Books: Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures: The Well-Mannered War By Gareth Roberts (1997)

“Two factions have laid claim to the planet Barclow: humans from Metralubit, and the Chelonians. But instead of fighting, for nearly two hundred years, the two sides are the best of friends. The Doctor, Romana and K-9 arrive to find an important election looming. K-9 begins a career in politics, Romana reunites with an old friend, and the Doctor discovers a plot to alter the war's friendly nature. And what has Galatea, leader of the beautiful Femdroids, got to do with this?”

As typical with a Gareth Roberts tale –especially with his love of the Fourth Doctor -story was good with some funny characters, including the communist character which made me smile -he's spot on with a lot of his comments. The combination of producer Philip Hinchcliffe’s horror and Graham Williams humor is handled very well. For the “guest characters”, he fleshes them out enough it and gives weight for their actions and motives. The return of his Chelonians, who he first introduced in the New Adventures lines, works fairly well in this story. There is a disappointing cliffhanger at the end, which is no fault of the author, but what happened to the book line up.

This was thirty-third and final book in the Missing Adventures range (and set between the TV serials Shada and The Leisure Hive) and The Well-Mannered War is one of a number of Virgin Doctor Who novels which sell for far in excess of their cover price, especially on online auction sites such as eBay and Amazon. This was my second attempt at getting a copy. The first time, bought some time ago (a year or so), I paid well over $40 for it. And it was a fairly horrible mess. This time, I paid about $30 and got a reasonable copy –certainly not new, but not that used. At the time, in the late 1990s, Virgin lost their license from the BBC to publish original Doctor Who fiction. Lungbarrow and The Dying Days are similar in this respect, as they were the two final Virgin New Adventures to be published (though, originally, Lungbarrow was to be the last, which lead directly in the 1994 TV movie, but due to publishing issues, it became the penultimate title instead). And those can go for well over $100 a piece.

Years later, it was learned by Who author Lance Parkin the reason the last three books in the Virgin range, were so expensive on the secondary market was excessive demand, rather than an unusually low initial print run. However, he also noted that reprints of these books were not allowed, because Virgin's license expired before a second printing might otherwise have been made (which also may explain why all those books have never been reprinted over the decades – the original authors retain the copyrights of various characters and situations they created for the story, which would force the BBC into contract negotiations that they would see as untenable to them financially –as seen with the tales written by Douglas Adams).