The Disappearing Future, edited by George Hay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what follows is nothing of the sort. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She then eats a red-coloured pear, with,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, by Terrance Dicks

Originally published on 19 August 1976, this is the first Doctor Who book issued from the new home of Wyndham Publications Ltd: 123 King Street in Hammersmith, London. The previous novelisations — and the three Mounties books — give the address of 14 Gloucester Road in South Kensington, the modest basement from which this whole industry started.

Beyond that one-line change in the indicia of this novelisation, which I doubt most readers noticed, there’s no evident sign of things being any different. The authoritative history on all this stuff, The Target Book, suggests that things were not happy at King Street, with a humber of staff leaving or losing their jobs, yet also quotes children’s editor Liz Godfray saying that,

“the Doctor Who schedule was largely unaffected by the behind the scenes changes” (David J Howe with Tim Neal, The Target Book (Telos, 2007) p. 34). 

As we’ve seen in previous posts, the early days of Target saw delays in publication and titles being switched about. But by this point the range had reached what we might call a time of peace and ordered calm. We can see this in a list of forthcoming novelisations published in the fanzine TARDIS, vol 1, no. 8 (July 1976) and supplied by one Angus Towler in Cookridge — presumably a fan who had written into Target:

This is pretty much what got published over the next 12 months, with only Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen pushed back to a later date. The range was now a well-oiled machine. Keep cranking the handle and out came novelisations — plop, plop, plop.

If we apply my estimated lead time of 7.5 months, Terrance wrote Doctor Who and the Web of Fear in January 1976, while the Doctor Who story The Brain of Morbius was on air — a serial he wrote but asked to have his name taken off. Though Terrance seems to have been quick to forgive script editor Robert Holmes for rewriting his story so drastically, it had not been a happy experience. If current Doctor Who was not a source of joy, I wonder how much he took solace in returning to the first Doctor Who story with which he had a connection.

He didn’t work on the TV version of The Web of Fear. “When I first arrived [at the BBC]”, he told the Doctor Who Appreciation Society’s local group in Surbiton on 28 March 1978,

“that show was being edited, and I remember seeing playbacks of episode six.” (reported in the fanzine Oracle and reproduced in Stephen James Walker (ed.), Talkback — The Unofficial and Unauthorised Doctor Who Interview Book, Volume One: The Sixties (Telos, 2006), p. 179).

Episode 6 of The Web of Fear was recorded on Saturday, 17 February 1968 and broadcast on 9 March. There’s no surviving paperwork to tell us the date of this playback — which was when the edited, completed episode was shown to cast and crew in Theatre D at BBC Television Centre (with star Patrick Troughton invited to watch it upstairs, in the office of head of serials Shaun Sutton). I’ve discussed this with David Brunt, author of the forthcoming The Doctor Who Production Diary: The Troughton Years, and we think — based on earlier episodes of The Web of Fear for which records survive — that it was probably the Thursday after recording, i.e. 22 February.

This is significant because Terrance later claimed that he’d not really watched Doctor Who until he started working on it. So the date of the playback suggests he became a regular viewer from Episode 4 of The Web of Fear, broadcast on 24 February — having already seen Episode 6 in playback. Or, perhaps, knowing he was joining this series and would attend a screening of cast and crew, he tuned in the previous week and his first regular viewing of Doctor Who was Episode 3.

I like to think so, because — by coincidence — that episode saw the debut of Nicholas Courtney as Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart. Nick, like Terrance, joined Doctor Who for what he thought would be a matter of weeks, and by the end of the year had become part of the establishment of the TV series. They each remained regulars on the series until 1974 and 1975 respectively, and close to it ever after.

In fact, this long association caused a problem for Terrance in novelising The Web of Fear. When that story first aired, viewers didn’t know Lethbridge-Stewart at all. That he “suddenly popped out from nowhere” (says the Doctor), one of just two survivors of an attack by Yeti at Holborn, means we’re invited not to trust him. He is one of the characters we’re effectively invited to view as suspects — a potential servant of the alien Great Intelligence. The others include cowardly Driver Evans (the only other survivor from Holborn), supercilious journalist Howard Chorley, and salt-of-the-earth Mancunian, Staff Sergeant Arnold. 

But most readers of the novelisation of Doctor Who and the Web of Fear would know the character of Lethbridge-Stewart from his subsequent adventures, in TV Doctor Who and in previously published novelisations. Terrance acknowledged this up front. In the TV version, little is made of the Doctor’s first meeting with Lethbridge-Stewart. In the book, we get this to open Chapter 5, putting this on a par with one of the most famous meetings of two men in British imperial history:

“Although neither of them realised it, this was in its way as historic an encounter as that between Stanley and Doctor Livingstone. Promoted to Brigadier, Lethbridge-Stewart would one day lead the British section of an organisation called UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce), set up to fight alien attacks on the planet Earth. The Doctor, changed in appearance and temporarily exiled to Earth, was to become UNIT’s Scientific Adviser.* But that was all in the future. For the moment, the two friends-to-be glared at each other in mutual suspicion.” (p. 42)

The asterisk links to a footnote, “See Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion”. It is Terrance linking the first Doctor Who story with which he had a connection to his first Doctor Who novelisation.

The reference in the above paragraph to the Doctor and Lethbridge-Stewart’s friendship being “all in the future” is also literally true. As per the scripts and broadcast version of The Web of Fear, we are told that the Doctor’s previous encounter with Yeti, in The Abominable Snowmen, took place in 1935 (p. 8 of this novelisation), which was “over forty years” (p. 8) before the events of this story; he includes a footnote, citing his novelisation.

The novelisation of The Web of Fear is therefore set, at the very earliest, in 1976 — the year it was published — meaning that all Lethbridge-Stewart’s subsequent adventures, as the Brigadier at UNIT, were still yet to take place. A young reader of this novelisation when it was published might have had dim memories of Lethbridge-Stewart’s second TV adventure, The Invasion, broadcast in 1968. For a 12 year-old, eight years ago is the ancient past. The young reader of this novelisation would have been presented with the boggling thought that it was also in the future.

Indeed, in Episode 2 of The Invasion, the Brigadier says the encounter with Yetis “in the Underground [ie in The Web of Fear] must be four years ago now”, meaning that The Invasion is set, at the earliest, in 1980. But just before Terrance started work on this novelisation, dialogue in the TV story Pyramids of Mars (broadcast 25 October — 15 November 1975) states — more than once — that Sarah Jane Smith is from “1980”, presumably meaning that the events in Terror of the Zygons take place in that year. That story was Lethbridge-Stewart’s last regular appearance on screen. 

So all the Brigadier’s adventures, from The Invasion (1968) to Terror of the Zygons (1975), occur in a single calendar year. No wonder he had a breakdown…

*

My first edition of this novelisation is in pretty good nick, the cover still smooth and shiny, only the spine a bit creased. The cover illustration is among Chris Achilleos’s best. Instead of the usual black-and-white stippled portrait of the Doctor’s staring dolefully back at us, the second Doctor is in colour, his face expressive, agonised, looking downwards — as if under terrible pressure. 

Behind him, radiating outwards to fill the frame, is a cobweb in black-on-white, which may explain the choice to put the Doctor in colour so he stands out. On some previous covers, Achilleos framed the central figure with radiating colours. The cobweb is much more effective, I think, because it is something tangible, not just a tone. Cobweb also has associations with horror, while the stark black and white is colder and less comforting that the colour fills.

The Doctor’s gaze directs our attention to the elements in the lower part of the frame: a Yeti with bright beams of energy blasting out from its eyes to ensnare a soldier. In fact, this is a bit of a spoiler because the ensnared soldier is Staff Sergeant Arnold, the character revealed at the climax of the story to be the servant of the baddies. Yet there’s nothing in the cover or the text of the book to identify that this is Arnold, beyond the stripes on his arm signifying his rank as sergeant. 

I wonder if Achilleos even knew that the soldier he put on the cover was the bad guy in the story. It may be that he simply worked from the most dynamic stock photo available, a soldier brandishing a rifle rather than just standing around.

Reference photo from The Web of Fear,
showing Jack Woolgar
as Staff Sergeant Arnold,
c/o the Black Archive

The beams of bright energy are edged with purple, which may have dictated — or been chosen so as to compliment — the purple Doctor Who logo. This is only the second purple logo featured in the range (following Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet), and the second time a Doctor Who novelisation featured a purple spine and back cover. 

In fact, the back covers of this book and Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon (1974) look very similar. Both employ yellow text on purple. Using one of the three primary colours (blue, red or yellow) in juxtaposition with a colour mixed from the other two is a well-known technique, the clash of so-called “complimentary” colours meant to be striking and bright.

The difference between these two back covers is revealing about the way the range had changed in its first two years. Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon boasts a single paragraph in yellow teasing the plot of the book, the key characters and elements given capital letters. There’s then a quotation from a newspaper, underlining the universal appeal of Doctor Who — generally, not this particular story — to both children and adults. The slogan “A TARGET ADVENTURE”, places Doctor Who within a wider genre of exciting books (something John Grindrod first pointed out to me).

There’s no quotation or slogan on the back of Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, as though Doctor Who by now could stand on its own, with no need of introduction. The yellow-coloured text teasing the plot comprises fewer words than the earlier book (87 words compared to 97) but the point size is much bigger and the text presented in three paragraphs — the words less densely packed and so more digestible.

The novelisation is similarly digestible, six 25-minute episode condensed into just 128 pages, whereas Terrance’s previous novelisation needed 144. Last week, in response to my last post, Paul MC Smith from Wonderful Books produced this helpful graph of wordcounts:

Relative word counts of Doctor Who novelisations
Graph by Paul MC Smith

To keep Doctor Who and the Web of Fear breezily concise, Terrance cut anything inessential to the plot, including visually arresting moments from the TV serial that don’t really suit prose. For example, the opening scene of Episode 1 picks up from the end of the previous serial, with the doors of the TARDIS wide open while the ship is still in flight, the Doctor and his friends at risk of tumbling out. Likewise, episode 4 of the TV version features a thrilling battle between Lethbridge-Stewart’s soldiers and the Yeti in the streets of Covent Garden. Both are missing from the book.

Otherwise, it’s a pretty faithful record of the story seen on screen, with some deft amendments. For example, the unfortunate stereotype of rich, greedy Julius Silverstein in the TV version is here a “tall, elegant white-hair old man”, Emil Julius, much more childish than grasping.

Terrance also picks up on the attempt by Captain Knight to chat up Anne Travers in episode 1, where she cuts him dead.

KNIGHT: 

What’s a girl like you doing in a job like this? 

ANNE TRAVERS: 

Well, when I was a little girl I thought I’d like to be a scientist. So I became a scientist. 

To this, Terrance adds that Knight, “welcomed any opportunity to work with Anne Travers” (p. 28), offering to help her with a task rather than send for a technician. It makes a bit more of their relationship, suggesting something more along the lines of that between Captain Turner and Isobel Watkins in The Invasion — where the characters end up together. Here, the relationship seems to be one way; when, later, Knight is killed by Yeti, there’s no suggestion that Anne spares him even a thought.

This is an example of an addition Terrance makes at the start of the story that doesn’t pay off at the end. Another is — as I said above — his telling us on p. 42 that Lethbridge-Stewart is someone we can trust when, on screen, he’s one of the characters we’re invited to suspect is one of the Great Intelligence’s suspects. Terrance sets up that guess-who-the-baddie-is early on; on p. 31 he reminds us of the Doctor’s previous encounter with the Yeti, and the Intelligence’s ability to take over and control unwitting human servants. As the story continues, on p. 70 he makes the guess-who plot explicit, the Doctor thinking through the six suspects by name: Anne Travers and her father, then Chorley, Lethbridge-Stewart, Knight and Arnold.

We know to discount Lethbridge-Stewart — we’re reminded, on p. 77, that this man and the Doctor are at the start of a long friendship. But in listing the suspects on p. 70, Terrance surely lays a false lead by not including a name: he leaves out Evans. This is just after he’s reminded us that Evans is cowardly and selfish, with Jamie appalled that the man refuses to do anything dangerous and would rather run away.

“Jamie shook his head. ‘I’m not running out on my friends.’

Evans stood up. “Well, I’m sorry to leave you, boyo, but you got to take care of number one in this world.’” (p. 66)

Again, Terrance is keen to avoid stereotypes, and later shares a thought from Lethbridge-Stewart — who we know we can trust — that “the Welsh usually made such splendid soldiers” (p. 99). Terrance also ensures that at the end of the story, Evans finds “unexpected resources of courage” (p. 91) and redeems his earlier shortcomings. The cowardly red-herring character ends the story as a hero.

The Doctor here is also a compassionate, considerate hero. He’s introduced vividly, 

“a small man with untidy black hair and a gentle humorous face. He wore baggy check trousers and a disreputable frock coat” (p. 13).

(ETA: Oliver Wake points out that this is the first time in print the Doctor is described as wearing a “frock coat”, though this particular Doctor doesn’t wear one — his black jacket is something else, the bottom front flaps pinned back to make it resemble the shape of a tail coat. Piers Britton in his book Design for Doctor Who says the Doctor first wears a frock coat in Pyramids of Mars, which became,

“a mainstay of [Tom] Baker’s wardrobe for much of his long incumbency, ensuring that it became a Doctor Who fixture. Frock coats were retroactively ascribed to the Hartnell and Troughton Doctors in much of the expanding Doctor Who literature of the 1970s” (Britton, p. 177).

A second frock coat was introduced in The Android Invasion and worn again by the Doctor in The Brain of Morbius. Perhaps Terrance attended recording and herd the coat described as such, and the term worked its way into this novelisation as if meaning any kind of Doctor-type long coat.)

We get a good sense of this considerate hero later, when he is “looting” an electronics shop in Goodge Street for the components he desperately needs to thwart the Intelligence and save everyone on Earth, 

“At the back of his mind he hoped that the Government would remember to pay compensation [to the shop owner]” (p. 93).

At the end of the story, he wins the battle but not the war against the Intelligence because his friends have, with the best of intentions, tried to help. On screen, he is cross with them. Here, his anger is quickly curtailed by “seeing the happy faces all round him” (p. 124) and he asks for their forgiveness. It’s characteristic Terrance; it’s rare on screen for the Doctor to apologise. As in previous novelisations, Terrance makes the Doctor a bit kinder and more heroic. He also underlines that this is the same man as other incarnations, here using the Third Doctor’s catchphrase “reverse the polarity”.

Then there are the other regular characters. “Towering over” the Doctor, Jamie — no surname — is introduced to us as, “a brawny youth in Highland dress, complete with kilt”, who has been travelling in the TARDIS “since the Doctor’s visit to Earth at the time of the Jacobite rebellion” (p. 13). That background shapes Jamie’s character here in ways it doesn’t in the TV version, such as when he first encounters soldiers.

“Although their coats were khaki rather than red, Jamie found it hard to forget that English soldiers were his traditional enemies” (p. 45)

I wonder if that was informed by the complex relationships between redcoats and Indians in Terrance’s Mounties trilogy. But this kind of complex relationship between characters, each of whom thinks they are right, is characteristic of Terrance. Here, he adds that while the Doctor and Jamie are “the best of friends … occasional disputes were inevitable” (p. 13). 

Victoria — no surname — is introduced as a “small, dark girl” (p. 14); as with Sarah in Terrance’s previous novelisations, the darkness refers to her hair, not her complexion. Again, we get a concise history of this character, an orphan from 19th century London. Sadly, this then doesn’t inform her actions in the story. Even so, Terrance adds a couple of interesting character moments for her not in the TV version, First, there’s her perspective on the young man in her life:

“Jamie had rushed off with his usual impulsiveness, forgetting all about her” (p. 48).

There’s no suggestion of romantic feelings or emotional connection between them, as was seen in the next TV story. Rather, Jamie doesn’t consider Victoria. Terrance does not add anything to pre-empt the events of that next TV story, such as suggesting that Victoria is in any way unhappy aboard the TARDIS. In fact, he adds something I think informed by his own interest at the time in meditation and positive thinking, when Victoria makes an effort to say something positive:

“Travers was still very confused and Victoria felt she had to keep his spirits up. Strangely enough this had the effect of making her feel better herself” (p. 105).

Then there’s Lethbridge-Stewart, introduced here as having an,

“immaculate uniform and a neatly trimmed moustache” … ‘And who might you be?’ he asked [the Doctor], sounding more amused than alarmed.” (p. 40)

“Amused” is such an apposite word to describe Nicholas Courtney’s manner of playing the character.  Terrance also refers to the man’s “relaxed confidence” (p. 63), which is again very apt. Nicely, we glimpse how Lethbridge-Stewart sees the Doctor, as a “funny little chap” (p. 75), and then get the contrary view with the Doctor recognising a soldier who knows no surrender (p. 76). Indeed, that’s an issue for Lethbridge Stewart, trained for action yet in a situation where he is unable to act (p. 90). In spelling this out, Terrance makes action the consequence of character.

We’re told Lethbridge’Stewart’s name is Alastair (p. 41), the name first used in print in The Making of Doctor Who (1972), cowritten by Terrance, and on screen in Planet of the Spiders (1974), script-edited by Terrance. Terrance still doesn’t use the middle name “Gordon”, for all it was used on screen in Robot (1974-5), which he wrote. As I’ve said before, that suggests “Gordon” was an ad lib by Tom Baker in rehearsals on that story, to improve the rhythm of the character’s name. But it also suggests that the various fans in contact with the publisher and with Terrance by the time he was writing the novelisation hadn’t pointed out the missing part of the name.

That interaction with fans had a big impact on Terrance’s approach to these novelisations. We’re on the cusp of that change here. Between writing this book in January 1976 and it being published in August, Terrance received a letter from fan Richard Landen listing continuity errors in The Making of Doctor Who, and was a guest at a DWAS meeting at Westfield College, University of London. Reading up on this interactions, I’m struck by Terrance’s patience in dealing with fans in their late teens and 20s expressing the view that books written for 8 to 12 year-olds are perhaps a bit childish… 

This tiresome fan could point out odd things in Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, the stuff I might pick up if I were editing this book. Just as the Doctor makes an unwitting cameo in one of the Mounties books because Terrance wrote the word with a capital D, Captain Knight refers here to “some kind of Doctor” and “the Doctor who was in the tunnels” (both p. 36) before he knows it’s the character’s name. In the same vein, why does Lethbridge Stewart need to tell his men that they’re looking for a “blue Police Box” (p. 89) — if they know what a police box is at all, they’d surely know it was blue.

I would be tempted to excuse such pendantry by saying it’s a living. But it doesn’t really pay.

(ETA: Steven Flanagan on BlueSky suggests that Lethbridge-Stewart being a Scot means he would be more familiar with red police boxes.)

Still, this journeyman writer is enthralled by how deftly Terrance adapts the TV story. The scripts were brilliantly, vividly conveyed by director Douglas Camfield. It’s a hard task to relay anything of the same atmosphere in prose, but Terrance is brilliantly vivid. Mostly, he tells us directly what’s happening so we can easily visualise each scene. He doesn’t embellish or overly complicate the action, but makes things more palpable through his choice of words. 

For example, there’s the Yeti dragging the unconscious old Travers, “as a child drags a teddy bear by one arm” (p. 81) — perfectly, simply, conveying the gait of toddling creature, the prey hanging limp in its grasp, the relative power of these two bodies. He adds bits of army slang to convey the culture and feel of these soldiers — “bodge” (p. 86), “spit and polish” (p. 111), and “daftie” (p. 119). And then there’s another example of his sophisticated vocabulary in a book aimed at children, which makes perfect sense in context, when the Doctor responds to “Jamie’s woebegone face” (p. 99).

At the end of the novelisation, Terrance sets up what’s to come in the lore of Doctor Who, with Lethbridge Stewart telling Travers that this adventure has shown the need for some kind of intelligence Taskforce.

“I think I’ll send the Government a memorandum…” (p. 125)

This archivist of all-things Doctor Who is delighted to think that UNIT began with a memo. (What was the subject line? To whom was it CC’d? What were the initials in the bottom left, a clue to the name of Lethbridge Stewart’s secretary?)

With his memo, we know — not least because Terrance told us in opening Chapter 5 — that everything is about to change in the world of Doctor Who. And yet the book closes on what are by now stock phrases in Terrance’s books, Doctor Who the same as it ever was and will be. With a “wheezing, ground sound”, the TARDIS fades from view.

“The Doctor and his two companions were ready to begin their next adventure” (p. 126)

*

These long posts on the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks take time and effort. and involve expenses. I don’t currently have enough other paid work to justify going on with them without your support.

Throw some coins in the hat and next week you get Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks. And then we’re onto Christmas 1976 and the triple whammy of The Making of Doctor Who (and the origins of “never cruel or cowardly”), Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars (about which Terrance discussed his working methods), and The Doctor Who Dinosaur Book (I’ve been talking to palaeontologists)…

Doctor Who The Revenge of the Cybermen, by Terrance Dicks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kellman killed

Harry sees K dead

Doc knocked out —

Harry sees Doc — goes to unstrap b[omb]

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

Doc survives — Harry idiot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is that all about?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The blurb lays out the stakes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

Writing Magazine #251

I've written a piece for the new issue of Writing Magazine, out now, on handling factual material. There are pointers on copyright, libel and building good relationships, but I also hoped to get across why working in non-fiction can be so creatively rewarding.

This issue includes tips for writing dialogue, "the latest romance trends in YA and romantasy and guidance on how to fight back against AI. Plus, explore cosy fantasy and creating your own literary gardens, and discover what self-awareness can add to your writing."

• Buy Writing Magazine #251 (November 2025)
• Writers' Guild of Great Britain free online guide to Working With Factual Material

Writers' Guild guide to working with factual material

The Writers' Guild of Great Britain has produced a new, free guide to working with factual material. 

I've been involved in helping put it together, in my role as chair of the guild's Books Committee. Earlier this week, I was quoted by trade paper the Bookseller in its coverage of the free guide. Later this week, on 27 August, I'll be hosting a free online event about it later this week (see below for details).

It's likely to be my last job as chair, as my three-year stint comes to an end next month at the guild's AGM. 

Full blurb for the guide and event details as follows:

The lives of real people and true stories have always provided inspiration for writers. But the practicalities of working with factual material – and the potential to upset an existing person (or their lawyer) – can leave writers feeling anxious.

Which is why WGGB has today (19 August 2025) launched a new free, online guide on working with factual material.

The guidelines cover how copyright law treats factual material and how writers can build relationships with their subjects. They also provide advice on how to avoid being accused of libel or defamation.

The guidelines have been produced by the WGGB Books Committee, but the advice and principles contained in them will also be useful for writers working in other craft areas such as film, TV, theatre or audio.

The guide includes answers to questions that the WGGB is regularly asked. For example:

• Do I need ‘life rights’ to write about a real, living person?
• What if I want to write about a real, deceased person?
• Do I need permission to include a reference to a brand or trademark in my work?
• Do I need a licence to quote an academic or journalistic article in my work?
• Do I need a licence to parody or pastiche something factual in my work?
• What if my sources are in the public domain?
• How do I protect my copyright when doing research/conducting interviews?
• Should my interview subjects sign an NDA?
• How do I work with historical consultants?
• What if my subject wants a cut of the profits from my project?
• I want to base a fictional character on a real person – can I do that?

When it comes to undertaking research and interviews, for example of subjects or specialists in the author’s chosen area, we have published an accompanying template ‘Right to release’ form (as a free download) which the writer can ask the interview subject to sign to confirm that they understand the purpose of the interview and which grants the writer the right to use their material.

Working with factual material guides writers through understanding the differences between libel and defamation, best practice to protect themselves against a legal case, and the implications of writer warranties and indemnities.

WGGB Books Chair Simon Guerrier said: “When it comes to working with factual material, there are clearly many areas in which writers want help and clarification — as WGGB has received numerous enquiries in the past few years.

“This clear, concise publication guides writers through what they need to know and includes some practical tips.

“I’m very grateful to everyone on the WGGB Books Committee and at the union for their hard work in putting these guidelines together.”

Working with factual material – come to our free event on 27 August

WGGB Books Chair Simon Guerrier will be offering some practical advice on this subject and discussing with guests (to be announced) the pitfalls of writing about real-life characters, events and issues, whether contemporary or historical.

Live captions will be available throughout. Please let us know when you register if you have any additional access needs.

5-6pm, 27 August

Online, via Zoom

Price: free

More information and bookings

Backlisted #244: The Ballad of Halo Jones

I'm the guest on the latest episode of books podcast Backlisted. Keen to choose a book that was a formative influence and by an author they'd not previously covered, I chose The Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore and Ian Gibson. Thanks to Dr Una McCormack, Andy Miller and Nicky Birch for inviting me. What fun.

• Backlisted #244: The Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore

In our natter, we mention other works by Alan Moore. You might like to read the big essay I wrote for my MA on V for Vendetta. 

The episode also mentions something that was announced on Saturday at the excellent Target Books Day: I am currently at work on a biography of Terrance Dicks, to be published by Ten Acre Films (who published by previous biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television). More of all that anon.

Things Are Not Always What They Seem, by Michael Herbert

“This individual is a poseur and a professed agnostic with an exaggerated idea of his own importance.”

Special Branch report on Mac Hulke, 1 March 1948, cited p. 35.

The subtitle of this book is, “The writing and politics of Malcolm Hulke”, an author probably best known for his work on The Avengers and Doctor Who. Hulke knew and worked with David Whitaker, and when I was researching my biography of Whitaker, I swapped notes with Michael Herbert as he was working on this, which he’s been kind enough to acknowledge in the end notes. 

The first, 66-page chapter gives an overview of Hulke’s life, which is often extraordinary. He was apparently born on 21 November 1924, a year and 10 months after the death of his supposed father, Colonel Walter Backhouse Hulke — though there’s no record of Malcolm Hulke’s birth beyond what his mother told him. Indeed, when he applied for citizenship in 1948, “the most exhaustive enquiry and search” by Special Branch could find no record of him at all and succeeded only in casting doubt on the details he provided. It also noted his late mother’s two convictions for larceny (see p. 37).

The latter case, in 1926, involved Elsie Hulke distracting a shop assistant at a draper’s in Deal while her partner, Winifred Boot, hid “two cardigans down her [own] skirt” (p. 16). Herbert tells us that “Elsie teamed up with Winifred”, and that they lived together from 1929 until Elsie’s death in 1943, but doesn’t speculate further on their relationship. Yet Hulke’s former neighbour, Lauraine Palmeri, recalls that Hulke was,

“brought up by a much-detested Aunt whom he called ‘Miss Boot’. When he had to turn out her house after she died, he was still full of bitterness [and] at one time he was having sessions with a psychiatrist … learning to heal and rewrite his childhood to replace some of what had happened with happier memories” (pp. 45-46).

Even so, right up until Miss Boot’s death in 1967, Hulke lived round the corner from her and managed the house she rented out — which is how Hulke met and ending up working with my current subject of research, Terrance Dicks: a tenant from 1962. Years later, Miss Boot continued to cast some shadow over Hulke and his romantic relationships, such as when he mentioned the hypothetical prospect of marriage in a letter to a friend:

“Maybe I could at last do it. Bootie’s been dead a long, long time now and my super-conscience is fading a little.” (Letter to Jean Tate, 29 October 1974, p. 49)

What hold did she have over him?

After this overview, there are then chapters on specific periods of Hulke’s career: his relatively brief membership of the Communist Party; his time with the left-leaning Unity Theatre in an administrative role; his relatively late start as a writer in the 1950s, in TV, film and the stage; his nine episodes of The Avengers (four co-written with Terrance Dicks); his work on Doctor Who 1963-1969; his other work in TV 1964-75; Doctor Who 1970-74; his spat with the TUC 1967-70; and the books and short stories he wrote. An appendix gives details of his radio plays. Much of these later chapters comprise synopses of TV episodes, with quotations from dialogue and screengrabs. 

Bits of this stuff I knew; I detail the spat with the TUC in my biography of David Whitaker, based on the same sources, though I see it quite differently from what’s described here. To me, it seems extraordinary that Hulke fought for and won full payment for a script he never even wrote, based on a first-draft outline co-written with Gerry Davis that did not meet the original brief, as Whitaker later said candidly to Hulke, having been with him in that initial meeting. Hulke was certainly tenacious in the matter but I suspect won himself few friends.

The real treasure here is the information and direct quotations from 40 letters Hulke wrote to his friend Jean Tate between August 1974 and January 1977, providing insights into his thoughts, feelings, health and work. He makes light of his heart attack in January 1975; he’s furious that the editor of the book Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion has seen fit to, er, edit it.

There are lots of other fascinatingly odd things. For example, Herbert says Hulke’s first Crossroads novel — based on the creaky but popular tea-time soap opera — features some “surprisingly explicit” sex (p. 420), while the second novel involves Meg being involved in a plane crash, ending up in a Victorian mansion that is “cut off from the rest of the world” and then taking a teenage boy from there back to the motel, “to integrate him into the modern world”. Herbert says this seems to have been lifted from James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, which Hulke had already adapted for BBC radio in 1966.

I’m especially delighted by Hulke’s novel Roger Moore and the Crime Fighters — The Siege (1977), which features a dog called Dalek and a would-be assassin pretending to be an extra on Doctor Who until his deception is spotted by Roger Moore, “who informs the police” and so foils the plot. I wonder how that conversation went.

“Look, chief inspector, I’m telling you this man wasn’t Pat Gorman, Max Faulkner or Terry Walsh. There’s only one explanation: an attempt to kill the President of Walinga.”

I’m glad I wasn’t Hulke’s editor.