Star Trek 4, by James Blish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk seems to find this eccentric: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doctor Who and the Missing Hour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Star Trek 3, by James Blish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McCoy refers to this as “hanky-panky”.

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

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

Bookish Volume II, by Matthew Sweet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doctor Who Magazine #633

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine boasts some exciting news: my novelisation Doctor Who - The Six Doctors will be published on 21 January, followed by Steve Cole's novelisation Doctor Who - The Vampire Mutation on 4 March. Both are based on newly discovered paperwork in the archives of the late Terrance Dicks, which I worked my way through last year. I say a little about that in the news story, and will have more to share in due course.

I've also written another Who Connections feature for the mag, this time using the song "As Time Goes By" as my starting point, inspired by something my friend Matthew Sweet told me. And Paul Cornell has kindly written in to add some extra facts to my previous Who Connections piece, on Star Trek.

Here is some publicity bits related to The Six Doctors and The Vampire Mutation:

Black Archive: The Daleks, by Oliver Wake

I greatly enjoyed this shrewd, wide-ranging exploration of the seven-part Doctor Who serial variously known as Serial B, The Mutants or The Daleks. First broadcast over the winter of 1963-64, it introduced us to the outer-space robot people of the planet Skaro.

Wake covers a lot of ground, detailing how the story evolved from Terry Nation’s initial wheeze through storyline, draft scripts and production, and what this process of revision by multiple people did to the resulting drama and its meanings. As he says, in this first serial the Daleks are not and never were Nazi analogues; that came later. He makes an argument that they’re something more like ants in an anthill, and provides good evidence.

A lot of what’s here is his analysis of paperwork from the time and old interviews, sources with which I’m very familiar — I wrote the Black Archive book about The Edge of Destruction, the Doctor Who serial that followed this one, and a biography of the story editor on both stories. What strikes me most is how deftly Wake has taken a great wealth of material and written something so concise and pacy. There are lots of big ideas and we rattle through them. Nation would approve.

Wake is excellent on the serial’s debt to Nation’s 1962 dramatisation of “Imposter”, the short story by Philip K Dick, and what we can glean from the RNID summary of the story — a document I’d not been aware of before — that was clearly based on early versions of scripts. He’s also good on citing his sources, so we can check his claims — though it’s a bit jarring to be caught up in some smart, insightful bit of reasoning and then hit my own name. “Oh no, him.”

I particularly liked the analysis of the direction of two key moments: the cliffhanger at the end of episode 1 where Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) is menaced by a sink plunger and then the sequence in episode 2 where we get a first proper look at the Daleks. Wake is also brilliant in his deductions about the real-world item used for the Daleks’ domed heads, using that to explore the specific aesthetic style of this first iteration of Daleks. I’ll not name the specific style here; that’s worth you paying for the book.

My only quibble, really, is where he says Nation muddled his science, eliding two distinct ideas — that radiation can mutate DNA, and that a species evolves over time through mutations in DNA — so that the neutron bomb makes the Daleks and Thals evolve into very different creatures from what they once were. He also says that real petrified jungles aren’t like the one seen here. I don’t think that’s Nation being wrong, as such. He just didn’t think Earth science applied to his story, where he could set the rules. He said as such in an interview included on the video Daleks: The Early Years (1992):

“You land their ship, the TARDIS, on a planet and from that moment on everything on that planet is your creation. If the rocks talk, fine, that’s my planet. If the creatures have 12 eyes, that’s what happens on my planet. So you have this wonderful freedom to do almost anything you want.”

Nation revelled in things being different and strange, and not as our scientists would think possible. So it was not a mistake but conscious choice. And that meant he could sometimes be ahead of the boffins: as I’ve said before, his Planet of the Daleks (1973) features an “ice volcano” in that “instead of white hot lava … erupts with molten ice” — daft fantasy until, 16 years later, scientists spotted cryovulcanism for the first time in space, and it became science fact.

Wake’s book also prompted what may be a new thought. The appendix discusses a short-lived title for the serial: Beyond the Sun. Wake argues that this suggests a setting far beyond our Solar System, but I wonder if that’s right. “Beyond” means “on the farther side of”; departing from Earth, we’d need to head towards the Sun and keep going past it — to the area of space on Earth’s own orbital path but diametrically opposite. In that sense, Skaro would be a hidden, twin planet of Earth.

We can date the moment this changed: on 23 September 1963, Doctor Who story editor David Whitaker commissioned writer Malcolm Hulke for a story called The Hidden Planet, set on planet in the Solar System previously undetected because it shares Earth’s orbit but is on the far side of the Sun. Unlike Skaro, this would have been a world almost like our own but with a number of notable differences the Doctor and his friends would explore; the setting sparked the story.

The Hidden Planet didn’t make it to the screen, but Whitaker seems to have hung on to the idea: his 1966 story The Power of the Daleks is set on a planet called Vulcan, the name used in (discredited) theories about Earth having a twin.

Doctor Who Magazine #632

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is out today, and features another Who Connections piece by me, this time on Star Trek (pp. 44-49), examining how and when it first influenced Doctor Who and when, exactly, Doctor Who then influenced Star Trek. For this, I spoke to Star Trek books writers Diane Duane and Barbara Hambly, and to Jean-Marc Lofficier.

If this is of interest, you might like to read my posts on the anthologies Star Trek by James Blish, Star Trek 2 by Blish, the original novel Spock Must Die! by Blish, and also The Disappearing Future edited by George Hay.

The new issue of DWM also includes a glowing review by Jamie Lenman of Space Security Service - Bret Vyon Lives, the audio set on which I am producer and co-writer, which is released by Big Finish next week.

I took pictures of the Star Trek and early Doctor Who novelisations to illustrate my article, and here are some of them for those that like that sort of thing.

Doctor Who Legends - Patrick Troughton

The new Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition is out now, devoted to Patrick Troughton and 60 years of the Second Doctor.

I've contributed the first article, "The Doctor's Doctor" (pp. 6-11), looking at why so many of the other actors who've played Doctors Who cite Troughton as their favourite, and what that reveals about what he brought to the role. 

Many thanks to Charles Norton, who helped me check the veracity of one of the interviews with producer Innes Lloyd.

Justin Richards, 1961-2026

My former editor Justin died last weekend. His great friend Peter Anghelides has written movingly about him. 

I knew Justin, first, for his brilliant, brilliant debut novel Theatre of War (1994), which is so smart, funny and surprising. He found clever things to do with companion Bernice Summerfield being an archaeologist, and it’s really good on what history actually is. But for all it’s keenly intelligent, it’s also great fun.

By mid 1999, I was in correspondence with Justin as he patiently read and gently rejected my pitches for Doctor Who novels. He was always encouraging, on one occasion recommending that I read Story by David McKee before trying again, on another telling me that a thriller plot like I had in mind needed to feel— as the reader read the book — like a zigzagging path, lurching in different, surprising directions. But at the end, when the reader looked back the way we’d come together, they should see it had really been one long, straight avenue, the ending inevitable.

He bent the rules to commission my first book before the particular range was brought to an end. There would always be “just a few notes”, often saying what he liked as much as what he wanted changed. 

When I had a bit of a bruising, unhappy experience on a writing project nothing to do with Justin, he insisted on buying me lunch so that he could share — off the record — his own similar, bruising experience of some years before. He was so funny about it, so at ease, and lifted off all the weight I’d not even been conscious of carrying.

I saw his patience, his generosity, his intelligence and mischievous sense of fun on numerous occasions. It’s why he is such a keenly felt loss. 

Talk on David Whitaker and Terrance Dicks

The talk I gave on Doctor Who writers David Whitaker and Terrance Dicks for the York Festival of Ideas earlier this month is now up in full on YouTube for your delight:

The books mentioned at the end are my biography David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television (2023), and my archive-investigating analyses of the Doctor Who stories The Evil of the Daleks and The Edge of Destruction for the Black Archive range. 

It is my 50th birthday today, so you should buy at least one of these.

My new biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be out later in the year. I am busy writing it right now.

Doctor Who Magazine's Time Museum

Out now from the people what make Doctor Who Magazine, The Time Museum is - it says here - a virtual exhibition of the whole of Doctor Who, told through 100 objects. 

I've written three of the entries, on Cameca's brooch from The Aztecs (1964), the burping bin from Rose (2005) and Queen Victoria's gun from Tooth and Claw (2006).

By chance, I was asked for this at the same time that I was writing the panels for an exhibition in an actual museum, about which more anon.

Doctor Who quiz on YouTube

I'm one of the contenders on the debut episode of Gav Rymill's Doctor Who quiz, battling Ellie Collins, Benjamin Cook and Tim Missing-Episodes. You can enjoy it here and now:

The Time Team Unearthed - The Art of Adrian Salmon

I've had some late nights reading / poring over this beautiful new book collating the artwork that Adrian Salmon produced over more than 20 years for the "Time Team" feature that used to run in Doctor Who Magazine. The brief was simple: produce a single, sizzling image based on the TV episodes under discussion that particular issue. But original editor Gary Gillatt wanted Ade to use dramatic licence, to show us the things that aren't seen on screen but should be.

The result was that Ade produced a captivating image for almost ever TV Doctor Who story of the 20th century. For this book, he's gone back and filled in the gaps - and added a few extras.

The result is gorgeous, and gorgeously packaged, providing a thrilling, vivid, fast-moving history of last millennia's Doctor Who all from one artist's perspective. It is fascinating to see Ade's style develop, and the commentary explains how this was in part down to changing the tools he used (he names the specific makes of pens) and in part due to influences of other artists and an effort not to get bored.

There are loads of details I'd not noticed before - the Sandbeast in his image of The Rescue, the way the artwork for Resurrection of the Daleks mirrors what he did for Earthshock, or the tiny Doctors visible in what he did for The Power of Kroll and Time Flight. The new material is great, too, my favourite probably The Myth Makers with another tiny Doctor. But also, cor, The Evil of the Daleks. And also, woo, The Massacre... 

I'm delighted, too, that the book contains so many sketches, drafts and alternate takes. As the commentary says, some of this material has been a job to track down, and Ade has helped restore some artwork by hand painting new colours. The effort is well worth it. Kudos, too, to editor William Brooks for pulling the whole thing together.

Some of the stuff contained here is from the same period when I employed Ade for cover artwork for the Bernice Summerfield range of audio plays and books - I could tell exactly when just by looking at the style of art. In those days, it was a thrill to receive by email his thumbnail pencil sketches and discuss with him which of two or three options worked best for a particular new title. I've always been particularly, er, drawn, to his pencil sketches - and have failed more than once to convince my masters to employ him to illustrate a novel or novelisation just in pencils. One day...

But while we discussed the various options for any given cover, I don't think we ever talked about Ade's approach to his art, or how he put it together. So this book has been a revelation. How illuminating to learn his approach to colour, and what makes an image pop. The art of the art, as it were.

As Ade says, there's more of his artwork out there, as the "Time Team" was born anew to look at 21st century episodes. He also produced a wealth of other Doctor Who related artwork - I remember the unused cover he did for Short Trips: Zodiac in 2002 (not least because that book included my fiction debut). So I hope there's a second volume.

(A collected Cybermen strips next with new instalments, please and thank you.)

The Case of the Missing Masterpiece, by Terrance Dicks

This is the first of 10 novels to feature the “Baker Street Irregulars” — not the street gang who assisted Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four but four modern-day schoolchildren (and their dog) who solve mysteries by applying the methods of the (to them fictional) Holmes.  

Published in hardback in May 1978 and later reprinted in numerous editions, The Case of the Missing Masterpiece was the first original novel by Terrance Dicks since the last of the Mounties trilogy, War Drums of the Blackfoot, two years previously. The Mounties series had been conceived and commissioned by Richard Henwood at Target Books; when he moved to Blackie & Sons as group publishing director, he invited Terrance to Glasgow to meet with his team and come up with a new line of adventures.

The result was originally called “Robinson’s Irregulars”, as per the title page of the surviving manuscript in Terrance’s archive. By the time of publication, that had been changed to make the link to Sherlock Holmes more explicit.

In the book as published, the gang is referred to, once, as “Robinson’s Irregulars”, as well as “The Magnificent 3½” and “The Frightful Four” (p. 21), which may mean those were other working titles, too. One is clearly a reference to The Magnificent Seven (1960), Terrance a big fan of westerns; the other is clearly a reference to Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five, which is also a range of adventures involving four children and a dog. That gives us a sense of what Terrance was stirring into the mix: a mash-up of Holmes, westerns and Blyton.

The book begins with a prologue in which two villains we can’t see because of their stocking masks — but who in stature resemble Laurel and Hardy — steal a painting from a posh house, and brutally cosh the man who tries to stop them. They bind and gag the poor man but, notably, the Laurel-like burglar then goes back to remove the gag so the man doesn’t choke. It’s an intriguing bit of kindness.

The story proper then begins in what Terrance calls an ordinary London school, as if that’s something to which all readers will relate. It’s not a very racially mixed London school judging by the names and descriptions — something Terrance would be better on in his later books. But I love the description of the chaos of the school yard, the kids,

“all fizzing like shaken-up Coke bottles” (p. 11).

Amid this, Dan Robinson sits quietly reading The Hound of the Baskervilles. Tall, skinny, bookish and a loner, Dan is rather modelled on Terrance as a schoolboy. When the book is taken from him by a bully and ruined, Dan immediately fights back — and calls the bully a “moron” and “stupid cretinous spastic stinking twit” (p. 14). Later, Dan also pulls at his eyelids to affect being Japanese (p. 79). This is our hero!

When the fight is stopped by a teacher (“Potty Benton”), the bully challenges Dan to a wager: he can have a new copy of the tattered Hound of the Baskervilles if he can solve the real-life case of the stolen painting, in the week that they’re off school. Dan accepts.

He’s joined in his task by three friends. Best mate Jeff Webster is a stocky, sensible boy. Liz Spencer, we later learn, works on the school paper and is the daughter of a journalist. To begin with, we are told that,

“Liz was a keen supporter of Women’s Lib. She was a tough, wiry girl, who had dealt out many a thick ear as a practical demonstration of her principles.” (p. 17)

From this, I suspect Liz was named after Lis Sladen, who’d played plucky journalist and women’s libber Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who, a character Terrance helped to create. Finally, there’s Mickey Denning, younger than the others, dead keen to help and liable to get into trouble. When he goes to spy on the villains later on, he is quickly caught — fulfilling the kind of plot function of Jo Grant in Terror of the Autons.

The four friends start by visiting the house from which the painting was stolen — which is open to the public. As luck would have it, the eccentric Sir Jasper, who owns the place, is also an aficionado of Holmes and gamely recreates the burglary and his being coshed on the head for the benefit of the children. He also shares with them the words of a rude song involving his own name, “Oh Sir Jasper, Do Not Touch Me!”, which isn’t exactly suitable for children. Today, they’d be on to the police about him.

Then Terrance does something brilliant: on the basis of their conversation with Sir Jasper, Dan tells the others what is going on, as a cliffhanger. We have to read the next chapter to discover — always the best bit in a Holmes story — how he’s put this together from a series of logical deductions.

This is swiftly followed by another great moment, when Dan declares that instead of acting like characters in a mystery story, they’ll go straight to the police. Again, the details of routine police work seems a bit odd for a children’s story — we’re told it consists of dealing with flashers, knicker nicking and dog mess (p. 45). But then there’s another great twist: Mickey goes off on assignment to investigate a clue, and spies two men who turn out to be brothers. That doesn’t mean anything to him but it does to us, as readers, because we’ve already heard that the Hardy-like villain from the prologue is working in league with his brother.

Things move swiftly. At one point, Dan and Jeff are trapped on the roof of the villains’ headquarters, the villains climbing up to get them. Then, the villains get hold of Dan’s address and lay siege one evening when he’s home alone. It’s all brilliantly tense — and the solution is ingenious, even if the police arrive very quickly. Still, it seems nuts that the police then leave Dan in the house alone for the rest of the night, assuming the villains won’t return. Also, why don’t the police insist on speaking to Dan’s parents, who would surely come home when they heard what had happened?

Next morning, the nice detective Dan has met, Inspector Day, gives the boy a stern talking to.

“It’s not like in books. It isn’t suspecting, it isn’t even knowing whodunnit that counts. It’s proving it.” (p. 110)

He advises Dan and his friends to give up the case and lie low. Of course, they do no such thing and — by somehow identifying a splash of mud on the side of a van briefly glimpsed as it sped past — they head by train to the Essex marshes for a final showdown.

This is clearly based on the real-life village of Althorne, the battered old houseboat that the villains use as a hideout just like the one where Terrance and his family had regular holidays. Terrance may well have written this section of the book there, his own children fizzing like Coke bottles around him. (I think the nature reserve as described in Doctor Who and the Three Doctors is the same spot.)

There’s other stuff of this sort: Dan’s room at the top of his old, terraced house, complete with office and sloping ceilings, is very much like the top floor of Terrance’s house in London, including the office where he worked. Mickey’s large Cockney family is very much like Terrance’s family, on his mother’s side. 

By peppering the book with such real details and observations, the more outlandish bits of adventure are kept grounded. It’s obviously a much more relatable story than the Mounties novels, and more real than Doctor Who. It is of its time but a cracking adventure, and leaves us wanting more. 

Art by John Bolton

The back cover promises two further titles: The Fagin Foundation and The Blackmail Boys, which were published in November 1978 and sometime in 1979, the suggestion being that, like the Mounties, this was commissioned as a trilogy. 

But the idea for the Mounties came from Richard Henwood. I think this is something different; it’s very much Terrance’s book: what he wanted to write, rather than what people wanted from him, for the first time since he became a novelist.

For more, see my list of the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks, with links to posts on them. You might also like my 2015 article “My Immortal Holmes” for the Lancet Psychiatry on the appeal of Sherlock.

Doctor Who Magazine #628

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out today, featuring an exclusive extra comic and a  preview of the two episodes of The Daleks' Masterplan thought lost since 1965 which will be up on iPlayer from tomorrow. Exciting.

I've also contributed the first of a new series, "Who Connections" (pp. 30-33), this initial one inspired by a the chance discovery of an extraordinary connection between Stooky Bill - the puppet seen in The Giggle (2023) - and a character from a Doctor Who story more than 40 years before. There is also mention of Star Trek and EastEnders.

Spock Must Die!, by James Blish

A matter transporter in Star Trek works like a fax machine that destroys the original. That, effectively, is the case put by Dr Leonard McCoy at the start of this original Star Trek novel:

“Every time we put a man through the transporter for the first time, we commit murder” (p. 6).

The adventure that follows seems to suggest he is right. The crew of Enterprise is alerted to an emergency on the planet Organia (previously seen in the TV episode Errand of Mercy, the first to feature Klingons). Our heroes are keen to investigate but even when travelling at a breathless Warp 6, Organia is six months’ flight time away. 

Scotty and Spock plan to get round this by extending the range of the transporter using tachyons and hand-waving. If things go to plan, the person who steps into the transporter will remain on Enterprise but a perfect duplicate will be created on Organia, able to carry out reconnaissance and report back. They will then remerge with the tachyon universe for reasons of plot convenience — we wouldn’t want two versions of the same person, would we?

However, something goes wrong and there ends up being two identical Spocks on Enterprise. Captain Kirk names them “Spock One” and “Spock Two” and determines that one must be destroyed. That decision is made before we realise that one of the Spocks is evil and working with the Klingons, but we don’t know which. Both Spocks behave in ways that seem out of character, so how can Kirk deduce who to kill?

This is a fun, fast-moving and exciting adventure. For all it is told on an epic scale over a six-month period (from star date 4011.9 to 4205.5), it feels like a TV episode of Star Trek from the original series. The high-concept idea at the heart of it, the high-emotion stakes and the, ahem, questionable science and ethics all feel authentic. It presumes we are familiar with the TV show, too, as there are no descriptions of characters — not even mentioning Spock’s ears.

This may have been in response to the first original Star Trek novel, Mission to Horatius by Mack Reynolds (1968), which was written expressly for children and is generally considered to be not very good. More than that, the then producers of Star Trek complained about the racially coded ways in which Sulu and Uhura were described. I wonder if in writing Spock Must Die!, the second original novel, James Blish was instructed not to describe them at all.

Referring to Uhura as “the Bantu girl” (p. 9) conveys something of her ethnic background, though it’s not very specific — Bantu languages are spoken over a very wide area. It’s not a connection gleaned from TV episodes, either, but lore surely added by Blish based on “uhura” being a Bantu word (for “freedom”). Yet the same reasoning would make Kirk and McCoy both Scottish. Even so, other writers seem to have picked up on this and referred to Uhura as Bantu in later novels etc. 

That’s also true of another bit of lore here. On p. 2, Kirk recalls McCoy’s reasons for joining Star Fleet (a divorce) and the name of his daughter, Joanna. This isn’t from a TV episode; the character Joanna McCoy was devised for TV and then not used, yet she was added to the series “bible” issued to writers and is mentioned on p. 124 of The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry (1968). Blish must have drawn from one of these sources and decided to make Joanna canonical. She has since appeared or been referenced in various novels and other media. Spock Must Die! might not be the first original novel of Star Trek but it is the first that other writers then built on. 

Then there’s stuff where Blish applies fixes to things seen and heard on screen. For example, he tells us that Montgomery Scott’s Scottish accent, “came out only under stress” (p. 3). On another occasion we’re told that Scotty’s,

“English [accent] was as high, white and cold as his terminology” (p. 71).

I’m not sure Scotty ever sounded English on TV. Besides, Blish pointing out the inconsistency made me spot when he is inconsistent himself, such as when Scotty starts all Brigadoon and then trails off:

“An’ it’s oft before lang an’ lang that I’ve cursed the designer who thought it’d be cute to put no pockets in these uniforms” (p. 99).

The plot of Spock Must Die! is woven from the established lore of the TV series, so that there are frequent footnotes telling us to refer to specific novelisations (also written by Blish). He shares a number of facts about the operations of Star Fleet, such as that there are 17 Federation starbases (p. 8), the Enterprise has a crew of more than 430 (p. 22) and that more than a third of them are female (p. 109).

We learn that Uhura is fluent in Eurish, the language of James Joyce (pp. 48-49), that Kirk practices his quick draw in the mirror (p. 61) and that, according to McCoy,

“The retraining of left-handed children to become right-handed — in complete contradiction to the orders the poor kids’ brains are issuing to their muscles — badly bollixes up their central nervous systems, and, among other bad outcome, is the direct and only cause of habitual stuttering” (p. 64).

Scotty also uses the term “bollixed”, on p. 99 and p. 103, a term never used on screen (until Miles O'Brien says “bollocks” in an episode of Deep Space Nine). Spock has a a gift for “telempathy” (p. 115), i.e. picking up on someone else’s feelings from a distance, predating Counsellor Troi’s own similar gifts in Star Trek: The Next Generation. At the end of the book, the Klingons and their worlds are banned from spaceflight for a thousand years (p. 112), and Uhura learns that a lieutenant at Star Fleet wants her to teach him Eurish. Her response is:

“I hope he’s cute” (p. 117).

It’s a cheery note on which to close this perilous adventure, and we leave the Enterprise to continue its voyages. The irony is that on screen these had already ended; the last episode of Star Trek was filmed in January 1969 and the series was formally cancelled the following month. The indicia of this battered paperback says it was first published in the USA and Canada in February 1970, and that this is a second printing. Mine is a US edition, with the price of 60¢ printed on the spine. Yet I think it may be a UK-issued edition.

I’ve seen some accounts say that this novel and Blish’s novelisations of multiple TV scripts of Star Trek were not available in the UK until the Corgi editions first published in 1972. So I was a bit surprised by the author’s note at the start of Spock Must Die! First, he suggests that this original novel,

“might make a television episode, or several, some day. Although the American network (bemused, as usual, by a rating service of highly dubious statistical validity) has canceled the series, it began to run in Great Britain in mid-June 1969 [actually, 12 July], and the first set of adaptations was published concurrently in London by Corgi Books. If the show is given a new lead on [sic] life through the popularity of British reruns, it would not be the first such instance in television history.” (p. -1)

I don’t think Corgi published new versions of the book at this stage; instead, they seem to have distributed Bantam-published US stock with a sticker added giving a price in shillings and pence. I’ve got a copy of the first novelisation, with 50¢ printed on the cover and a sticker for 3/6 to one side (see image, right). 

So, when were Star Trek books available in the UK, exactly? I looked up the details in trade magazine the Bookseller:

Star Trek (aka Star Trek 1) by James Blish, comprising 7 TV stories

• Published in the US by Bantam tab 50¢, January 1967
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 3 shillings and sixpence, 21 April 1967 (source: Bookseller, 15 April 1967, p. 1,938).
• Issued again in the UK by Bantam at 3/6, 18 July 1969 (source: Bookseller, 12 July 1969, p. 134), to coincide with Star Trek first being aired in the UK for the first time, from Saturday 12 July.

Star Trek 2 by James Blish, comprising 8 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 50¢, February 1968
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 3/6, August 1969 (source: Bookseller, 16 August 1969, p. 1,384), alongside Star Trek 3.

Star Trek 3 by James Blish, comprising 7 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 50¢, April 1969
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 3/6, August 1969 (source: Bookseller, 16 August 1969, p. 1,384), alongside Star Trek 2.

Spock Must Die! by James Blish, an original novel

• Published in the UK by Bantam at 60¢, February 1970
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 4 shillings, April 1970 (source: Bookseller, 25 April 1970, p. 2,174).

Star Trek 4 by James Blish, comprising 6 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 75¢, July 1971
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 25p, October 1971 (source: Bookseller, 23 October 1971, p. 2,076).

Star Trek 5 by James Blish, comprising 7 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 75¢, February 1972
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 25p, June 1972 (source: Bookseller, 24 June 1972, p. 2,696).

New, Corgi-editions of these books were then published in the UK 1972, with Corgi editions of Star Trek 6-11 to follow.

We know Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks — about whom I'm writing a biography — had a collection of Star Trek books which he loaned to his writers. For example, on 8 March 1972, he wrote to Bob Baker and Dave Martin with notes on a storyline and added, “Where are my Star Trek books?” (source: p. 102 of the “09-04 The Mutants Production Documentation” PDF included on the Doctor Who Season 9 Blu-ray box-set).

Now I know what books those were, I can better trace the influence of Star Trek on Doctor Who in the early 1970s. More on this to follow.

• See also: me on Doctor Mirabilis by James Blish (1964)