Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters, by Terrance Dicks

Where were we? Back in January, I posted at length about The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book, which was the third of three Doctor Who books written by Terrance Dicks all published on 16 December 1976. He didn’t stop to rest: a month after that, Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters was published simultaneously in hardback and paperback on 20 January 1977. It was Terrance’s 14th Doctor Who novelisation and 20th published book since his debut, Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, three years previously.

• See my list of all 235 books written by Terrance Dicks
• Pre-order my biography Written by Terrance Dicks, due for publication on 30 November

A novelisation of the TV story Carnival of Monsters (1973), adapted from scripts written by Robert Holmes, had been on the Target schedule since at least August 1975, when it was planned for publication in June 1976 — as per the “Advance information on Doctor Who books in preparation” reproduced on p. 92 of The Official Doctor Who Fan Club vol 2 by Keith Miller. That list doesn’t name the authors assigned to each book, but Terrance had novelised Holmes’s two previous TV stories, Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion and Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, so I suspect he was always attached to this one, as a matter of course.

So why was publication delayed by six months? My guess is that Gerry Davis was originally assigned to novelise his own TV story Revenge of the Cybermen (1975) but when the scripts were largely rewritten by Holmes — now script editor on the TV series — Davis declined to adapt them in that form and Terrance duly took over the book version, which had originally been scheduled for publication in April 1976 and was published on 20 May. Terrance then returned to the book I suspect he had always been assigned, Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks; this had been scheduled for May 1976 and was published on 22 July. The early schedule then listed Carnival of Monsters (Jun 76) and World’s End (Dalek Invasion of Earth) (Jul 76), but these were pushed back down the list. Instead, Terrance skipped ahead to Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, originally scheduled for Aug 76 and published on 19 August, and Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks, scheduled for Sep 76 and published 21 October.

I think we can explain this swappage on the basis that Target had decided to capitalise on the Christmas market by publishing three books on the same day in December: Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars (a novelisation of a recent TV story featuring the (then) current Doctor;  a revised The Making of Doctor Who; and The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book. To accommodate this, they could have pushed the whole schedule of novelisations back, but I think they prioritised titles. They must have thought The Web of Fear, featuring the popular Yeti as well as the first appearance of regular character Lethbridge-Stewart, would sell better than Carnival of Monsters, and that the linked novelisations of Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks together would sell more copies than the solo World’s End, for all it also featured Daleks.

Given my estimated 7.5-month lead time, Terrance must have delivered a manuscript for Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters by the end of May 1976 for publication in January, so I think he wrote it after delivering his first draft of what was originally called Brainstorm and then became The Lambda Factor — his episode of the TV series Space: 1999. 

He may well have completed work on it before beginning the late-commissioned The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book. That book surely explains the cover artwork on this novelisation: the TV story Carnival of Monsters briefly features a plesiosaurus but it is this real-life monster rather than the story’s original creation, the Drashigs, that is depicted by Chris Achilleos. That choice is odd given that the back-cover blurb describes it simply as a “prehistoric monster”, suggesting that the name plesiosaurus was not considered a sufficient draw for punters. So, was the cover commissioned with the idea that this illustration could also be used in the Dinosaur Book, along with the dinosaurs that had already featured on the covers of Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters and Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, in the same way that the successful The Doctor Who Monster Book had repurposed cover art?  

The cover illustration is a more convincing, dynamic creature than the one seen in the TV story. In producing his striking artwork for the covers of these books, Achilleos had previously made use of reference material such as photographs and old comics. I suspect the same was true of the plesiosaurus and the SS Bernice seen here — though I’ve not been able to identify sources. He did not use reference from the TV story, or from the dinosaur books that George Underwood cribbed from for The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book (namely Album of Dinosaurs illustrated by Rod Ruth and the Ladybird book Dinosaurs illustrated by BH Robinson). 

Digging around, I thought the films King Kong (1932) and Son of Kong (1933) may have been a source — either the “sea monster” battling Kong by a cave in the former, or the one that attacks a boat 1:04:19 into the latter on YouTube.

Screengrab from Son of Kong (1933)

Achilleos certainly had form in borrowing from King Kong, as he provided cover artwork for the copyright-dodging Amok: King of Legend, a 1976 novel by Bernard L Ross (a pseudonym for Ken Follett, who was at the time working with Terrance’s friend Malcolm Hulke on Crossroads novelisations and Hulke’s never-published original novel Airship). Perhaps Achilleos had stills from King Kong or related artwork for that book and reappropriated something from them here…

Yet when I put this frankly brilliant theory to Paul MC Smith, author of new book Screen Printed — The Definitive Guide to the Exciting Adventures Based on the Popular TV Serial and a skilled detective in tracing Achilleos’s sources, he was unconvinced. He shared with me a close-up of the creature from Son of Kong, which seems much frillier and bobblier than what Achilleos drew. 

Production still from Son of Kong

Paul thinks that, like with other covers for Doctor Who novelisations, Achilleos probably drew inspiration from old comics he had at hand, but we’ve not yet been able to identify which. Do get in touch if you have suggestions…

We don’t know the source Achilleos used for the SS Bernice either, but his stippled portrait of the Third Doctor is taken from a BBC photograph of Jon Pertwee stood back-to-back with Patrick Troughton in front of the police box prop on the set of the Doctor’s laboratory at UNIT HQ from The Three Doctors. We even know that this picture was taken in Studio 1 at TV Centre on Tuesday, 28 November 1972. I think Achilleos makes Pertwee look a bit darker-haired and younger than the photograph. It’s not quite the “shock” of white hair described in Terrance’s prose.

The lads

The yellow border is a new innovation, and makes the whole cover a lot brighter and more striking. Achilleos used the same trick with a later novelisation, Doctor Who and the Ark in Space by Ian Marter, published in May the same year, and Mike Little seems to have appropriated the idea for his cover of Terrance’s Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius, published the following month. Perhaps yellow borders were a short-lived way of maintaining visual continuity in the range despite a change in cover artists, prompted by Achilleos leaving the range.

Let’s get into the book itself. Until now, I’ve largely worked from first-edition paperbacks but this time I reread a 1984 reprint I’ve owned since it was published. It begins by telling us that the Doctor has just recovered his ability to travel in “Time and space”, only the former capitalised, with a footnote referring to the events of the previous TV story, The Three Doctors, as already novelised by Terrance. The Doctor is now attempting to visit the planet Metebelis 3 — a name than meant little when the TV story was first broadcast but by the time of publication had new meaning because it had been seen in two further TV stories. The mention of it on the first page here foreshadows significant events to come for the Doctor in Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, also by Terrance, and Doctor Who and the Green Death by Malcolm Hulke — both already published.

As per the TV story, the Doctor tells us that on Metebelis 3, “the air was like wine”, which makes me wonder if the atmosphere there has narcotic properties and provides a natural high. Terrance adds some practical detail about the Doctor’s new-found abilities to pilot his spaceship:

“I don’t drive the TARDIS, I programme it” (p. 8).

The house style today would be “program” for a computer, and the TARDIS would probably be “she”; indeed, in Terrance’s next-but-one novelisation, Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos, he has the same incarnation of the Doctor refer to the TARDIS as “the old girl” (p. 139), not a phrase used in the script.

When the action moves to the planet Inter Minor, Terrance draws from a line of dialogue by Pletrac to explain the division between the two types of indigenous being. On screen, Pletrac refers to himself and his colleagues, “as members of the Official species”, distinct from the Functionaries. Strictly speaking, that word “species” suggests that while Officials and Functionaries are both grey-skinned humanoid creatures that look rather like one another, a pairing of one with the other cannot produce any offspring. On p. 10, Terrance reiterates that idea, telling us that the two groups, “had gradually evolved into two different [ie distinct] species”. Yet on the same page he also speaks of a more cultural kind of division, differentiating  the minority “Official caste” from the “larger class” of Functionaries. This is muddling up  kinds of categorisation, biological with ideological (see also Doctor Who’s tangled history of using the word “race”).

There’s an in-joke in the description of the Functionaries as looking “coarse, lumpy, unfinished”,

“As if they’d been slapped together out of rough clay by a rather poor sculptor” (p. 11).

On screen, the Officials are played by guest actors in close-up, while the Functionaries grunting about in the background are supporting artists / extras. The make-up and costume budget seem to have been applied accordingly.

As is typical with a script by Holmes, the dialogue sparkles, and a character’s manner of speaking and the vocabulary they use demonstrate their personality and worldview. Terrance largely keeps the best lines, but peppers the prose with telling details. For example, there’s this about Official Kalik:

“Like all officials, he had no inhibitions about stating the obvious” (p. 12).

He spells out some of the class-conscious stuff in the dialogue for younger readers who might miss the point:

"It did not occur to Kalik that it was not the rebellious Functionaries who were abnormal, but the conditions under which they had to live and work” (p. 15).

Or there’s what a closer look at the glamorous outfits worn by performers Vorg and Shirna reveals about their existence:

“Many neat darns and patches showed a desperate attempt to keep up appearances” (p. 12)

The analogies are simple and relatable: at the climax of Chapter 3, a giant hand picks up the TARDIS as though it were a box of matches (p. 35), and I particularly like the ravenous Drashigs crashing through the walls of the miniscope as easily as “opening a sardine can” (p. 73). That works especially well because it’s Jo who observes this — so it’s revealing of her perspective. But sometimes Terrance veers into a kind of authorial analogy. For example, when the TARDIS expands back to normal size, we’re told it reaches “the size of a Police Box — which is what it was, at least on the outside” (p. 62). Yet none of the characters who witness this moment would recognise a police box, let alone suspect it wasn’t what it appeared.

Stage directions in the script describe Vorg’s Miniscope device as “a large gaudy cylinder, a cross between a juke box and a samovar”. We come to learn it’s like a TV set, only one with miniaturised people inside performing live entertainments without realising they are on show. Terrance describes it as like a What the Butler Saw machine (p 13), and I wonder how many young readers when this was first published knew what that meant, let alone readers now. “The scope was a kind of peepshow,” he continues. I know Peepshow was the working title for the story, but that name suggests something risqué if not outright pornographic, and not really suitable for a family audience or young readers. That was surely why the title of the story was changed for broadcast. Indeed, Terrance also quotes the line of dialogue that inspired the title used on TV — “a whole Carnival of Monsters” (p. 22).  

When the Doctor and Jo are apprehended on the SS Bernice, the Doctor explains himself away by making up a pulpy adventure story of the kind Terrance loved to read — and which no one believes (p. 26). It’s a rare example of Terrance adding to the source material. Largely, he transposes each 25-minute episode into three chapters, each chapter comprising about nine or 10 pages, so there’s a little over a minute of screen time per page.

That’s fine because the source is so rich. The characters from 1926 drop references to real-life musicals Lady Be Good and Chu Chin Chow, and there are self-reflexive in-jokes about the TV series Doctor Who, such as Jo’s observation that “[I] suppose we’re due for [another] monster bit any minute now.” There’s an extra joke of that kind in the book, when Vorg tries to justify the lurid entertainments in his peepshow by saying they’re, “not only amusing but educational too” (p. 42). 

Terrance makes the analogy plain: once inside the workings of the miniscope,

“Jo felt like an ant that had wandered inside the back of a television set” (p. 51).

But this is a special kind of TV set, with an especially powerful effect on its audience: Terrance tells us that the miniscope produces something like a hypnotic effect, putting the viewer right in the midst of the action (p. 43).

There is, though a limit to the in-jokes. When the Doctor is all set to box with Lieutenant John Andrews (Ian Marter), there’s a reference on screen to real-life boxer John L Sullivan (1858-1918) — but Terrance resisted the urge to play on the fact that Marter had gone on to play a companion with the same surname, Harry Sullivan. Other writers of Doctor Who books would not have been so restrained!

Terrance’s additions are much more about character. When, in the script, Jo complains about her lot to the Doctor, Terrance gives her an extra sentence to underline that she’s generally more fun: “Sorry to be such a misery” (p. 60). As he’s done before, he shares practical tips he may have learned in National Service, like the need when landing from a height to bend the knees and roll like a parachutist (p. 89). Likewise, he adds the detail that Major Daly had, 10 years before the events here, “seen action on the Western Front” (p. 79), thus explaining his prowess using what Terrance specifies as a Thompson sub-machine gun with a magazine of .45 calibre bullets.

There are some other additions: we learn that the Miniscope includes Tellurians (humans), Ogrons, Drashigs and Cybermen — all as per the TV story — but also Ice Warriors. Still, it’s odd Ice Warriors and Cybermen would collapse when exposes to airless cold (p. 117). 

He also modifies the way in which the Doctor survives his first encounter with the Drashigs. On TV, he uses his sonic screwdriver to ignite the marsh gas around the creatures. Here, on p. 66, he draws a flare pistol from his pocket instead. This has been mentioned only briefly before, on p. 48 and p. 50, when the Doctor takes it from a wall rack on the Bernice. Presumably, this was to avoid any suggestion of the Doctor using the sonic as a weapon, but was that imposed by someone else on Terrance or, since script editing the TV story, had he devised that rule for himself?

Terrance provides us with some insights into the Doctor’s scheming mind as he works to rescue Jo:

“The Doctor’s own behaviour had been calculated from the very first. As long as Jo Grant was inside the Scope, she was still in great danger [so] he had to dominate these Minorans from the start, force them to help him.” (p. 95)

In this,

“He was gambling, that like all authorisations, they would harass and bully anyone who seemed weaker than themselves, while responding favourably to a display of force and bluster” (p. 97).

Notably, Terrance does not embellish what I think is a key moment in the TV story, and Doctor Who more generally, when the Doctor tells Jo that he “had a great deal to do” with persuading the Time Lords to ban the use of miniscopes. As I argued in my article “Who Connections — Star Trek”, for Doctor Who Magazine #632 (August 2026), pp. 44-49, this is news to Jo, so it must have happened sometime before the Doctor met her, and the sense is surely that it happened before his exile to Earth, so in a previous incarnation. It is changing the role of the Doctor, from itinerant traveller to intergalactic diplomat and campaigner in the same vein as Captain Kirk, and suggesting that, despite the lack of evidence in TV episodes from the 1960s, that the Doctor has always been like that.  The lack of embellishment to this scene in the novelisation suggests that Terrance didn’t recognise it as a big change in the lore of the series. 

Other small changes make the Doctor more dynamic, powerful and in charge. He carries Jo on his shoulders (p. 116) and they later materialise back beside the TARDIS, “just as the Doctor had planned” (p. 121), though it seems to have been down to luck. Terrance also acknowledges a plot hole in the story: Jo realises that the Doctor recalled the name of the SS Bernice in the first place because it famously disappeared; by sending it and the crew back to their own time, haven’t she and the Doctor changed history? “Only in a few very small details,” handwaves the Doctor.

The book concludes with Vorg — who, like Daly, fought bravely when occasion demanded — “surrounded by an admiring audience of Officials and Functionaries … telling the story of his valour for the hundredth time” (p. 123). In his review of this novelisation for Escape to Danger, my friend Jim Sangster sees this as meaning that the different classes/caste/species of Inter Minorans now live on equal terms, with “no sign of the lower caste being ushered away.” I’m not sure I’m convinced that there really has been a redistribution of power. The (unseen) president is still in charge, the Officials still command. As with the Doctor sending the SS Bernice home, I don’t think there’s much evidence that a lot has really changed.

All in all, it’s a great TV story, full of wit and excitement, and it’s a good novelisation. But I think it’s perhaps a more run-of-the-mill entry than Terrance’s previous novelisations, which up to this point tended to fix on big-event stories — the first adventures of particular Doctors or companions, battles with Daleks and other big-name monsters, and major events affecting series lore. This book was the last novelisation of the five stories from the 1972-73 series on TV, and perhaps marks the beginning of something that will become a lot more prevalent with Terrance’s books for the range: a novelisation that is less a top-notch, must-have story, and more just filling a gap. 

But there were still plenty of classics to come. Terrance’s very next book is a corker and among his own favourites. Next episode: Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth.

Other pals writing about this novelisation:

• Matt Michael read a first-edition hardback, coo posh
• Nicholas Whyte thinks it only an average novelisation  

Written by Terrance Dicks - pre-orders open

You can now pre-order my new biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, which will be published by Ten Acre Books on Monday, 30 November.

We'll be launching the book at the Portico Library on Wednesday 25 November and I will be signing copies at the Who Shop in London on Saturday 28 November.

Here is the cover of the exclusive hardback edition available from the Who Shop, with cover art by Andy Walker:

Blurb for Written by Terrance Dicks as follows:

“Through the ruin of a city stalked a little boy…”

Terrance Dicks was the bestselling author of 235 books for young readers, and is widely credited for teaching generations of children to read, instilling in them a life-long love of reading.

That would have been achievement enough, but he was also writer, storyliner, script editor and producer of some of the most popular TV shows — best known for his work on Doctor Who, but with credits ranging from The Avengers to Crossroads, and Space: 1999 to the BBC’s ‘Classic Serials’ of the 1980s, including Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist and Vanity Fair.

With access to Terrance’s treasure trove of papers, and new interviews with those who knew and worked with him, Written by Terrance Dicks is the authoritative biography of his life and work. This is Terrance’s own story.

Simon Guerrier has written countless Doctor Who books, comics and audio plays, including the new novelisation The Six Doctors, based on Terrance Dicks's draft script. He's also the author of Sherlock Holmes: The Great War and has produced a number of documentaries for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4.

Cover photograph by Chris Ridley (c) Radio Times Archive. Cover design by Stuart Manning.

For more, see my list of the 235 books written by Terrance Dicks, with links to detailed posts on individual titles.

Also available, my previous biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television.

Target Book Club 2026

Art by 
Gürkan Özer

On Saturday, I was in London to speak at Target Book Club, reading Chapter 4 of my forthcoming Doctor Who novelisation The Six Doctors, which I have adapted from scripts and surviving paperwork from the archive of Terrance Dicks.

You can now listen to that and all the other speakers, care of the Hamster Book Club podcast: Target Book Day 2026. List of speakers and their speakings below.

As well as reading from my book, I also announced that my biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be published on 30 November. You can pre-order it now.

00:01:40 “Chapter One” by Bruce Nicholson, read by Una McCormack (a woman!)

00:07:25 “Father in the Mirror” by Julian Richards, about his late father Justin

00:21:54 “Zarbi-Ye-Ye!” by Robert Crighton, on the oddness of Doctor Who and the Zarbi

00:38:24 “And the Mysterious Imagery” by Jason Thompson

00:54:19 “Lyle and a Time Lord” by Matthew Sweet

01:14:21 “Exterminations in the Library” by Gary Brannan, on the archive of Terrance Dicks held at the Borthwick Institute for Archives in York

01:29:17 “The Revolting Rutan Will Not Be Television” by Paul Kirkley

01:43:07 “Literal Targets” by Jonathan Morris, who has posted a transcript and missing bits

01:49:29 “The Stallslady is BBC Enterprises” by Stephen Wyatt on how fans interpret his work

02:02:01 Reading from The Power of Kroll novelisation by Robert Shearman

02: 08:37 “Young Men Are Dying For It” by James Goss, on his novelisation of The Armageddon Factor

02:22:30 “Bargain Hunt / On Target” a game with Steve Cole and 02:32:52 a few words from Albert dePetrillo off of BBC Books

02:36:01 Reading from An Unearthly Child novelisation by Nigel Robinson

02:47:38 Reading from The Six Doctors novelisation by Simon Guerrier

02:59:00 “Drawing Inspiration” by Paul MC Smith

03:14:25 “Et zut! Ca recommence!” by Phil Pascoe

03:28:21 “The Changing Face of Doctor Who” by Andrew Orton

03:43:15 “The Timeless Pieces” by James Cooray Smith

03:53:34 “Revenge of the Blurboids” by John Grindrod

04:11:34 “A New Target At Last” and a reading from The Vampire Mutation novelisation by Steve Cole

[Not included] “The Five-Fingered Bookmark” by Professor Esther MacCallum-Stewart (she was a woman, too!)

The Doctor Who Production Diary - 2. The Troughton Years, by David Brunt

This engrossing, 774-page brick of a volume details the day-by-day production of Doctor Who in the late 1960s, when Patrick Troughton was the Doctor. It follows the magnificent first volume in perhaps even more exhaustive detail, covering the period Monday 18 April 1966 (when ‘significant’ changes to Doctor Who were mooted, which surely included the recasting of the lead character) to Monday 4 August 1969 (and the issuing of an audience research report on reactions to the final episode of The War Games). I have delighted in every page.

A lot of histories of Doctor Who tend to focus on one given story at a time. Brunt’s approach coveys the dizzying chaos of multiple stories being in different stages of development all at once. Seeing things presented in this way sparks a lot of new thoughts and connections.

For example, The Evil of the Daleks was broadcast as the final story of Season 4, the last episode airing on 1 July 1967. After a summer break, Season 5 began with The Tomb of the Cybermen, the first episode broadcast on 2 September. That gap, I think, helped to hide the fact that these two consecutive serials, recorded back to back, have a number of similar features. The Doctor visits the planet of his enemies and meets a larger-headed leader version whose plan is to brainwash humans. The Doctor defeats the villains but, in the closing seconds of the final episode, we see that something survives… 

That surely can’t be a coincidence, so I suspect story editor and co-writer Gerry Davis consciously sought to mirror the Dalek story in what he wrote for the Cybermen. Something similar then happened in a subsequent Cybermen story, The Invasion (1968), in which the villains are seen stalking around landmarks of London, mirrors something similar in The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964).

Another connection I’d not made before is that the first approval to wipe an original videotape recording of Doctor Who (boo, hiss) was issued on Thursday 9 March 1967 (p. 198), two days ahead of the broadcast of Episode 1 of The Macra Terror, which debuted a new title sequence. It’s boggling — to me — to think that the videotape archive of Doctor Who remained complete for the entire span that the original title sequence was in use. The wiping of episodes and the commissioning of new titles are also both, I think, signs of a production team looking forwards, not back — at a time when they were also jettisoning what had once been a fundamental part of the series format, stories set in the past. It is all part of a consistent mindset.

As with the first volume, I must declare an interest in that I liaised a bit with David Brunt as he assembled this extraordinary compendium. Especially with the later bits, we scrutinised many of the same sources as I worked on my imminent biography, Written by Terrance Dicks. We discussed and debated various points where the sources aren’t entirely clear, and he read over my draft chapters and caught some of my more glaring errors.

As he explains in the introduction here, his approach has been to work chiefly from the BBC paperwork held at the Written Archives Centre in Caversham — his list of the files there that he looked through takes up two whole pages (pp. 771-2). From this, he lays out, as objectively as possible, what happened on what date. Along the way, he makes a number of shrewd deductions to tackle discrepancies in the primary sources or to plug gaps in the record. 

Even so, his emphasis is on evidence from documentation. Where no documents survive, he is warier than me of using things said in later interviews by cast and crew. For example, there are several accounts that script editor / associate producer / producer Derrick Sherwin organised a screening or screenings of the Quatermass serials from the 1950s for himself and his team (Terrance Dicks and Trevor Ray) ahead of commissioning the first Doctor Who stories involving the new Earthbound format. In discussing that with Brunt, we think this must have taken place in late December 1968 — but, unable to be surer than that, he leaves it out of his production diary.

There are a few instances where I disagree with his conclusions — not that he’s wrong, but I interpret things another way. For example, in his entry for Tuesday 18 October 1966, he provides a summary of an early version of Part One of The Power of the Daleks, detailing how it varies from the episode as broadcast. That surviving early script is not dated, but Brunt suggests it’s the version issued to the cast for the start of rehearsals, which began on this particular Tuesday. I think the very different and much wordier version of the Doctor in this script suggests that this is the script written by David Whitaker, before — on Friday 7 October, as detailed by Brunt — Dennis Spooner was engaged to rewrite it. I think a now-lost Spooner rewrite was used in rehearsals, prior to a final (surviving) camera script being drafted.  

Likewise, Brunt thinks “on or around” Tuesday 20 February 1968 that Terrance Dicks was interviewed for the job as assistant story editor on Doctor Who, and at the same attended the video playback of the most recently recorded instalment of Doctor Who, Episode 6 of The Web of Fear. My sense from Terrance’s own (brief, not entirely clear) accounts of what happened is that this playback was among the first things to happen once he’d been appointed.

This isn’t meant to quibble — it’s a delight to engage with this stuff and puzzle out the nuances as best we can. Brunt’s different perspective has made me look again at what I’ve come up with and in a couple of places I’ve been able to correct small details in my own book, just in time. What’s more, something here prompted a new line of thought and on Monday I’m off on a research trip to dig out what I hope will be new information for an article in DWM...

I look forward eagerly to the next volume.

Doctor Who Magazine #635

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out today, and comes with a free Target novel: Doctor Who - At Childhood's End by Sophie Aldred.

In among the other treats, Chris Bentley talked to me about my forthcoming audio novel The Missing Hour, which is released next week. And on p. 8, reader Lloyd Peterson from New Jersey, USA, responds to my recent article about Star Trek. It's nice to make such far-reaching connections...

Trailer for The Missing Hour

Big Finish have posted a three-minute excerpt from my forthcoming, six-hour Doctor Who audio novella, The Missing Hour, which is due for release in full on 22 October.

To hear the excerpt, read by Barnaby Edwards, visit The Missing Hour page on the Big Finish website and click "Listen to the trailer" or "Download Trailer" just below the cover image.

Written by Terrance Dicks book launch, 25 November

The Portico Library in Manchester will host the launch of my new biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, on the evening of 25 November. I'll be in conversation with Portico Library trustee Esther Lisk-Carew from Manchester Metropolitan University, discussing Terrance's life and career.

• Buy tickets for Written by Terrance Dicks: Book Launch with Simon Guerrier

As well as his prolific contribution to Doctor Who and the 235 books he published, Terrance was also script editor and producer of the BBC's classic serials in the 1980s. At the event, the Portico Library will display some first editions of some of the books he saw dramatised, including Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist. 

I'll also be at Target Book Club in London on 24 October. More events and details relating to the book, including how to pre-order it, to follow soon. You can already pre-order my novelisation The Six Doctors and Steve Cole's novelisation of The Vampire Mutation, both based on papers I uncovered in the course of researching the biography.

(Yes, 25 November is the anniversary of the UK broadcast of The Five Doctors.)

Star Trek 4, by James Blish

Star Trek is 60 years-old today, sort of. Over the weekend of 1-5 September 1966, its pilot episode The Menagerie was shown to attendees of the 24th World Science Fiction Convention, held in Cleveland, Ohio — says p. 93 of this book. The series proper began with The Man Trap, broadcast on CTV in Canada on 6 September and on NBC in the US two days later. It wasn’t shown in the UK for almost another three years.

Anyway, this fourth anthology of prose versions of TV episodes was published in the US in July 1971 and issued in the UK in October, price 25p (the first Star Trek book in New Pence). It was the last of five Star Trek books available in the UK prior to 8 March 1972, the date on which Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks wrote to writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin, asking (among other things) for the return of the Star Trek books he’d loaned them. So, this is my final post on the subject of the influence of these books on Doctor Who of that period.

(For more of this stuff see my posts on Blish’s Star Trek, Star Trek 2, Star Trek 3 and the original novel Spock Must Die!, plus my article “Who Connections — Star Trek”, for Doctor Who Magazine #632 (August 2026), pp. 44-49 and my forthcoming biography Written by Terrance Dicks...)

The cover of Star Trek 4 looks very different from previous books, with artwork depicting the USS Enterprise in space, between two pale blue worlds. For the first time, there’s no artwork or photograph of the main characters — I wonder if, like with the later Doctor Who novelisations, there were issues over fees owed to actors. As with the previous volume, this is “all new award-winning” Star Trek, though that “new” is a little ingenuous: the adventures here were all broadcast on TV at least three years previously.

The book is dedicated “To Donna Woodman and the other new English Star Trek fans”, the author having now settled in the UK and, through these books, found himself the locus of an active fandom determined to see Star Trek resurrected. In his preface, Blish says he receives a lot of letters from fans and uses them to decide which stories to adapt next — suggesting he had free choice, rather than having it imposed by the publisher or rights-holder. 

He tells us that The Menagerie, adapted in this volume, won the prestigious Hugo award in 1967 and City on the Edge of Forever (adapted in Star Trek 2) won in 1968, but that the subsequent cancellation of the series meant there was nothing to nominate for the award in 1970. This is not entirely honest. For one thing, it misses out the 1969 awards entirely, where no Star Trek episodes were nominated. Technically, Star Trek could have been nominated in 1970 — any of the the 11 new episodes first broadcast in 1969 would have been eligible. But for two years running, it seems, the series was on air but not considered good enough by science-fiction fans.

Production on Star Trek ended in 1969, so Blish was faced with a limited number of episodes to choose from for these books, and an even more limited number of good episodes. But he’d also by this point committed to double the number of these books: 

“As matters stand now, there will be at least four more, all within the next year or so” (p. ix).

That may explain why there are just six episodes in this book, so as not to burn through the fuel. But I think it also explains the peculiar choice of first story.

All Our Yesterdays involves yet another time travel portal, on this occasion dumping our heroes back in a superstitious period. Spock gets emotional and snogs a woman because, we learn, he is 10,000 years back in time and that's what Vulcans were like back then — as if the psychology of his people, even on a far distant world, is contagious. There’s no effort to suggest that the same is true of humans. Anyway, the basic wheeze is that Kirk, with his technological gizmos, is accused of witchcraft. There’s a bit of running about. It’s not very good.

The Devil in the Dark is much better. It’s set on the planet Janus — not Janus VI as on TV — which is rich in the element pergium, atomic number 358. Mining operations for this precious resource are halted by a “big and kind of shaggy monster” (p. 23) that kills an engineer. There are references to new sci-fi material teflon (p. 24 and p. 26), a recent real-life invention of the space age, and Kirk is surprised that people here still use old-fashioned technology like fission (p. 27), because the Enterprise gets its energy from antimatter (p. 25). There’s no mention of teflon, fission or antimatter in the TV episodes, so this sci-fi materials stuff must all come from Blish.

At one heroic moment, Kirk says, “I feel the need for a conference” (p. 29), meaning a planning meeting to decide the next move. I tend to think of sci-fi business meetings round a table, all Walter Citrine in space, as a characteristic of The Next Generation, so this early version caught my attention. But “conference” is also the word Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks and producer Barry Letts used for their meetings with writers to discuss potential storylines, scene breakdowns and scripts. I’ve seen no evidence of the term being used on Doctor Who before this, so the intriguing thought is they took the word from Kirk to make their natters about plot logic sound a bit more dynamic…

If that’s a bit fanciful, elements of this episode were surely a direct influence on them. The plot, involving the last survivor of an intelligent alien species attacking human miners, only for us to realise the alien is quite nice, surely helped to shape The Curse of Peladon (1972). You can almost hear Spock addressing the Third Doctor in one exchange (though he’s really addressing McCoy):

“No creature is monstrous in its own environment, Doctor. And this one appears to be Intelligent, as well.” (p. 29)

I’ve previously argued that the influence of Star Trek episode Mirror Mirror on Doctor Who story Inferno (1970) must have been via the book rather than the TV episode, given relative dates they were available in the UK. Here, the opposite must be true: scripts for The Curse of Peladon were commissioned on 14 May 1971, after a storyline conference between Dicks, Letts and writer Brian Hayles on 1 March — months before this book was issued in the UK. But The Devil in the Dark was broadcast on BBC One at 17.15 on Saturday 6 September 1969 and repeated on 17 March 1971, the latter just as the plot for The Curse of Peladon was being worked out. So, it was the repeat that influenced Doctor Who.

Hayles said himself that he drew on Conan-Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), with attacks by a mythical creature revealed to be a hoax. Yet his Doctor Who story is much closer to what happens with the Horta here. The whole feel of the Doctor Who story, with a sci-fi trip to a civilisation that feels if not ancient than medieval may mean All Our Yesterdays was also an influence.

Both TV episode and book version of The Devil in the Dark reveal the Horta to be a silicon-based life form, which may have influenced Baker and Martin’s later Doctor Who story The Hand of Fear (1976). Blish thought beyond the surface of this creature, and tells us it has teflon-like internal tubing — a stone on the outside but with circulatory system of molten plastic.

Spock sets out his case for not killing the creature even before he’s learned its soft centre:

“If this is the only survivor of a dead race, to kill it would be a crime against science.”

Kirk seems to find this eccentric: 

“Spock in particular was sometimes inclined to hold his fire when his conservation instincts, or his scientific curiosity, were aroused” (p. 34).

He supports his friend, but is bemused by this hippy/ecowarrior/woke sensibility. I would argue thaty this sensibility is very much in line with the Third Doctor — and a new development compared to previous incarnations. I contend that this Star Trek influenced both the character of the Third Doctor and the adventures he had.

Blish describes something quite different to the blobby creature seen on screen:

“It was huge, shaggy, multicolored, and knobbly with objects which might have been heads, sense organs, hands” (p. 37).

The shagginess is much more like Aggedor in The Curse of Peladon, so perhaps the book informed the design of that story — which went into production after this book was available in the UK. 

The TV episode and the book both reveal the simplistic way in which the Horta communicates with humans: “No Kill” it says (p. 39). Blish suggests in the altar and chamber something of the creature’s culture (p. 40). I think this inspired more than stuff in Doctor Who; amaze amaze, there’s quite a bit of the Horta in Rocky in Project Hail Mary.

In treating the wounded stone creature, McCoy uses thermoconcrete — a fun gag — and gets to use the first iteration of his, “I’m a doctor” catchphrase; in this case, he is not a bricklayer (p. 41). At the end of the story, the Horta and its progeny agree to help the humans with their mining. Spock says the agreement is logical, but I can’t think what’s in it for these indigenous creatures as their world is plundered.

That, I think, is where The Curse of Peladon is notably different from Star Trek. Doctor Who of this period is much more ambivalent about the virtues of the Federation and Earth Empire, which Terrance acknowledged quite openly:

“You can’t just do a kind of old imperial story whereby the galactic federation is coming to Peladon and is bringing the simplistic natives the benefits of civilisation, like Sanders of Africa bringing law and order to Africa. This isn’t how people think any more, even with a family adventure serial. We are all well aware now that what happens when an advanced [people] meet a primitive [one] is not always to the benefit of the primitives.” — Terrance interviewed by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado for Doctor Who — The Unfolding Text (1983), p. 53.

The next story in the book, Journey to Babel, begins with Dr McCoy asking Spock for a demonstration of the Vulcan salute, which we’re told is “complex” and that McCoy cannot reproduce, making it sound more like the flourish of Arnold J Rimmer in Red Dwarf than the familiar split-fingers thing. Again, I wonder how much Star Trek Blish had actually seen to miss something so well known. 

The concern about such protocol is that Kirk, Spock and McCoy are welcoming aboard a Vulcan ambassador called Sarek. Kirk knows this Sarek is 102 years-old, but not that he is Spock’s dad. The awkwardness that follows is surely because Kirk has been badly briefed; I reckon by AI.

There’s some fun stuff about Spock’s people, such as that a Vulcan teddy bear, a sehlat, is alive and has six-inch fangs (p. 51). (No, even I think it’s going too far to suggest that that could have been an influence on the troll doll in Terror of the Autons.)

Sarek is one of a number of delegates squabbling over whether to allow planet Coridan to join the Federation. The issue is that, 

“Coridans have a nearly unlimited wealth of dilithium crystals, but are underpopulated and unprotected. This invites illegal mining operations.” (p. 52)

Of course, the Federation is acting entirely altruistically and it’s just one heck of a coincidence that its fleet of starships run on exactly these crystals. One delegate, a Tellarite, is then murdered and we must work out the culprit. That is all very The Curse of Peladon, though Journey to Babel was first broadcast in the UK on Monday, 22 June 1970, a month after scripts had been commissioned for that Doctor Who story.

There are some notable details here: McCoy can give Kirk orders; Spock trusts McCoy, “to McCoy’s obvious startlement” (p. 58); and Spock insists on observing protocol even if means doing so at the expense of his own father (p. 59). Spock’s relationship with his father doesn’t seem logical in the slightest, but hush, you’re spoiling the story.

At the end, Spock exposes the real villains — smugglers from Orion trying to cause chaos and play off both sides (p. 66). There’s something of that in The Curse of Peladon and another Doctor Who story, Frontier in Space (1973), though I think the latter owes more to the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967). In fact, I wonder if that film inspired elements of this Star Trek.

The Menagerie begins with a 15-line footnote explaining that Blish felt it too confusing to adapt the broadcast version, which added lots of new material involving Kirk etc to the untransmitted pilot episode which had Spock under the command of a different captain. Instead of all the dramatic business of Spock-now facing court martial, Blish simply adapted the script of the pilot, in the process restoring the original ending not seen on broadcast. 

Reading it now, with these episodes readily available to watch or rewatch, that means the adaptation offers intriguing details about the original conception and development of this key story. But I can a Star Trek fan of the time feeling a bit short-changed to lose half the TV story — including all the “proper” bits of Star Trek, such as Kirk, McCoy etc. Our relationship to the book is different when it is the only permanent record of ephemeral TV.

Blish says that The Menagerie was the only two-part Star Trek story of the orignal run because the producers didn’t feel it worked. That is odd because it works very well, I think. Indeed, some of my favourite moments of later iterations of Star Trek are its cliffhangers.

The story begins in the aftermath of the Enterprise’s maiden battle, somewhere around Rigel VIII, with Spock still limping from whatever was involved (p. 69). Blish underlines how remarkable it is that Pike doesn't think twice about leaving the Enterprise in the command of Number One — a woman. She is,

“Slim and dark in a Nile Valley sort of way, she was one of those women who always look the same between the ages of twenty and fifty, but she had a mind like the proverbial steel trap, and Pike have never seen her shaken in any situation” (p. 70).

But Blish doesn’t think — or have the authority — to provide her with a name. (In the TV series Strange New Worlds, the character’s name is Una, which is a nice play on “number one” but also in rightful homage to my pal Una McCormack, and surely the coolest thing ever to happen to a TV tie-in writer.)

Blish refers to the “dematerialization of the Transporter” (p. 72). This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. The TARDIS is said to “dematerialise” (or it is “dematerialising” or has “dematerialised”) in dialogue used in TV stories The Time Meddler and The Myth Makers (1965), The Daleks Master Plan (1965-66) and The Smugglers (1966). My guess is that that was the influence of story editor Dennis Spooner, picked up by his immediate successor Donald Tosh. But the word then fell by the wayside.

But then the term was picked up again by Terrance Dicks in exactly the period of Doctor Who that I think was influenced a lot by Star Trek. Not only does the TARDIS dematerialise, it boasts a dematerialisation circuit. In that sense, the word is used in dialogue in Terror of the Autons, The Mind of Evil, The Claws of Axos and Colony In Space (1971), Day of the Daleks and The Time Monster (1972), The Three Doctors (1972-73), The Green Death (1973) and Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974).

That can’t come from this book, which was published after those 1971 episodes. But perhaps Terrance took the word “dematerialise” from the Star Trek episode Return to Tomorrow, where Scotty uses it to refer to the transporter. That episode was first broadcast in the UK on 17 August 1970, just as scripts for Terror of the Autons were being finalised. Yes, yes, it’s a stretch, but I’m rather delighted by the thought that such a potent word in Doctor Who might have been pinched from the opposition.

Whatever the case, the fantasy realm Captain Pike encounters here is described as, “almost like that of an Oriental potentate” (p. 84); the latest example in these books of Oriental to mean “alien but sexy". There seems a genuine risk that Pike might give up Star Fleet and go with these fantasy slave traders, even before, “Pike saw another girl, nude, her skin green” (p. 85) which tempts him further. This is Vina, her name surely taken from Weena in The Time Machine by HG Wells. Like Pike, she seems quite keen on the fantasy, protesting, “No, let us finish” (p. 86) when it threatens to stop.

At the end of the story, Pike escapes the fantasy world and Vina, but his experience affects how this captain, in charge of a crew of competent people not judged by their sex, now views some members of his crew:

“Pike could not resist stealing a quick look from Number One to [Yeoman] Colt, wondering which of them, in other circumstances, he might have picked.”

Nicely, Blish ends with a twist on this, empowering the two women:

“When he found them both looking at him as if with the same speculation, he turned his eyes determinedly to the viewscreen and banished the thought” (p. 93).

In his afterword, Blish notes that it was decided that this dynamic of captain and two potential love interests would not sustain many episodes of the TV show so it was abandoned. In other changes, he says, Number One was demoted and became Lt Uhura, Colt became Janice Rand, medical officer Boyce becames McCoy, and Tyler became Sulu.

“The net effect was to make the new officers more interracial than before” (p. 94).

He concludes that he sometimes gets letters criticising his adaptations for being different to those as broadcast — presumably from fans with audio recordings of the episodes. He says, “I had to make my own judgment of what would best serve the authors’ intents”, showing fidelity to what was in their heads, if not what they typed.

Next up is The Enterprise Incident, the first adaptation in these books of a third season episode, in which Kirk is working under sealed orders that seem irrational. To keep the secret, he plays up to being “irritable and snappish” as if fatigued (p. 95), to the extent that when Spock questions his behaviour, Kirk responds, “you pointy-eared turncoat” (p. 104).

All of this is because the Federation are sending Kirk on a secret mission to meet a Romulan Commander, an otherwise unnamed woman Kirk thinks, “beautiful, aristocratic, compelling” (p. 99). Like Vina, she soon slips out of her clothes:

“Compared to her appearance in uniform, she seemed now to be wearing hardly anything, although this was in part an illusion of contrast” (p. 109).

We’re also told that, “Vulcans were cyclical in their mating customs, and immune to sexual attraction at all times” (p. 115). That’s clearly not true of the half-human Spock here, who is interested in the Commander.

We learn Spock has been in Starfleet for 18 years (p. 104). He kills Kirk again (p. 107) — a fact spoiled by the Radio Times listing for this episode: Spock “is eventually forced to eliminate his commander with the Vulcan death grip!” (Radio Times #2498, 25 September 1971). I can see why that description would make the casual viewer want to tune in.

The Enterprise achieves Warp Nine while shrouded by the Romulan cloaking device (p. 114), a piece of technology that seems to work very well and is extremely useful; the Enterprise never uses it again. Likewise, the Romulan Commander is a striking woman with a connection to Spock — just the sort of character deserving of a rematch. We don’t see her again, either.

Finally, there’s A Piece of the Action, involving a cargo cult based on Chicago gangsters — and on a particular book, Mobs of the Twenties published in New York in 1993 (p. 121). It’s a fun idea for a story from the 1960s adapted for prose in the early 70s to hinge on a text from the near future but about the past, seized upon by an even more distant future.

In the TV episode, Kirk makes up a card game he says is played on Beta Antares IV. Blish adds that Antares is, in fact, not a double star — so this is Kirk being clever (and certainly not wrong about basic astronomy), saying something his friends will know to be false as a kind of signal to them (p. 124).

Blish also adds a reference to “klee-et”, which he explains is a Vulcan word meaning “prepare to engage”, and refers us in a footnote to the episode Amok Time in Star Trek Three (p. 124, yes spelling out the ordinal) — the first time a footnote appears in these books of adaptations of episodes, having been used a lot in original novel Spock Must Die!

Again, the morality here is a bit suss, Kirk using a show of force from the Enterprise to put down the gangsters. Basically, the Federation is a bigger hoodlum than they are. But I’m struck by a notable absence in these four books: apart from Errand of Mercy in Star Trek 2, they’ve avoided all the TV episodes that work as analogies for the contemporary conflict in Vietnam. At university 30 years ago, I read with great interest H Bruce Franklin’s “Star Trek in the Vietnam Era” in Science-Fiction Studies vol 21, no 1 (March 1994), pp. 24-34, which demonstrates how select episodes of Star Trek reveal changing attitudes to the real-life conflict. Was there an active choice made not to adapt the stories that touched on contemporary geo-politics? Again, I’m curious who decided or imposed the episodes to be adapted.

As a permanent record of the TV episodes, these books must have had a formative influence on early Star Trek fandom in the US and the UK. I wonder how much they influenced a sense of the “best” episodes, or most worthy ones, filtered by the selection process and Blish’s own prejudice as an active member of the community at the World Science Fiction Convention. How much did he impose on fans?

I think this stuff was hugely influential on Doctor Who — both on TV and and on its own nascent fandom. Doctor Who surely took the idea of the Doctor as diplomat from Star Trek. He’s got his own elegant way of fighting — CTRL+F “Vulcan neck-pinch”, CTRL+R “Venusian aikido”. But the Doctor doesn’t kill his best friend the Brigadier, let alone kill him twice. And there’s nothing about the Doctor having alien hormones or a previously unmentioned wife. At least not for the time being.

My abiding thought is how much these breezy adaptations of TV episodes must have influenced Terrance Dicks’s approach to the novelisations of Doctor Who, and even the fact that such books existed at all. Star Trek 5 by James Blish was published in the US in February 1972 and issued in the UK in June that year. Thereafter, Corgi published UK editions of the Star Trek books by Blish. That was surely a vote of confidence in a market for such titles, even with no new Star Trek being made on TV. That must have helped support the case for a new line of Doctor Who novelisations launched by Target in 1973.

I shall return to those Doctor Who novelisations in due course, with a long post picking up where I left off. Coming soon: Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters…

Doctor Who and the Missing Hour

Big Finish have announced details of my new six-hour audio novel, Doctor Who - The Missing Hour, to be released in October.

June 1940 and the island of Malta is under constant bombardment.

Flight officer Roddy Wright is one of a handful of Hurricane pilots helping to defend the island. He knows the odds are against him.

So, too, does his daughter. In fact, Barbara knows that there are just days - hours - until her father goes missing in action.

She can't alter history. But until that fateful hour, how can she resist spending more time with the father she lost so long ago? What could possibly go wrong?

It is written by me from a storyline by Fio Trethewey, and narrated by Barnaby Edwards. Sound design and music by Richard Fox, script editor Roland Moore, producer David Richardson, senior producer John Ainsworth and executive producers Jason Haigh-Ellery and Nicholas Briggs. The splendid cover art is by Sean Longmore. 

Roddy takes his name from Roderick Malachi Seaburne Rayner (1918-82), a Hurricane pilot in the Battle of Britain and my great uncle.

Star Trek 3, by James Blish

This third volume of breezy adaptations in prose of Star Trek episodes was first published in the US in April 1969, by which point the TV series had been cancelled. It was issued in the UK in August of that year, with a sticker saying “3/6”, just weeks after the series began broadcast on Saturday teatimes in what was usually the Doctor Who slot. I read it, along with Star Trek, Star Trek 2 and the original novel Spock Must Die! earlier this year as research for my forthcoming biography Written by Terrance Dicks, and I’ve also written a piece on the cross-pollination of these two series, “Who Connections — Star Trek”, for Doctor Who Magazine #632 (August 2026), pp. 44-49.

The cover takes the same format as Star Trek 2, though with a black background rather than white. Whereas that previous book featured a photo of two leading members of the cast, this has three — presumably to match the title. The three leads of the series here are Kirk, Spock and Uhura, making the latter a selling point. Indeed, the first interior page lists the main characters as Kirk, Uhura and Spock, in that order, and describes her thus:

“Lt. Uhura—Unbelievably beautiful, she is the most popular member of the Enterprise crew and also one of the most brilliant scan engineers around.”

The front cover notes Star Trek is now “award-winning” and promises “mind-reeling” and “eerie excursions into galaxies of probability”, and the back cover promises journeys into “the supernatural”. I’m not sure there are galaxies, plural, or forays into the supernatural. There’s a lot of cod psychology of various kinds, including Spock getting horny.

Blish’s preface, written in 1968, addresses the “award-winning” claim on the cover. First, he explains for the lay reader the annual “World Convention” of science-fiction fans — admitting that, at the time he wrote this, it had only been held outside the US on one occasion — and Worldcon’s Hugo awards for best sci-fi of the previous year. The Star Trek episode The Menagerie was nominated for “best dramatic presentation” in 1967, and in 1968 all four of nominees were from Star Trek; City on the Edge of Forever won. However, Blish adapted that story in Star Trek 2 (using elements from the draft script that didn’t make it to the screen), so this new volume presents the three other nominees — The Trouble with Tribbles, The Doomsday Machine and Amok Time. 

Oddly, he doesn’t include The Menagerie here (it’s in Star Trek 4, about which more anon). And though Blish notes that City on the Edge of Forever also won an award voted for by TV writers (a Writers Guild of America award for “best episodic drama on television; the episode The Return of the Archons was also nominated), it’s the accolade from the science-fiction fans that he clearly thinks most worthy of note. That’s despite feeling that, “s-f fandom and Star Trek fandom do not seem to overlap very much, certainly by no more than 10 per cent” (p. viii).

Blish goes on to say that he’d received more mail about his two Star Trek books than for the rest of his writing career (27 novels over 20 years, including a Hugo award winner), and then answers a number of frequently asked questions — no, he can’t supply photographs of or access to the actors; yes, there is a book about The Making of Star Trek and yes, he is writing an original Star Trek novel. From this, we get a nebulous sense of early Star Trek fandom, casual viewers hungry for information and communion.

The first story in the book is The Trouble with Tribbles from the script by David Gerrold, which got its own book in 1973. Blish starts by telling us that we don’t know where tribbles originate from, describing what they look like — “a cross between an Angora cat and a beanbag” (p. 1) — and that they are harmless. He underlines that point, setting up the harm to come.

The story twice mentions the Organian treaty with the Klingons from a previous on-screen adventure, Errand of Mercy, which is as per the TV episode. That episode was included in Star Trek 2 but there’s no footnote back to it as there would be from Spock Must Die! onwards. Indeed, I think Blish introduced footnotes with that novel to give his own, original story a sense of authenticity. Perhaps the references to the treaty here prompted him to revisit it in the novel. 

Then there’s stuff not in the TV episode. On screen, early on, Kirk asks under what authority Nilz Baris has put a whole quadrant on defence alert, and is told Baris is Federation Undersecretary in Charge of Agricultural Affairs. “That gives him the authority,” says Spock, on screen. But in the book, Kirk counters that it is, “A position with no military standing of which I am aware” (p. 3) — suggesting that Kirk and the Enterprise are part of the military. As per the original version of the script, the book version features Koloth, the Klingon from Errand of Mercy. That may mean Blish was working from draft scripts.

Other than that, the adaptation has Spock remark on an unusual monicker — “His name is Cyrano Jones, of all things” (p. 9) — which seems oddly out of character (who is he to judge?). And there’s an odd bit of character work:

“Uhura had never shown the faintest sign of sentimentality before, but [with the pet tribble] she seemed to be far gone in gooiness” (p. 7).

Not for the first time, I wonder how much Star Trek Blish had actually seen when he wrote this.

Next up is The Last Gunfight, the TV episode Spectre of the Gun, in which our heroes find themselves in Tombstone on 26 October 1881, taking the place of the real-life notorious gunfighters — by coincidence, something that also happens in the Doctor Who story The Gunfighters (1966). 

Perhaps there is some direct crossover between this episode of Star Trek and Doctor Who. I wonder if the idea here, of god-like beings who intend to execute a person by putting them in a fantasy world drawn from their own memories, influenced Bob Baker and Dave Martin when they conceived Deathworld, the initial idea that became The Three Doctors (1972-73). Blish says the events are drawn from Kirk’s “ancestral memories—archetypes drawn from the collective unconscious” (p. 25), a concept not used on screen (but an element in Doctor Who and the Silurians (1970)). He also adds a reference to the events of City on the Edge of Forever (p. 26), again without a footnote, and tells us McCoy hails from Atlanta (p. 28).

When Chekov is apparently killed, Kirk finds his science officer’s cold response hard to take, thinking that he’ll “never get used to Spock’s hidden emotional life” (p. 31). Spock, out of character, refers to McCoy as “Bones” (p. 34), and adopts a Scottish accent to achieve rapport with Scott, “his voice suddenly taking on a dark, Caledonian color, as deep as that of a prophet’s” (p. 35). (Do prophets have dark, deep voices?) It’s an example of Spock’s psychological knowledge of, and love for, his various human shipmates, which earns the following response from Kirk — again not heard on screen:

“Privately, and for no other ears than yours, I think you are a sentimental bag of mush” (p. 37).

The Doomsday Machine features Brand, not Matt, Decker — I assume some relative of the Will Decker in the first Star Trek movie. The story involves an ancient, alien weapon able to destroy whole planets, but we’ve already had a story, Operation — Annihilate! in Star Trek 2, in which the Enterprise could itself do that. I think this story must have influenced the Doctor Who adventure Colony in Space (1971), about an ancient, alien weapon able to destroy a whole star, not least because it was novelised as Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon.

Scotty’s fluctuating accent is acknowledged here; we’re told he gets more Scottish when things are serious (p. 50) — in Spock Must Die! it is a sign of him being under stress. It’s also interesting that when Kirk is teleported, the room he was in, “faded around him” (p. 51) — we see it from his perspective, something rarely done on screen.

Assignment Earth begins with references to Kirk’s two previous experiences of time travel (in City on the Edge of Forever and Tomorrow is Yesterday, both in Star Trek 2). The plot involves the Enterprise travelling back from the 23rd century to Earth in 1969 to prevent Gary Seven and his cat from sending a rocket off course — the implication being to start a war. That was surely an influence on what became Day of the Daleks (1972), in which guerrillas from the 22nd century travel back to c. 1980 to blow up a man they think responsible for starting a war. In both cases, the action taken to prevent catastrophe is what causes it. I wonder, too, if the description here of the incongruous Gary — “a man impeccably dressed in a twentieth-century business suit” had an influence on the appearance of the Time Lord at the beginning of Terror of the Autons (1971).

On the same lines, I wonder if Mirror Mirror inspired some of The Curse of Peladon (1972), as it involves a storm stranding the Enterprise landing party on a planet that has firmly declined an invitation to join the Federation. The storm affects the teleport, sending Kirk to “another dimensional plane” (p. 71), where he meets alternative versions of his friends, including a bearded Spock, living in a tyrannical regime. As I argue in my piece for DWM, this was surely an influence on the Doctor Who story Inferno (1970), and script editor Terrance Dicks must have taken the idea from this prose adaptation because the TV episode Mirror Mirror wasn’t broadcast in the UK until the summer of 1970, when Inferno was in the midst of being shown.

McCoy refers here to Spock as “Spocko” (p. 82) and Kirk says of Uhura “Good girl” (p. 76) — neither of them in the TV episode. I was taken by Kirk referring to one of his alternative counterparts as “Mr Pseudo-Sulu”, and describing Pseudo-Chekov’s “lubricious expression” on seeing Uhura (both p. 79) — a rare bit of Blish enjoying the kind of well-chosen words that feature in novelisations by Terrance Dicks. He tells us the Enterprise is a “fifty billion credit starship” (p. 75) and adds some psychology:

“Evidently this universe had never discovered that men pay more attention to a machine when its voice is feminine” (p. 74). 

Friday’s Child is another story about a planet with valuable mineral deposits the Federation is keen to get its mitts on for the indigenous people’s own good. Blish gives us a history of Ceres, then explains that it’s not the dwarf planet (he calls it an asteroid) of the same name in the Solar System. The people of Ceres seem primitive but are descendants of space-travelling humans from Earth, so must have regressed in just a few generations.

There’s a fair bit of male gaze here — a meal is “served by a most scantily clad Cerean girl of whom it was impossible not to be aware” (pp. 87-88). McCoy also refers to “basic humanoid stock” and “genetic drift" (p. 95), what with being an old racist. As well as English, he speaks Vulcan, Old High Martian, medical Latin, Greek, Fortran and Vegan (p. 91). 

The story here is all about a woman, Eleen, who doesn’t want to care for her new baby, due to various things that have been going on. The Enterprise crew are surprisingly judgmental and unsympathetic. “We intend to keep both you and your baby alive, whether you want it or not,” McCoy tells her (p. 94). Kirk tells her, just as sternly, that she is required to look after the child because of her traditions, which he’ll “enforce … if I have to” (p. 99). Ick.

The book concludes with Amok Time, which begins with Spock throwing soup at Nurse Chapel (in the TV episode he just declines it). His quarters are, says Blish, “simple, sparse and vaguely Oriental”, while his reading screen shows an image of “the head of a very young girl, no more than a child” (p. 106) — who turns out, thankfully, to be a grown-up he’s known since childhood. As per the TV episode, his request for shore leave has been declined, but he’s not revealed the medical condition that would surely justify his workplace making reasonable adjustments. This sort of thing wouldn’t happen in the Next Generation, where the Enterprise has office managers.

Blish tells us that Spock’s normal pulse rate is 240 bpm and he has non-existent blood pressure and green blood (p. 107), information not featured in this TV episode but taken from The Naked Time. As I say in my DWM piece, I think the first UK broadcast of that episode, on 19 July 1969, inspired the lines in Spearhead from Space about the Doctor’s own pulse rate, though it may have been taken from this book. Kirk assumes that Vulcans breed “eugenically” (p. 106), and I realise that Pon-farr, as described (p. 109) is basically periods for men. 

The arena on Vulcan is described as being like Stonehenge (p. 110); I wonder if that’s the result of Blish having recently moved to the UK. As per the TV episode, we’re told T’Pau is the only person ever to turn down a seat on the Federation Council, though it’s not clear why. Spock’s childhood pal T’Pring, “no child now”, is still referred to as a “girl” (p. 111). T’Pau sets out the stakes of the duel to follow in much more on-the-nose language than broadcast:

“Are you prepared to become the property of the victor? Not merely his wife, but his chattel, with no other rights or status?” (p. 112)

McCoy refers to this as “hanky-panky”.

Then Kirk and Spock fight to the death. Oddly, Blish chooses to narrate this from Kirk’s perspective, which undercuts the tension — and the “death” of Kirk on screen. Instead, we have Kirk listening to Spock’s remorse at having killed him.

Still, killing Kirk seems to end Spock’s manic sex drive, like some kind of sexual release. I also wonder how the Vulcans will react when they learn Kirk has survived the ordeal: wouldn’t they demand a rematch? It all ends happily and a cured, unsexed-up Spock praises Nurse Chapel’s “very good plomik soup” (p. 117), providing closure. The Enterprise heads off to further adventures…

Bookish Volume II, by Matthew Sweet

Harold Terence Sneed is found in his parlour in Borough, stabbed through the ribs. The irony is that he’d just conducted a seance; one of those present at that attempt to reach the spirit world is the cause of Sneed now passing on.

Maxie Kleinmann is an elderly tailor on Jermyn Street who claims to have killed the man found dead on his shop floor, with a single punch to the throat. And when Gabriel Book takes Jack Blunt to Germany to trace the death of a man very close to them both, there are soon more murders…

I’ve not yet seen the second series of Bookish, of which this is a novelisation, but the book is a delight. I noted of the first volume that it provides some clues to when Book’s adventures are set which we don’t glean from the TV episodes. Here, the three cases all take place in the autumn of 1946, the second story — Dead Man’s Whistle — between 23 October (p. 125) and 8 November (p. 201), and the last one, Killer Nacht, on and around 6 December. Indeed, the first case, Memento Mori, takes place soon after the end of the last series (in September), as there are newspaper headlines about it.

As before, the book is bookended by a brief glimpse of the future, two years on from last time, with a letter from Book in Los Angeles to Nora dated 13 February 1964 and her reply from the following day — meaning that, away from the fog and cold of London, he missed The Edge of Destruction go out.

There are a number of Doctor Who references in the book — Sneed is named after the undertaker in Gatiss’s first Doctor Who episode, and there’s an appearance by Luigi Rossini (Lew Russell) and his circus from Terror of the Autons, and a Chinese fowling piece.

In fact, the book is chock full of references — to books, to real crimes and odd bits of history such as the sad death of Eleanor Marx (the doctor who attended her, and lived just round the corner, was the dad of Ernest Shackleton). I should dearly love footnotes, and a reading list.

I’ve seen the series described as cosy crime, and can see it being just the thing for Sunday evenings in the Call the Midwife slot. There’s a steely edge to some of this stuff, and a pathos which Mark Gatiss has always been so good at. The last episode, in particular, ends with some real tension on the heartstrings — and leaves me baying to know more.

But I note that one of the regular characters is not mentioned in correspondence from 1964. Is that a clue about what’s to come?