I haven't done one of these in a while, but recently I've been munching my way through some old Target Doctor Who novelisations before I have to get rid of them (due to space restrictions) and as Season 7 is short on stories (but not on episodes) I thought it was worth another Blog article.
So, this time around we get two of the earliest Target books:
Doctor Who and The Auton Invasion, by Terrance Dicks (pub. 1974, 156 pages - with illustrations!)
Doctor Who and The Cave Monsters, by Malcolm Hulke (pub. 1974, 158 pages - with illustrations!)
And then two more from when they were fully established:
The Ambassadors of Death, by Terrance Dicks (pub. 1987, 144 pages)
Inferno, by Terrance Dicks (pub. 1984, 126 pages)
This is generally considered to be one of the best seasons of Classic Doctor Who - gritty, consistent, shocking and challenging, before a kind of cosy 'comfort' set in to the Pertwee era. Is this matched by the books?
Doctor Who and The Auton Invasion was televised as Spearhead From Space. Target felt it needed a punchier, more dramatic title. The same with (Doctor Who and) The Silurians which became Doctor Who and The Cave Monsters in print. there are several early examples of this title changing tendency (mainly Malcolm Hulke books, admittedly) and it does give some of them a certain frisson but the idea was quickly dropped. The other claim to fame that these two books have is that they are the first two authentic Target novelisations and really set the bar for what was to follow. 1973 saw Target re-printing the three 1960s novelisations of David Whittaker's The Daleks and The Crusaders and Bill Strutton's The Zarbi. Fuelled by enthusiasm for the opportunity Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke then produced some of the most readable prose 'adaptations' of any of the TV stories.
Doctor Who and The Auton Invasion is a lovingly expanded adaptation of Spearhead From Space. It's like Dicks has revisited Robert Holmes' story and Derek Martinus' direction and thought 'how can I build on this to flesh it out a bit and give it more of an over all coherency?' We get a prologue from the end of The War Games (which I'm surprised the DVDs haven't offered as an extra), we get thoughtful character backgrounds, explanations (like why Madame Tussauds would have a dull exhibition of senior civil servants and military men, for example!) and expansions on what was televised - particularly building the episode one cliff hanger and developing the 'octopus' at the end - and it's all so simply yet well-written it just picks you up and carries you along. Liz Shaw doesn't get much more of a look in than she does on TV, unfortunately, but it's possible that Dicks struggled with this anyway, knowing his preference for heroine-tied-to-the-railway-lines type companions. You can't help but feel a tad short-changed at some of the 110 page 4th & 5th Doctor books that Dicks would later come out with when he was churning them out month on month and clearly didn't have the time or the creative energy to apply the same level of care and thought. But here he was very much writing what he knew directly, and it's a great place to start the range.
Doctor Who and The Cave Monsters is a slightly different kettle of fish, yet just as brilliant in its own way. Hulke has clearly picked and chosen what he wanted from his TV scripts, or thought specifically about what would work best in print and what was needed from the televised story. The 'Silurians' here are Reptile Men instead, and they have names and characters beyond the Young Silurian / Old Silurian ciphers on TV. You'd be hard pushed to find more powerful moments of pathos and character than 'Old' Okdel's tears and his willing acceptance of his own death at the hand of 'Young' Morka. The story is essentially the same as on TV, but some of the details are different. What we may lose in detail, though, is made up for through creative narrative and point of view story-telling. Doctor Quinn and Miss Dawson are having a terribly protracted innocent courtship, and they benefit from further development in print - as does Doctor Meredith. Doctor Lawrence, on the other hand, is nowhere near as objectionable on the page as he is on screen and this is perhaps a shame - as is his altered demise. There doesn't appear to be any benefit to making Hawkins a sergeant rather than a captain in the book, or for changing Major Baker to Major Barker (being more familiar with the TV version I gave up trying to auto-correct myself after a while). Whereas The Auton Invasion built the story up, The Cave Monsters had seven episodes to fit in so it's down to strategic cutting to make it fit into a length that would sufficiently appeal to children without being too stodgy. It's major achievement, though, is in humanising the monsters, giving them clearly defined and individual characters in a way that the TV programme hadn't really achieved up to that point.
The Ambassadors of Death comes much later in the run of books. The illustrations are long gone, so this is all text. By this point we'd been through a severe page limitation and were emerging out the other side. Terrance Dicks' output had diminished considerably since in many cases the original TV scriptwriters were choosing to adapt their own work, so Dicks and Nigel Robinson between them were mopping up any earlier gaps. This was one such gap.
Overall Terrance was probably the best person to write this novel. Many have regretted Malcolm Hulke passing away and never having got his teeth into this script, which was largely written by him and script assistant Trevor Ray although credited to David Whittaker. But Hulke was probably too close to such a troubled script. Dicks, as script editor, gave the final polish to all of it and evened out the various contributors' work.
This book is pretty standard fare. It's not quite a simple script-to-page effort with the occasional token descriptive passage, but it displays little of the adaptive energy and enthusiasm of The Auton Invasion from 13 years earlier. It still succeeds because it's a cracking story with some great characters, concepts and action sequences. Simply reflecting these on the page is enough to give this book appeal. Some might have felt this was a good opportunity to give the story proper 'closure' at the end, but it's faithful to the abrupt televised version and we leave it half way down a page as the Doctor leaves Liz and the others to negotiate the safe return of the alien ambassadors. The middle episodes don't feel like they lose much from the story being curtailed to 144 pages and Dicks is very economical in places where action sequences which take several minutes on screen can be dealt with in a brief paragraph on the page, without the reader feeling that they're being rushed or missing out on anything.
My favourite part of the book is a typo on page 40:
'The guard fell, and the same brown-gloved hand took his eyes and opened the door of the cell.' Ouch! Very King Lear. I assume 'eyes' should have been 'keys', since there's no indication it was a retinal scan lock!
Inferno is another similar adaptation, but from three years earlier when 128 pages was the maximum length. How do you get seven of the best TV episodes ever into 128 pages and do them justice? Answer: make it 126 pages of very small type. Inferno, like Ambassadors of Death, is a great read almost simply because it's such a good story, but Season 7 gives us a useful comparison between the early years of the Target range and it's established adolescent period. All four books are great reads, but all four treat their source material in a slightly different way. Inferno's quirk of adaptation comes when The Doctor is in the parallel universe. On TV we get occasional reminders of what our friends are up to in the 'real world', and this may have been felt a necessity by the production team in case of any chance first time viewers not understanding what was going on. In the book we get one 'cut back' early on and then that's it, we keep with the fascist world and see that adventure through to the end. The 'missing' sequences are briefly referenced after the Doctor returns to 'our' universe but not gone into in any detail - nor do they need to be either; the Doctor is having an adventure on a parallel Earth, that's what we're interested in and that's what the author is focusing on. It also serves as a self-editing technique for the story, since some detail still has to be compromised to ensure it fits comfortably into it's limited page numbers - but at least it's done in a thoughtful, creative way that benefits the narrative. If it had been a shorter story it possible that Dicks may have been tempted to write a farewell scene for Liz Shaw at the end, or offer some hints that she would be returning to Cambridge. Considering what's been done since - particularly Gary Russell's Virgin MA The Scales of Injustice - I think it's good that he followed the TV version faithfully and ends Liz Shaw's adventures with her smiling away at the departing backs of the Doctor and the Brigadier.
My only query is why Dicks shied away from called the mutants Primords. The name isn't used on TV but it's what the creatures are credited as at the ends of the episodes. Dicks' just called the creatures 'mutations'. I guess if you call them Primords you're identifying them as a specific individual species, whereas Dicks' view is very much that these are mutations of mankind, not a different species altogether.
All these stories are excellent and are challenging works of telefantasy / sci-fi which have much to offer the reader as an alternative to watching them on TV. They highlight many of the considerable strengths of the Target range, as well as some of it's occasionally more frustrating limitations. I would recommend reading all these books, although at the moment only The Auton Invasion and The Cave Monsters are readily available as they've been re-published in recent BBC Books editions.
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