The success of The Stones of Blood (2011) engendered The Androids of Tara, another David Fisher–penned renovelisation of a tv story originally novelised by Terrance Dicks.
If you've read The Stones of Blood, you won't be surprised by the approach that Fisher takes here. The story is largely what we saw on screen with bits of backstory expanded and fleshed out, particularly the society on Tara, explaining how they became a feudal world dependent on androids. Like in Stones, many of the characters get these added bits of backstory spelling out who they are and where they came from, particularly Madame Lamia and the family of Count Grendel.
Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara |
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Originally published: 2012 Acquired: January 2025 Read: February 2025 |
Perhaps because of this, the novel just isn't as fun. It's nice to have the bits of backstory, but there's no Tom Baker, no Mary Tamm, no Peter Jeffrey to make the dialogue sing here. Not to say this is bad, I enjoyed the experience of reading it a lot, but certainly not as much I did the experience of reading Stones. I did really like the ending, though, with the Doctor getting his fishing license finally. (I don't think this bit of business is in the screen version? It has been a long time!) I do see the audio was read by John Leeson; having heard his enthusiastic reading of other stories, I can imagine he turned this into a thumping good time and lifted it off the page.
The Target novel has an afterword by editor Steve Cole, discussing the process of how the novelisation was originally commissioned as an audio and then adapted to the page. I was a bit disappointed by this; Cole discusses how his edits restricted the point-of-view of the narrator, for example taking a reference to a "horse" out of a scene from Romana's point-of-view, as she wouldn't know what a horse was. Cole's argument is that this works on audio—where you are literally being told a story—but not on the page. I don't really see why this should be the case. Why does a novel have to be told in a third-person limited perspective? I think this has increasingly become the convention in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, but I don't see why we can't have an omniscient narrator who knows what Romana is thinking and what a horse is. As I read these books, I've been listening to some other Targets on audio, most recently Doctor Who and the Giant Robot (1975) and Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion (1976),* and those stories don't seem afraid to slide back and forth between perspectives within a scene as needed. In the latter, we even have scenes from the perspective of dinosaurs, but those scenes also let the dinos know what, for example, a "car" is! Cole's edits go so far as to add a bit explaining why Romana and the Doctor split up, allowing Grendel's men to capture Romana. I'm glad he disclosed all these changes in the afterword, but I feel like overall I'd rather have read the unfiltered David Fisher version; why get the original writer to employ his distinctive voice if you're just going to file those bits away?
Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who: Warriors' Gate and Beyond
* I thought about doing a series of posts reviewing these too, but decided that I have probably committed myself to enough self-imposed writing projects at the moment. I do have actual work to do!