Adventures in Lockdown (edited by Steve Cole)

Chris Chibnall, Paul Cornell, Russell T Davies, Neil Gaiman, Mark Gatiss, Pete McTighe, Steven Moffat, Vinay Patel & Joy Wilkinson (2020) Adventures in Lockdown, 182 pages.

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In 2020 BBC Books gathered a great team of Doctor Who writers and their short stories in a collection called Adventures in Lockdown. Just to see all the writers’ names made me buy the book.

The texts are very short and they come in many different styles. Some add things to the tv series and some are alternative versions of things that have happened. For my great annoyance one story even proves that Doctor Who is only a tv show character and the Time Lord does not exist at all.

Some of my favourites are Chris Chibnall‘s Things She Thought While Falling, a story about what The 13th Doctor tought about while falling towards Earth the first time after renegenarion and Vinay Patel‘s The Tourist, a weird story about a man who does not remember his own life. I also loved a combination of stories by Paul Cornell where The Doctor has an ethical problem after punishing a villain too harshly. In a Neil Gaiman story Rory is making a video diary to his unborn child.

Russell T Davies has written his own version of how The 8th Doctor regenerated into the 9th. The story became obsolete when Steven Moffat created The War Doctor and a full story line about the events at the end of the Time War. The Davies version is also included in the book.

The texts are very short and the book is fast to read. Nobody explains anything, so the presumption is that the reader already knows quite a lot. I like that.

Even if some stories don’t fit into my impression of the Whoniverse, the story combilation is great material for fans. I will read it again, absolutely.