This isn't the first novelisation of a fourth Doctor story to be written by someone other than Terrance Dicks (that would be 1977's Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom), but it is the second, and it's the first one I've read in this sequence. And the author is no ordinary author; it's the Target debut of Ian Marter, who played Harry Sullivan on screen and would go on to write ten Doctor Who books for Target in total, more than anyone other than Dicks. (Though, of course, Marter is a very, very distant second. I don't have any of Marter's other novelisations, but two decades ago I did read Harry Sullivan's War.)
Doctor Who and the Ark in Space by Ian Marter |
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Originally published: 1977 Acquired: March 2009 Read: December 2024 |
Almost certainly because of this, we get a strong sense of Harry here, much more than we saw in either The Loch Ness Monster (1976) or The Genesis of the Daleks (1976), where Harry often felt like an extra body in the room. Here, he is usually the viewpoint character for the strange discoveries on the Terra Nova (what Marter's book dubs the tv serial's "Space Station Nerva"), and while sometimes flabbergasted, he also occasionally contributes good ideas to the proceedings. I particularly liked a segment (added by Marter) where, while Sarah Jane is crawling through the space station ducts with the power cable, he tugs out an encouraging-but-patronizing message on it in Morse!
Equally, though, Marter has a good command of Tom Baker's Doctor in his flippant but foreboding mood, continuing the improvement we've seen in this area since The Pyramids of Mars (1976). It makes sense—standing alongside Tom Baker for a year's worth of recordings would probably give you a pretty good sense of the way he plays the Doctor!
The weak spot here is thus probably Sarah; Marter uses the Doctor and Harry as his main focalizing characters (sometimes switching which one within a paragraph, which is a bit jarring to a modern reader used to these things being more clearly demarcated), and tends only to use Sarah when there's no other option. Though as someone else pointed out to me, Sarah often has little to do in the actual stories on screen; it's only because of Lis Sladen's performance that she comes across as a strong character, Lis being a gifted actor who could do a lot with a little!
I don't know anything about Marter as a person, but based on this, I wonder if he read science fiction growing up; I feel like this book demonstrates an affinity for sf lingo and concepts you don't quite see in Terrance Dicks, whose interests seem elsewhere (in the adventure and the action and the history). I couldn't tell you why exactly, but in the book's somewhat moody, somewhat elliptical tone, it made me think of Fritz Leiber's sf from the 1950s and '60s, like The Big Time and The Wanderer; Marter is certainly the right age to have read Leiber growing up. Anyway, I sometimes found transitions confusing, but otherwise this is a solid piece of atmospheric sf; like some of the first Doctor books I read for my previous project, I think you could (Doctor and company aside) imagine this standing alone as a novel in a way that's not quite true of a Terrance Dicks effort.
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