Time Trips is an anthology of Doctor Who stories by accomplished authors All eight stories are novella length, previously published as separate ebooks. Each has a two-page title spread with an illustration by Ben Morris. Although a couple of the Doctors appear in two stories, and not all the Doctors are covered, the assortment does span six different versions of the hero from his sixty years of television adventures.

A.L. Kennedy's "The Death Pit" is a delightful tale of the Fourth Doctor. It is 90% characterization, with an old-fashioned freak-of-interplanetary-nature monster. It takes place at a golf resort in the 1970s, and it has more than a whiff of Douglas Adams about it.

Jenny Colgan's "Into the Nowhere" is entirely too much bickering between Clara and the Eleventh Doctor, with insular fannish features: demands that readers understand Clara's ontological peculiarity, along with unexplained references to the Shadow Proclamation. The use of trappings from Christian myth reminded me unpleasantly of the episode "The Satan Pit" (first televised in 2006) where they likewise served to paper over weak plotting.

Nick Harkaway's story "Keeping Up with the Joneses" has the Tenth Doctor managing a crisis inside the TARDIS, touched off by leftover ordnance from the Time War. The resulting instability creates an entire Welsh town within the hyper-architecture of the machine. This locale is called "Jonestown," for reasons that make sense within the story, but the name still evokes the great 1978 massacre/suicide of the Peoples' Temple in Guyana, which I find it hard to believe was Harkaway's intention.

Trudi Caravan sends the Third Doctor and Jo to Australia for one of the shorter adventures in the book, "Salt of the Earth." It might be the best tonal match for an actual representative television episode among all of them. It is set in the later 21st century and benefits from a closer view of that future than was available in the 1970s Pertwee era. Jo's experiences with advanced technology are thus piquant for today's readers who have already seen much of it developed.

"A Handful of Stardust" by Jake Arnott features the Sixth Doctor and Peri, allowing them to encounter both John Dee and the Master in Elizabethan England. It is cleverly written, and Arnott does seem to keep the protagonists irritating in the same ways they were in the 1980s show. The presentation of Dee isn't very sympathetic, and in some ways he is eclipsed in the story by his junior contemporary Thomas Digges.

Cecelia Ahern's "The Bog Warrior" is pretty bad. If it hadn't been for the Ben Morris title illustration, I wouldn't have been able to know that the protagonist was the Tenth Doctor. He is largely a bystander in a Cinderella-inflected exoplanetary drama involving zombie soldiers and a counterrevolution.

"The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller" by Joanne Harris has a little bit of Alice in Wonderland, a lot of Bixby's "It's a Good Life," and a dose of McGoohan's The Prisoner in a story supplementing the Third Doctor's regeneration in "Planet of the Spiders."

The last story is the earliest in the Doctor's biography as well as Earth's history. Stella Duffy sends Patrick Troughton's Doctor with Jamie and Zoe to classical Alexandria in "The Anti-Hero." Short chapters helped this one feel like an old television serial.

I borrowed this collection from my public library, and I foresee no itch to reread it, nor do I expect I will ever bother to own a copy. Still, most of the stories were clever and enjoyable, and I can easily recommend the book to Doctor Who fans.

On the heels of 2013's 11 Doctors, 11 Stories, BBC Books deployed another monthly e-book series, the fruits of which are collected here in print format. Time Trips was less structured than 11 Stories, with just eight stories for a random assortment of Doctors: one for Two, two for Three, one for Four, one for Six, two for Ten, and one for Eleven. Like with 11 Doctors, the writers are popular successful writers outside of Doctor Who and that definitely works to the book's benefit: these are unique voices, not the same old folks who turn up in every Big Finish and every Short Trip. And, amazingly, six of the eight are women! Despite Doctor Who's huge female fanbase, few women seem to write for the tie-ins, but BBC Books shows it can be done.

Like any anthology, it contains both strengths and weaknesses. I really liked the opener, A. L. Kennedy's "The Death Pit," filled with droll witticisms and good characterization of a solo fourth Doctor and just-off-normal happenings. I appreciated Jenny Colgan's "Into the Nowhere" for being set after "The Name of the Doctor" and thus actually doing something character-wise with Clara's knowledge of the Doctor's timestream, but the actual story left me kind of cold. Two standouts featured the third Doctor written by women, which surprised me: Trudi Canavan's "Salt of the Earth" was a surprisingly atmospheric tale set in future Australia, while Joanne Harris's "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller" focuses on him trying to make it back to UNIT HQ as he comes close to regeneration, being somewhat moving on its last page. They're both different sides to Jon Pertwee's incarnation than we usually get and all the better for it.

Weaker tales include the two tenth Doctor stories, Nick Harkaway's "Keeping up with the Joneses," a dull series of surreal events, and Cecelia Ahern's "The Bog Warrior," where I could just never bring myself to care about the characters.

The book as a whole is enlivened by the fact that each story has a title illustration by Ben Morris, and the inclusion of a bonus story, "A Long Way Down" written by Jenny Colgan and illustrated by Ben Morris, that starts on the back cover, moves to the back flap, and then mostly takes place on the reverse side of the dust jacket! A cute tale of the twelfth Doctor falling out of the TARDIS, amplified by Morris's illustrations and the way you have to keep rotating the dust jacket, giving you the same vertiginous feeling as the Doctor and Clara!

It's a shame that 11 Doctors, 11 Stories and Time Trips seem to be it for e-book novellas from BBC Books, as I've found all of them to be worth the time and effort of bringing new voices into Doctor Who prose fiction.

There’s a lot to commend the latest BBC Books roundup of their eBook output. First there’s the gorgeous, detailed design including a dustjacket which, with a little origami work, tells an amusing little short story, along with some nicely stylised frontispieces for each story. Then there’s the gender balance – I’m not certain any Doctor Who short story collection has been skewed towards female contributors before; certainly not by a three to one ratio. And of course, it’s always interesting to see what novelists who’ve earned their stripes elsewhere make of the chance to play in the Doctor Who sandbox.

With the nature of the collection the level of quality is inevitably variable. Pick of the bunch is Joanne Harris’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller. Whilst quoting poetry doesn’t strike me as a very Pertwee thing to do the use of the story’s chronological placement to emphasise story and theme is welcome. Only A L Kennedy’s The Death Pit has a similar virtue, mainly through being able to locate a gap for a solo fourth Doctor story (and even then it feels like it should be placed a couple of seasons later than it is). Stella Duffy and Jenny T Colgan’s contributions are also well worth reading, the former borrowing some body horror from a Steven Moffat script as part of a nicely gruesome tale and the latter having fun updating old New Adventures tropes. ( )

This collection of short stories was pretty good overall. Most had fairly strong or interesting plots, with the only negative aspects being writing style or the inclusion of characters from the show whom I do not like.

The Death Pit (4/5): This Fourth Doctor adventure was lots of fun. I could very easily imagine it as an episode. This story also provided the most quotes for my commonplace book, thanks to the dry-witted narration.

Into the Nowhere (2/5): This Eleventh Doctor adventure was my least favourite of the collection, because it featured Clara, and the Doctor was constantly looking at her tenderly and scooping her up in his arms. It all sounded very Mary Sue fanfiction to me. The overall plot was OK though.

Keeping up with the Joneses (3.5/5): This Tenth Doctor adventure was written by Nick Harkaway, so that gives it an extra half star. The story itself was nice and timey-wimey, as befits Ten, and I liked the use of Wales as a setting.

Salt of the Earth (4/5): This Third Doctor adventure made use of Australia as an interesting setting, and Jo Grant was useful as well. I enjoyed this one a lot.

A Handful of Stardust (2/5): This Sixth Doctor adventure had an ok plot, although I predicted part of it and the writing was too Ye Olde Hystorickal Shoppe at the beginning. Also I am not fond of the "capture and tie up heroines on examination tables" plot device. Icky.

The Bog Warrior (3.5/5): The Tenth Doctor's second adventure in this collection was agreeable enough, although I couldn't decide whether the geological names were fun or silly.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller (4/5): The Third Doctor's second adventure in this collection is set in the moments after Three is poisoned with radiation on Metebelis 3 and is going to regenerate into Four. The story itself is slightly reminiscent of The Prisoner and packs a surprising emotional punch.

The Anti-hero (3.5/5): This Second Doctor adventure is set in Alexandria, contains bagpipe jokes and features Zoe schooling some ill-informed male astronomers. A solid read. ( )