The First Doctor Novelisations: The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977)

Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume One
by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth was the second first Doctor novelisation of the Target era, and the first by the venerable Terrance Dicks. Like The Tenth Planet (1976), it picks out a key moment from the series's history as yet unchronicled in prose, the return of the Daleks and the departure of Susan, an event mentioned but unseen in The Crusaders (1965).

Collection published: 2022
Novel originally published: 1977
Acquired and read: August 2024

People like to bandy about the word "workmanlike" when describing Terrance Dicks. I think Dalek Invasion shows the positives and negatives of that approach. He's not interested in making this a book book like the writers of those first three novelisations were... but on the other hand he's much better at writing a novelisation than Gerry Davis was with The Tenth Planet. (That said, he's got better source material to work with!) Terry Nation's original script features a lot of convoluted moving backward and forward across a devastated London and England, and Dicks captures that perfectly well, occasionally smoothing out some bits of the tv serial. (On screen, the Doctor says this preceded the events of The Daleks, but Dicks changes it to take place afterwards; there's one bit where Ian admits to himself that his plan doesn't make a lot of sense, which felt like a bit of a lampshade moment.)

My favorite part of the book was the first chapter or so, where the characters are exploring the deserted London. "Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man" is a fantastic opening line, one I knew before I even read the book. In fact, I once played a game called Liebrary with a number of friends where you get a card with the title, author, and synopsis of a famous book; each player then has to write down an imagined first line for the book (the genuine one is also included in the mix). If more people pick your line than any other, you score points. When Orwell's 1984 came up, in a moment of inspiration I wrote down "Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man" and won the round handily... even though most of my opponents were also English graduate students! Has Terrance ever written such a great line before or since?

The part that didn't quite work for me were the Daleks themselves. I think probably the Daleks are a bit tricky to capture on the page, but I don't know that Dicks even really tries; the famous cliffhanger where one comes up out of the Thames is curiously undramatic, and I don't think the book really sells you on their alien nature or their monstrousness. It seems to reckon (perhaps accurately) that you'll already know and care what a Dalek is because you've seen one on tv!

I read Dalek Invasion as part of The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume One, which collects five novelisations. A couple I already own, but I will save it to read The Wheel in Space when I get around to doing the second Doctor novelisations. The introduction by Frank Cottrell-Boyce is nice, and I do like the simple but elegant cover of the paperback edition, but the most interesting thing was that the list of famous fans of Terrance includes Sarah Waters, of Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet fame. I would never have guessed! Does anyone know more about this? Googling "'sarah waters' 'terrance dicks'" just gets you the blurb for The Essential Terrance Dicks on a number of sites. (I did find a Guardian interview that says she was "a clever, solitary child lost in make-believe, reading widely 'but nothing memorable', and watching 'an awful lot of telly, sci-fi, horror and Doctor Who'" in the 1970s.) Maybe it's a cliché, but let's get her in to novelise a "Paternoster gang" story. Ooh, or a Thirteen/Yaz one.

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who: Galaxy Four