September 2005, the dying days of the EDAs...

Having just finished the rather lovely To The Slaughter I now have my sights well and truly set on the final EDA The Gallifrey Chronicles, which amongst other things will (I presume) restore the Doctor's homeworld just in time for RTD and his chums to blow it up again. It will also, (again, I presume) restore the Doctor's memories, and give some kind of conclusion to the adventures of Fitz and Trix.

Having started the EDA reviews almost exactly a year ago, with the intention of being at this stage back in June, when The Gallifrey Chronicles was actually published, I feel that perhaps a word of explanation might be in order. Specifically, a brief justification of why, like the Great Prophet Zarquon, I am so very late. Not that it needs excusing, perhaps, but, well, I've started so I'll finish.

There have been a couple of factors involved. The first is comparatively minor, and is also crushingly practical - namely the difficulty, on occasion, in actually managing to get hold of the books. Surprisingly, the more recent EDAs (and really by 'more recent' I would say anything from about 2001 onwards) come round on eBay far less regularly than the earlier ones, which is why, in desperation almost, I have turned to the safe and sanitised delights of Play.com for many of the more recent books. This is probably a convenient point at which to thank the various people who have kindly sold me their own copies of some of the books - namely Ant Williams, who allowed me to start 2005 with The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, and Hope (or 'The Good, The Bad, and The Raving' - although not necessarily in that order); Si Hart (source of Eater of Wasps and The Year of Intelligent Tigers); and lastly Logo Polish, who actually supplied The very Gallifrey Chronicles which I'm about to read! Thanks to you all.

But another, more important, reason why I have slipped so far behind schedule is simply, well, sorry BBC, but... the quality of some of the books themselves. I think one of the lessons learned from The Trial of a Timelord was that a long-running story arc linking together several adventures isn't necessarily a good idea, and particularly when the resolution turns out to be rather rushed and messy. For that matter, perhaps we should respect the wisdom of Lord Thomas of Baker, who suggested that even the much looser Key to Time theme wasn't a great success - his opinion, at least in the early 90s, was that each adventure should be approached with great enthusiasm and attack, but then at the end you should dump the whole lot and move on "always with a sense of a brand, new adventure".

Indeed, you don't even need to look further than the previous book range for a warning of the perils of linked stories. The NAs started with a series of four books linked by the character of 'the Timewyrm', but Virgin clearly realised very quickly that a linking theme in TV spin-off novels is rather like immortality - namely, a curse not a blessing. The following three books were (allegedly) a trilogy linked by a silver cat in the TARDIS, but since neither of those elements even appears in the middle book it's clear that in oh so many ways, 'standalone' books were a better move. Not only do they allow for being swapped in the release schedule if the need arises, they also make it much easier for the casual reader to pick one up at random without being totally confused. Mind you, to go off at a slight tangent, Virgin forgot their own lesson in their last year or so, and nearly came a cropper when a key book in the 'Psi-Powers' arc almost never got published at all!

So with all this weight of precedent against it, the decision to link stories together into what is generally called 'the Sabbath Arc' was either brave or foolish or just plain ignorant of the facts... and during that arc is where I, and the EDAs in general, really began to flounder. For one thing, the character of Sabbath seemed ill-formed and inconsistent - sometimes a mischievous time meddler, sometimes a Machiavellian chess-player, and then again at other times just the hired help for some unspecified menace. And to compound matters, there was no real sense of where the arc was heading until very near the end of its run, with the introduction of the crystals in Timeless. Add to that the fact that the finale Sometime Never... lacks any real sense of emotion or personality, and the whole thing really was, dare I say, a mistake.

At the same time, to make matters even worse, I was reading that run of very stodgy and tedious books just at the time that the shiny new TV series arrived. Since the latter reminded us all within about twenty minutes, just why we love Doctor Who so much (namely, that it's fun and it's entertaining and it's alive) it only served to highlight even more, how dull and dreary and weighed-down the EDAs had become.

Thankfully, with the ending of Sabbath's arc (and indeed his life, poor old soul) the EDAs seem to have recovered some of their earlier vitality. Of the five books since Sometime Never... only one of them (The Tomorrow Windows) was below par, and the past two or three have been amongst the very best of the range. I think this indicates where the EDAs have been at their strongest. The Deadstone Memorial and To The Slaughter are by Trevor Baxendale and Stephen Cole respectively, both of whom have contributed various other books to the range - Eater of Wasps by the one, and Vanishing Point by the other, are also amongst the top rank of the EDAs. And I think that whilst arguably the highlights of the NAs were those 'envelope-pushing' moments (Human Nature, Happy Endings, The Also People, The Left-Handed Hummingbird) the EDAs (which didn't have the need to 'prove themselves' in quite the same way) have been at their best just telling entertaining, exciting, stand-alone stories. The real triumphs in terms of the EDA authors haven't been the experimental types such as Lawrence Miles or Paul Magrs; but rather the reliable, 'jobbing-writers' (the Ian Stuart Blacks and David Fishers rather than the Douglas Adamses, if you like, and with respect to all concerned). So the books by Trevor Baxendale, and Stephen Cole, and (to come up with some names other than just those two) Mark Clapham, and Nick Walters, are the ones to reach for if you have the choice and the inclination, rather than the fascinating, but utterly baffling, Interference or the awful, but awful, The Scarlet Empress.

I have enjoyed the EDAs, mostly, and once I've finished The Gallifrey Chronicles, I will have read the whole lot in the two-and-a-bit years since May 2003 - well, except for about thirty pages which were inexplicably missing from my copy of Legacy of the Daleks (although frankly, it was so dreadful a book I didn't much miss them). They have been more prone to lows than the NAs (although having said that, there may be an element of the Memory Cheats in that observation) but they have certainly had their own share of highlights.

Lastly, before I finish, my thanks of course to Lissa for hosting my witterings (and apologies if that sounds like some kind of euphemism) and for finding the lovely clear cover images that have accompanied them. And, of course, for the superb banner and the Ed Andrew gag.

So, in a curious case of time repeating itself, another literary era of Doctor Who comes to an end. Back in 1997 Lance Parkin wrote the final NA, ending with the shocking moment where Benny Summerfield beds the Doctor. Now, eight years later, Parkin is back, to write the last story of the eighth Doctor. Can he possibly top that?

Hold onto your hats - I'm going in...