You can see that in the NAs, which tried similar stories following Time's Crucible, but to less substantial effect. For that matter, the hints of people lost in the TARDIS that the Doctor has forgotten, but the TARDIS probably hasn't, seem less comical in the later stories of each range than they had in, e.g., Interference or the spinoff Adventure Games.

Again, Gaiman probably didn't know most of the history—he read the Target novelizations of the classic series voraciously, but, unlike Moffat, he'd never read any of the original novels. And it doesn't seem like Moffat made any major changes to his story. So, it's just a coincidence that he opened up so many of the same themes that Larry Miles and Paul Cornell had in the novels. But it may not be a coincidence that Moffat chose to follow up on them.

The Name of The Doctor

The Name of the Doctor, and the arc leading up to it, reuses many elements from Unnatural History, and the arc leading up to it, but it also borrows from some other stories.

Doctor Who?

The first EDA, The Eight Doctors, was all about the Doctor trying to discover the answer to the question "Doctor Who?" This was the first time the question had been asked seriously within any story, and Series 7 is the second time. Of course it's the Great Intelligence, rather than the Doctor, asking that question, and he's only interested in the answer because it's the key to opening the Doctor's tomb.

The Eight Doctors is also the novel that explains that every TARDIS has an Eye of Harmony, which is both a symbolic manifestation of the power source on Gallifrey and a link to that power. This idea is reused in the last EDA, The Gallifrey Chronicles, and again in Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.

It also featured the Doctor traveling through his own past, meeting all of his past incarnations, much as Clara did at the end of Series 7.

The recurring amnesiac-Eighth-Doctor storyline set up by the movie and this novel annoyed more fans than it inspired—even more so when later novels re-amnesified him twice, especially the second time, when he lost all memory completely because he'd removed his entire species from history. There's definitely something interesting that could have been done with that (and a few novels, notable The Adventuress of Henrietta Street and The Gallifrey Chronicles, touch on it), but mostly it was just tedious. In Series 7, the Doctor doesn't have the same kind of total amnesia, but he is blocking (or hiding?) something very important (which turns out to be his War incarnation) that, as in the later EDAs, directly connects with his having destroyed Gallifrey (or not, in this case).

Sam and Clara

Finally, The Eight Doctors also introduced a new companion, Sam Jones, who the fans also hated… but who ultimately became fascinating, at least as a plot device if not as a character.

Sam was a perfect companion. In fact, she was so perfect that the Doctor was suspicious. Had some enemy created her, or twisted her into exactly what he needed, to manipulate him? Or, worse, had he somehow twisted her history himself? Starting with Alien Bodies, the novels began to gradually reveal that there was something to this suspicion. And then, in Unnatural History, the story came out.

As a result of the leakage from the Eye of Harmony in the TV movie, a dimensional scar opened in time. Sam had split into two people, and the Doctor had a conversation with her where he explained that she was impossible. Blonde Sam—the one who was traveling with the Doctor as his perfect companion—was destined to sacrifice herself to close the rift. But the problem was worsened as a result of first the TARDIS and then the Doctor's biodata becoming entangled with the rift, just as Griffin was trying to manipulate it, not to mention Faction Paradox and all the other contingents trying to rewrite history at the time. The Doctor tried to find a way to keep both Sams alive and in history, but ultimately, Dark Sam sacrificed herself by walking into the rift, disappearing into the Doctor's past histories, leaving Blonde Sam free to travel with the Doctor.

Clara was, in the Doctor's words from He Said, She Said, "Always exactly what I need. Perfect. Too perfect." A few hints were dropped throughout the series, then, in The Name of the Doctor, the story came out.

As a result of the TARDIS explosion at the end of the previous series, there were cracks in time. The Eye of Harmony as also involved again. Clara had split into multiple people, and the Doctor had a conversation with her with very similar wording to that in Unnatural History. One version or another of Clara was apparently destined to sacrifice herself to save time. But the problem was worsened when the Doctor's biodata became entangled with the cracks (the TARDIS had obviously been entangled from the start…), just as the Great Intelligence was trying to manipulate it, not to mention the renegade faction of the Church and all of the enemies in the Alliance trying to rewrite history. The Doctor tried to find a way to keep Clara alive and in history, but ultimately, she sacrificed herself by walking into a rift, disappearing into the Doctor's past histories.

Of course things went differently from there. The Eleventh Doctor stepped into his own past, and with Clara's help he was able to sort out the root problem and get history back on track, and then the Doctor regenerated and Clara went off with his new incarnation.

Also, their personalities are very different. Sam was a strident teenage activist, always sure of her ideals but unsure of herself, while Clara is a self-assured young woman who doesn't seem to care too much about political causes. Sam was insecure and hesitant with men, with little middle ground between platonic friendship and stalker-level seduction, while Clara was breezily flirty with everyone. They're both smart, and they both somehow have knowledge they shouldn't have had (primarily about computers), but they're smart in different ways.

So, as usual, Moffat has taken an idea from the novels and spun a different story out of the same major plot points, around characters who have many superficial similarities but feel like completely different people, and he's even used dialogue from the novels in ways that fit the different situation differently, but at the same time perfectly.

The Great Intelligence's Plan

In a nutshell, the Great Intelligence wanted to change history by rewriting the Doctor's timestream, and in particular by changing his death.

Alien Bodies gave us the idea of biodata, the timestream made physical and manipulable. Unnatural History had multiple agents trying to manipulate history through the Doctor's biodata. Griffin was particularly interested in changing the Doctor's history, while Faction Paradox (and, behind the scenes, the Enemy) were more interested in using the Doctor's insanely connected biodata to change everything.

Faction Paradox was especially interested in changing the Doctor's death—both his future death (as seen earlier in Alien Bodies) and his past reincarnations (as seen later in Interference), and they succeeded in the latter. Interestingly, in the TV version of the story (in the following episode), it's ultimately the Doctor who changes history by changing the death of a previous incarnation.

There are some clear differences. Neither Griffin nor the Faction Little Brother attempt to enter the Doctor's biodata; Griffin edits it with some kind of technological tool, while Little Brother entices the Doctor into causing a paradox that will affect it indirectly.

Other Connections

"Time travel has always been possible in dreams" is lifted straight from Larry Miles. The whole idea of time travel via candlelit rituals, which somehow manages to violate the rules of time travel as the Time Lords (and we) know it, is exactly what Faction Paradox have always done.

Little Brother's long conversation with the Doctor in Unnatural History has a lot that resonates with The Name of the Doctor, even though on the surface it's all different.

• "Is this the version where they banned all mention of his name, and yours, for consorting with aliens? Or the one where he got every record of himself deleted from the files?" This was about the Other and about the Fifth Doctor in Cold Fusion. But it can just as easily be read as about the War Doctor, and about the Eleventh Doctor deleting every record of himself from every file in the universe.
• "Maybe you're living in the middle of a time war. Maybe there's an Enemy out there... who's rewriting you when you're not looking… Maybe there's no one left on Gallifrey... Or maybe the whole planet's being destroyed, and undestroyed, and destroyed, and you just caught them at the wrong moment." That's probably about the Second War in Heaven and its aftermath, although if so, it's mostly referring to events that hadn't happened yet for either Little Brother or the Doctor, and hadn't been written yet for the authors to know about. So it applies just as well to the Last Great Time War and its aftermath that they also couldn't possibly have known about. The War Doctor destroyed Gallifrey, but the Eleventh Doctor is (next episode) able to go back in time and undestroy it, leaving it sealed in a bubble permanently on the verge of destruction, which the Twelfth Doctor will presumably be able to undo (otherwise, how are the Time Lords going to give him that new cycle of regenerations that they gave him for saving them?).

The ghost of River has some similarities to the ghost of the Master as glimpsed in the late EDAs.

Beyond Series 7

At the largest scale, the EDAs are about the aftermath of a Time War. The Time Lords were going to lose—and, because of how they'd changed to fight the War, they didn't deserve to win anyway (as seen in The Taking of Planet 5 and a few other novels, in addition to those discussed above, and to some extent the Faction Paradox spinoff series and the Benny New Adventure Dead Romance). The Doctor erased most of the Time War by destroying Gallifrey (in The Ancestor Cell), erasing both the Time Lords and their Enemy from history. The Doctor carried this secret knowledge with him, unknowingly also carrying the means to undo what he'd done and restore Gallifrey. The novels end—like this episode—with most of the secrets being revealed. So now, the TV series has gone beyond the EDAs; in Day of the Doctor we see how the Doctor changes the history of the War and saves his people. It still remains to be seen how he restores them from the time bubble, and how he stops Rassilon's Final Sanction, and so on, but the novels never got to explore any of that territory. It'll be interesting to see whether this means that Series 8 will have a lot less of the EDAs than the past three have.

The other major theme in the EDAs has been changing both universal history, and personal history—both things that should be impossible, but with the Time Lords at first challenged and then removed from the universe, everything is up for grabs. That's been a theme of the entire revived series, and especially the Moffat era, but if the Time Lords return, will that change?

Meanwhile, in Unnatural History, Interference, Anachrophobia, and other novels, Faction Paradox realized that if the Doctor were to create paradoxes by changing his history, this would give him unfathomable power, but also place him in some sense under their control. This is a much more interesting threat than the direct threats the Doctor has faced in most of the TV series, and it's one of the few things from the novels that Moffat hasn't touched on at all. But in the last three episodes, the Doctor has stepped into his own timeline, went back and changed the most significant event of his life, found his Fourth incarnation alive at the same time as him, gotten a new cycle of regenerations by the Time Lords even though they're still locked in a time bubble… Will any of that have consequences? If the Twelfth Doctor has no shadow, we'll know Moffat's still reading Miles…