Released as eBooks across 2014, the ‘Time Trips’ stories invited a group of well-known writers to come and play in the Doctor Who universe.

The eight stories have now been collected into a hardback volume, wrapped with an additional dust-jacket tale.

With each writer choosing their Doctor and period of the show, and only eight tales, there was no attempt to have a spread across the show’s history as with 2013’s Puffin collection. Consequently we have ended up with two stories for the Third and Tenth Doctors, and one for each of the Second, Fourth, Sixth and Eleventh.

The standout tale comes from Joanne Harris. ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller’ is a touching story nestled in the continuity of Pertwee’s final story and provides an authentic rendering of his dashing Doctor. Dying after his final trip to Metebelis Three, he ends up in a menacing village of giant toys and gets to enjoy one heart-rending final hurrah.

The other highlight is Jenny T Colgan’s ‘Into the Nowhere’ which delivers a well-pitched series of thrills and scares for Eleven and Clara on a curiously unnamed planet, culminating in a cracking twist. Colgan also provides the cover story, a clever little temporal tale which you follow around the dust jacket and also has the added benefit of featuring the Twelfth Doctor. Adding these tales to her rather fabulous novel ‘Dark Horizons’, you have to wonder why Cardiff has not come knocking for a script or two yet!

For ‘The Anti-Hero’, Stella Duffy takes the Second, with Jamie and Zoe, back to the Great Library of Alexandria for an encounter with Hero and she catches the charm of this trio well. Jake Arnott creates an enjoyable celebrity historical too in ‘A Handful of Stardust’, with a story that fits the Sixth Doctor well although its resolution feels a little weak (if fitting for the era).

Of the other trips, we also enjoyed Trudi Canavan’s ‘Salt of the Earth’ as it provided the superb image of the Third Doctor and Jo landsailing across the salt plains of future Australia.

While most of the stories have something to recommend them, they are variable in both length and tone, veering from the exciting pace of the modern series to more traditional fare and a couple struggle to feel sufficiently Doctor Who-ish for our taste. It would be hard to call the collection an unqualified success, but there is plenty to enjoy here, particularly from Joanne Harris – who we hope is working on a full length Doctor Who novel right now!

Released on Monday 2 March 2015 by BBC Books.

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