Doctor Who By Other Means: The Benny New Adventures, Part 1

When Virgin lost the licence to do Doctor Who novels, that could have been it – editor Rebecca Levene could have wound things down and let the line die. That, however, wasn’t the path that Virgin took. After all, the whole reason the BBC wanted to take back the licence was that the novel line did rather well, with consistently healthy monthly sales. What if Virgin kept going, focusing on concepts and ideas they and their authors had the rights to use themselves because they weren’t covered by the Doctor Who licence, and tried to retain some of that audience, even as the first entries in the Eighth Doctor Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures were emerging to tempt them away? Thus, in The Dying Days – the sole New Adventure to feature the Eighth Doctor – Benny gets a lift to the world of Dellah in the 26th Century, where St. Oscar’s University – an extremely cosmopolitan higher education institution – has offered her a professorship. With the Earth Empire receding in this section of…