The Sorcerer's Apprentice

When the news came that we were going to get original novels carrying on from where the original series left off in 1989 it was cause enough for fans to rejoice, but after a while Virgin Publishing went one further and announced The Missing Adventures range of novels which would bring us new stories from the earlier eras of the series. Virgin actually tested the waters on this concept with a range of three "Missing Episodes" novels based on scripts that did not make it to television, and with those behind them they carried on with the next ones. The New Adventures featuring the seventh Doctor were made to look a more uniform set with matching white spines, and thus the Missing Adventures were produced with sharp black ones to separate them, and a standard cover format of the old diamond logo from the 1970s with a panel of illustration artwork and a rectangular sidebar of art on the side depicting the Doctor and a companion from the story. The first of the Missing Adventures (hereafter known as MA's) was published in 1994, Thirty three titles were produced in total, and each of the past Doctors got a good representation in print, averaging about four titles featuring each Doctor and all but one companion - Leela - was featured in print. The rules were simple: stories were to fit in between televised episodes and there were to be no radical departures from the series format. As the novel series is not official series canon, there are a few small continuity issues here and there, but that's to be expected when dealing with such a long series. No one can be expected to know everything.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice picks up only moments after the TARDIS departs from the court of Kublai Khan; the ship sets down again almost immediately prompting Ian and Barbara to question if they have indeed moved that far at all in such a short amount of time. The Doctor tells them that the time spend in transit has very little bearing on the actual distance they travel, and shows them this by leading the crew outside to an idyllic forest glade which is definitely not China of 1289. Almost immediately they are set upon by a fire breathing dragon, and realize as the adventure continues that they are on a world where fantasy has come true, complete with ye olde style knights and castles, dragons which breathe fire, magical beasts, leprechauns, and magic wielding sorcerers. And to make things even worse, there's a hostile fleet of military spaceships in orbit on a mission of its own to restore the crumbling Earth empire and the TARDIS has raised its defense shields and locked the crew out.

The novel unfolds like an epic tale similar to Marco Polo and The Daleks with the TARDIS crew spending weeks, maybe months on this world as they are dragged into its internal conflicts. The Doctor refuses to believe in magic and wants only to learn what has happened to the TARDIS but when Susan is taken hostage by the villainous wizard Dhal and used in his plot to gain power, the rest of the crew are forced to get involved. Ian and the Doctor embark on a quest for a mythical object which will turn the tide against Dhal, or so everyone hopes, and Barbara is left to mix with the nobles of the land. The feeling of time passing in great lengths is not maintained, though, in the sequences with Susan where she is locked up by Dhal, dragged out to be taunted and gloated at, and then locked up again. Susan is not alone, though, and has a kidnapped princess as company in her cel and the two of them together play off each other well. Author Christopher Bulis plays a few retcon games with Susan's dialogue (retcon meaning "retroactive continuity") and drops hints about she and the Doctor having titles where they come from but not exactly being nobles, and there is a bit of a flirtation with her latent telepathic abilities that allowed her to sense something wrong inside the TARDIS back in Edge of Destruction. The Doctor, Barbara and Ian all come across on paper almost perfectly to their screen lives - Bulis captures their mannerisms well, right down to the Doctor's crankiness and the inevitable clashes with Ian when they do not agree. The people of Avalon read a bit cliche'd, as do the military folks in their ships, but I found myself stifling a chuckle at the way Bulis has the ape-guards speak - it's shades of the Ogrons (who will not actually appear in this blog for a while).

And then it happened.

I found something about the book I did not like. Bulis does well on his narrative, it's pretty standard stuff that evokes more or less vivid images, but every so often he punctuates the pages with the phrase "and then it happened" followed by, well, something happening. I spotted it about three times on the last day I was reading the book. It's all fine and dandy to use it once but when it starts to show up a lot it doesn't really add anything to the sequence it is supposed to be enhancing. In fact I found it just annoyed my much like internet headlines of late which include that whole "...and then THIS happened" line. But as this was published in 1994 there were no such headlines to imitate, so I just take it as Bulis trying to be dramatic and not exactly succeeding. It didn't exactly spoil the book for me, but it could have been left out and things could have happened on their own without fanfare.

Other notable things - check out that cover. That's a nice striking red thing the Doctor has on and the slightly naughty looking Susan in her nightie is... interesting. The dragon with the TARDIS, though, looks a bit cartoonish, but still clever. Since all the MA's share this artwork and binding format they don't really sit well with the Target novels of the TV episodes they are set between, even because of their sheer size alone; Apprentice is 296 pages long, which is just about the combined length of its two neighbouring titles. I tried to shelve them all together and then a fellow fan friend of mine saw it and snorted "Oh, you're one of those people,". He was right, it looked bad. And it looked even worse with the BBC Books novels series which replaced Virgin's novels later on, so right now they sit together, a little cluster of black framed joy on the shelf. There's four more of them ahead in the first Doctor's adventures, but now back to TV.

NEXT EPISODE: THE KEYS OF MARINUS