Phoenix Court (series)

Phoenix Court was a "queer magic realist" series of novels and short stories written by Paul Magrs. It featured the first appearance of, who was later introduced to the Doctor Who universe.

The series comprised four novels: Marked for Life, Magrs' first novel, published 1995; Does It Show?, published 1997; Could It Be Magic?, published in 1998 and adapted from the 1997 short story of the same name ; and finally, Fancy Man, published two decades later in 2018. Magrs has also written several short stories featuring characters from the Phoenix Court series, including his first published work Patient Iris, as well as Judith's Do Round Hers and Could It Be Magic?, short stories in the 1997 anthology Playing Out.

While Phoenix Court predated Magrs' first piece of licensed Doctor Who prose, Old Flames, Magrs has explicitly affirmed that Iris from the Phoenix Court series is one and the same as the DWU Iris. For instance, in the afterword to The Scarlet Empress, where he wrote how he "injected" Iris into the DWU, and while she wasn't a Time Lord originally, she was still the same character. Magrs' later BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Blue Angel was an explicit sequel to the Phoenix Court series.

Connections with the DWU
In Bafflement and Devotion, the ' appearance was described in such a manner reminiscent of Iris from the Phoenix Court series, implying that they were the same incarnation.

The Blue Angel was the first direct crossover with the Phoenix Court series, where it was shown that Phoenix Court, the titular council estate in Newton Aycliffe, existed in both the Doctor's universe and the Obverse. The novel went out of its way to tie the continuities of the series together, going so far as to have one of the characters pass meta-fictional commentary on fiction where he said all reality was essentially fiction and therefore equally valid.

Hospitality, a short story printed in Iris: Abroad, continued the story of from the Phoenix Court series.

An in-universe version of Marked for Life appears in the stories Dog Days of Summer and Dark Side, and in The Story of Fester Cat the in-universe Paul Magrs talks to his cat about the book.