Virgin New Adventures

A meeting was held at Virgin in mid-July 1996 with the New Adventures editorial team, Peter Darvill-Evans, Rebecca Levene and Simon Winstone, and several regular writers for the series: Paul Cornell, Gareth Roberts, Andy Lane, Lance Parkin and Justin Richards.The links between the NA Dead Romance (a standalone volume in which Bernice Summerfield does not actually appear) and the two-volume Eighth Doctor novel Interference (all written by Lawrence Miles) are particularly close.[citation needed] The New Adventures were self-described as being "stories too broad and deep for the small screen," and purported to take Doctor Who into "previously unexplored realms of time and space".[citation needed] Among the developments were a "hardening" of Ace, with a story arc that had her leave the Doctor for three years (from her perspective) and returning as an older and more cynical character, more morally ambiguous endings and the introduction of new companions, such as Bernice and the Adjudicators Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester.Hints were therefore dropped about the "true" nature of the Seventh Doctor, which culminated in the penultimate novel in the Virgin series, Lungbarrow, written by Marc Platt.(Similarly, the NA's sister series, the Missing Adventures, included novelisations of the spin-off production, Downtime and the BBC Radio drama The Ghosts of N-Space.)One novel in the series, All-Consuming Fire, written by Andy Lane, featured a crossover with Arthur Conan Doyle's characters Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and also with H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.Gatiss and Roberts both did their first ever professional fiction writing for the line, as did others who later found success elsewhere, including Daniel Blythe, Justin Richards, Andy Lane and Lance Parkin.Big Finish Productions produced audio drama adaptations of the novels Birthright and Just War, altering them to remove the Doctor and his various companions and focus on the character of Benny Summerfield.In October 2012 a special adaptation of Benny's debut story, Love and War was published with Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace, to mark the 20th anniversary of the character's début.Due to the success of what was planned to be a one-off release, Big Finish continued the line with an adaptation of The Highest Science, again featuring Sylvester McCoy and Lisa Bowerman in their respective roles, in December 2014.