Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, by Terrance Dicks

On Wednesday, 7 October 1998, Peter Griffiths from Doctor Who Magazine took Terrance Dicks to the bar at BAFTA in London’s Piccadilly to conduct an extensive interview about his work on Doctor Who. When they got onto the subject of novelisations, Terrance said he had enjoyed bringing scripts to life in vivid prose. “I still remember one of my favourite opening lines,” he continued:

“Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man” (cited in DWM #273, p. 48).

This, the opening sentence of Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, remained a personal favourite for the rest of Terrance’s life. His family even quoted it at Terrance’s memorial service in 2019 as an example of how, said the celebrant,

“He crafted the brilliant phrasing that remained emblazoned in the minds of the many young readers who devoured his books.”

It was one of three examples of such indelible phrases, along with “sonic screwdriver” (not actually Terrance’s coinage) and the TARDIS’s “wheezing, groaning sound.”

But “crafted” was exactly right. A draft manuscript of Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth survives in the archive of Terrance Dicks’s papers now held at the Borthwick Institute in York, enabling us to see his efforts to perfect that brilliant opening sentence and the ones that immediately followed:

My friend Gary Gillatt once observed that the 1977 Doctor Who story Horror of Fang Rock, which Terrance wrote a few months after completing this novelisation, has a perfect title; you couldn’t replace any single word and improve it. There’s something similar going on with the opening page of this book. The prose is simple, vivid and arresting. Terrance crams the 25 lines of text on the opening page full of potent adjectives: tattered, grimy, blotched, diseased, wasted, gleaming, stiff, jerky, shattered, nightmare, sluggish, debris-choked, polluted, great, stiffly, grimy, inhuman, rubble-littered, strange, wheezing, groaning.

I have seen examples of this simple, rich kind of writing before, in my days writing advertising copy. Terrance also spent five years as a copywriter, and I think it informed his prose style. Compare the opening of this novelisation to the following ad for Imperial Leather soap from 1958 — not written by Terrance, but the sort of thing he’d have been taught to emulate when he worked in ads, including on TV campaigns for the same brand of soap, c. 1959-66: 

The Waltz 1815

The waltz came in a whirl of naughtiness. Daring, dizzying, it didn’t take the beauties of the day long to find out how it made eyes shines and pale cheeks bloom with roses. This day’s generation of dancers has the sparkle of clear, rose-petal skin not on dance nights only—but for keeps. The reason is more and more women are switching to IMPERIAL LEATHER SOAP—the superfatted soap that’s so gentle, so rich, so sure in the way it deep-cleanses and softens.

(Queen magazine, 18 October 1958, p. 2.)

See how quickly and concisely the judicious use of adjectives conjures distinct feelings and images. It is rather like a dance itself: in a quick box step, we move forward into an impression of a party in 1815, then sidestep to the present, then close with the science, all of it tactile and sensuous. The language is simple to ensnare us, then drops in something more substantial, like grit — “superfatted” isn’t a real word. 

I’ve spoken before about Terrance dropping the word “capacious” into Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen, and other examples of this kind of judicious use of vocabulary, but capacious doesn’t appear until p. 106 of that novel, by which point we’re already under the spell woven by his “plain style”, as Orwell would have called it. So, I think Terrance took the methods learned in copywriting to make soap alluring and, in Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, applied them to the end of the world.

Speaking of which, the title page of this novelisation tells us that it is,

“Based on the BBC television serial Doctor Who and the World’s End by Terry Nation” (p. 3).

Now, the production team of Doctor Who never knew the TV serial by that name, but we can use this disparity between what the team at Target thought the story was called and the name they applied to the front cover to deduce the sources from which Terrance and the team worked. 

As broadcast, World’s End was the title of the first episode of the six-part story that the Doctor Who production team in 1964 referred to internally by several different names. Surviving paperwork shows that it was initially “The Daleks”, then “Return of the Daleks”, “The Invaders” (the title Nation used on his draft scripts) and finally The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Producer Verity Lambert used the latter in an internal memo dated 8 October 1964, just over six weeks before the broadcast of its first episode,  ie World’s End. Perhaps because the title kept changing, on camera scripts used in production the story was simply “Serial K” — that is, the 11th Doctor Who serial. No overall title was used on screen or in listings. 

The 1966 movie version seems to have taken the BBC’s internal title, ie The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and slightly amended it to Daleks — Invasion Earth 2150 AD (sometimes rendered as Daleks! Invasion Earth 2150 AD or Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 AD, but not how it appears on screen). I think the change was made to emphasise the future setting, not least to an overseas audience who might not have heard of Daleks or the TV series. It also comprises fewer words and characters than the BBC version, so can be rendered in a larger point size in the same space on posters etc.

In 1973, the Radio Times special published to mark 10 years of Doctor Who provided summaries of all Doctor Who stories to date. For early stories — those broadcast with titles for individual episodes rather than the serial as a whole — it tended to use the name of the first episode, so this entire six-part story was called World’s End (p. 9).

Terrance clearly had a copy of the Radio Times special to hand, because he repurposed material from it in his 1976 version of The Making of Doctor Who, published three months before this novelisation. Surviving paperwork shows that Target paid the BBC a fee to reuse the Radio Times synopses, and Terrance largely did so word for word. That special also seems to have been a key source of reference photographs for artwork on the early Target books, too.

I think that Radio Times special was also used by Terrance and the team at Target when working out which TV stories to novelise. That’s why this serial was added to the schedule as Doctor Who and the World’s End, the form in which it was listed as “in preparation” in the first edition of Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, published in May 1975. 

To write the novelisation, Terrance would have worked from copies of the six camera scripts held by the BBC. As we have seen, these were headed “Serial K”, so would not in themselves have prompted a change of title.

Yet one of the relatively small number of changes Terrance made to the Radio Times synopses when he incorporated them into The Making of Doctor Who was to the title of this story: he renamed it “Dalek Invasion of Earth (6 episodes)” (p. 58). I can see why he preferred that title: it more accurately describes the story, not least in including the word “Dalek” — which would also help sell the novelisation that was already on his schedule to write. 

He could have chosen something more concise, such as “Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion”, which would have been more in keeping with the style of a previous novelisation, Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion (itself a more concise version of the TV story Invasion of the Dinosaurs). But Terrance employed a longer version that matches the wording used internally by the Doctor Who production team in 1964. I think it very unlikely that he looked through the production files and found the title there. So where did he get this precise wording from?

In the schedule of forthcoming novelisations that fan Graham Wellfare sent Keith Miller of the Official Doctor Who Fan Club circa August 1975 — reproduced on p. 92 of The Official Doctor Who Fan Club vol 2 — this book was listed as “The World’s End (Dalek Invasion of Earth)” for publication in July 1976. Note the “of”: this is the title used by the 1964 production team, not the amended version from the movie. So, fans at the time knew the story as The Dalek Invasion of Earth, despite what the Radio Times special said.

My understanding is that they did so because this was the title used on BBC Television Play Synopses produced at the time of broadcast by the Royal National Institute for the Deaf, with information provided by the production team, including the late-agreed title. By the mid-1970s, these RNID documents had become a key source for fans diligently compiling summaries of old episodes, in the days when there seemed little prospect of ever watching old episodes again. (I have seen RNID synopses for some other early Doctor Who stories, but not for The Dalek Invasion of Earth.)

Terrance’s revised The Making of Doctor Who acknowledges the help of members of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society including Jan Vincent-Rudzki and Stephen Payne, so my guess is that they advised him on the “proper” title for this story, based on this unimpeachable source, and he agreed that it worked better as an overall title than World’s End. In July 1976, “Daleks Invasion Earth”, and not “World’s End”, was listed in a schedule of Target books published in the DWAS fanzine TARDIS (vol 1, no. 8, p. 2), the list supplied by fan Angus Towler. Without the “of”, that is closer to the movie title, but I suspect it is just an abbreviated version of the “correct” title for the TV serial, as DWAS continued to use The Dalek Invasion of Earth as the proper name of the serial — see for example p. 14 of the society’s Cybermen Daleks Autumn Extra (Autumn 1976) and p. 10 of fanzine Celestial Toyroom #4 (October 1976), both helpfully provided on the DWAS website.

[Jonathan Morris points out that, as I said in my post on the novelisation Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, that Terrance used the phrase “the Dalek invasion of Earth” on p. 103 of that book, when the Fourth Doctor recalls events of that earlier story, and that in the script it is “the Dalek invasion of the Earth”. That novel was published in July 1976, so written towards the end of 1975, after the Wellfare list. My guess is that this rephrasing, too, was informed by the fan advisers.]

Given publication on 19 May 1977 and the lead times we’ve talked about before, I reckon Terrance began work on Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth after completing work on The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book c. July 1976, and must have delivered the manuscript for this new novelisation by the end of August.

It’s a longer novelisation than usual for Terrance, my first-edition paperback comprising 144 pages rather than the by-then usual 128. Yet Paul MC Smith, author of Screen Printed — The Definitive Guide to the Exciting Adventures Based on the Popular BBC Television Serial provides word counts for the novelisations and, compared to the books Terrance wrote immediately before and after this one, Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth is a more concise adaptation:

• Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters: 27,691 words / 4 episodes = 6,923 words per ep
• Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth: 34,616 words / 6 episodes = 5,769 words per ep
• Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos: 31,486 words / 4 episodes = 7,872 words per ep

Terrance must have had access to the RNID synopsis or a similar document detailing the plot of the story because the camera script only provides a three-word summary of the pre-filmed opening sequence:

“MIX TELECINE (2) TK 23 (ROBOMAN COMMITS SUICIDE)”

It’s possible he arranged a screening of the episode to see what happened in this scene, but later discrepancies between events on screen and how Terrance describes them suggest he didn’t (re)watch the story. For example, he says the 2164 calendar found by the Doctor has a “familiar pattern of numbered squares” (p. 21), suggesting a relatively large monthly planner type of calendar rather than the small, squat ring-bound day-by-day version seen in World’s End. Likewise, he describes the character of Jenny as a “small dark girl” (p. 34), whereas actress Ann Davies had her hair dyed blonde especially for the part.

As I said above, Terrance crams the opening page of the novelisation with evocative adjectives. There’s something haunting in the idea of the great, wide Thames reduced to a “debris-choked, polluted stream” (p. 7) — a dystopian image from a life-long Londoner. He adds some cruel irony, too: the Roboman’s head gear is what makes him want to kill himself, and the weight of it is what drowns him. The result is an opening page that is indelibly brutal.

We’re then back in familiar territory, with the bigger-on-the-inside TARDIS and its “many-sided” console (did no one advise Terrance that it has six sides?), and a pithy description of the First Doctor:

“He had flowing white hair and a proud, imperious face, with more than a touch of ruthless cunning” (p. 8)

This is not Terrance’s first description of the First Doctor — there’s one in Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks when the incarnation is seen on a screen, and in the novelisation of The Three Doctors, in which the First Doctor plays a (slightly) more active part. But this is Terrance’s first full novelisation of a First Doctor adventure (rather than a Third Doctor adventure in which the First Doctor cameos). I’ll get on to the significance of that in a moment…

Terrance takes the opportunity to provide a précis of the story of Doctor Who so far — how school teachers Barbara and Ian followed their unearthly student Susan home, discovered “home” was a time machine and were then kidnapped by Susan’s grandfather, beginning a series of adventures in time and space. This is the first occasion in which those events from the very first TV episode are imparted in a novelisation, and I think Terrance drew from the brief account of events given in the revised The Making of Doctor Who (p. 53), which itself drew from the Radio Times special. It’s a further example of what he’d done in previous novelisations: outlining the essential lore of Doctor Who for fans old and new. (Another time, I’ll compare this to his similar précis of the story-so-far that opens his much later novelisation of Planet of Giants…)

In setting out this early lore, he tells us — as did that first TV episode — that TARDIS is an acronym, which Terrance says stands for Time And Relative Dimensions (plural) In Space (p. 9), not the singular dimension of the TV episode. If fans at DWAS read over the manuscript of this novelisation, they did not correct him.

This groundwork done, the Doctor and his friends exit the TARDIS and explore the eerily quiet riverbank outside, trying to deduce what has happened here. In the TV version, the Doctor notes dilapidation and Ian floats the idea that they’re in the midst of a construction site:

DOCTOR WHO: Well, you take this bridge now. It isn't an easy task, is it? Look at all this neglect all over the place. It's been abandoned, all of it. 

IAN: There's always a mess with construction work, Doctor. 

It seems William Hartnell slightly mangled the words and meaning in the camera script, which makes clear that it definitely is a construction site — for a new bridge across the river. The sense is that work on this ambitious project must have been halted abruptly:

DOCTOR: Well, look at this bridge. Not a small undertaking. Yet all around is this air of neglect. This place has been abandoned.

(HE RUNS HIS HAND ALONG A GIRDER AND DISTURBS A PILE OF DUST.)

IAN: But there’s always a mess in construction work, Doctor.

Terrance embellishes that idea, describing a taller, more massive structure of building works than is seen on screen. Susan climbs this and is afforded a panoramic view of the “deserted, half-ruined city” (p. 13) — which Terrance sadly doesn’t describe in more detail, as I’d love to know what is and isn’t still standing. The scale of the structure then serves the plot: when it collapses, the sense is of the TARDIS entirely buried under rubble and not, as on screen, that the door is partially blocked.

The novelisation omits the line of dialogue where the Doctor says Susan needs “a jolly good smacked bottom” for causing this collapse, which is not in the script — further evidence that the script was Terrance’s primary source, not a screening. Stage directions in the script then refer to a “flying saucer drifting over rooftops”, which Terrance develops into the following:

“They watched the saucer drift slowly downwards. It looked exactly like the classic flying saucer of science-fiction films and drawings, silvery-coloured, oval in shape, and with rows of windows round the exterior.” (p. 24)

This is not the flying saucer seen on the cover of the novelisation — about which more in due course.

Among other additions are a reference to the European Emergency Committee (p. 28), which I think is a gag by Terrance, the UK having joined the EEC on 1 January 1973; he is surely positing that the connection lasts almost 200 years and is only broken by the actions of a foreign state. If he doesn’t explain this reference, he feels the need to explain the term “heliport” (p. 37).

He also explains that the secret room used by Tyler and his friends in the London Underground was originally a staff room for London Transport personnel — though doesn’t say why they would want to conceal the entrance with a secret button. He gives Tyler a first name, Jim (p. 29), which suggests that he and the DWAS experts had not seen Terry Nation’s draft script (from when the story was called The Invaders), where Tyler’s first name is Carl. Terrance doesn’t give Dortmunn a first name but later tells us Craddock’s first name is Bill (not Jack as in the draft script) and Thomson’s name is Mick (p. 38). I’m not sure why the Daleks are interested in knowing their captives’ names, but it serves to help the reader empathise with these men before they are ruthlessly dispatched.

When Ian recalls his first encounter with the Daleks, there’s a footnote: “* See ‘Doctor Who and the Daleks’” (p. 31) — the first such footnote in one of Terrance’s novelisations to cite a book written by someone other than him. Note, too, that that book boasts a wholly different account of Ian’s first meeting with the Doctor to the one included here, so actually following up on this reference would be a bit jarring. Terrance simplifies some of the continuity stuff here, removing the Doctor’s guesswork that his and Ian’s prior encounter with the Daleks took place in the distant future. Instead, he muses that the Daleks survived that previous encounter because they may have had other colonies on other parts of Skaro (p. 37). 

There is no mention of the saucers on the Daleks’ backs that allow them to roam beyond their city, as seen in the TV story (again, they are not in the script). Here, the Doctor muses that the Daleks have adapted themselves “on the hover-craft principle” (p. 38).

For all Terrance tries to make sense of the logic of events here and wider Doctor Who continuity, I’m puzzled by the mechanics of the Dalek invasion, which began “about ten years ago” with a space-borne plague which weakened humanity while the Daleks patiently waited. We are told that, “whole continents were wiped out [such as] Asia, Africa, America” (p. 43). But then one human, Baker, says there are not many Daleks on the Cornish coast (p. 68) — so what have the Daleks got against, or in favour of, Cornwall? 

We’re told the sewers of London are smelly (p. 93), but would they be when, given 10 years of devastation, so few people are left to use the facilities? Would there really still be tins of edible food to be looted from department stores (p. 35) or tins of milk fresh enough for using in tea (p. 71)? Likewise, Barbara suggests that the ancient vehicles in the transport museum still work because, “I imagine they used to drive them out occasionally, for parades and exhibitions” (p. 82) — but that was a decade previously. 

My favourite addition is the passage, pp. 95-96, told from the perspective of the monstrous Slyther — Terrance surely inspired by his friend Mac Hulke, who did something similar at the start of his 1974 novelisation Doctor Who and the Silurians. It doesn’t last long, and abruptly switches back, in the same section, to Ian’s point of view. But Terrance does something similar in the opening paragraph of his next novelisation, Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos, and in the opening shot of the TV script he wrote soon after, Part One of Horror of Fang Rock, in both cases with the POV of a creature as it closes in on new hunting ground...

The spiv Ashton is, here, plump, wears a soft hat and good coat (p. 97), which may draw from Terrance’s own memories of black marketeers in the war. Similar childhood memories may have influenced the visceral moment Ian and his friends eat from tins of spam and of peaches with their fingers (p. 99) — yuck! But Terrance is also keen on adding heroics: though Ashton acts for selfish reasons to shoot at the Slyther, concerned only to protect himself, Terrance notes that this unwittingly saves Ian and so is Ashton’s last good deed (p. 101). Having let us see things from the Slyther’s point of view, Terrance also ensures the creature survives the fall that surely kills it in the TV version (p. 102).

The Daleks aren’t so nearly developed: they are straightforwardly villainous, as they are in the story. Even so, there’s a mention of “bemused” Daleks (p. 127), and one Dalek refers to a waxwork of a milkman in a museum as a “subcultural effigy”, which makes me wonder if it took classes in anthropology. Later, when the Daleks’ plan is helpfully stated out loud by one Dalek to another, when they both already know it, the Doctor notes the “sheer audacity”, as though the Daleks are giddily reckless. It’s a long way from the cultural richness of the Daleks in their first story, where they had philosophers and scientists, a detailed history, what seems to be art on the walls of their city, and even experimented with drugs.

I wonder how much Terrance was aware of this TV sequel making the Daleks more simplistic. He seems to have consciously moulded events here to make the Doctor more heroic. The TV story lays the groundwork when the Doctor first confronts the Daleks and mocks their claims to have conquered Earth. Terrance adds various bits to what follows. Outside the Dalek saucer, the Doctor stops Craddock helping the doomed Thompson, assuring him “but our time will come.” Terrance then adds that Craddock is persuaded, “such was the confidence and authority in the Doctor’s voice” (p. 39).

Later, the Doctor is “very much in command” (p. 105) of the small rebel party. When he gives an order, no one questions it — “once again, the Doctor had taken charge” (p. 117). The weary, cynical Tyler admits “reluctant admiration” for the Doctor (p. 129) and “was quite prepared to believe the Doctor could do anything” (p. 134). Terrance does more than add this kind of commentary; he adds action, too. As though to explain that the Doctor and his friends didn’t just walk freely into the Dalek base, there is a reference to the Doctor having outwitted a photoelectric alarm (p. 130). He’s witty, too: when the Doctors observes David kissing Susan while they’re supposed to be preparing a meal, he drily notes that, “Something is cooking” (p. 116).

Unlike some other TV stories where the First Doctor can behave erratically, foolishly or even immorally, in this particular battle with the Daleks he’s a straightforward hero, defiantly standing up to the Daleks and refusing to be cowed, and making a noble self-sacrifice on behalf of his beloved granddaughter. He is not always like this, but novelising this particular story supported a theory Terrance had already expounded in The Doctor Who Monster Book, that the Doctor is the same character — the same hero — in each incarnation. Indeed, the First Doctor here can sound very like Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor:

“Science, my dear chap, not chance” (p. 133).

In his later novelisations featuring this Doctor, and in the TV story The Five Doctors (1983), I think it’s this sometimes crotchety but straightforwardly heroic First Doctor that Terrance always writes. So this book, and the TV serial it is based on, are foundational.

Here, the Doctor’s example inspires others to act bravely, such as the moment where Barbara decides a course of action when things otherwise seem so hopeless:

“We can try to find their [the Daleks’] main control room. That’s what the Doctor would do.” (p. 118)

Terrance adds a few details to what we know about the Doctor’s companions here, too. There’s extra tension when Susan doesn’t tell Barbara that Ian and the Doctor are on board the Dalek ship — and then Barbara discovers the truth and is angry (p. 53). There’s also a rare glimpse of Barbara’s life before she joined the TARDIS:

“She’d run her own little car in her teaching days, and had learned the basics of car maintenance just to save on garage bills” (p. 82)

We learn less about Ian, though he’s able to use a “judo throw” (p. 62) on Craddock the Roboman, and we get some insight into his motives: an admittedly vague plan to either find the Doctor or, as if following his example, to gather useful information  (p. 89). His actions in the opening moments of what, on TV, was Episode 6 are also different: he kicks at the capsule and makes it oscillate rather than pulling out random wires, and he diverts rather than wedges the bomb — more like what he does in the movie version of this story. I think the book gives him more skilful, considered action that random interference.

There’s little added for Susan, but then the TV scripts already had her talk about her past, her future, her hopes and fears — a bit more depth than she often got on screen. (It still feels a bit daring to do anything else, like when I have Susan mention her mum in my recently released audio novel, The Missing Hour, which you might like to purchase, hem hem.)

There is a fifth leading character in the story: Terrance’s depiction of London. Take, for example, his description of the Daleks on Westminster Bridge, an image he knew well having selected a publicity shot of it for a double-page spread in The Doctor Who Monster Book. There, he pithily described the events of the story; here he describe the effect of the image. It is, he says, an,

“Unforgettably symbolic picture of Daleks framed in front of the ornately decorated façade of the Houses of Parliament [which] represented so many centuries of human progress and tradition” (p. 69).

On TV, the geography of the chase through the real streets of London is a bit confused. Barbara and Jenny race the wheelchair-bound Dortmunn over Westminster Bridge, down Whitehall and into Trafalgar Square, which is just a few streets from Covent Garden — and the real-life Transport Museum with its collection of antiquated vehicles (staff there once kindly helped me with a query about the bus seen in 1965 TV story The Chase, when I was working on my 2005 novel The Time Travellers). 

But on TV, before they get to the transport museum, they set off into Knightsbridge and duck down beside the Albert Hall. The sense, I think, is that what looks like a transport museum is actually a wing of the Science Museum on Exhibition Road. Terrance, though, has the motley band of heroes cross Westminster Bridge and then head into Belgravia to a “Civic Transport Museum” on a “quite side street” (p. 70).

[ETA: Richard Long tells me that the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden only opened in 1980, so the production team on Doctor Who may well have envisaged a museum in Knightsbridge.]

Here Terrance has Barbara ask, “Had Londoners ever solved their traffic problem?” At the end of the novel, he has Londoners already in boats and cars again, as if the bustle of transport is the lifeblood of the capital. (What would he have made of the recent pedestrianisation of Oxford Street?!)

Terrance keeps the stuff about the Women in the Wood near the mine at Bedford asking for news of London:

“What’s it like now, dearie, still as wonderful? … When I went it was all so pretty. The shops and the moving pavements… and I went to the Astronauts’ Fair.” (p. 108)

This is not quite as delivered on screen, but I wonder how much it resonated with Terrance, who as a schoolboy visited the Festival of Britain and later had the Doctor retread the same steps in Timewyrm: Exodus (1991). The old woman also hasn’t had oranges in years, just as Terrance would later recall his own wartime privations in Prisoners of War (1990). But I find myself puzzling once again over the economics of the Daleks: have they cultivated oranges themselves? Is that because they use them to bribe humans, or know citrus is a cheap, efficient means to prevent their slave workers developing scurvy? Perhaps Daleks like marmalade.

On TV, the Dalek plot is thwarted quite quickly into Episode 6, allowing time for the emotional, character stuff as Doctor Who loses a regular character for the first time. Terrance cuts this all back, yet while on TV the return from Bedford to London is done by a fade from one scene to another, conveying some undefined interval, Terrance underlines that it took “a very long time time.” On arriving back at the London riverside, he adds some lines from Tyler:

“There’s your police box, Doctor, and I won’t ask questions. As far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to every police box in London.” (p. 138)

When this book was written, most London police boxes had already been demolished. How many, exactly, did Terrance envisage would still be standing in 2164?

If people driving boats and cars signify the resurrection of London here, Terrance adds something else:

“A sound familiar to every Londoner, one that had been missing for a very long time — the chimes of Big Ben” (pp. 138-9).

Again, it’s a very TV idea to use a sound effect to help convey a world going on beyond the small studio set, but this is a novelisation by a Londoner who spent part of the war in the city. It is more than an effect; it’s a memory transposed to the future.

Of course, the TV serial was drawn from writer Terry Nation’s own childhood experience of the war. Nation always had a plain, engaging style and the novelisation is in a similar vein. That explains, I think, why there are fewer examples here of Terrance dropping in more complicated words, though there’s an “autocratic” (p. 76) and a wooden “derrick” (p. 95).

After that thrilling, brilliant opening page, perhaps there is a sense that Terrance didn't work quite so hard on the words here. Sometimes the characters speak a little too like him. The Doctor says at one point that, “You’re a good lad, Chesterton” (p. 45); that doesn’t sound entirely like William Hartnell but might do for Peter Cushing’s movie Doctor. On the same page, Tyler refers to “that Doctor chap”, and on p. 95 young David Campbell refers to the frustrated alligator as a “poor chap” — it is usually the Doctor that Terrance has employ “chap”, a Third Doctor word that Terrance puts in the mouths of other incarnations. 

In trying to underline a Roboman’s connections to ordinary human existence, we hear the names of people supposedly close to him — but “Phil” and “Angela” (p. 114) are so majestically un-sci-fi that it seems almost like parody. So, too, does the whole paragraph given over to a delicious meal (p. 116), the kind of thing I’ve had to be wary of in trying to emulate but not pastiche Terrance for my forthcoming novelisation of his The Six Doctors.

Perhaps the thing that most surprised me reading this again is how much Terrance crops the Doctor’s final, moving speech of farewell to Susan. Hartnell delivered it so beautifully that the sequence has been used in various later programmes to convey his mastery of the role. Indeed, one reason I feel its absence is because I know it so well from the beginning of The Five Doctors (1983), written by Terrance.

In fact, the TV story ends with Susan dropping the TARDIS key that Terrance says, “she’ll no longer need”. But he decides not to end the book on a note of such perfect, searing pathos. Instead, we cut back to the interior of the TARDIS where the Doctor does not brood for long:

“‘I’ll get over it,’ he said briskly. ‘Bound to happen one day. Now then, I really must get you two home again…’” (p. 141) 

Off he goes to new adventures. That’s especially extraordinary, given that Terrance as script editor allowed the pathos at the end of The Green Death (1973), in which there’s a similar kind of parting with a companion who is off to get hitched. Had he perhaps not been happy with the ending of that TV serial, or the response it garnered? If so, was he in this novelisation sort of correcting his own work on screen? He may just thought this mushy stuff would be unpalatable to his young (intended) readers.

That isn’t quite the end. My first edition paperback includes adverts for many more books from Target, primarily ANIMAL STORIES  involving dogs, badgers, skunks, ponies, calves, etc. It then devotes a little space to a list of six Doctor Who novelisations, all of them illustrated, and two written by Terrance — the implication being that these were thought of lesser interest to readers of a Dalek book than stories about animals. Perhaps that was the publisher simply being optimistic about flagging its other titles.

All in all, this is a good novelisation of a good TV story, and one with an important historic role in helping to helped establish the character of the Doctor as Terrance inherited him and as we know them today — as defiant, monster-battling hero. With that in mind, it’s striking how the book was packaged, because the cover doesn't show the TV story.

All right, the pink Dalek is referenced from a black and white photo from location filming of the TV production, but the spaceships and Roboman are (as Paul MC Smith demonstrated at Target Book Club recently) from posters for the movie version. Terrance refers to the Robomen carrying whips and truncheons; artist Chris Achilleos has one sporting a machine gun. This is, I think, an Achilleos version of a poster for the movie, not a depiction of the book contained within.

(Not always visible on later editions but clear at the foot of my first edition is Achilleos’s new signature — an A in a circle, introduced on his previous book for the range, the cover of Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom by Philip Hinchcliffe. The 1982 reprint loaned to me by my friend Ed Salt crops this, and I treated myself to a first edition to find out what else might be missing. Er, nothing, as it turns out. Still, I think the orange version of the Doctor Who logo used on the first edition conveys the heat and fire of invasion better than the later pale blue version.)

Of course, Achilleos often had limited reference photos to work from. We can also understand why he and the team at Target may have favoured something redolent of the movie: it was the more readily accessible form of this story when the book was published, having been shown on TV by this point, and there were still sometimes screenings, while the TV version was in effect ancient history unlikely to be seen again. So the image is exciting in itself but also, to many potential readers, familiar. 

That was certainly true in my case. I remember the thrill, aged maybe eight or nine, of finding in the library a book that promised the movie I loved, having seen it once on Saturday-morning TV, and the excitement of then discovering it was something else: what I thought of as the authentic version of the story.

*

You might like to know that my exhaustive biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be published on 30 November 2026 and is now available to pre-order from Ten Acre Books. Pre-order it now.

The launch event, at the Portico Library in Manchester on 25 November, has now sold out. I will be signing copies of the book at the Who Shop in London on 28 November. The Who Shop also has an exclusive hard-back edition for sale.

See more of my posts on the 235 books written by Terrance Dicks.

In addition, Jonathan Morris’s excellent book for the Black Archive series explores the different versions of The Dalek Invasion of Earth. 

My pal Jim wrote about this novelisation on Escape to Danger. There is also my pal Matt Michael’s view. 

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.

War With the Robots, by Harry Harrison

This anthology of eight science-fiction stories was first published in the US in 1962 by Pyramid Publications and the UK in 1967 by Dobson Books. I read a paperback published by Panther, an imprint of Granada Publishing, in 1976. The indicia says it was “made and printed” by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) in Bungay, and that it is set in Linotype Times. It doesn’t credit the cover artist — though that looks, to my untrained eye, like Chris Foss.

My guess is that these stories were collected in an effort to emulate the success of Isaac Asimov’s anthologies, not least the interlinked robot stories collected in I, Robot (1950), The Rest of the Robots (1964) and The Complete Robot (1982). In revisiting the stories originally published individually in various sci-fi magazines, Asimov revised them and added bridging material to make a more cohesive whole.

The opening “A word from the (human) author” rather suggests this will be something similar, Harrison explaining the history of fictional “robots”, as coined by Karel Capek in his play RUR (1920), then arguing that robots are already with us in the sensing and deciding gadgets we take for granted in our lives, from the automatic alarm clock on. He then, separately, introduces the first story by telling us,

“The first creature from earth to set foot — or treads — on the moon will be robot” (p. 11). 

Indeed, he says, that robot was in the planning stage at the time of writing. So the reader would surely expect the story to follow to address some aspect of this. But “Simulated Trainer” (originally published as “Trainee for Mars” in Fantastic Universe in 1958) is about humans in training to be the first to land on Mars. There’s a fun idea at the heart of it about the psychological impact of knowing, or not, that you’re in a simulation. And there is a robot, in the manufactured Martian creature encountered early on. But it’s not quite what I expected from the author’s note.

“The Velvet Glove” involves robot Jon Venex applying for a job and getting caught up in a drug-smuggling operation. The rather crude analogy being drawn is that robots are not the first demographic group to be treated as slaves. It’s kind of fun, but ends before we get into what I think would be more interesting territory, with a robot working for the intelligence services while also undergoing a political awakening about the lot of its kind…

“Arm of the Law” is much better: a robot worth $120,000 credits is delivered to a police department, and rather than turning a blind eye to the local protection racket, sets out to arrest all the villains. It’s sort of dumping a dorky, literal robot of the Asimov kind into the cynical, morally grey world of Hammett or Chandler. It’s not so vividly, richly told — but good fun.

My favourite, “The Robot Who Wanted to Know”, is about the places reading can take you. One robot, we’re told, has followed a thread of enquiry through available books, and is now an expert of languages. But the robot protagonist follows a different line, into romantic fiction, and then wants to participate so fakes an invitation to a masked ball. The resolution is neat, producing a mechanical fault that also works an analogy.

“I See You” (originally published as “Robot Justice”) is set in a Big Brother-type world of mass surveillance, where no crime goes unobserved and is swiftly punished. The hero-villain who attempted to steal money is sentenced to 20 years of dismal menial labour, objects and gets more penalties added. How can he escape from the all-seeing machine? Again, the resolution works well — what doesn’t a camera look at? — and ends on an arresting cliffhanger, which helps it linger.

‘The Repairman” involves a technician sent to repair a bit of kit on a remote and primitive planet. The kit is vital to interplanetary travel, but the unsophisticated locals have developed a religion around the artefact. So the repairman of the title must dress up as an indigenous creature, complete with spiky teeth and tail, and pretend to be an emissary from their ancestors / gods. It’s all a bit Star Trek, I think, in High Colonial mode. Ho ho, this salt-of-the-earth hero is so much smarter than the silly natives…

One thing of note is that the repairman surveys the area by sending down a “Flying Eye”, effectively a drone camera. In 2022, I got Samira Ahmed to interview Philip Hinchcliffe, former producer of Doctor Who (1974-77), at length, for the release Daleks! Genesis of Terror. He said that on getting the gig in 1974, “I gave myself a crash course in sci-fi I hadn’t read. Most of it was basic stuff: Asimov, Brian Aldiss and other people. And I thought ‘Wow, this is a really interesting story area’.”

As I argued in my essay for The DNA of Doctor Who — The Philip Hinchcliffe Years in 2024,

“Planet of Evil was the direct beneficiary of this: on the DVD, Hinchcliffe says the ‘occuloid tracker’ – what we’d now recognise as a surveillance drone – was his idea, drawn from one of the science fiction stories he’d read. There are, for example: automated flying ‘eyes’ in ‘This Moment of the Storm’ by Roger Zelazny; golden, basketball-like ‘copseyes’ in ‘Cloak of Anarchy’ by Larry Niven and ‘flying eye’ probes in ‘The Repairman’ by Harry Harrison.”

I read the story when researching that piece, but then completely forgot it. “Oh yeah,” I thought when I got to the reference to the Flying Eye this time, but couldn’t remember what happened next. That is not the greatest endorsement of a story.

In fact, there’s a Flying Eye in the next story in this collection, too, “Survival Planet”. This is another High Colonial story, this time about Good Space People visiting a world once ravaged by Bad Space People called Slavers. The primitive-seeming natives have taken steps to protect themselves from the Slavers, and treat the Good Lot as if they’re no different. But the implication, of two adjacent stories with the same kit, is that both occur in the same shared universe. It is the only evidence apart from Harrison’s introductions to each story that these are all connected.

The final story, “The War of the Robots” is not included in the acknowledgments as having been previously published, so seems to be new to this collection — and provided the overall title. It involves the last survivors on one side of a longstanding war, battling to continue in the rising heat of their underground base. Robots don’t suffer the same effects, so the humans withdraw, allowing them robots to pursue their war for them. Only things aren’t quite what they appear and at least some characters discover they have been duped…

There’s something fascinating here, and perhaps more relevant now than when it was first written, about artificial intelligence replacing human workers, with their enthusiastic consent. But Harrison’s introduction to the story is guilty, I think, of the same naive zeal:

“Homo sapiens is a born improver. Everything keeps getting bigger and bigger and better and better … This applies to war too” (p. 149)

The problem, then, is that he’s not at war with the robots.

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!)

Hideous Kinky, by Esther Freud

I can see why this strange, disturbing novel had such an impact when first published in 1992. It’s the semi-autobiographical account of a childhood trip to Morocco in the early 1970s, at once exotic adventure and horror story.

In the opening pages, the young narrator is in a van driving from the UK to Marrakech with her elder sister Bea, unnamed Mum, Mum’s boyfriend John and a silent, sullen woman called Maretta who we then learn is John’s wife. The implication, unrecognised by the narrator, is that Maretta is unhappy with the relationship between her husband and the unnamed Mum. There’s something odd and uncomfortable going on, to be teased out by the reader from the narrator’s account. 

The only words the girls have heard Maretta ever say are “hideous” and “kinky”, which they work into the rules of their game of tag, I think unwittingly taunting her. Then Maretta is seriously ill, and covered in lice, and suddenly we learn that John has taken her back to London. Much later, we briefly hear news that Maretta previously suffered the loss of a child but is now pregnant by John again… We don’t hear of them again.

The point is that the narrator shares with us events as they happen — the chaos and feelings and textures of this adventure with her Mum — but doesn’t quite grasp what they mean. As readers, we must deduce the things not said or understood: connections, desires, what characters are escaping. Bit by bit, we piece together that the narrator’s Mum is as much escaping the “rules” laid down by her strict mother in Tunbridge Wells as searching for some kind of freedom or meaning. Yet she depends — desperately — on the connections she’s escaped, reliant on regular payments sent out by the girls’ father.

The effect, I think, is to invite us to pass judgment. Some of what’s described here is very funny, such as the local women who regularly steal clothes from a washing line, including nappies, and then flaunt them whether or not they fit. The children briefly had a pet chicken while living in a hotel; the chicken stalks the other rooms and shits on people's stuff.

But much of what is described made this hapless parent jittery with apprehension. At one point, Bea is seriously ill and fears all her teeth will fall out, and the adults acknowledge that yes, her lips have gone blue — and don’t do much else about it. On another occasion, Mum gives away the previous talcum powder that prevents the narrator’s rash. The narrator can’t read, is prevented from going to school, and is conscious of missing out.

Then Bea refuses to go with Mum and younger sister on yet another jaunt, so stays behind with a neighbour. When Mum and narrator eventually return, days and days later, Bea is no longer where they left her, has spent time living with a man Mum doesn’t even know, and is now somewhere else, ultimately tracked down to the home of a woman who refers to her as an orphan. 

Part of what makes this all so affecting is that the book offers few clues to the ages of the two children, beyond them being very young. In the film version, Bea is eight — younger than my own daughter now — and her sister Lucy (the unnamed narrator of the book) just six. The book is compelling because I found myself worried for their welfare. 

I couldn’t resist the signed copy of this spied in my local Oxfam bookshop, not least because Esther Freud played Threst, one of the Cryons, in Attack of the Cybermen. As a kid, I used to be terrified of that period of Doctor Who; as an adult, a story about a wayward parent with young children in potential peril is way, way more disturbing…

The School for Scandal and Other Plays, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

I bought this Penguin Classics edition second-hand an age ago because David Whitaker (about whom I wrote a book, which I never mention) had played Sir Oliver Surface to great acclaim in a 1957 production of A School for Scandal at the Theatre Royal in York, the cast including John Barrie, Derek Martinus and Titus Oates, who later changed his professional name to Simon and was in Doomwatch. 

Skimming through the script of that particular play, I got a sense of the farcical comedy, and the kindly, authoritative role. The book comprises three plays by Sheridan: The Rivals (1775), The Critic (1779) and The School for Scandal (1777). Reading them all now, at a more leisuredly rate and without an agenda, I've been delighted by the modern-feeling pace and the quality of gags. In The Rivals, for example, Lydia races to tidy up her salacious novels before posh visitors walk in, and asks her servant to help:

LYDIA: Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books - quick, quick - fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilet - throw Roderick Random into the closet - put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man - thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa - cram Ovid behind the bolster - there - put The Man of Feeling into your pocket... (p. 48).

Sat in a quiet library last week, "Put The Man of Feeling into your pocket" made me snort out loud.

Likewise, The Critic has an amazing sequence in which abominable playwright Sir Fretful Plagiary insists he never reads reviews in papers. The mischievous Mr Dangle says this is just as well, as the reviews are particularly awful. Plagiary can't resist asking what is said, so Dangle provides a whole page of different example, ripping into every aspect of Plagiary's work, and Plagiary must pretend not to be offended.

We then visit rehearsals for a play, The Spanish Armada, into which the author has inserted a romance between the daughter of the head of the English fort at Tilbury and one of the Spanish sailors, no matter how improbable this might be. This sailor has the most amazing, authentically Spanish name: Don Ferolo Whiskerandos. Scenes of this terrible play out with critics commenting on further outlandish devices: characters telling each other things they already know, or the overuse of research (one character, known to have been a good dancer, duly enters a supposedly tense scene with his toes turned out). You could make a checklist of this stuff and use it to teach creative writing.

The School for Scandal is very Bridgerton, involving society gossips who then get caught up in their own scandals, and various people donning different person to find out what people are really like. The morality is all a bit twisted, which makes it surprising and fun. There is a ridiculous scene involving two people both hiding, separately, in the same room which often seems to have been performed as a standalone scene, such as in the 

The plays are peppered with references to contemporary people and things, which need a bit of explaining in footnotes. I'm not sure how funny these would have been, even at the time - it's a lazy kind of placeholder comedy, where you trick a laugh from the audience by naming something they recognise. Sometimes, Sheridan does something a bit more witty than that, such as in The Critics where it seems the famous actors being praised or critiqued in a scene are the very men who'd have been on stage in it.

For all the wit and zip feel up to date, the plays are oddly unstructured and they each just sort of stop. I was prompted to read up more on Sheridan, and discovered his private life was even more scandalous than the intrigues staged here. What a binfire - and knowing this, you can feel the chaos in his writing.