line of original Doctor Who fiction. After 61 New Adventures and 33 Missing Adventures, Doctor Who fiction came to an end at Virgin with The Dying Days, their only Eighth Doctor novel. However, the final Doctor Who book actually published by Virgin was So Vile a Sin, featuring the Seventh Doctor; it had been scheduled for release several months before The Dying Days but was delayed due to difficulties with the manuscript. Bernice Summerfield The New Adventures series continued with Bernice Summerfield, one of the new companions introduced for the New Adventures, as the lead character, starting with her taking up a job as professor of archaeology at the St Oscar's University on the planet of Dellah. The new line was written by many of the writers that had written for the New Adventures and continued to feature elements of both the Doctor Who New Adventures and, to a lesser extent, television continuity. Indeed, its concluding arc – the so-called "Gods arc", which sees an alien race with god-like powers devastating Dellah – ties in with concurrent events in the BBC Eighth Doctor line. The links between the NA Dead Romance (a standalone volume in which Bernice Summerfield does not actually appear) and the two-volume Eighth Doctor novel Interference (all written by Lawrence Miles) are particularly close. Storytelling The New Adventures were self-described as being "stories too broad and deep for the small screen," and purported to take Doctor Who into "previously unexplored realms of time and space". What this meant, in practice, was a shift towards more adult-oriented science fiction writing, and use of the literary form to play around with the standard conventions of the series. From the beginning, the novels were controversial for their use of sex, violence and bad language, although this was never as frequent or as extreme as many people seemed to believe. As the series found its audience over time a greater share of fandom began to accept the new direction. Among the developments were a "hardening" of Ace, with a story arc that had her leave the Doctor for three years (from her perspective) and returning as an older and more cynical character, more morally ambiguous endings and the introduction of new companions, such as Bernice and the Adjudicators Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester. Bernice, in particular, proved so popular that in addition to appearing in her own novels, she has gone