Below is the complete list of Neil Gaiman’s Doctor Who 50th Anniversary E-Shorts books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Doctor Who 50th Anniversary E-Shorts Books
Publication Order of Doctor Who: Thirteenth Doctor Adventures Books
- Time Lapse (2019)
(By Naomi Alderman)
Time Lapse was first published in 2019; within the Doctor Who: Thirteenth Doctor Adventures series, it is listed as book #5. 
About Doctor Who 50th Anniversary E-Shorts
In 2013, Doctor Who celebrated fifty years of adventures through time and space with a special collection of short stories featuring the first eleven incarnations of the Doctor. Published by Puffin Books, the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary E-Shorts brought together eleven prominent authors, each contributing an original adventure centred on a different Doctor. Neil Gaiman wrote the final instalment, Nothing O’Clock, a sinister encounter involving the Eleventh Doctor, Amy Pond, and an ancient enemy whose freedom threatens the universe.
The project was conceived as a year-long literary celebration of the television programme’s history. Beginning in January 2013, a new electronic short story appeared each month, with the sequence progressing through the Doctor’s successive incarnations. This approach allowed individual writers to explore different periods of the programme while preserving the distinctive personalities, companions, and storytelling traditions associated with each Doctor.
Contributors included Eoin Colfer, Michael Scott, Marcus Sedgwick, Philip Reeve, Patrick Ness, Richelle Mead, Malorie Blackman, Alex Scarrow, Charlie Higson, and Derek Landy. Their stories range from historical adventures and alien encounters to mysteries involving familiar enemies, demonstrating the versatility of a fictional character capable of travelling anywhere in time and space.
Gaiman’s contribution, Nothing O’Clock, was published on November 21, 2013, shortly before the television programme’s fiftieth-anniversary special. The story features the Eleventh Doctor, portrayed on television by Matt Smith, alongside his companion Amy Pond.
Its central threat comes from the Kin, an ancient race of beings so dangerous that the Time Lords imprisoned them thousands of years earlier. Their prison was designed to be completely inaccessible, ensuring that the Kin could never escape while the Time Lords continued to exist.
However, the destruction of Gallifrey during the Time War has unexpected consequences. With the Time Lords apparently gone, the ancient safeguards holding the Kin captive no longer function as intended. Their release creates a danger that the Doctor, one of the last surviving members of his civilisation, must confront.
The Kin possess an especially disturbing characteristic: they operate through stolen identities, presenting themselves in forms that conceal their true nature. Their appearance introduces an unsettling atmosphere reminiscent of traditional supernatural horror, particularly through imagery involving masks and seemingly ordinary individuals behaving in profoundly unnatural ways.
Gaiman places much of the adventure on Earth, with events involving the contemporary world and the year 1984. The story also reaches into the distant past, linking the Kin’s origins to the ancient history of the Time Lords.
The relationship between the Doctor and Amy provides an important counterbalance to the darker material. Amy’s curiosity and determination complement the Doctor’s eccentric intelligence, while their established friendship gives the adventure the familiar warmth associated with their television appearances.
Gaiman was already an experienced Doctor Who writer when Nothing O’Clock appeared. He had written The Doctor’s Wife, broadcast in 2011, which explored the relationship between the Doctor and the TARDIS through an unusual supernatural premise. He subsequently wrote Nightmare in Silver (2013), featuring the Cybermen.
His literary contribution reflects similar interests. Rather than relying exclusively on action or technological spectacle, Gaiman develops tension through ancient mythology, disturbing imagery, and the suggestion that familiar reality conceals something fundamentally wrong.
The original eleven stories were collected in Doctor Who: Eleven Doctors, Eleven Stories (2013), allowing the complete anniversary project to be read as a single anthology. The collection was subsequently expanded with Lights Out, a Twelfth Doctor story by Holly Black, and later material featuring the Thirteenth Doctor. These expanded editions include previously published stories alongside additional contributions, rather than representing entirely separate adventures by Gaiman.
An important distinction is that the anniversary collection is a multi-author Doctor Who project, not an independently written Neil Gaiman series. His contribution consists of Nothing O’Clock, while the surrounding stories were created by other writers.
The anniversary E-Shorts demonstrate the enduring flexibility of Doctor Who as a literary property. Each author approaches the same central character through a different creative perspective, drawing upon decades of established mythology without requiring every story to follow a continuous plot. Gaiman’s instalment stands out for its eerie atmosphere and inventive use of Time Lord history, capturing the mixture of wonder, humour, and unsettling mystery that has long defined the Doctor’s adventures.