Knock-knock.
Who's there?
Yes.


One of the what ought to be the freedom of writing a story involving the character known as "the Doctor" is that he can be dropped into any time or place to have an adventure. This freedom, however, has it limits:  though time and place may be flexible, the Doctor, himself, is not.  And it is this that causes the stories in Time Trips, a collection of short stories by well-known contemporary authors, to stumble.

The stories in Time Trips are a mixed bag, covering multiple Doctoral incarnations, some with companions, some without.  The success of these stories is also a mixed bag, some of them capturing the character of the Doctor and the sensibility of a "Doctor Who" story very well, others failing dismally.  What was most surprising about the failures is that the authors of those stories are, in their normal genres, quite good writers able to capture character and scene in well-respected novels.

The most blatant of these failures is the story "the Bog Warrior."  In it, the Doctor is dropped, sans companion, into someone else's story and acts only as an observer not a participant.  The author tries to insert the Doctor into a ready-made world instead of building the world around the Doctor.  It is not a "Doctor Who" story; it is a story that has the Doctor in it.  On the other hand, one of the most successful stories in the collection is not even in the book, per se: it is incorporated into the dust jacket, its physical structure and placement mimicking the tumbling nature of its narrative.  In addition to this, though, it succeeds because "a Long Way Down," though the Doctor himself has only a small part, uses the sensibility of the Whoniverse as the basis of the story rather than shoe-horning the Doctor into a universe where he does not fit.

In short, Time Trips is only a moderately successful addition to stories about the Doctor and except for the loss of the unique format of "a Long Way Down" is best purchased in paperback.

BBC
Doctor Who: Time Trips
Stories by Cecelia Ahern, Jake Arnott, Trudi Canavan, Jenny T. Colgan, Stella Duffy, Nick Harkaway, Joanne Harris, A.L. Kennedy
(BBC Books; Penguin Random House UK, 2014)