The Disappearing Future, edited by George Hay

“A thirteen-course brain banquet” boasts the back cover of this 160-page anthology from 1970, comprising six short stories and seven essays — four of the latter republished from elsewhere. 

It is, promises the cover, a “symposium of speculation.” That’s in line with editor George Hay’s firmly held view of the valae of science-fiction as a kind of blueprint for tomorrow — or, as the Science Fiction Encyclopaedia puts it, 

“that sf provides an armamentarium of mostly technological tools for coping with the future, and that a – or even the – main role of sf was to educate us for that future”.

This was the basis on which Hay helped to establish the Science Fiction Foundation, originally at North East London Polytechnic, and the journal Foundation. (The Encyclopaedia says that this was in 1972, but on 10 June 1971 Hay sent a letter on SFF-headed paper to Barry Letts, producer of Doctor Who…)

A second blurb on the inside first page here suggests that this is exactly what the book will contain: “versions of the future we are now storing up for ourselves” sourced from “practising scientists and well-known sf authors”. Hay — I’m sure he wrote this, for all he refers to himself in the third person — goes on that,

“we have recently begun to to criminally destroy our ancient life-giving relationship with external nature … The Disappearing Future insists that Mother Earth is urgently giving us, her children, the red alert, and that we have very little time left in which to take even evasion action. The decision is ours.” (p. 1)

That sense of urgency, that sense of the whole Earth as environment and as nurturing mother, is surely an example of the impact of the “Earthrise” photograph taken in December 1968 by the crew of Apollo 8, seeing the world as a whole, single organism, as explored in Robert Poole’s book Earthrise. So it’s odd that, having brought up Mother Earth and imminent environmental catastrophe on p. 1 of this anthology, pretty much nothing further is said on the subject.

In his foreword, Hay tells us that the theme on which he submissions was, “the future, as the writer saw it, as derived from present events and trends”. He wanted a mixture of fiction and non-fiction to allow ideas to be explored in detail without holding up the action (or requiring clunky exposition). But he also says that this book is a response to the “paucity” of so many other tired and cliched anthologies of SF, not least in the shadow of the Moon landing,

“Now that space has finally cracked open, now that we know we can make it” (p. 9)

If not the whole-Earth environment, then, the promise is of a practical, useful ideas about what happens next, how we prepare for and embrace the future. Something to build on and with — or, if you will, a foundation…

But what follows is nothing of the sort. 

The anthology opens with “The First Forecast of the Future” by Professor IF Clarke, Head of the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde — and, er, not a scientist. It’s a short history of predictions, mostly focused on the anonymously written The Reign of George VII, 1900-1925 (1763), with references to Ini by Julian von Voss (1810) and the work of Jane Webb (he doesn’t mention the title but he means The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827)).

Well, yes all right, it’s not really about what the future might hold, but gives us some context for how long we’ve been thinking this way. Fine.

Next up is “The Show Must Go On” by David I Masson, in which a character called Piitasan — his name taken, I think, from the marxist Karl Peterson — wanders through urban streets full of squalor and violence. He shares his views on the economics of labour as he steps over a “meths drinker”, ignores a rape in progress, refers to “spastics” and “mongols” and things then don’t end well for him. There’s some sort of analogy in this nasty mess, something a bit Clockwork Orange but not as fedt or insightful. It just left me feeling grubby.

Ophthalmologist and media boffin Kit Pedler’s “Deux Ex Machina?” was apparently first published in the Listener. It’s a bit dry and technical, positing some ideas about the future of robots, or “biological mimics” / “biomims” as he calls them, because why use the perfectly good and understood “android”? He doesn’t use “Cyberman” either; his biography mentions his work on Doomwatch with “Jerry” Davis, but not that they met on Doctor Who. 

Then we get “Political Science — Mark II” by John W Campbell, which Hay’s foreword suggests has been published elsewhere but doesn’t say where. This is more editorial than essay. Campbell starts by laying out his own scientific credentials:

“I have over the east few years brought up the subject of psi, and the facts of dowsing, and protested that scientists refused to apply the scientific method of open-minded experiments — and have been lectured by many kindly people on the subject of how little I understood” (p. 32). 

Yes, the “facts” of dowsing. But this is just the preliminary to his main point, which is to object to the vote taken by members of the National Academy of Sciences, decided 200 to 10, against making “scientific studies of genetic differences of intelligence among racial groups” (p. 33). Campbell thinks people voted out of fear of embarrassing results — which suggests he already felt he knew what those results would be. As with psi and dowsing, he seems to see the value of science as validating what he thinks or would like to be true. And it’s not really about the future at all.

“The Thorns of Barevi” by Anne McCaffrey is the sole contribution from a woman. It is told from the perspective of Cristen Bjornsen, a young woman from Denver who was abducted by alien Catteni and spent some time as a slave on the planet Barevi. In the nine months she has been there, it has been warm like summer on Earth, but the story begins with her worried that this will change as she only has the one outfit.

“Her sleeveless, single piece tunic was made of an indestructible material but it would not be very warm in cold weather. The scooped neckline was indecently low and the skirt ended mid-way on her long thighs.” (p. 35)

She then eats a red-coloured pear, with,

“its succulent juices dribbling down her chin on to her tanned breasts” (p. 36)

This is especially odd as the story is told in the third person from Cristen’s own perspective; this is how she sees herself.

Then she meets an alien Catteni who is humanoid, and “almost good looking” as he has an aristocratic nose and not the “thick, blubbery lips” of others of his kind. “She’d heard rumours…” she begins to tell us while admiring this handsome specimen, but we’re not told what part of his anatomy she has heard rumours about (p. 38). It’s not exactly subtle in the racial coding.

They run away from some other Catteni, taking refuge in a “flitter”. The handsome alien then says he hasn’t had a Terran before and, as if out of curiosity, rapes her — Cristen attempting but failing to resist his advances. 

“Her struggles only seemed to aid his efforts and just as she was certain she would be split apart, a surging emotion far more powerful and overwhelming replaced fear and pain” (p. 43).

Afterwards, they talk a bit and then, on more friendly terms, have sex again. End of story. I’m not really sure what this has to say about the future; I don’t really want to think what it says about the author.

Next up is “Sleep, Dreams and Computers" by Dr Christopher Evans, originally published in the Sunday Times Colour Magazine. He dismisses three theories about why we dream — to rest, to enter some realm of the fantastic, to be free of societal pressures and rules (the reason dreams are of use in psychoanalysis). Then he puts his own theory, based on a computer going offline from the exterior world to back up and sort data. It’s a compelling idea but not really about what the future holds.

Christopher Priest’s short story “Double Consummation” is based on a fun reversal where, in the Britain of the future, the social norm is not to have lasting or monogamous relationships. A man who works in politics is surprised to be dumped by one of his girlfriends, then finds out his other girlfriend has not taken her pills, is now pregnant and wants to get married — which he fears will end his career. It’s neatly set up and the ending works well, but it’s yet another story about sex without consent (in this case, concerning contraception). 

“The Temple Scientists” by Edward J Mishan — LSE staff member and author of The Cost of Economic Growth — muses on the differences between SF and FS, the latter his term for “future society” stories. I didn’t feel there was much of an argument here, really, more technicality than thesis. But it’s the only contribution, apart from George Hay’s foreword, to address other contributions: Pedler’s essay is “stimulating and thoughtful (and occasionally cynical)”, Masson’s short story “barely qualifies as SF” and Chapdelaln’s — which we’ve not got to yet! — is “perhaps too clever”.

“The Sunset Perspective” by Michael Moorcock is another outing for his achingly trendy / sexy time agent Jerry Cornelius, a character introduced in 1965 novel The Final Programme. Here Jerry struts around in “brown velvet bellbottoms” (p. 79) and “black car coat” (p. 80), while tackling an incursion in time that makes people revert to old, superstitious ways. For example, at one point he finds Miss Brunner — also from that first novel — busy burying a goat.

“He watched as she mumbled to herself, hitching her Biba miniskirt up to her thighs and urinating on the new mound of each” (p. 81)

I do not claim to be an expert on the logistics of miniskirts, but wouldn’t it already be around her thighs? Jerry then tries to help this victim of the time incursion in a manner thematically consist with other stories in this collection:

“He flung himself on top of Miss Brunner and began to molest her” (p. 87)

The story, set in the future, is peppered with headlines and fragments of news from the New York Times of 16 October 1969 and the November 1969 edition of Flying Review International, which I think was meant to convey a connection between the then-now and the future. Some 55 years later, it does not have quite the same effect, but gives an indication of exactly when this was written.

“Future Recall” by James Blish is an essay that largely refutes Hay’s whole thesis that science-fiction can and does prepare us for the future. I liked this a lot: it is engagingly argued and full of top facts — that the term “gas giant” is Blish’s own coinage (p. 102). Blish, whose novels I have long enjoyed, is full of shrewd insight. For example, he speaks of a vogue for mysticism in science at the time he was writing.

“When astronomers only a few years ago discovered the strange celestial objects called pulsars, the first explanation they suggested and published was that they might be navigation beacons for an interstellar civilisation. Had pulsars been discovered in 1935, a scientist here and there might have hoped that that was what they’d turn out to be (they didn’t), but he’d never dare to say so aloud.” (p. 103)

This is followed by “Someday You’ll Be Rich!” by Perry A Chapdelaine, about a PhD cyberneurologist who tries various different schemes to make money, and comes up with a means of rapidly churning out long strings of text using up every combination of keys on a typewriter, so that he can claim copyright on all stories as yet to be written. It’s a bit over-cooked and over-long, but striking to read now in the age of interminable techbro lifehacks and AI.

In “About Five Thousand One Hundred and Seventy Five Words” by Samuel R Delaney, originally published in Extrapolation (ed. Thomas D Clareson), the author presents a brilliant, original view of science-fiction based on the way meaning emerges incrementally as we read each word at a time. Every new word conditions what has come before, he says. If we’re introduced to a science-fiction object or idea — a thing that we know is invented — that shapes our sense of everything else in the story, even if it is part of our recognised world. It’s a really compelling idea, engagingly argued and great fun; that perfect mix of clever and funny and boggling. Hay admits in his foreword that it is “somewhat off-course” from the remit of the book; I rather wish more of the book was like this one.

Finally, “Welcome to Wesbloc/Wesbloc” by Anthony Haden-Guest is a report by the teaching machine Merlin:Merlin in the future city of Ecumenopolis, the gag largely being that many things in the future are named after things from the past — one computer called Orwell, another Lenny Bruce. But it ends with the teaching machine looking backward to “now”, so we get more contemporary headlines and fragments of real news, at the time a connection to the present, but in retrospect a weird snapshot of a historical moment. 

All in all, it’s a very odd collection that doesn’t really deliver on what Hay says in his blurb and foreword that he set out to do. It’s too open, too lacking in discipline, and far too often too nasty. Nerds, get over yourselves. 

Yet it has provided a blueprint for the future. Samuel R Delaney’s piece has got me thinking hard about the way meaning is constructed by the precise deployment of words. That has already changed the way I am reading Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks. I think it will shape how I read and how I write from now.

Vortex #202 - Bret Vyon Lives!

The new issue of Big Finish's free magazine Vortex includes a feature on the forthcoming audio boxset Space Security Service - Bret Vyon Lives!, on which I was producer and wrote one instalment: The Man Inside.

The feature by Kenny Smith includes an interview with me and fellow writers David Llewellyn and James Kettle.

Space Security Service - Bret Vyon Lives! is released in February 2026 but available to pre-order now.

Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, by Terrance Dicks

My first edition paperback of this novelisation, published on 22 July 1976, has clearly been well loved. The pages are dog-eared, the front and back covers are creased and the spine has faded to white, so you can no longer read the title. The effect of this love is that, on my shelf of Terrance’s books, it matches the white spine of Terrance’s previous novelisation, Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen. 

But a pristine copy looks very different. As this image from eBay shows, the spine of the first edition was bright red, the title in white. 

This is very different to Doctor Who novelisations of the time. In fact, it matches the red spines of Terrance’s three Mounties novels; putting his books in order of publication you would see two red spines, then white Revenge on its own, then two more red spines (followed by the purple-spined Doctor Who and the Web of Fear). 

But surely the reason for giving the Mounties novels bright red spines and back covers was to match the distinctive red coats worn by Mounties — so distinctive that they’re key to the plot of the third book. That’s obviously not the case with Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks. Something else is going on.

Here, the spine and back cover match the red logo and title on the front cover, which were unusual for the time: Genesis is the 23rd Doctor Who novelisation published by Target and only the second to feature a red version of the logo. On Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, I think the red logo is there to add some zing to the otherwise muted grey-green colour scheme of the illustration, helping to make the Fourth Doctor’s debut in print stand out as something special. The same does not apply to Genesis.

This is also only the second of 23 Doctor Who novelisations to feature a red spine. On Doctor Who and the Crusaders, that and the colour used for the title match bits of red in the cover illustration showing the clash or armies. Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks was the first novelisation since that book to be set in the midst of a war. In both cases, then, I think the red signifies blood.

Artist Chris Achilleos seems to have known the logo would be red because his cover art is sympathetic: the tunic worn by Davros has a reddish tinge, the inset portrait of the Doctor is sepia tinted rather than the usual black-and-white, and the background of the main image within the border is a brownish-red. 

The illustration is also much simpler and more muted than Achilleos’s previous work for the Doctor Who range: there are no laser blasts, cosmic phenomena or radiating energy. Perhaps he felt the red logo would provide sufficient zing. Or perhaps he took his cue from the dour-looking production stills from the TV story that he used for reference.

Photo reference for the Doctor
image c/o the Black Archive

Photo reference for Davros
c/o the Black Archive

Then again, other evidence suggests that the team producing this book knew it was something different from and more grown-up than the usual fare. The back-cover blurb takes an unusual format:

The place: Skaro

Time: The Birth of the Daleks

After a thousand years of futile war against the Thals, DAVROS has perfected the physical form that will carry his race into eternity – the dreaded DALEK. Without feeling, conscience or pity, the Dalek is programmed to EXTERMINATE. 

At the command of the Time Lords, DOCTOR WHO travels back through time in an effort to totally destroy this terrible menace of the future.

But even the Doctor cannot always win…

The blunt statement of fact at the start of this, giving the location in time and space, underlines that this is a big moment in history. That use of “Skaro” is surely meant to resonate with the reader — a name they would recognise, having been steeped in the lore of Doctor Who by previous books. And how extraordinary to tell us, up front, that this is an adventure in which the Doctor doesn’t win.

This is also the first book Terrance had published since Doctor Who and the Giant Robot to have more than 128 pages; this comprises 144. The very handy Based on the Popular BBC TV Serial by Paul MC Smith gives a wordcount of 33,549 words — some 3,500 more than the novelisations Terrance wrote either side of this. Yet look at the graph I produced before, of the wordcounts of the first 12 Doctor Who novelisations (in dark orange) compared to the second 12 (in light orange). 

The 144pp Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks comprises fewer words than the 128pp Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons and 128pp Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders. It is also noticeably shorter than the novelisations shown above by authors other than Terrance. These aren’t labelled in the graph but are, from left to right, Doctor Who and the Green Death by Malcolm Hulke, then — after the three books by Terrance — Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion by Hulke, Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet by Gerry Davis and Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors by Brian Hayles. They are all 144pp.

I suspect the publishers wanted this book, the third Target novelisation to feature the Daleks, to be just as long — and so more of an event. If not, Terrance could easily have cut this six-part serial down to 128pp, as he did with his next book, Doctor Who and the Web of Fear. Here, the Doctor standing on a land mine, him and Harry escaping the Kaled base only to be immediately recaptured, the two sequences with bitey giant clams, the scene (pp. 94-96) in which Nyder cosies up to Gharman before the scene in which Nyder betrays him... They could all be deleted without harming the plot or structure. In fact, I’m used to versions of this story that excise this stuff — I think I had the condensed, audio cassette version before I saw the condensed, omnibus TV version in 1982, a decade before getting to see the full thing on VHS.

Terrance may well have watched a condensed version of this story as he completed the novelisation. I’ve previously estimated a lead-time to publication of 7.5 months; supporting this, on 28 March 1978, Terrance told the DWAS local group in Surbiton that,

“From when I deliver a manuscript, it takes six to eight months to get the book into the shops.” — David J Howe, “Terrance Dicks Speaks”, Oracle vol 2, no. 2 (November 1978), p. 6.

That means that Terrance probably delivered the manuscript for Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks at the end of December 1975. On the afternoon of Saturday, 27 December, an 85-minute omnibus version of the story was shown on BBC One. 

Perhaps this enabled him to add some visual detail to the manuscript. Even so, it seems he largely worked from the scripts. As scripted, Part One opens with “fog-shrouded desolation”, from which soldiers wearing gas-marks emerge before disappearing back into it. This is how Terrance opens his novelisation, too. But in filming this sequence, director David Maloney decided to start things more arrestingly: the soldiers emerge from the fog and are mown down by machine guns.

Likewise, there’s this stage direction on p. 21 of the camera script for Part One:

“THE KALED TROOPS PULL OFF THEIR GAS MASKS. WE NOW SEE THAT THEY ARE ALL VERY YOUNG, FIFTEEN OR SIXTEEN YEARS OLD.”

Terrance tells us, on p. 21 of the novelisation, that when the Kaled soldiers remove their gas masks, they look “little more than boys”; on screen, the actors are young men. We can also see Terrance embellishing details in stage directions. For example, on p. 25 of the camera script for Part One, the Doctor is taken to a headquarters, some distance from the front lines, where he meets Ravon,

“A YOUNG OFFICER OF EIGHTEEN, SLIGHTLY BETTER DRESSED THAN THE TROOPS WE HAVE THUS FAR SEEN”

In the novelisation, Terrance underlines this: Ravon is “a tall, very young officer, elegant in his gold-braided uniform”, and we get a wry comment from the Doctor’s point of view:

“He noticed that the guards were smartly uniformed here, their weapons modern and well cared for. Strange how all wars were the same, thought the Doctor. The staff back at HQ always had better conditions than the men actually out fighting…” (p. 23)

There are other examples of Terrance working from the script. Chapter 10 ends as per the script of Part Five, with the Doctor asking his friends if he has the moral right to destroy the Daleks, and not — as per broadcast — with him being throttled by some slime; again, a last-minute change made by the director. 

But Terrance doesn’t simply copy out what’s in the scripts. For example, on p. 1 of the camera script for Part Five, the Doctor tells Davros that,

“The Dalek invasion of the planet Earth in it’s [sic] year two thousand was foiled because of the attempt by the Daleks to mine the core of the planet…. The magnetic properties of the Earth were too powerful.”

Terrance amends this slightly:

“The Dalek invasion of Earth in the year Two Thousand was foiled because of an over-ambitious attempt to mine the core of the planet. The magnetic core of the planet was too strong, the human resistance too determined” (p. 103)”.

The repetition of “of the planet” is a bit awkward, but look what else he’s done. In the script and TV version, the Daleks were defeated by natural, intangible forces. In just a few words, Terrance has made that defeat the result of two other things: the Daleks’ over-reaching themselves and human agency. In his version, the bombast of the Daleks was thwarted by heroic action.

Note that Terrance keeps the year in words, as per the script — for all he puts it in capitals — and does not amend the date. The date given in the script surely came from writer Terry Nation, perhaps having checked his own story outline for 1964 TV story The Dalek Invasion of Earth, which was originally to be set in the year 2000. That date features in some other production paperwork and was used in the TV trailer to promote the serial ahead of broadcast. 

But at some point the production team pushed the story further into the future: in Nation’s draft script for the first episode, the Doctor’s friend Ian finds a calendar dated 2049; in the camera script and episode as broadcast, the calendar is dated 2164. The late 22nd century is therefore the date more usually ascribed to the serial. For example, the Radio Times special published to mark 10 years of Doctor Who says the story takes place in “London in 2164” (p. 9), but see my post on the economics of the Daleks for more on invasion dating.

Intriguingly, no date is given for the events of the Dalek invasion in the summaries included in The Making of Doctor Who (1972) and The Doctor Who Monster Book (1975). But when Terrance wrote his novelisation, Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977), he included the calendar and date of 2164 (p. 21), as per p. 16 of the camera script. The implication is surely that he’d not read that script prior to this, as he would otherwise have included this detail in his previous books, such as the novelisation of Genesis.

That’s interesting (to me) because Terrance was scheduled to novelise The Dalek Invasion of Earth before he even began work on novelising Genesis of the Daleks. The list of “Advance information on Doctor Who books in preparation” reproduced on p. 92 of The Official Doctor Who Club vol. 2 by Keith Miller, begins with The Green Death by Malcolm Hulke, due for publication in “Aug 75”; though the list itself is undated, it was surely written before that date. It includes the following:

The Cybermens [sic] Revenge [ie Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen] Apr 76

Genesis of Terror [ie Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks] May 76

Carnival of Monsters Jun 76

The World’s End (Dalek Invasion of Earth) Jul 76

The Web of Fear Aug 76

Planet of the Daleks Sep 76

No authors are ascribed to these but they were all ultimately written by Terrance. The schedule changed, with the novelisations of Carnival of Monsters and The Dalek Invasion of Earth pushed back to 1977, and other books added before them. But by the time Terrance started work on the novelisation of Genesis of the Daleks, around December 1975, The Dalek Invasion of Earth had been on the schedule for months.

This all rather implies that the story had been selected and presumably cleared with Nation’s agent without Terrance having read the scripts. The selection of stories to novelise was therefore done on the basis of what Terrance and the editorial team remembered as being good and/or key stories, rather than by reading the scripts to be sure. 

Anyway, back to what Terrance wrote in this ‘ere novelisation…

As we’ve seen, by working from the camera scripts rather than the episodes as broadcast, Terrance omitted some of the more violent moments seen on screen — such as the machine-gunned soldiers in the opening moments. But that doesn’t mean he presents a bowdlerised version of the TV story. We could certainly understand why Terrance or his publishers might have wanted to do so in books aimed at readers aged 8-12, not least given the concerns raised when this serial was first broadcast. For example, Mary Whitehouse gave her view between broadcast of Parts Three and Four:

“Cruelty, corpses, poison gas, Nazi-type stormtroopers and revolting experiments in human genetics are served up as teatime brutality for the tots.” (The Mirror, 27 March 1975, c/o Cuttings Archive) 

But Terrance didn’t censor Genesis of the Daleks. In some places, he makes things more harrowing than on screen, such as when a shell of poison gas is fired at the Doctor and his friends, and there’s only one place for them to get gas masks:

“It wasn’t particularly pleasant grappling with the stiff, cold corpses, but things were too desperate for any fastidiousness” (p. 20)

There’s more on similar lines a bit later:

“Sarah had one of the most horrifying awakenings of her life. Buried beneath a pile of rapidly stiffening corpses, she could feel her face wet with blood. At first she felt confusedly that she must be dead too, or at least badly wounded.” (p. 33)

This, I think, is similar to what we saw in Terrance’s novelisation of Revenge of the Cybermen, where by describing events from the perspective of Sarah (or Harry), they become more horrible and haunting.

Yet Terrance also makes things more palatable by making the Doctor less brusque than on screen. On p. 17, he has the Doctor apologise to Harry and Sarah for the predicament they find themselves in. He then explains the situation and “seemed so genuinely distressed” that his friends assure him it is all right and that they will gladly help.

During the gas attack, our heroes are set upon by soldiers. Terrance tells us that,

“The Doctor and Harry closed ranks to defend Sarah. They put up a splendid fight. Harry had boxed for the Navy in his time and he dealt out straight rights, lefts and uppercuts in the best traditions of the boxing ring. The Doctor fought in a whirl of long arms and legs, using the techniques of Venusian Aikido to drop one opponent after another” (p. 21)

The word “splendid” makes this all sound quite fun, not the confused, brutal scramble on screen. In this version, Harry is more competent and heroic than seen on screen, and the Doctor is more Jon Pertwee than Tom Baker. It’s a moment of Genesis of the Daleks as if script edited by Terrance, not by Robert Holmes. While the Fourth Doctor on-screen in this period can be sombre and brooding, we’re told here that, “Characteristically, the Doctor wasted no time in regrets” (p. 104). He is a man of action.

There’s another example later, when the Doctor tells Harry to go first into the ventilation shaft of the Kaled bunker — even though there might be dangers lurking. On screen, this is played rather at Harry’s expense. Here, we have Harry’s perspective that if the Doctor really suspected any danger, he would of course go first himself. As with the change in Doctor Who and Revenge of the Cybermen where Terrance has the Doctor call Harry an “idiot” rather than the more unpleasant word used on screen, the change makes both the Doctor and Harry more heroic. 

Sadly, I don’t think the same is quite true with Sarah. She’s brave and resourceful as on TV, and yet there’s an odd moment in the novelisation when she asks the Doctor if he really needs to go back to the Kaled bunker to complete his mission, given the evident dangers. He says he must, not least to recover the Time Ring with which they can get back to the TARDIS.

“That was reason enough to convince even Sarah” (p. 93).

It’s an oddly uncharacteristic bit of self-interest. Until this moment, Sarah had been heading to the Kaled bunker anyway, and later she is the one who insists the Doctor completes his mission while he dithers over morality. 

There’s another bit of sexism earlier on, when the Doctor is told that “Davros is never wrong — about anything”, and responds, “Then he must be an exceptional man” (p. 31), assuming a gender. Terrance should have know better, having previously made a joke of this sort of assumption in  his own TV story Robot. 

Better, I think, is Terrance’s handling of the Thal woman Bettan, and the way in which she is persuaded by the Doctor to fight back against the Daleks. When they meet, the Doctor is a prisoner — and enemy — of her people, but we’re told she finds him “curiously compelling” (p. 86) and pauses to speak with him about the friends he has lost in the war. We’re then told Bettan is “an efficient and hard-working young woman, with an important official position” (p. 87) and plenty of work to do, yet she can’t help thinking of this strange, charming man and what he told her. It all helps to explain how, when they meet again, the Doctor is able to persuade her to join him (p. 90).

While the Doctor charms Bettan, he is more withering about other characters, for example diagnosing Ravon’s “basic insecurity” (p. 24) in needing to boast to his prisoners. That’s similar to what Terrance did with Broton in Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, covering the slightly clunky exposition by making it a point of character.

That said, there aren’t many examples of particularly well-chosen words here, as there are in Terrance’s previous novelisations. The Doctor attempting to befriend the Kaleds by speaking in German, “Kamerade” (p. 30) is as per the camera script. Terrance refers to the sucker arm of a Dalek as a “tactile organ” (p. 43), which makes it sound more like a tentacle than a stick with a sink plunger. Sometimes his descriptions are vague, such as when “some kind of field communications equipment” (p. 23) is swiftly followed by “some kind of central command post” (p. 24). Or there’s this:

“Harry and Sarah ran to the doors [of the bunker] and held them back by force. The Doctor came tearing along the tunnel, a patrol of Daleks close behind him. Just as their strength failed, the Doctor reached the fast-narrowing gap and squeezed through.” (p. 137) 

He mentions a patrol of Daleks then refers to “their strength”, but means the strength of Harry and Sarah from the previous sentence. This lack of clarity is very rare for Terrance and may mean the book was written and edited more hurriedly than usual.

More typical of Terrance is the eating. The TV story has a fun scene in which the Doctor is horrified, during an interrogation, not to be offered tea. That is retained here. But Harry also wants “a bite to eat” (p. 73) before he and the Doctor go in search of the missing Sarah. Priorities, man! She’s more important than a sandwich! 

When the Thals destroy the Kaled dome, they celebrate with “wine” (p. 85). I should like to know more about the viticulture of Skaro. In fact, some of the most interesting additions here are to the lore of Skaro and the Daleks. Here, we learn what happened to disfigure Davros:

“An atomic shell struck his laboratory during a Thal bombardment … His body was shattered but he refused to die. He clung to life, and himself designed the mobile life-support system in which you see him” (p. 42)

This makes explicit what is implicit in the design seen on screen, that the Daleks are an extension of Davros’s own life-support system, but there’s also the suggestion, I think, that the conception of the Daleks is Davros imposing what happened to him on everybody else. The atomic shell was presumably radioactive, which may mean Davros has — or had — cancer, so the conception of the Daleks was born out of a sense of his own body wasting away. They are an embodiment of his own desperation to survive.

As on screen, we’re told that Davros has been researching for 50 years (p. 70). Even if he began in his teens, he must be pushing 70. Did the atomic shell strike when he was a young man, so he’s spent 50 years developing Daleks, or did the strike happen some way into his career and diverted the course of research?

There’s a clue in the broadcast Part Two, in which Davros says he has been working “for some time” on the “Mark III project”, which Ronson confirms is a “Mark III travel machine” — later named a Dalek. Three stages of the project does not suggest it has been going on for very long.

But it seems that before working on travel machines, Davros looked at organic methods of getting about. That, at least, is the conclusion of the Doctor, Sarah and Harry when they encounter giant clams. On screen, Harry says Davros “obviously” rejected these for being too slow-moving. 

In the novelisation, it’s the Doctor who ventures this theory, but says “maybe” rather than “obviously”. Terrance also omits the references to the “Mark III” project and machine. That suggests a conscious decision to keep the genesis of the Daleks a bit vague. 

In other places, he adds to the lore. While the Kaleds understand and favour democracy (as on screen, but pp. 116-117), Terrance adds a suggestion of the way power is organised among the Daleks:

“One of the Daleks seemed to be speaking for the others, as if they had already evolved their own leaders” (p. 137)

That word “evolved” is interesting; it suggests leadership developed by nature not vote. In this Dalek’s final speech, vowing to emerge from the buried bunker stronger than ever, Terrance adds under promise / threat:

“We shall build our own city” (p. 139).

That’s surely joining up this story to the first TV appearance of the Daleks, when they are trapped within the confines of their own city. Yet there is no helpful footnote here, telling us to “See Doctor Who and the Daleks” — perhaps because Terrance only put in such references to his own books. Even so, I wonder if the conscious effort to be more vague about Dalek origins was a way of better joining up these two books.

Thinking about this sort of thing makes me realise something odd about Genesis of the Daleks — on TV and in the book. The war between Thals and Kaleds has been fought for thousands of years, but their domed cities are within walking distance of one another. There’s no suggestion that a night passes while the Doctor and co make this journey. The Doctor and his friends are not not trained walkers, so their maximum range in a day — not counting mountain-climbing, attacks by Mutos or giant clams — is probably a maximum 40 km / 25 miles, or about the north-south diameter of London, between Enfield and Croydon.

Another thing I noticed by studying TV version versus book is the irony of poor Ronson, who saves the Doctor and Harry from being the first victims of a Dalek — and then, later in the story, is the first person ever to be exterminated. Terrance didn’t pick on this irony, but he did add a nicely menacing touch not in the TV version: here, Davros claims that it was Ronson who gave the Thals the chemical formula they needed to destroy the Kaled dome (p. 85). It’s a classic technique of the tyrant, accusing someone else of the crime you yourself committed.

At the start of the story, the Doctor is given three ways in which to complete his mission successfully: avert the creation of the Daleks altogether, affect their genetic development so that they become less aggressive, or discover some inherent weakness that can be used against them. He fails on all counts. At the end of the story on TV, Sarah acknowledges this: “We failed, didn’t we?” The Doctor’s response comprises the last words of the story:

“Failed? No, not really. You see, I know that although the Daleks will create havoc and destruction for millions of years, I know also that out of their evil must come something good.”

This is, of course, great comfort to everyone who has ever suffered under the Daleks. It’s also… well, a bit of an anti-climax.

The novelisation tackles this head on, not least by warning us in the blurb, before we’ve even started reading the book, that “even the Doctor cannot always win”. But Terrance also works to make those closing sentiments of the TV serial work a little more effectively. In recruiting Bettan, in getting her to team up with the Muto Sevrin, there’s a sense of him galvanising people to stand up up to the Daleks. 

He underlines this in what the Doctor says when dithering over his right to destroy the Daleks. 

“the evil of the Daleks produced counter-reactions of good” (p. 120)

Terrance also adjusts those closing words from the Doctor. His response to Sarah’s question is that they’ve “not entirely” failed, as they’ve given the Daleks “a nasty setback” (p. 139). This is a “kind of victory”, which is also the name of this closing chapter, and surely an echo of “A Kind of Justice”, the epilogue to the second Mounties novel with its shock last twist. 

The closing words of the novelisation modify the last words of the serial:

“Disappointed, Sarah? No, not really. You see, although I know that Daleks will create havoc and destruction for untold thousands of years… I also know that out of their great evil… some… great… good… must come” (p. 140)

Again, a well-chosen word can make a significant difference to the stakes. The Daleks’ evil and the potential good have both become greater than on screen. It doesn’t entirely fix the anti-climax, but it’s a much more satisfying end. 

One of the best ever Doctor Who stories on TV and Terrance simply, subtly improves it.

*

I’m very grateful to those who have kindly chipped in to support these long, long posts on the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks. Writing them takes time and incurs some expenses, but I’ll press on while that support continues. 

Next time: counting the cuts when a six-part serial is squeezed into 128 pages, with Doctor Who and the Web of Fear… 

Oh, and also announced today: the family of Terrance Dicks have donated his archive of papers to the Borthwick Institute. 

Vworp's 62nd in Manchester tomorrow

A bit last minute, but I'll be one of the guests as Vworp's event in Manchester tomorrow afternoon to mark 62 years of Doctor Who. I'll present "The Unseen Terrance Dicks", the talk I originally gave at Target Book Club in London in July. 

Other guests include Susan Twist off of Doctor Who, Rob Shearman (writer of Dalek), Jonathan Carley (Big Finish's War Doctor), Mark Griffiths (BBC Books etc), and Georgia Cook and Fio Trethewey (also BBC Books and Big Finish and whatnot).

Tickets and further details here.

The Baum Bugle, vol 69 no. 2

The latest issue of the Baum Bugle, journal of the International Wizard of Oz Club, features a piece by editor-in-chief Sarah K Crotzer, "So...! The Many Heads of Jean Marsh".

It's an illuminated, six-page piece covering Jean's life and career, and includes a few words from me about working with her on several Doctor Who audio stories, beginning with Home Truths. 

There are some amazing photographs of Jean at the premiere of Return to Oz, care of Tricia Trozzi, as well as a feature on the press response to that movie and a checklist of merchandise. Thanks to Sarah K Crotzer for sending me a copy.

War Drums of the Blackfoot, by Terrance Dicks

This is the first of Terrance’s books to be published in my lifetime, on 12 July 1976. The indicia says it was published simultaneously in Great Britain by Allan Wingate (Publishers) Ltd and Tandem Publishing Ltd, in hardback and paperback respectively.

I suspect the print runs were not huge. While first editions of Target’s Doctor Who paperbacks are relatively easy to come by and it is the hardbacks that are rare, I’ve only been able to find a hardback edition of War Drums of the Blackfoot. I’ve also spoken to collectors who’ve been at this for longer than me, and they haven’t traced a paperback either.

Perhaps there’s more going on in this than simply the number of copies printed. Readers may have tended to keep hold of their Doctor Who paperbacks, building up a collection, whereas the Mounties books were more readily discarded. Even if readers grew out of Doctor Who, those books could be passed on to school fetes, bring-and-buy sales and second-hand book stalls and shops, where a subsequent generation of fans — including me — eagerly gathered them up. Thus these books survived. 

It may even be that discarded Mounties paperbacks ended up on those stalls, and I didn’t notice — or care, because they weren’t Doctor Who. I don’t remember seeing them but might have barely spared them a glance as I looked for the good stuff. If so, I played a part in unsold, second-hand Mounties getting binned. Sorry, everyone.

Hardback editions survive, I think, because they were largely published for and bought by libraries, which tended to hold on to their books. My copy of War Drums of the Blackfoot was, says a stamp on the title page, “Discarded by Havering Library Service”. It’s in pretty good condition, the dust jacket largely intact except for what look like chew marks in one corner. It’s not well thumbed and dog eared like some of my well-loved Doctor Who books.

The brick red spine as on the other Mounties books — still evident here on the back and on a stripe on the spine once covered by a library sticker — has faded to pallid orange. The front and back covers haven’t faded. This is a book that spent considerable time on a bookshelf, not being opened and read.

While the Doctor Who books went through multiple reprints and new impressions, sometimes within months of first publication, the Mounties books have never been republished. Several people have responded to these posts of mine saying that, though they know Terrance’s Doctor Who books very well, they had no idea these existed.

Yet, as Terrance worked out the plot of War Drums of the Blackfoot, three months ahead of publication of the first book in the series, he was optimistic that the Mounties would do well, as we can see from his earliest surviving notes. Thrillingly, these notes also tell us a lot about his creative process.

Monday Oct 6th 1975

Mounties III Preliminary notes

1) Fake Mountie murders Indians

2) Missing uniforms

3) Yankee coats incident. Mounting hostility and hysteria

Climax — ‘The Treaty’

(Later Books about — (1) Denbow and (2) Dubois) More role in this.

Fred Denbow and Henri Dubois were introduced in the first Mounties book, The Great March West, as colleagues and friends of hero Rob MacGregor. At this earliest stage of plotting the third book, Terrance wanted to build up their involvement so that they could each be the focus of further novels in the series.

His next notes are dated Thursday, 9 October, by which time Terrance had a title, “Wardrums [one word] of the Blackfoot”, and a basic structure, with a sentence summarising each of 10 chapters plus an epilogue to feature a final twist — much the same structure as the second novel, Massacre in the Hills. He also specified that the novel was to take place prior to 25 June 1876, the date of Custer’s notorious “last stand” — which surely meant he intended to include that key historical moment in a later book.

Over the next few days, Terrance developed each one-line summary into a paragraph per chapter, up to and including Chapter 7, each given a separate page of his spiral-bound notebook. On Tuesday, 14 October he added the note to himself that there should be, “Continuous conflict, tension, excitement, action. Hold back plot as much as possible.” 

He also calculated an approximate wordcount, based on an average 10 words per line, with 32 lines per page over 144 pages equalling 46,080 words. This is considerably more than the roughly 30,000 words Terrance produced for each Doctor Who novelisation at this time. But I don't think this greater wordcount meant he intended the Mounties books to be for older readers, not least because Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen and Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, written either side of this novel, are so grim and violent. 

Besides, the published version of War Drums of the Blackfoot isn’t as long as Terrance initially predicted. It comprises the usual 128 pages of an Allan Wingate / Target book of the time, whereas Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, at a slightly longer than usual 33,549 words, warranted 144 pages. (I’ll have more to say on wordcounts when I post about that novelisation, with data care of the dead useful Based on the Popular BBC Television Serial by Paul MC Smith.)

Anyway, having estimated wordcount, Terrance then stopped making notes and got on with bashing out a first, uncorrected draft. This was completed by 17 November, which means he was writing roughly 1,000 words a day. The book as published comprises 12 chapters and no epilogue, so he didn’t stick too rigidly to that first outline.

Once again, he seems to have drawn from the non-fiction history of the real-life Mounties, Maintain the Right by Ronald Atkin (1973). One crucial element, first detailed on p. 27 of the novel, is the poor state of the Mounties’ uniforms, which comes right out of Atkin:

“In fact, the quality of the uniforms was a continuing disgrace during the Force’s early years. In 1876, in an attempt to cut costs, the Canadian government had the police clothing and boots made of inferior materials by inferior craftsmen — the inmates of Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario. One constable reported that when he got his prison-made boots wet he was unable to remove them when they dried, so he had to soak them again before being able to get them off.” (Maintain the Right, p. 126).

Atkin also tells us about 25 year-old Ephraim Brisebois, in charge of the Mounties’ F Division, who was, in August 1875, tasked with the construction of a new fort.

“Inspector Brisebois made persistent attempts to have the new fort named after himself, even writing ‘Fort Brisebois’ at the head of all outgoing correspondence and on bills and invoices.” (MtR, p. 98).

Terrance refers to the real-life Brisebois in his notes but in the novel it’s a fictional Inspector Bellamy who wants the new fort named in his own honour (p. 13). In Atkin, we’re told work to build the fort was contracted out to the firm of one IG Baker (p. 98). In the novel, Bellamy has the Mounties doing the construction — as further sign of his self-serving nature.

In reality and in fiction, Commissioner Macleod over-ruled the inspector and named the new fort “Calgarry” — two Rs — giving the modern city of Calgary its name. In the novel, that’s because Macleod was born in a place of the same name on the Isle of Skye (p. 125); in reality, the gothic mansion known as Calgary Castle is on the Isle of Mull and Macleod had been a guest there. Terrance either misread what Atkin said or chose to simplify reality for the benefit of his readers.

Unlike the first two novels, there’s no “author’s note” here to tell us that the story is based in real history, which suggests that Terrance was conscious of being freer here with the sources. He took the problem of the poor uniforms and the problem of the vain inspector and imagined what happened next.

On meeting the “pompous and unpopular” Bellamy, Rob is amazed to find the inspector wearing a “handsome blue cloak” — part of the uniform of the US cavalry. Bellamy says, “complacently”, that his own cloak is “threadbare” and American uniforms have been delivered to him by mistake, so “I saw no harm in wearing this” (p. 14). Rob replies crossly that if the Indians see him in US Cavalry uniform, they are liable to attack…

Rob is, as usual, correct. What’s more, the Indians have been attacked by Mounties so turn on Rob and his friends. That’s what we see in the cover artwork, once again by Jack Hayes. It is not a hundred miles from the cover of the second Mounties novel: Rob on horseback in the centre of frame, staring coolly back at the advancing, aggressive Indian(s). 

The Mounties trilogy by Terrance Dicks
Cover art by Jack Hayes

Being closer in on the action this time, we see Rob’s face more clearly, which I think makes the cover more effective. It might have helped if the Indian’s arrow and the line made by his arms pointed at Rob’s face, to direct our focus — but perhaps that was thought too violent for young readers. Otherwise, it has the dynamism Hayes could convey so well, Rob’s horse rising up on its rear legs while he remains calm in the saddle. The whole composition is full of strained muscles and dramatic tension.

But am I imagining that Rob’s hat was added later, and doesn’t quite sit right on his head? The hat anyway makes Rob less relatable than the bare-headed young man of the first book. I’m not sure how well it would connect to the boys this was aimed at. It lacks what is achieved in the cover of the first book, a kind of “Who’s this cool guy I’d like to be?”

The text, though, works hard to ensnare us. First there’s the injustice of bad guys dressed as good guys as they carry out a crime. Then Rob, our hero, has to put up with a dangerous, vain idiot in command. Soon the plot kicks in, Rob setting out to find the needed evidence that some third party is stirring up trouble between Mounties and Indians. 

This plot seems to have been borrowed from the 1973 Doctor Who story Frontier in Space (script editor T Dicks), in which a third party is fomenting war between humans and Draconians. That, in turn, was surely borrowed from the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967), in which the Americans and Soviets teeter on the brink of war. In each case, the third party playing off the two sides turns out to be an old foe of the hero — Running Fox (from the first Mounties novel), the Master and Ernest Stravro Blofeld.

“See how it works? Fake Mounties killing Indians, fake Blackfoot attacking white men. Much more of this and we’ll all be at each other’s throats, They’ll just be able to stand back and watch us kill each other.” (p. 70)

Villains dressing up as, variously, Indians and Mounties, is also a reversal of what happens in one of Terrance’s favourite childhood books, Kim by Rudyard Kipling, where the young hero moves fluidly between British soldiers and native Indians (in India this time) by changing clothes and make-up. I think Terrance’s version of the Mounties’ Commissioner Macleod may even owe something to Colonel Creighton in Kim, a four-square British officer who knows when to turn “a discreet blind eye” to the natives, such as when the Indians here share some illegal firewater when celebrating their victory (p. 122).

Rob is, like Kim, a Friend of all the World, good at getting on with people from any background or culture. His valiant actions lead to Chief Crowfoot agreeing to a treaty with the white authorities (here, very much a Good Thing). Before that, Rob’s mission depends on the help of a villainous character from the first novel, the whisky trader Dempsey, with the plot hingeing on whether he can really be trusted. Effectively, it’s a test of Rob’s optimism and instincts, the very kind of hero he is.

The sub-plot, in which Rob’s friend and colleague Fred Denbow goes undercover as a posh, rich English idiot but gets caught by villains who aren’t funny at all, is a little like what Harry Sullivan gets up to in Terrance’s Doctor Who story Robot, though it’s also fairly standard stuff for this kind of adventure. For example, see John Steed going undercover as a man called Goodchild and then having to submit to the dentist’s chair in Terrance’s first work for TV, The Avengers episode The Mauritius Penny (1963).

The point is that this third Mounties novel is a mash-up of stuff from other adventure fiction peppered with details from real history. I don’t think the details all come from Atkin; Terrance must have been reading more widely. Fred’s quest, for example, means travelling the country.

“He ate so many free meals he hardly needed supplies. At every line camp, every round-up chuck wagon, every isolated ranch-house, he was invited to ‘Light down and set’, the traditional greeting invitation to the hungry stranger.” (p. 82)

This tradition and “Light down and set” aren’t in Atkin; they must be from some other historical source. One of the people Fred speaks to refers to the villains as “some mighty mean looking jaspers” (p. 83). I know that last word as a term for wasps, from growing up in Hampshire (it’s also used in Fingers in the Sparkle Jar by Chris Packham, who grew up not far from where I did). Whether or not Terrance meant it in that sense, where did he get it from?

Then there are the words and phrases that he doesn’t use here. Terrance makes no play on the real-life towns that feature in the plot, Lethbridge and Benton — the names of regular characters from Terrance’s time overseeing Doctor Who, who feature in several of his novelisations. In some later original novels, Terrance couldn’t resist the odd in-joke. Here, I think he was careful not to break the illusion, and to make the setting of the Mounties novels real. 

That meant avoiding cliches. The workers on cattle ranches Fred encounters are “cow-hands” (p. 86), never — in any of these books — cowboys. In places, Terrance even spells out the cliches he’s avoiding:

“You’ve been reading too many dime novels. Most Western gunfights happen over a bar-room table — and if you can get your man in the back, so much the better.” (pp. 60-61)

I think perhaps he also, here, corrects a cliche from the previous two books, in which he sometimes referred to the Indians as childish or child-like. Yes, the Indians here can be simplistic:

“To them the red coat was the Mounted Police. The possibility of trickery hadn’t even occurred to them.” (p. 33)

But in this novel it’s the villains who have “an almost childish sense of the importance of fair play” (p. 110) and are “like kids” as they dress up as Mounties and Indians (p. 113). Then, at the end, the villains’ plot is exposed and they are made to strip off their disguises.

“The Indians, always appreciative of a good joke, began to guffaw among themselves, and even women and children appeared from nowhere to see the fun. Soon the mercenaries were standing shame-facedly before their captors in an assorted of patched and filthy underwear.” (p. 121)

This is fun but lacks the punch of the second novel, which ended with what we feel is a gross miscarriage of justice and then a final twist. At the end of that book, I was left eager to find out what happened next in Rob’s relationship with the half-Indian Jerry Potts. Potts hardly features in this one. There is no consequence to the shock ending of that previous book and no twist at the end of this one to anticipate the next.

I don’t think Terrance could have ended on a cliffhanger as these books are meant to stand on their own. It is just all a bit neat and easy. What makes us want to read on is rough edges and things not being quite right. It may be that Terrance ended things on this happy note because he knew the Mounties were not going to have more adventures. 

In April 1976, he sent the first two Mounties books to Ronnie Marsh, Head of Serials at the BBC, suggesting a TV version co-produced with Canada. But he included the books and made the suggestion in a letter about something else entirely and I am not sure he meant it too seriously. There is no record of a reply. 

Then, in July — the same month this third novel was published — Terrance pitched an entirely different Wild West series to Carola Edwards at the same publisher. This would have ventured into much more adult territory, written under a pseudonym to distance them from the books that Terrance wrote for children. Again, there’s no record of a reply and nothing came of the pitch.

Instead, Allan Wingate / Target commissioned Terrance for ever more Doctor Who titles. Among them, I think, are some of his best work. Yet he still hankered after his own original series; his biography in the backflap of this book speaks of his developing interests in mysticism and meditation, which relate to a project he worked on that never materialised; I will detail that in the biography.

Then, in September 1976, Richard Henwood got back in touch. Henwood had, of course, set up the Target range, commissioned Terrance to write his first novelisations and come up with the idea for the Mounties series. Now, as group publishing manager at Blackie & Son in Glasgow, Henwood wanted to discuss new ventures.

But woah there, those ventures are a long way off for Terrance yet. First, there are a whole slew of Doctor Who books, starting with one of the best… 

*

These long posts on the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks take time and incur expenses, and I can’t afford to press on without help. Last week’s detailed post on Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen has had hundreds of views but resulted in zero contributions.  

Throw some cash in the hat and next week you get Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, Terrance’s tenth novelisation. The Doctor speaks German, Harry wants a meal before he’ll try to save Sarah’s life, and Sarah is buried under stiffening corpses.

Oh, and Terrance explains what’s up with Davros and makes the continuity fit with the Daleks’ first  TV adventure… Is that not worth a few quid?

Doctor Who The Revenge of the Cybermen, by Terrance Dicks

The eagle-eyed reader might spot the odd, occasional typo in this series of long, long posts about the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks. I blame the growing cyber-menace that is autocorrect and not my own fleshy human weakness. However, there is not a word missing from the title of this post. The absence of “and” is deliberate.

This is, after Doctor Who — The Three Doctors, the second Doctor Who novelisation not to employ an “and the” title. At least, the “and” is missing from the front cover of my first edition of this book. On the spine and title pages, and in most references to this novelisation, it is Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen. It is only from the front cover that the word has been deleted.

This was clearly done to make a long title fit the established cover template. On Terrance’s next novelisation, the long title Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks was made to fit by reducing the vertical height of the letters, still set in Futura Condensed ExtraBold, from 6mm to 5mm, or from 40pt to 35pt (based on the typeface I have for reference). 

The team at Wyndhams — who published Doctor Who The Revenge of the Cybermen simultaneously in hardback and paperback on 20 May 1976 — initially intended to shorten the title still further, presumably to make it better fit the template. “[Doctor Who and] The Cybermen’s Revenge” is the title given on a list of “Advance information on Doctor Who novelisations in preparation” sourced from Wyndhams, handwritten by Graham Wellfare and reproduced on p. 92 of Keith Miller’s The Official Doctor Who Fan Club vol 2. 

As I said in my post on that book, this list sadly isn’t dated but the first title given is [Doctor Who and] The Green Death by Malcolm Hulke, to be published “Aug 75” at 35p [in paperback]. That implies that this list was written before publication of that book on 21 August 1975 but after publication of the previous Target novelisation, Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, on 15 May.

The title was also “Cybermen Revenge” in Terrance’s handwritten notes for Chapter 10 of the in-progress novelisation. The three pages of notes are undated but were written between dated entries on other projects on 6 September and 6 October 1975. 

Therefore, I think Terrance wrote and delivered the manuscript for Doctor Who and the Cybermen’s Revenge in September 1975, under that title. My guess is that the production team then wanted to retain the title used on screen, as would be the case for all Doctor Who books from pretty much this point on (Doctor Who and the Space War, published 23 September 1976, was the last novelisation to rename a story). The awkward step of deleting “and” from the front cover of this book but not from the spine or title pages suggests that the change was made late in the process.

That original title for the book would have made this a closer match to Doctor Who and the Cybermen by Gerry Davis (published 19 February 1975), adapted from the TV story The Moonbase (1967), which Davis co-wrote with Kit Pedler. I think that may be part of a wider, conscious effort to link these two novelisations.

For the cover of Doctor Who and the Cybermen, Chris Achilleos produced a stippled, black-and-white portrait of the Second Doctor, including his collar and bowtie, framed by an image of the Moon (the setting of the story) with a flaming and dappled black border suggesting outer space. 

A Cyberman in the lower left of the frame stares impassively back at us. It’s the wrong Cyberman for the TV story, based on a photograph of the redesigned Cybermen from 1968 story The Invasion. But perhaps that was on purpose, to align more closely with the versions seen on TV in Revenge of the Cybermen, broadcast just weeks after this book was first published.

When producing cover artwork for Doctor Who The Revenge of the Cybermen, Achilleos seems to have had this earlier artwork in mind. Again, there’s a stippled-black-and-white portrait, this time of the Fourth Doctor, including the top-most part of his scarf. He is framed by an image of fiery space bordered by nebulous black. It’s not space station Nerva or the rocky asteroid of Voga that are the settings in the story; I think that makes it closer in style to the cover of Doctor Who and the Cybermen. Again, there’s a Cyberman in the lower left of frame. This time he faces another alien creature, a Vogan.

The big difference between the two covers, I think, is that the Second Doctor looks serious, suggesting a serious story, while the Fourth Doctor is beaming. The portrait is based on a photograph of Tom Baker on location for The Sontaran Experiment (1975), but in that photograph Baker’s expression is a bit more determined and grim, teeth gritted rather than smiling. Achilleos has also made the Doctor's hair fluffier and more bouffant. It’s a gleeful Doctor, not one fighting for his life.

Tom Baker filming
The Sontaran Experiment
c/o The Black Archive

There's something similar going on in the depiction of the monsters. On TV, the Cybermen tower over their victims — Terrance refers to them more than once in this novelisation as “silver giants”. But the Cyberman and Vogan here are the same height; indeed, the relative positions of eyes, mouth, chin and shoulders suggest that the Vogan is actually taller. 

There’s little sense that these two figures are deadly enemies; they seem to be smiling at each other. It doesn’t help that there’s something about this particular Vogan that’s a bit Private Godfrey from Dad’s Army…

As a whole, the composition lacks the dynamism and excitement of other work by Achilleos, such as Omega’s hands burning into the foreheads of the Three Doctors, or the kklaking pterodactyl of Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion. By placing the Cyberman on the left, as per Doctor Who and the Cybermen, and the Vogan on the right, the latter’s arm and body obscure much of the two-handed sci-fi raygun he is holding. For ages, I thought he was proffering some kind of ornate gift or bit of technical apparatus: a friendly gesture, not a threat to kill. Again, there’s no sense of him fighting for his life.

All in all, it’s a rather jolly-looking cover, at odds with the grim tone of the novel inside.

Before we get into the contents of the book, there’s one more thing to address about the cover which has a bearing on the words inside. The name given under the title is Terrance Dicks, not Gerry Davis.

Davis seems to have written the novelisation Doctor Who and the Cybermen around the same time as he wrote the scripts for what became Revenge of the Cybermen on TV. The two stories share a number of elements. For example, both feature what was then a new class of Cyberman — a “Cyberleader” (sometimes, in the novel, also a “Cyber-leader”). Both stories involve a “virus” that the Doctor is able to show is not a virus at all, but a toxin spread by the Cybermen as a prelude to taking control of a remote, human-crewed outpost in space. 

In both stories, the human crew are sceptical of the Doctor’s claims, believing that the Cybermen died out long ago. In Doctor Who and the Cybermen, the silver giants exploit human weakness for sugar and are themselves vulnerable to nail-varnish remover; in Revenge of the Cybermen, they exploit human greed and are vulnerable to gold. The implication, surely, is that in revisiting the older TV story for his novelisation, Davis found some of the structure and plot elements for the new TV adventure.

At that stage, it would also have been logical to assume that Davis would novelise his new TV story in due course. For one thing, of the various Doctor Who stories that Davis worked on over the years, this is the only one on which he received sole credit as writer.

Soon after publication of Doctor Who and the Cybermen and broadcast of Revenge of the Cybermen, Davis tackled the very first Cyberman adventure, Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet, published on 19 February 1976. In previous posts, I’ve estimated a lead-time on these books of 7.5 months; if that applies here, then Davis delivered Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet at the end of July 1975. Just as he finished that book and needed a new assignment, we see that, as per the list of books in preparation cited above, The Cybermen’s Revenge was added to the schedule. 

He retained copyright on the scripts of the TV story, so his permission must have been sought and given for this novelisation. But he didn’t write the book. Instead, he went on to novelise other TV stories he had worked on as co-writer and/or story editor, with his next one, Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen, published on 18 May 1978. 

The reason, of course, is that the version of Revenge of the Cybermen that made it to the screen is very different from what Davis wrote — as we can hear in the audio version of the original scripts. The production team felt there were numerous problems with this version and the scripts were extensively rewritten by Robert Holmes in his capacity as script editor, on staff at the BBC. Davis was not happy with the revised version; the upshot was that he retained sole credit and copyright on a story he largely hadn’t written and really didn’t like. Understandably, he didn’t want to novelise this version of “his” story.

That is significant because it means that Terrance Dicks was commissioned on the specific understanding that he would novelise Revenge of the Cybermen as broadcast. This in turn presented him with a challenge I don’t think he’d faced before. 

Up until now, he’d novelised Big Event Doctor Who stories: the Third Doctor’s debut, his first encounter with the Daleks and the Master, and his death; the Fourth Doctor’s debut, the Second Doctor’s first encounter with the Great Intelligence, the Three Doctors all meeting up. Even Doctor Who’s encounter with the Loch Ness Monster is a big, iconic moment. These are all good, strong stories, too.

With Revenge of the Cybermen, Terrance was presented for the first time with a TV story that, for all I enjoy it, is fundamentally flawed. When he had been script editor, it was his job to fix problems in storylines and scripts. Here, the brief was to not fix the story but match what went out on screen. At times, I don’t think he could help himself, whether in trying to correct faults or in offering wry comment on illogical proceedings.

The three pages from his notebook relating to this novelisation give some sense of his approach. They cover events in Chapter 10, which is the end of Part Three and start of Part Four of the TV story, with a line break for the cliffhanger.

“Kellman killed

Harry sees K dead

Doc knocked out —

Harry sees Doc — goes to unstrap b[omb]

Commander — stop! Explain [that undoing the strap will set off the bomb]

Doc survives — Harry idiot

Doc says Commander keep on — rest of u will get grd + attack”

There’s no reference here or in the other pages of notes to what we see on screen, such as what people are wearing or what things looks like. That suggests Terrance worked from the words in the camera script — stage directions and dialogue — rather than from a screening of the episodes, which would have provided visual details. The notes are a summary of plot, Terrance establishing for himself the overall thrust of the action before translating each scene into prose.

(ETA: Nicholas Pegg told me on Bluesky me that “A further indication that Terrance was working from the scripts rather than from the TV broadcast is his retention of ‘cobalt bombs’. On screen they became ‘Cyber-bombs’, which [director] Michael Briant told me was part of a general decision ‘to make everything Cyber’.” Thanks to Nick, who knows a surprising amount about Cybermen given that he is Dalek.) 

But there is more than that going on here, too. This page of notes includes the word “gyroscope”, which isn’t used in the scripts or the story as broadcast. I think the word was prompted by something else in the script at this point: the machine that the Cybermen use to track the progress of the Doctor as he carries their bomb is a “radarscope”. The word is used in dialogue at other points of the story but it’s also in the stage directions of the script just after the Doctor insults Harry. And I think that word prompted Terrance to use “gyroscope” in a completely different moment in the novelisation, as an apposite word for the very opening sentence:

“In the silent blackness of deep space, the gleaming metal shape of Space Beacon Nerva hung like a giant gyroscope” (p. 7).

The model used in the TV story (and in The Ark in Space) looks a little like the kind of gyroscope that children have as toys, but that single word also conveys a spinning, moving, mesmerising instrument. We do more than visualise the shape; we can feel its intricate, automated workings. It is tangible and a wonder — all from a single word.

There are plenty of other well-chosen words: p. 49, for example, boasts “imperious”, “melodious” and “ostentation”.  The explanation of the “transmat beam” vital to one part of the plot is told from Harry’s perspective, so it is at once conversational, easy-going and fun:

“His travels with the Doctor had familiarised him with this latest triumph of man’s technology, an apparatus that could break down a living human body into a stream of molecules, sent it to a predetermined destination by a locked transmitter beam, and reassemble it unharmed at the other end. With transmat you could send a person as easily as a telephone message” (p. 38).

That page of notes above has another well-chosen word, when the Doctor calls “Harry [an] idiot”. He uses a more offensive term on screen and then falls back unconscious. In the book, he follows the rude comment with something kinder:

“Nevertheless I’m very glad to see you again” (p. 102).

The Doctor is nicer than on TV, Harry is not so undermined; both are more heroic.

In opening the novel, Terrance describes Sarah as a “slim, dark pretty girl” (p. 7), by which he means white but brunette. Her “exceptionally good peripheral vision” (p. 17) explains how, on TV, she alone dodges a Cybermat that has killed more than 40 other people. But when she screams, we’re told it’s in “true feminine style”. That’s the view of the omniscient narrator because Harry, from whose perspective this is sometimes told, knows better. For example, he knows that Sarah “always refused to accept the role of the helpless heroine” (p. 90).

Harry is the same “broad-shouldered, square-jawed young man” (p. 7) as in Doctor Who and the Giant Robot and Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster. He has the same vocabulary as in the former, referring here to all the “ruddy gold” (p. 47) on Voga. But there’s a steely side to Harry that we don’t really see on screen, such as when the villainous Kellman is killed in a rockfall that’s partly Harry’s fault.

“Harry felt no sympathy. As far as he was concerned, Kellman had been luckier than he deserved.” (p. 100).

The Doctor, meanwhile, is a “very tall, thin man whose motley collection of vaguely bohemian garments included an incredibly long scarf, and a battered soft hat jammed on top of a mop of wildly-curling brown hair” (p. 7). It’s the first time in print, I think, that this incarnation is described as “bohemian” — though note in this case that it is only “vaguely”.

(For all his love of specific, well-chosen words, Terrance can also often be vague. On p. 64, two things in quick succession are described as “some kind of”…)

That opening page of the novel also introduces the lead character as “that mysterious traveller in Time and Space known as ‘the Doctor’”, repeating the phrase from The Doctor Who Monster Book and Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster; less description now as slogan. 

There’s also a reference to the Doctor’s “habitual cheery optimism”, which seems more Terrance than the TV story, and at odds with the lofty, “Olympian detachment” Tom Baker was told to convey by producer Philip Hinchcliffe. It is, I think, a sense of the Fourth Doctor had Terrance stayed on as script editor beyond Robot.

Speaking of which, we’re told it’s been a “few weeks” (p. 8) since that adventure. On TV, the first episode of Revenge of the Cybermen aired 13 weeks after the last part of Robot. Working solely from on-screen evidence, has such a lengthy period really elapsed for our heroes? I would have said it was days.

Page 8 has two footnotes, each referring the reader to other novelisations by Terrance: Doctor Who and the Giant Robot and Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks. The latter was the next of his Doctor Who books to be written and published, so had clearly been scheduled at the time he wrote this — begging the question: why didn’t he write that one first? It’s as if these books were purposefully published in reverse of the order of broadcast so that readers had to puzzle out the correct sequence, encouraging them to be active collectors.

On TV, Revenge of the Cybermen begins with the Doctor, Harry and Sarah finding themselves back on space station Nerva and referring to the previous time they were there, in The Ark in Space. A novelisation of that story had not yet been scheduled, so Terrance omitted these lines and instead makes reference, in his narration, to the adventure they have just concluded, and their efforts to “prevent the growing menace of the Daleks” (p. 8). The continuity references are to Terrance’s other Doctor Who books.

There are a couple of further examples of that: the Doctor uses an eye glass (p. 40 and p. 59) as per Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, and there is a reference to Harry Houdini (p. 121) as per Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders. In Terrance’s most recently completed novelisation, Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, there’s reference to the Brigadier’s “recall device”. Here, it’s the “Space-Time telegraph” (p. 127) as per dialogue in the script — where it is “space-time telegraph”, lower case. The book ends with a scene inside the TARDIS, the Doctor tracing the signal to Loch Ness, nicely cueing up the next / previous novelisation.

The continuity of the Cybermen is interesting. Terrance knew the history of the silver giants, having detailed it in The Doctor Who Monster Book, but there’s no reference to their previous encounters with the Doctor here. Humans, on Nerva, have only vague recollections of the Cybermen (p. 30), just one of several species to attack Earth in its early space-faring years. Again, that is as per The Moonbase.

These Cybermen wear “clothes” (p. 64). We’re told several times that they’re emotionless and without feelings, which is a fundamental characteristic, sort of Cybermen 101. But on TV, the Doctor taunts them:

“You've no home planet, no influence, nothing. You’re just a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers skulking about the galaxy in an ancient spaceship.” (Part Three)

What is that all about?

In the novelisation, we’re told that when the Doctor says this, he “seemed to be determined to be as tactless as possible” (p. 76) and “seemed to be set on provoking their captors”, after which “it seemed almost possible to detect the overtones of hate in the Cyberman’s voice”, as the Doctor continues in the same way, “infuriatingly”. It is not clear if this narration is from the perspective of one of the human observers, but the repeated use of “seemed” is Terrance suggesting an explanation for what happens in the script, without imposing his view.

Responding to the Doctor, the Cyberleader’s voice rises in volume and intensity. The Doctor continues being annoying and,

“For some reason this childish insult finally broke through the Cyberleader’s control” (p. 77).

It lashes out, exactly as the Doctor has planned; he uses rage against the machine.

I don’t think a Cyberman losing its temper is inconsistent with it being emotionless. It’s sometimes said of the Cybermen that they’ve had their emotions deleted or surgically removed — but what bit of the brain would that be, exactly? 

The academic paper that first coined the term “cyborg” and which I think is key to the original conception of the Cybermen, “Cyborgs and Space” by Manfred E Clynes and Nathan S Kline (1960), suggests the use of “an emergency osmotic pump containing one of the high-potency phenothiazines together with reserpine” to automatically respond to abnormal “thought processes, emotions, or behaviour” in the human test-subjects surgically altered for work out in space. The idea was to chemically suppress the emotions.

If the same thing is happening with the Cybermen, they can be emotionless and yet capable of emotion. The Doctor just has to find the right means to trigger them. Note to anti-Cybermen forces: being infuriating and childish works, as here; but don’t waste your time wanging on about sunsets and nice meals, as in Earthshock (1982).

Less fathomable is the sequence in which the Cybermen strap bombs to the Doctor and two humans, then insist that they carry these into the depths of the asteroid Voga. The Cybermen say that, once in the right position, the bombs will begin a 14-minute countdown, allowing the Doctor and the others time to escape with their lives. The Doctor thinks but does not say,

“Pull the other one, it’s got bells on” (p. 82). 

So why does he then do as instructed? Well, with the Cybermen using a radioscope to monitor the humans’ progress, and able to detonate the bombs remotely if they veer off course, the Doctor feels he has no other option to escape than to do as bidden, then use the 14-minute countdown to defuse the bombs (p. 83). But we are then told that the Cyberman have anticipated exactly this response; in fact, there is no 14-minute countdown and the bombs will simply explode when they reach the right position. The Cybermen have lied to the Doctor so that he unwittingly does what they want (p. 85).

It’s a clever bit of psychology. But then, almost immediately, one of the other humans asks the Doctor if he really thinks there will be a 14-minute countdown. “I doubt it,” says the Doctor (p. 85). He doesn’t believe the Cybermen’s story, and the humans are at least suspicious. The Cybermen’s clever bit of psychology hasn’t fooled anyone.

So, er, why then is the Doctor willing to carry the bombs into the depths of the asteroid? Well, he says Micawberishly, that he is hoping for something to turn up (p. 86). It’s all a bit woolly and confused, the Doctor relying on luck. We can see that Terrance tried to make sense of it as he wrote this section, but not entirely successfully — because, I think, he couldn’t veer too far from what had been broadcast.

As on screen, Voga is both an asteroid (p. 18) and planet (p. 30), the idea being that the new asteroid is the last-surviving fragment of the planet. On screen, it is also described as a satellite  — ie moon  — of Jupiter, to which the Doctor responds:

 “What, do you mean there are now thirteen?” (Part One)

Terrance cut this line, perhaps because he knew that a 13th moon of Jupiter had already been found by the time of publication: Leda, discovered on 14 September 1974. A 14th moon, Themisto, was spotted in 1975 but not confirmed until years later. But Terrance also refers to Voga as a meteorite (p. 43), suggesting his knowledge of space science was on a par with his knowledge of cars. 

The plot hinges on Voga being an asteroid/planet/satellite/meteorite comprised largely of gold, which is immediately lethal to Cybermen. We see the evidence of this on screen: throw a bit of gold in their general direction and they choke and die. Yet Cybermen can also teleport into the caverns of Voga, stomping around and battling Vogans there with no perceived adverse effects. I suppose Terrance could have fixed this by suggesting that the gold must be forced into their breathing systems, and in sufficient quantities, to be deadly. Perhaps that would only have served to highlight this basic flaw in the story.

But I think the fundamental problems of Revenge of the Cybermen are the structure and the tone. Let’s start with the structure.

The blurb lays out the stakes:

“A mysterious plague strikes Space Beacon Nerva, killing its victims within minutes. When DOCTOR WHO lands, only four humans remain alive. One of these seems to be in league with the nearby planet of gold, Voga… Or is he in fact working for the dreaded CYBERMEN, who are now determined to finally destroy their old enemies, the VOGANS? The Doctor, Sarah and Harry find themselves caught in the midst of a terrifyingly struggle to death—between the ruthless, power-hungry Cybermen and the desperate determined Vogans.”

A central part of the story, then, is who Kellman really works for. Yet I think, ironically for a story about Cybermen, that it is difficult for us to care.

The trouble is that Kellman is, when we meet him, a sardonic, mean-spirited character. There is no great mystery about him being involved in the “plague” that has killed more than 40 people. This horrible fact is not mitigated by the discovery that he is really working for the Vogans, not least because it seems he does so because they will pay him in gold.

Villains in other stories, such as Broton or Davros, present articulate reasons for the evil they do, challenging the Doctor. Kellman offers no such challenge. In fact, he speaks in cliches — at one point using what Terrance calls, “one of science fiction’s immortal cliches” (p. 65). There is no redemption: he proves to be a bit cowardly and is then killed in a rockfall. The usually kind-hearted Harry has no sympathy at all. Kellman deserves only scorn.

That is unusual for Terrance, who so often in a conflict endeavours to see the other point of view. And I think that is the fundamental problem here: there is no depth to or interesting aspect of Kellman. I find myself wondering what Terrance would have done had he been allowed to fix this.

My sense, from the notes he gave as script editor to writers on other stories (available in the production paperwork included on the Blu-ray boxsets), is that he would have wanted to simplify unfolding events and concentrate on revelations of character. So, with that in mind…

At the start of the story, Kellman should be the last person we’d suspect of controlling the Cybermats or working with the Cyberman. A kindly, warm-humoured character, to whom our heroes — and we — take a shine. Only later, when he’s exposed, should we see his colder, more ruthless side, as when James Bond shifts from charmer to hitman. That, in turn, would give the actor a bit more to work with.

Then, over time, we come to learn his vital but morally difficult mission: sacrificing the crew of Nerva to gain the trust of the Cybermen so that he can destroy them and in doing so save countless more lives. Just as Harry learns that he’s got Kellman completely wrong, that the man is a hero, they are both caught in a rockfall. Kellman dies. And Harry realises that he will have to complete the mission, no matter the cost…

Something along those lines. But I think if you can fix Kellman, you fix much of what’s wrong in this story.

Then there’s the tone. The story begins with the Doctor and his friends returning to Nerva to find, instead of Vira and their other friends from The Ark in Space, something out of a horror film for grown-ups. Terrance acknowledges the effect:

“For the rest of her life Sarah Jane Smith was to be haunted by the memory of that nightmarish stumble down the long curved corridor filled with corpses” (p. 14).

It is not a moment of peril in a science-fiction adventure, where our heroes are at risk. It is them stalking their way through the carnage of something brutally realistic that has already taken place and so they are powerless to stop. It is horrific because it is hopeless.

Later, Harry witnesses the brutal death of someone at first hand, and we’re told “it remained for ever photographed on his memory” (p. 107). Then, the Cybermen are defeated and Nerva and Voga are saved, but on screen there's barely time to draw breath or acknowledge what our heroes have been through before they head off to their next adventure.

Terrance adds a brief moment of reflection, addressing the oddness of this, with Sarah,

“surprised to find herself as calm as she was. She supposed so much had happened recently that they’d both lost the capacity to be surprised” (p. 127).

It’s a damning diagnosis. The implication is that Sarah and Harry are both suffering from PTSD… Either that, or from bad writing.

*

These great long posts take time to put together and incur expenses. I’ll keep doing them while I can afford to, so do please support the cause if you are able.

Next time: the last of the Mounties books, War Drums of the Blackfoot, which borrows some of the plot of one of the Doctor Who stories on which Terrance was script editor. And then it’s Genesis of the Daleks…