I've been catching up on the Doctor Who fiction I've had on my reading list; every three months, I take the book I've owned the longest and read it. The next one in that sequence ought to be the first Doctor novelisation Galaxy Four, but I've decided to do things slightly different with the Target novelisations, since they're so short. When I hit one of those, I'll read all the unread Targets I have with that particular Doctor, in order of original publication (plus I'll add on any Targets featuring that Doctor that have received a modern reprint).
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| Originally published: 1964 Acquired: January 2013 Read: July 2024 |
For the first Doctor, that sequence is The Daleks (1964), The Zarbi (1965), The Crusaders (1966), The Tenth Planet (1976), The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977), and Galaxy Four (1986).
Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks by David Whitaker
illustrated by Arnold Schwartzman
Famously, this is the first Doctor Who novel of any kind, a novelisation of the first Dalek story (which pedants know as The Mutants but most modern viewers call The Daleks), released on the eve of the Daleks' return to television in The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Since it was not seen as the first of a range of tie-ins, but rather as a standalone novel, it was designed to work on its own. Story editor David Whitaker took Terry Nation's script and appended a couple chapters on the front explaining how the Doctor, Susan, Ian, and Barbara all ended up journeying to Skaro together—in a way not at all consistent with An Unearthly Child—and also added a short chapter at the end where the characters decide to continue to adventure together. You could take this book and hand it to someone claiming it was the first Doctor Who story and they would totally believe you. (Maybe I will try this on my kids someday.) In addition, it's designed to work as a book: Whitaker novelizes the story in the first person from Ian's perspective, so it doesn't read as a tv tie-in, but a proper adventure novel.
Anyway, it's a really strong read. The opening chapters are intense and atmospheric, Whitaker really capturing Ian's disorientation and fear. This is a much more forbidding introduction to the Doctor than we got on screen, but it works well as a lead-in to an intense story. I am not a big fan of the original Dalek story, but telling it in the first person makes it creepy and unsettling. When you encounter it for the first time, a Dalek isn't an outer-space robot monster, but an inscrutable alien—this is true of their first story and no other, and the novelisation captures that fairly well. The description of the Dalek mutant is unsettling, and the glass Dalek at the story's climax is amazing.
In prose, a lot of the story is streamlined to positive effect; we don't spend twenty-five minutes with various characters jumping across a chasm, and the tight focus on Ian means some of the story gets related secondhand, which usually works well. I was surprised that this takes out all the references to radiation from the tv story; it's just vague "poison," even though the weapon used in the past is eventually established as an atomic bomb.
Ian of course is the star here. He's always been one of my favorites, and I'd love to hear William Russell's audiobook version of this story. (I once got it from the library but had to return it before I finished the first chapter, I think!) The book also does well by the Doctor, working in a nicely done character arc across the story about him and Ian coming to trust each other. I think Susan comes across better here than she does on screen; divorced from Carole Ann Ford's somewhat histrionic performance, she's more of a cool, collected, mysterious girl. The one regular the story does poorly by is Barbara, who mostly comes across as Ian's love interest, and only because she's the girl one. I think Jacqueline Hill's performance did a lot for the character in her early days.
I read the 2011 reprint, which has a new introduction by Neil Gaiman, the original illustrations by Arnold Schwartzman, and an afterword by Steve Tribe. The Gaiman intro is all right, and the Schwartzman pictures are nothing to write home about; he picks a surprising number of banal moments where the regulars are standing around to illustrate. Whitaker gives great descriptions of the Dalek city and its environments, but Schwartzman doesn't bother to illustrate that! The afterword by Steve Tribe does a great job of giving historical context for the book, but as an American, I found the pedantic explanation of what "feet" and "inches" were hilarious. The thing I needed explained was the oft-used term "gasometer"!
Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Zarbi
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