Lungbarrow

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Lungbarrow
Doctor Who book

Series	Virgin New Adventures
Release number	60
Featuring	Seventh Doctor Chris, Romana, Ace, Leela, K-9
Writer	Marc Platt
Publisher	Virgin Books
ISBN	ISBN 0-426-20502-2
Set between	The Room With No Doors and the television movie
Release date	20 March 1997
Preceded by	The Room With No Doors
Followed by	The Dying Days

Lungbarrow is an original novel written by Marc Platt and based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Published in Virgin Books' New Adventures range, it was the last of that range to feature the Seventh Doctor.

It was the final novel, under any banner, which featured the Seventh Doctor as the "current" Doctor, although McGann's Eighth Doctor had already made his televised appearance by the time the novel was published.

Like all Doctor Who spin-off media, its canonicity in relation to the television series is unclear.

1 Plot
2 Background
3 Trivia
4 See also
5 References
6 External links
- 6.1 Reviews

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The Doctor returns to Gallifrey and the House of Lungbarrow, where for over 800 years his 44 cousins have been trapped. The Doctor is accused of a murder, but finds many allies in the form of former companions Ace, Romana, K-9 and Leela, as well as the secret linking him to a figure from Gallifreyan history known only as the Other.

[edit] Background

Lungbarrow wrapped up the last of the continuity of the New Adventures and put the Doctor on course to gather the Master's remains from Skaro, as depicted in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie. It is also one of a number of the New Adventures which is hard to obtain and is often seen on auction websites such as eBay at prices many times the original cover price.

The novel which followed Lungbarrow, Lance Parkin's The Dying Days, featured the Eighth Doctor. When Virgin subsequently lost their license to print original Doctor Who fiction, they chose to focus on a character from the New Adventures which the BBC did not own, former companion Bernice Summerfield. Lungbarrow serves, in concert with Dying Days, to gradually increase the standing of Summerfield's character, laying the groundwork for the later appearance of the Seventh Doctor's then-companion, Chris Cwej, in Summerfield's own novels.

Platt's novel, though, is largely concerned with concluding what was known as the "Cartmel Masterplan". In the final two seasons of the original 1963-1989 run of Doctor Who, the then script editor Andrew Cartmel introduced new elements of mystery into the character of the Doctor. Suggestions of dark secrets that the Doctor might be more than just a Time Lord were inserted into scripts of stories such as Ben Aaronovitch's Remembrance of the Daleks and Kevin Clarke's Silver Nemesis. Had the series not been effectively cancelled in 1989, the following season would have made some of these revelations. Elements of Platt's planned Lungbarrow instead became part of the Season 26 serial Ghost Light.

Along the way to this resolution, Lungbarrow ultimately reveals much new information about the Doctor's home world and race, some of which had been hinted at ever since the first New Adventures novel. Many of the New Adventures authors migrated to the BBC Books Doctor Who line and elements of this backstory also made their way into subsequent novels. However, there have also been elements in those novels that contradict it.

Some of the novel's revelations, among them that the Doctor's first televised companion, Susan, may not have in fact been his biological granddaughter, have proven controversial among some segments of fandom.

A new version of Lungbarrow, with both additions and subtractions to the original text, author's notes and an artwork gallery, was presented as an e-book on the BBC website on 22 August 2003.

[edit] Trivia

The Houses that Platt gives Gallifrey are similar to the household featured in Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. Badger, a character who makes his first appearance in Lungbarrow, has much in common with a character in Peake's Gormenghast novella, Boy in Darkness, which originally appeared in the collected work Sometime, Never by Golding, Wyndham and Peake. ^[1]
Lance Parkin on an Outpost Gallifrey forum thread ^[2] stated in 2005 that the reason the last three books in the Virgin New Adventures range, including Lungbarrow, 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.
The numbering of this book (60 of 61) refers to the publisher's intended order, not the actual order of publication. Because of chronic delays troubling Ben Aaronovitch's So Vile a Sin (which was eventually finished by Kate Orman), it was actually the 59th New Adventure published.