As mentioned around here previously, I've been on a mission to read Doctor Who books I've owned along time but never gotten around to. Next up on that list is a Target novelisation, Doctor Who and the Ark in Space by Ian Marter. But when such a book on my list is a Target novel, I read through all the Target novels featuring that particular incarnation that fall into either of two categories: 1) I already own it, or 2) it was (re)published in the current century, and I read them in publication order. For the fourth Doctor, then, that sequence will be The Loch Ness Monster (1976), The Genesis of the Daleks (1976), The Pyramids of Mars (1976), The Ark in Space (1977), The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), The Horror of Fang Rock (1978), [The Five Doctors (1983),] The Stones of Blood (2011), The Androids of Tara (2012), and Warriors' Gate and Beyond (2019). Quite a few! As I did with the first Doctor novelisations (see the sequence of posts starting here), I want to chart how the approach to novelising the show changed over time.
Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster by Terrance Dicks |
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Originally published: 1976 Acquired: August 2024 Read: November 2024 |
I begin with the novelisation of Terror of the Zygons, which went out under the title Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster. This wasn't the first fourth Doctor novel; that would be Doctor Who and the Giant Robot (1975), but that one hasn't got a modern reprinting. It is, however, the second, and I think that comes through in that the personality, the force of Tom Baker does not come through on the page. In fact, I usually found it easier to imagine Jon Pertwee delivering the lines!
I assume that on screen, Tom put his own spin on it all, but Terror of the Zygons is a story I have only seen once, probably a little less than twenty years ago, so I was very much dependent on the novel itself to conjure imagery and sensation. I don't think Dicks does a bad job of this, especially at the beginning; I like the sequences of Broton observing our protagonists from a distance as they scramble across the moors. But I also don't think he does a great job of it, either. The Zygons are one of Doctor Who's great visual creations, and their spaceship interior an interesting one (I think, but if not, it's the kind of thing that in prose could be), but there's not a lot of atmosphere here in these parts of the story.
What's interesting to me is that while many of those early first Doctor novelisations were clearly novels, this is clearly a novelisation; there's a lot of cross-cutting between different locations in the same scene (usually Dicks puts one location's prose in parentheses), which is much more of a tv move, and the kind of thing you might expect a prose version to move away from. But Dicks very much embraces the fact that this originally went out on screen. I think this probably makes it less interesting to the adult modern reader, but I imagine it probably works well with kids; this is one I can imagine to handing over to my six-year-old reader of chapter books who is (we might say) "Doctor Who curious," which isn't so true of, for example, The Daleks (1964) or The Crusaders (1966)! I might be the target audience of the 2012 BBC Books reprint I own, but I wasn't the target audience of the original.
My reprint, by the way, has an introduction by Michael Moorcock; it's fun enough, but I see little in it that indicates he has much appreciation for or has actually even read the book in question! He clearly likes the tv serial, though.
Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars
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