Prequel 1: Frayed

Back in the classic era of Doctor Who there were really just two ways to enjoy the series: you either watched it on TV or you read the story in one of the many many many novelizations published by Target Books. Given that there were a lot of televised episodes missing (and there still are today) a lot of fans never even saw some of the earlier episodes and had to rely on the novelizations to fill in the gaps, to give us an idea of what we were missing. By the time I got to see the old black and white era episodes I had read the novelized versions of most of them; some were about on par with Target's standard practice of telling the adventure in under 140 pages, but then there would be others where the author was allowed to go a bit beyond what was seen on TV and maybe add something that was scripted and never made it to broadcast. It was in these embellishments and changes that the next level of Doctor Who was seeded, and eventually we as fans got what we had always wanted: new adventures in print.

New material was called just that, The New Adventures, and they were started by Virgin Publishing in 1991 and they picked up where the televised series had ended in late 1989, taking the current Doctor as played by Sylvester McCoy to new places, with new companions and new monsters. In 1994 Virgin branched out and gave the same treatment to the previous incarnations of the Doctor with The Missing Adventures. And in 2001 the BBC extended a license to Telos Publishing to create their own series of hardcover Doctor Who novellas, although the Telos run was ended after only 15 tales. Eventually the BBC cancelled Virgin's license as well and all the printed Doctor Who material flowed from BBC Books, although Big Finish was able to publish their own books eventually.

The original fiction of Telos and Virgin allowed imagination to run a bit wild but still stay within the bounds of what should be a Doctor Who story. New authors who were not necessarily part of the BBC stable came forward with their takes on the show and shared what some purists call non-canon speculation - possibly labelled so harshly because some of the storytelling was new, gritty, scary and innovative and those not really wanting to look beyond their TV screens didn't like that. For all my complaining about new directions in the televised show lately, I actually adored these novels, almost all of them, for the fact that they broke out of the confines of TV and built on what we knew, or in the case of Frayed, what we did not know.

Frayed takes place before the televised series, before the Doctor and his grand-daughter Susan are the people we will meet in a tale of curious school teachers and a police box in a junkyard. Here they are travellers, explorers, with a fully functioning TARDIS but before it is named such. There is no police box, there are no Daleks, just an old man and a young girl who calls him "grandfather".

Despite the "reset" of the protagonists this is pretty much a normal Doctor Who story through and through with the Doctor and Susan becoming separated and allowing the reader to see the tale unfold from two perspectives - three if you count that of the rest of the cast, who are under attack by forces unknown only called "the foxes" on an alien planet where children with a genetic predisposition towards difficult behavior are warehoused and eventually, hopefully, cured.

Is this a good place to start for a new fan? No, honestly, it is not. The significance of a lot of smaller points are lost on a fresh reader, the quirks of the Doctor's speech and body language are better suited to be enjoyed after seeing William Hartnell's portrayal on screen. A science fiction fan, however, would certainly enjoy the technological edge of the story, the wild environment of the planet and the claustrophobic facility where the bulk of the tale takes place. But where the Doctor Who content of the novella is concerned it's pretty much best viewed in retrospect, much like the Companion Chronicles audio series made by Big Finish which take place within this pre-series universe.

But I liked it, I liked it a lot. And now that Big Finish have been picking up the Virgin novels for adaptation into audio, maybe they will pick up some of these as well...

(image of possible audio cover nicked from online, it's not mine, but I think it looks great).