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  

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…