“New Adventures in Sci-Fi.”

Doctor Who was dead, to begin with.

1992 isn’t considered a landmark year in the history of Doctor Who. The TV series had ended in 1989. The 2005 revival was an unlucky thirteen years away. Even the British television watching public’s collective one-night stand with Paul McGann was four years in the future. 

The Doctor Who Target Books range, a series of prose adaptations of TV scripts that had been running continuously since 1973, was also coming to a natural end. This wasn’t simply a consequence of the TV series’ stopping. It was because Target had, under Peter Darvill-Evans and his predecessor Nigel Robinson, successfully hoovered up almost all of the previously unadapted nineteen sixties and seventies serials across the five years prior, actively undertaking a programme to ‘complete’ Doctor Who in Target Book form. 

Target’s Doctor Who books had long been a source of regular income for the company, and a regular fix of printed Who adventures for fans. But in 1990 there was no new book in April, May, August or December. Because there couldn’t be. By the end of 1990 there were only eight Doctor Who serials of which Target had not published an adaptation. Four Dalek stories, three Douglas Adams stories and Battlefield. The material wasn’t there adapt, print and sell. Target were in a strange position. With no TV series fans would surely have lapped up adaptations of old stories in larger numbers, but the adaptations of older stories were, basically, done.