Doctor Who: New Adventures (Andrew Cartmel) Books in Order
Part ofAndrew Cartmel Books in OrderBrowse Andrew Cartmel's Doctor Who: New Adventures books in order, with short summaries, series background, and help on where to start.
Last updated: June 8, 2026
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Publication Order
4 books
Cybermen
by Andrew Cartmel
1990
A deep dive into Doctor Who’s Cybermen, covering their evolution, designs, and the ideas that make them frightening. Part reference guide and part behind-the-scenes history, it digs into stories, concepts, and what it took to bring Cybermen to life.
Nightshade
by Andrew Cartmel
1992
The Doctor and Ace land in a quiet English town in the 1960s and find the locals trapped in a nightmare that feels like a film coming to life. To stop the deaths, they have to uncover what is feeding on fear.
Warlock
by Andrew Cartmel
1995
The Doctor and his companions are drawn into a conflict where a corporation’s plans and a psychic child’s nightmares start to merge. As war becomes a business, the Doctor has to stop a scheme that could poison an entire planet.
The Star Beast
by Andrew Cartmel
2024
The Doctor reunites with Donna Noble when a small alien refugee lands in London and brings a much bigger problem with it. With danger closing in, Donna’s family is pulled into a mystery that tests what the Doctor can safely remember.
Series background & context
The Doctor Who New Adventures began after the television series stopped in 1989, when the story carried on in novels instead. That change mattered. The books were free to be longer, stranger, and more interested in fallout. The Doctor could still save the day, but the people around him did not always walk away unchanged.
Andrew Cartmel was right at the heart of that shift.
As the script editor who helped shape the final TV era of the Seventh Doctor, he already had a clear sense of what he wanted from this incarnation: less clowning, more mystery, more moral pressure. His New Adventures fiction keeps pushing in that direction. In Warhead and Warlock, the threats are not just monsters with ray guns. They come out of war economies, corporations, psychic damage, and systems that treat human beings like raw material.
That gives his books a very particular feel. They are futuristic, but grubby. Political, but never dry. Angry in places, funny in others, and always interested in what power does to ordinary people. The Doctor is still the smartest person in the room, yet Cartmel likes to make that intelligence uncomfortable. This is a manipulative, strategic Seventh Doctor, the version who can look three moves ahead and still leave you wondering what he is not saying.
Ace matters here too.
The New Adventures as a whole often let companions grow up in ways television had only hinted at, and Cartmel's corner of the range fits that mood. His stories throw Ace into militarised futures, messy alliances, and situations where courage is not enough on its own. She has to learn how ugly a victory can look from close up.
If you are curious about the wider line, Cartmel is a strong place to get the flavour of it. These books show why the New Adventures still have a hold on readers: they treat Doctor Who as science fiction that can be adventurous, satirical, unsettling, and surprisingly mean when it needs to be. They do not replace the TV series. They pick up where it left off, then head somewhere rougher.
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