Five more Who books, of which three are decidedly skippable and two rather good.

( Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons )
( Doctor Who - the Mind of Evil )
( Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos )
( Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon )
( Doctor Who and the Dæmons )

So, on to the Third Doctor books, starting with three Dicks efforts of varying quality, and a good one by Malcolm Hulke; all covering stories first broadcast in 1970.

( 6) Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, by Terrance Dicks )
( 7) Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, by Malcolm Hulke )
( 8) Doctor Who - the Ambassadors of Death, by Terrance Dicks )
( 9) Doctor Who - Inferno, by Terrance Dicks )

( Northern Ireland and Doctor Who )

I've headlined this post by referring to Liz Shaw, but in fact she doesn't come across particularly well on the printed page and, given my childhood memories of the first two of these books, I was surprised by how much I liked Caroline John in the TV role when I watched. I am beginning to spot a pattern where the brainy companions (Zoe and Liz) don't transfer well to the novelisations, whereas the screamy ones (Victoria, Polly and I expect Jo) actually come over rather better.

I'd already read probably the best Jamie / Zoe novel, Doctor Who - The Invasion, by Ian Marter, and also the worst, Doctor Who and the Dominators, also oddly enough by Ian Marter. Four of the other six are fairly standard efforts by Terrance Dicks, but the other two present points of interest.

( 35) Doctor Who - The Wheel in Space, by Terrance Dicks )
( 36) Doctor Who - The Mind Robber, by Peter Ling )
( 37) Doctor Who and the Krotons, by Terrance Dicks )
( 38) Doctor Who - The Seeds of Death, by Terrance Dicks )
( 39) Doctor Who - The Space Pirates, by Terrance Dicks )
( 40) Doctor Who and the War Games, by Malcolm Hulke )

So, that's it for the Second Doctor novelisations. I finished up my read-through of the First Doctor novels by regretting that almost nobody manages to capture Hartnell's performance on the printed page. Troughton (who perhaps put less of his own personality into the part than any other Doctor before Davison) is easier to pin down, the visual aspects of his performance more easily described. Of the other regulars, I felt that Victoria gains most, and Zoe loses most, on the printed page. Perhaps it is easier to inject some gravitas into the rather two-dimensional Victoria than to convey how stunningly cute Wendy Padbury is as Zoe.

The best of the Second Doctor novelisations are John Peel's Doctor Who - The Power of the Daleks, Terrance Dicks' Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, Peter Ling's Doctor Who - The Mind Robber and Ian Marter's Doctor Who - The Invasion, with honourable mentions to Doctor Who - The Evil of the Daleks, the other three early Season 5 books, and Doctor Who and the War Games. None is quite as good as the best of the First Doctor novelisations, though.

Since I am reading these on my commute and am taking a long weekend chez scattyme in France, it'll be a while before I do the next lot.

These five Who books are all from 1967-68 stories, but from different ends of the chronology of publication. The first of these was in fact the very last of the official novelisations produced by Target/Virgin, in 1993; the other four were among the first five Second Doctor books, published between 1974 and 1978 by Target. Having been underwhelmed by my last clutch of Who books reviewed, I'm happy to report that all of these are good stuff.

( 27) Doctor Who - The Evil of the Daleks, by John Peel )
( 28) Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen, by Gerry Davis )
( 29) Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen, by Terrance Dicks )
( 30) Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors, by Brian Hayles )
( 31) Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, by Terrance Dicks )

So that's it for the Jamie/Victoria combination. While Victoria, apart from in Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen, is the screamiest girl companion since Susan, the affectionate interactions between the Tardis crew are almost (but not quite) as entertaining on the page as on the screen.

All five of these books are medium good, and four of them are important as the perspective through which fans of my age first encountered the Second Doctor. The best of them is certainly Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, which wraps up one line of continuity (the Yeti and Travers) while setting up another (the Brigadier and UNIT). But all are worth adding to the serious Who fan's library. (The same can't be said for the other two novels of this run, alas.)

Five novelisations of Second Doctor stories, all originally broadcast in 1967. None of them specially good, and a couple which are pretty dire, but all very quick reading for my commute.

( 22) Doctor Who - The Highlanders, by Gerry Davis )
( 23) Doctor Who - The Underwater Menace, by Nigel Robinson )
( 24) Doctor Who and the Cybermen, by Gerry Davis )
( 25) Doctor Who - The Macra Terror, by Ian Stuart Black )
( 26) Doctor Who - The Faceless Ones, by Terrance Dicks )

In summary, your life will not be incomplete for lack of having read any of these! These are the five books featuring Ben, Polly and Jamie in the regular cast; it is remarkable how much more interesting Polly is as a character than the other two. Shame she didn't stay longer.

And so I reach the end of the first phase of this insane project, the last two novelisations featuring William Hartnell's incarnation of the Doctor.

( 17) Doctor Who - The Smugglers, by Terrance Dicks )
( 18) Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet, by Gerry Davis )

So, that's it for the First Doctor novelisations. The best ones are David Whitaker's original Doctor Who and the Daleks, Ian Marter's Doctor Who - The Rescue and Donald Cotton's Doctor Who - The Romans, with honorable mentions to the other four by those three authors, John Lucarotti's Doctor Who - Marco Polo and the three Dalek novelisations by John Peel. None of them is quite the real thing though: Hartnell's performance was so strongly visual that it is impossible to catch on the printed page. The only way to really get a flavour of early Who is to watch it.

On to the Troughton era now...

41) Doctor Who - Planet of Giants, by Terrance Dicks
42) Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, by Terrance Dicks

Two quite different Terrance Dicks novelisations here. Doctor Who - Planet of Giants was literally the last First Doctor story to see print, in 1990; Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth was from much earlier in the sequence of publication, in 1977. In fact they are respectively the last and the first Dicks novelisations of Hartnell stories.

I’m slightly surprised to report that Doctor Who - Planet of Giants is the better novel, perhaps because it had only three episodes on TV rather than six and therefore Dicks has had to pad rather than summarise; and his own powers of invention, once brought to bear, are helpful. We do miss out on the broadcast story’s key selling point, the visual special effects of the Doctor and company miniaturised to an inch in height, but the plot as a whole does hang together, though fans of Barbara will (as usual) complain that Dicks doesn’t do her character much justice. And once again, as with Doctor Who and an Unearthly Child, Dicks finishes by telling us that the Daleks are out there waiting to start the next adventure which is a bit tedious second time round..

Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth leans a bit on the Peter Cushing film as well as on the originally broadcast story. Its most remarkable innovation, and improvement on the screen version, is the Daleks’ pet monster, the Slyther, which is much more terrifying on the page. But unfortunately a lot of the good bits of the TV story – the desperate chase across a deserted London in episode 3, and even the Doctor’s farewell to Susan at the end – are truncated and lose their effect. It’s still a good story but this comes across rather in spite of than because of Dicks’ efforts.

I’ve already read Doctor Who - The Rescue – probably Ian Marter’s best book – so will head for Doctor Who - The Romans by way of Venusian Lullaby.

22) Doctor Who and An Unearthly Child, by Terrance Dicks

Why yes, I am planning to (re-)read all the Doctor Who novelisations. They are mostly such a quick read that they just about fill a leg of my daily commute.

This is the novel version of the very first Doctor Who story, as broadcast in 1963. But the novel was not published until shortly before the story was shown again as part of the 1981 repeat season of the Five Faces of Doctor Who, so it ties much more into the continuity of the publication of dozens of Target novelisations of Who stories by the early 80s than into the TV programme's internal chronology starting on 23 November 1963. In fact, we already had a hard-copy version of the origins of Who in the form of David Whitaker's Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure With the Daleks, so Dicks was in the peculiar position of writing the story over again, of making the weirdness and newness of the 1963 story both accessible and intriguing to the 1981 fan.

Anyway, he largely succeeds. We have a bit more background to fill out both the first quarter of the book, set in a contemporary London school, and the rest, set in a stone age environment; indeed, Dicks fills out both settings perfectly satisfactorily. If you are looking for a good entry point to the Doctor Who novelisations, this is entirely characteristic and appropriate. (Fans of Barbara will rightly assert that their heroine comes over rather girly, but this is a common Terrance Dicks problem with assertive female characters.)

Of course, the story's main importance is as a gateway for things to come, and Dicks does really well in his last couple of paragraphs, when the travellers have once again landed on an unfamiliar planet:

The Doctor was about to meet the creatures who were destined to become his greatest enemies.

Out there on Skaro, the Daleks were waiting for him.

That, if nothing else, would make you want to read the next books in the sequence.

4) Doctor Who and the Face of Evil, by Terrance Dicks
5) Doctor Who and the Robots of Death, by Terrance Dicks
6) Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang, by Terrance Dicks
7) Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock, by Terrance Dicks
8) Doctor Who and the Invisible Enemy, by Terrance Dicks
9) Doctor Who and the Image of the Fendahl, by Terrance Dicks
10) Doctor Who and the Sunmakers, by Terrance Dicks
11) Doctor Who and the Underworld, by Terrance Dicks
12) Doctor Who and the Invasion of Time, by Terrance Dicks

Feeding my newly reacquired Leela fixation, I zoomed through the novelisations of all nine of the TV stories in which she features over the last few days. ( What I thought )

So, in summary, none of these very special apart from Doctor Who and the Sunmakers which is rather good.

'I saw amazing things, out there in space. But there's strangeness to be found wherever you turn. Life on Earth can be an adventure too.

You just have to know where to look.'
4) Invasion of the Bane, by Terrance Dicks
5) Revenge of the Slitheen, by Rupert Laight
6) Eye of the Gorgon, by Phil Ford
7) Warriors of Kudlak, by Gary Russell

These are four short, cheerful books, full of positivity, sticking pretty closely to the first four broadcast Sarah Jane Adventures. It's interesting that the BBC have chosen to go back to the old approach of novelisation of the broadcast stories for Sarah Jane, while instead publishing original fiction featuring the Ninth and Tenth Doctors and Torchwood. I sense a didactic purpose, getting kids into the reading habit with these attractively covered volumes, each of them 119 pages of text in fairly large print (at a cost of £4.99 each, which, alas, is standard these days). I don't think it took me as long as an hour to read any of them.

( Invasion of the Bane )
( Revenge of the Slitheen )
( Eye of the Gorgon )
( Warriors of Kudlak )

Anyway, I'd recommend all of these for the younger Who fan, who might then be persuaded to lend them to older Who fans.

Sorry for much Who posting today, but this one brings me up to date with three stories from the Tom Baker era, indeed from two different parts of Graham Williams' term as producer: his first two stories from 1977, and his second last from 1980.

( Horror of Fang Rock )

( reflections on Leela )

( The Invisible Enemy )

( Nightmare of Eden )

So, one and three quarter excellent stories, the rest not so good.

9) Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, by Terrance Dicks

Much of my Doctor Who reading this month has been a displacement activity from Proust (but more on that in my next post). This is one of the good Terrance Dicks novelisations, of the 1975 TV story Terror of the Zygons, the second Season 12 Fourth Doctor story to be written up (after Doctor Who and the Giant Robot), and one of the good early Dicks efforts: decent efforts at background characterisation given for Sarah, Harry and the Brigadier, and much entertaining back-chat between the Doctor and both his allies and his enemies. Obviously I got it as an exercise in nostalgia after reading Sting of the Zygons, at a cost of UK£3.95; worth every penny, I tell you.

19) Doctor Who – the Caves of Androzani, by Terrance Dicks
20) Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, by Terrance Dicks
21) Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, by Terrance Dicks
22) Doctor Who and the Leisure Hive, by David Fisher

Four Target novelisations of Doctor Who stories from the original series here. The first two are average Terrance Dicks treatments of two of Robert Holmes’ best scripts, The Deadly Assassin being regarded by many as the Fourth Doctor’s greatest story, and The Caves of Androzani regarded by almost everyone as the Fifth Doctor’s best moment.

But with Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, Dicks has taken a Third Doctor TV story which by all accounts (I haven’t seen it) was decidedly average and turned it into a cracking good read. It was one of the first of his many many Doctor Who books (and he’s still at it), and for those of us (like me) who occasionally mock the by-the-numbers approach of his later efforts, it’s very much worth re-reading the earlier ones to remind ourselves of how good he was at turning dodgy special effects and occasionally wooden acting into a novel that caught the spirit of what he, as script editor, had no doubt hoped and intended the original TV version to be. (Like The Caves of Androzani, Planet of the Spiders has the Doctor regenerating after an adventure climbing around in caves. But I think that’s a coincidence.)

David Fisher wrote two Doctor Who novels based on his own scripts for the Fourth Doctor stories Creature from the Pit and The Leisure Hive. (He also wrote the original scripts for two Fourth Doctor Key to Time stories, The Stones of Blood and the Androids of Tara, but the novelisations of those were done by – of course – Terrance Dicks.) I remember really enjoying his Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit when it first came out, and Doctor Who and the Leisure Hive is, for the same reasons, also a hilarious read – Fisher has a Douglas Adams-like ability to build in circumstantial detail and hilarious commentary to make you feel that this is a real, zany universe in which the Doctor and Romana are dealing with complex alien societies as well as future technology. I saw the series when it was first broadcast, but missed the last episode for some reason – I see it’s now on DVD, and after reading this I am very much inclined to add that to my collection too.

5) The Making of Doctor Who, by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks

Way way back in the mists of childhood, wwhyte and I got hold of the second edition of this book, which was tremendously informative about Doctor Who up to, I think, The Hand of Fear, but was particularly important for me as it was the first book I had read which was about sf; it was possible, I realised, to think and write more deeply about sf as well as just reading it.

This is the first edition, which states on the first page, "Doctor Who has now been running over eight years, which makes it one of the most successful shows on British television." I think I got it at WorldCon. It is very much aimed at a younger audience; quite a long chapter, for instance, on how a television programme is actually made, what the director does, etc. ( sample )

One section which was completely changed in the second edition was the re-telling of the Doctor's televised adventures as a continuous narrative, presented as memoranda from the files of the Time Lords and of UNIT. (The second edition simply presented each story separately in a list, as all serious Doctor Who reference books have done since.) This section is preceded by the indictment and initial defence for the Doctor at the end of The War Games, revealing also the Doctor's "real name".

( click here to discover the Doctor's real name )

Anyway, certainly superseded in usefulness by pretty much every work of reference on Doctor Who published since, but very nice to have.

I have slipped behind in noting these, partly due to my long trip ending after 24 hours rather than six days last week. So this will be a fairly short set of reviews.

( Five Sarah Jane Smith Plays... )

( ...five with Five, Six and Seven... )

( ...and three of Eight. )

Anyway, looking forward to the next ones now; though I may take a break from the sequence for some more spinoff plays first.

20) Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters, by Terrance Dicks

A good Robert Holmes script, turned into an average Terrance Dicks novel. I remember seeing this one in 1981 during the "Five Faces of Doctor Who" repeat season; wonder how well it would stand up to re-watching now?

14) [Doctor Who:] Made of Steel, by Terrance Dicks

Yes, Terrance Dicks is still out there, still writing Doctor Who novels; this is in the BBC's £1.99 "quick reads" series, picked up in Forbidden Planet last week. The Doctor and Martha get mixed up with a remnant cell of Cybermen (incidentally answering the question my wife asked me after we watched "Doomsday") and also deal with thick and uncomprehending military types. Dicks makes a valiant effort to catch the Tenth Doctor's character, and on the whole succeeds, with only a few passages which I thought too reminiscent of the Third Doctor of Dicks' novelisations. A decent quick read.

1) The Eight Doctors, by Terrance Dicks (.co.uk, .com)

This was the first of the BBC's series of Eighth Doctor books (the book-of-the-TV-film apparently being in a different category). I had read one of these before and was not madly impressed. Here, however, we are on comfortable ground; Terrance Dicks' record of writing more Doctor Who novels and novelisations than anyone else is unlikely to be surpassed any time soon.

Though it really ought to be called Doctor Who and the Heroic RetCons. Dicks uses the opportunity of creating a new fictional environment for the Eighth Doctor to try and iron out some of the grosser continuity problems left by both the Eighth Doctor TV film, and the Trial of a Time Lord (and also a wee bit of clearing up from The Five Doctors, which I think I must try and watch again soon). Sensibly, rather than pull all eight Doctors together (he had after all written The Five Doctors and was script editor for the programme at the time of The Three Doctors) he has the Eighth Doctor dropping in on his predecessors at various points of the programme's established timeline.

The most effective piece of writing in the book is a description of the Third Doctor chasing the Master across southern England after his escape from prison in The Sea Devils. The least convincing bit is actually the characterisation of the Eighth Doctor himself. Lance Parkin got this rather better in his Dying Days, the last of the Virgin New Adventures, the last before Peter Darvill-Evans and Rebecca Levene cruelly had the franchise removed from them; in Terrance Dicks's hands, he comes across as rather like the Third Doctor, but a little less arrogant. On a tangent, I was interested that Dicks chose to place the Fourth Doctor encounter with the Eighth in the world of his vampire story, State of Decay, and its novel sequel.

Anyway, the fun bits outnumber the embarrassing bits, just about. Certainly worth reading for a sense of where the BBC thought the Eight Doctor might lead them, and also for the heroic retconning. I still feel no desire whatever to catch up with the Trial of a Time Lord season.

6) [Doctor Who] Timewyrm: Exodus, by Terrance Dicks

Gosh, Terrance Dicks can actually come close to writing tolerably well. Here we have the Seventh Doctor and Ace pursuing the Timewyrm (last seen in ancient Babylon) to Nazi Germany - or rather, first to a 1951 Festival of Britain celebrated after a German victory; then following Adolf Hitler from the Munich putsch to 1940. It would be easy to do this very crassly, but Dicks manages to stay (for my money) the right side of the line. Still a slight feeling that he wished he was writing a TV series rather than a novel, but satisfying enough. Also brought back a villain from one of the series I have not yet seen...

14) [Doctor Who] Blood Harvest, by Terrance Dicks

A sequel to State of Decay, published in 1994, featuring the Seventh Doctor, Ace, Bernice Summerfield, a guest appearance from Romana, a Dashiell Hammett private eye, more vampires, and conspiring Time Lords back on Gallifrey (reference is also made to The Five Doctors). Very interesting to see what Terrance Dicks could do once liberated from the novelisation format. Here we have the Doctor and Ace running a speakeasy in Al Capone's Chicago, while Bernice and Romana return to the planet of State of Decay (now mysteriously easier to get to - it is only towards the end of the book that someone remembers that it is in E-Space - and with a much larger population) to check on the return of vampirism there. Bernice's attempts to bring British parliamentary democracy to the peasants and aristos may not bear immediate fruit. It all hangs together remarkably well, though, with only a few lapses of prose that reminded me, ah yes, this is by Terrance Dicks. (The private eye character gets a few first-person sections of narrative, though otherwise we are in standard omniscient narrator territory.) Good fun.

12) Doctor Who and the State of Decay, by Terrance Dicks

This is Dicks' novelisation of his own script for the 1980 Fourth Doctor story featuring Romana, K9, Adric (who stowed away on the Tardis at the end of the previous story) and vampires. Suffers from the usual problems of the novelisations - too much reliance on dialogue in particular, and Dicks' rather flat prose. Still I remembered a couple of vivid moments from the series - the high-tech destruction of the Great Vampire by the Doctor, and also the rather clumsily written moment where Adric attempts to assure Romana that he's on her side - weakened the dramatic impact drastically as I remember, though perhaps that was the fault of Matthew Waterhouse's acting. I had forgotten that the Doctor found the key piece of information on magnetic data disks left by Rassilon in every Tardis just in case. Good nostalgia, though I really read it as preparation for the two sequels.