Back when I read my way through the first Doctor novelisations, I noted how the very idea of a "Doctor Who book" was emerging. Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks (1964) was literally the only Doctor Who book in the universe when it came out; Doctor Who and the Zarbi (1965) was the second.
Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two |
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Collection published: 2022 Novels originally published: 1976 Acquired and read: December 2024 |
But by the time the first two books collected in The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two were published, things were very different. Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars were the fourth and fifth novelisations to feature the fourth Doctor—and the 23rd and 27th Target novelisations overall. By this time, there was no need of the novels to stand alone, to work for people who hadn't seen the television programme, or even the stories being novelised. The function of these books are very different to those earlier ones, part of a project to pump out the books to meet the demands of an enthusiastic child readership. And of course, no one was better at meeting that demand than former script editor Terrance Dicks.
When I read Dicks's Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977), I observed that the novel's unfortunate weak spot was 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; [...] 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 felt the same way here, and I would extend that observation to Davros, the Daleks' creator. Maybe something about the Daleks doesn't capture Terrance Dicks's fancy (I haven't read any of his third Doctor Dalek novelisations yet), maybe he more broadly just can't vibe with a Terry Nation script, I don't know. But I felt like The Genesis of the Daleks had all of the to-ing and fro-ing of its tv counterpart, but little of the atmosphere or intensity. I know the inclusions in The Essential Terrance Dicks were determined by fan vote, but I kind of suspect fans were more voting on the quality of the original stories than that of the books in question per se. Of course, I can see how this book would be invaluable in 1976, when there was little chance you were going to see Genesis of the Daleks again, but while this book was of course an effortless glide to read, I found it had little to recommend the 2024 reader.
Pyramids of Mars, on the other hand, seemed to have lit up Terrance's imagination. This might be an unambitious novelisation of a story I've seen several times, but I found there were a lot of nice little touches here. While The Genesis of the Daleks seemed to go from dialogue sequence to dialogue sequence, faithfully recapitulating the script, The Pyramids of Mars has an original prologue about the Osirans, an original epilogue about Sarah Jane after her travels with the Doctor, and a number of long bits of dialogue-less prose that set the scene atmospherically or provide backstory. I suspect, based on all the original Dicks novels I've read, that the historical setting did more for him than the science fictional one of Genesis. This is pretty straightforward stuff (though Dicks carefully removes all references to "1980"), but it works on its own to a degree that Genesis did not. My current litmus test is to imagine my six-year-old reading these (I haven't actually tried to foist one on them yet, though), and I felt like I could imagine them getting a complete novelistic experience out of Pyramids that I don't think they would Genesis.
I think it also helps that this is the first of the books I've read in this sequence where Tom Baker comes through. Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster (1976) was too early for Dicks to have a sense of how Baker plays it, and Nation always writes a pretty generic Doctor, but here Dicks captures the moody, capricious nature of Tom Baker on the page pretty effectively. I look forward to seeing how this is handled in future novelisations.
The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two, by the way, has a foreword by Robert Webb of Mitchell and Webb fame, and it's a good one. "If I told you that Terrance Dicks taught me to read, I would be exaggerating. But not much."
Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Ark in Space
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