Anthony Lamb’s cover art.
The ninth series of The Fourth Doctor Adventures concludes in February with a world of witches and a planet-sized puzzle. As with January’s Volume 1, both stories are set during Doctor Who’s 18th TV season, when the Doctor and his companions were trapped in the pocket universe known as E-Space.
“I was asked to do something erring towards the supernatural – something a bit more on the Gothic side – which isn’t a natural fit with the E-Space trilogy,” says Alan Barnes, writer of The Planet of Witches. “You can’t use any of our conventional Gothic things, because E-Space isn’t supposed to be related to our space. With State of Decay [1980], the vampires had come from our universe – there was no tradition of vampires in E-Space. So I couldn’t use any tropes that are from our reality; they had to be unique to E-Space.