Reviews

I don’t say this lightly, but this might just be the best way to experience Doctor Who’s very first Dalek story. Written in the first person from Ian’s point of view, Doctor Who and the Daleks takes everything exciting from the TV version of the story and just improves upon it in almost every conceivable way. It’s the story you know, but with an added layer that turns it into something entirely new.

If you’ve seen “The Daleks”, then you know the basic story. The TARDIS turns up on the planet Skaro, where the Doctor, Susan, Barbara, and Ian encounter the deadly Daleks and the mysterious Thals. Soon, they’re drawn into the middle of a centuries-long war, desperate to find a way to defeat the Daleks and leave this planet before the Daleks blow it to smithereens. A familiar story, and one that’s recreated fairly faithfully. But this isn’t a perfect, line-by-line adaptation. No, Whittaker adds a few twists to the story, spicing things up.

For starters, the first few chapters offer an alternate origin for how Ian and Barbara join the Doctor and Susan in the TARDIS. This new origin hits many of the same beats as the original, but it’s been tweaked just a bit. And that’s very much the case for the book as a whole. It’s the story you’re familiar with, the story you’ve loved for all these years. But it’s just a little bit different in ways only a really good book can be. And that’s what makes it so exciting.

Here, the story’s not restrained by the constraints of a 1960s BBC budget. The Daleks and their world can be as alien, as frightening as you want them to be. The Thals can be this very sci-fi group of perfectly manicured people. The action can be larger than life, the sets can be as huge and intricate as you want them to be. The story can be paced perfectly, without needing to pad out its runtime to fill a certain number of episodes with a certain amount of allotted screen time. Everything about Whittaker’s adaptation just works, elevating the story off the page and into the depths of your imagination.

This elevation is helped brilliantly by Robert Hack’s very retro illustrations. Hack doesn’t try to recreate the episode’s imagery, nor does he try to recreate the Peter Cushing film’s take on the story. Instead, he offers an alternate view of what “The Daleks” might’ve looked like had it been able to reach the heights the script clearly aimed for. And his illustrations are the best reason to get the specific edition of the book as they really do add a lot to the experience. Awash I’m very retro colors, lots of oranges and blues and quintessentially 1960s sci-fi imagery. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, for sure. And I definitely think the book could’ve used a bit more illustrations than it had, especially smaller ones to help break up the larger sections of text without illustrations. But as a whole, Hack’s illustrations elevate Whittaker’s prose into something truly special.

At the end of the day, if you’ve never read a Target Doctor Who novelization, this illustrated edition of Doctor Who and the Daleks is the perfect place to start. Offering a new take on a familiar story, the writing itself is a joy to read. Quick-paced, action-packed, yet still full of lovely character moments. And the illustrations just add an extra level of enjoyment to the whole affair. In this, the year of Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary, what better thing to give a Doctor Who fan than this glorious illustrated edition of the show’s very first novelization?

scarletsky's review against another edition

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adventurous medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

serialreader's review

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adventurous lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

alysmw's review against another edition

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4.0

Very enjoyable and easy to read. I didn't like how different it was from the original episode. Why change it?

kmt75's review

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adventurous medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

phileasfogg's review against another edition

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4.0

Capsule review, in case you don't want to read the thousands of words I have to say about this book and a lot of other things

The first Doctor Who novelisation (adapting the second TV story) is a first-person narrative in the voice of Ian, one of the Doctor's original companions. A number of changes have been made between screen and page, most notably in the way the main characters meet. Thus, depending on the kind of Doctor Who fan you are, this is either a fascinating alternate version, or an annoyingly inaccurate one. I like having lots of versions.

The story is a little slow for the modern fan, because it's the story that did it all first, before Doctor Who developed a kind of narrative shorthand that would allow it to flit through these scenes in minutes rather than hours. Its strength is the reality with which it imbues minor characters who didn't quite come alive on screen, and their relationships with the main cast, thanks in no small part to the acting skills of the narrator of the audiobook I'm reviewing.

The audiobook is narrated by William Russell, the actor who played Ian on TV, and he does a great read. He's especially strong on creating distinctive voices for all the characters. The forty years that had passed since he played Ian on TV tell in his voice, but he's still very recognisably Ian Chesterton. And now he's played 'book Ian' as well as 'TV Ian', which is neat.

I sought this out to listen to because I liked the idea of William Russell reading the novelisation that's narrated by the character he played. It largely lived up to that promise, though you wonder if it might have been written more naturally, more conversationally, and less like a first-person novel, if the author knew the actor would some day perform it. You can sometimes almost imagine Ian is now an older man telling the story of his adventures, perhaps tweaking a few details to make a better story for his grandkids, pretending he was a scientist and Barbara was secretly in love with him. (Oh, ignore me, I'm just being a fan here, coming up with a theory to explain why the book is different to the TV show.)

The book concludes with a ten minute interview in which Russell reminisces about the book's author, the TV series' original script editor David Whitaker.

The Limitations of Audiobooks

The first thing I learned from this book was: you can't read an audiobook in bed. You only ever hear about ten minutes. You wake up to find the narrator has read four hours without you, and your app has given you a merit badge for being a 'night owl'. And you constantly find yourself wondering if the transition from one location to another was a scene change, or did you doze off for a while and miss something?

Also it's hard to skim it to find bits when you're writing a review. Fortunately I still have the paper copy I read in 1980.

Genesis of the Novelisations

After the international media event that was the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who on TV, it seems a shame no-one made much of a fuss about its 50th anniversary as a book series. Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (the original title--from now on I'll just call it ... the Daleks) was published on 12 November 1964.

There had been TV novelisations and original novels based on TV shows before, though not very many, and none seems to have made much of an impression. The earliest movie novelisation I know of off the top of my head is King Kong (1932), released in advance of the movie to promote it. Wikipedia tells me there were earlier ones, for silent films like London After Midnight, though it doesn't provide a definite first.

The novelisation is a neglected field of study.

Perhaps the nearest thing to an early success in something like a TV novelisation came with the Quatermass books by Nigel Kneale, which were actually the original teleplays themselves. A novelisation of mini-series A for Andromeda, co-written by scientist and writer Fred Hoyle, was published in 1962. An original novel based on The Avengers was released in 1963 and seems to have been thoroughly ignored by the world, and almost utterly forgotten, despite the increasing popularity of that series in later years. I'll be reading and perhaps reviewing it and some later Avengers novels later this year.

It's curious that novelisations and other tie-ins seem to be regarded as a particularly degraded form of literature, existing at best at the level of pulp fiction, whereas movieisations and TVisations of novels have never had any such stigma. It's common to believe that a mediocre book has been turned into a great film. But you don't often hear someone say they think a great novel has been created out of a mediocre movie or TV show. Perhaps this is because few people read novelisations of movies or TV shows without already knowing and liking the original, whereas we often see movies and TV shows based on books we haven't read. If we enjoy the show we might seek out the book, and then we might discover it isn't as good as the adaptation.

And perhaps also it's because a good director will movieise a book, but good novelists seldom write TV and movie tie-ins. (Though it has been known to happen.)

Doctor Who may actually be the number one exception to the idea that people don't read novelisations of shows they don't know. Back when TV shows trickled out of a box at rare intervals and then disappeared forever, as it seemed, the dozens of Doctor Who novelisations had a persistence that the TV show didn't, and there are many fans of a certain age who discovered the series through the books.

Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks

Despite being the first Doctor Who novelisation, this is the story of the second TV serial. A sensible choice. The very first episode of Doctor Who is great television, but the remaining three episodes of that first serial, involving power struggles among prehistoric humans, are not the stuff to launch a series with. (That first story was finally novelised in 1981.)

One of the things that makes ... the Daleks fascinating for the fan is that it takes the bold step of creating a new 'origin story' for the characters.

Ian is not a schoolteacher, and has never met Barbara and Susan. He's an unemployed research scientist who's wandered aimlessly from job to job. In a few sentences the book gives this alternate Ian more back-story and psychology than was ever hinted at in his 77 TV episodes.

Barbara is Susan's tutor. The circumstances by which Susan has come to have a tutor are not explored. In the TV series, Susan insists on going to school against the Doctor's wishes, and inadvertently draws teachers Ian and Barbara into the Doctor's life. Perhaps in the book version of reality the Doctor won her over, convinced her to stay away from the school by the compromise of hiring a tutor.

Susan is much the same character as on TV, which is to say there's not much to say about her.

The Doctor is the same dubious figure he was in the early episodes on television, but speaks more coherently. While the changes to Ian and Barbara would be ignored by later novelisations, the first Doctor was virtually always novelised as a man who could speak whole sensible sentences, with none of the 'fluffs', some intentional and some not, that characterised his screen persona. (I think one or two of the novelisations written in the '90s may be exceptions.)

This reboot of the series makes a lot of sense. Much of the first TV episode is about how weird Susan is, but by the time ... the Daleks was published, TV Susan had turned out not to be all that weird after all. Best not to remind viewers that part of the original premise of the series hadn't panned out.

After the characters have come together and the Doctor's ship, Tardis, has been explained, the rest of the story is about the Doctor's first encounter with the Daleks. It plays out similarly to the TV version, though exclusively using Ian's point of view necessitates some changes.

We lose the famous scene where a Dalek first appears, because that happened to Barbara alone. And it's essentially a visual moment, so there's little point in having Ian tell us about Barbara telling him all about it. Susan's solo adventure is related by her to her companions afterwards. Barbara's friendship with Ganatus barely gets a mention, though you can imagine Ian doesn't notice it or chooses not to mention it. Ganatus was the best written and acted Thal on screen, but he's only a name in the background in the book, because his best scenes were all with Barbara. Instead there's a bromance between Ian and Kristas, who didn't make nearly as much impression in the TV version as in the book.

Ian's confused relationship with Barbara suggests this version of Ian has a sort of emotional blindness; today we might say he's on the spectrum. Or is he just a man? On TV there was only the occasional suggestion he and Barbara had something going on.

The Doctor is almost a minor character and is absent from much of the story, which matches the TV version. In these earliest stories Ian and Barbara were the protagonists. (Deal with it, Clara haters.)

The dramatic heart of the story on TV is the moral dilemma raised by Ian trying to persuade the peace-loving Thals to fight the Daleks, so Ian and his friends can retrieve a TARDIS component from them and leave the planet. In the book, Ian and his friends know the Daleks plan to kill all the Thals, and have the means; on TV the audience knew this, but the characters only thought it might be possible. Hence the dilemma is not so strong: Ian is really persuading the Thals to fight for themselves. But how could the vital knowledge be communicated to the audience without Ian knowing it, when he's the narrator?

On TV the creature inside the Dalek is carefully hidden from the audience, with only a claw briefly visible. In the book it's described in loving detail. The Dalek creature is often seen in the 21st century Doctor Who series, and looks pretty much as David Whitaker described it. One of the great things about the novelisations is that the people making the show in the old days wrote the novelisations, and the people making the show now read them as kids, so occasionally details created in novelisations have made it into the 'real' show.

A weird quirk of the three earliest novelisations from 1964-1965, is that the TARDIS is Tardis. The authors knew this was wrong. The audience knew it was wrong. But the editor must have had a style guide which said ship names must be written like Tardis. When another publisher continued the series in the 70s, the TARDIS became the TARDIS again, though Tardis was retained in the reprints of the original three.

As a story on TV, and in the book too, ...the Daleks suffers from being the first of its kind. Situations that were new for the early audience of the show and books, are hopelessly hackneyed for an audience that has seen fifty years of similar stories. Our heroes being locked in a room is of course a very frequent event in the TV show, so much so that the Doctor eventually made a gadget that could open virtually any door. In The Daleks, the characters spend much of an episode trying to escape from a locked room.

There's a long quest narrative as the characters split into two groups to attack the Dalek city on two fronts, a sequence that I now realise owes a lot to The Lord of the Rings, complete with a cave entrance guarded by a lake full of monsters. In later years we'd skip the journey, or the story would provide some faster means of travel than walking, or it would put the characters where they need to be in the first place so they don't have to spend an hour of screen time getting there.

Consequently, this story feels very slow to our modern eyes. Our 21st century Doctors would have whizzed through this adventure in about twenty minutes. But they wouldn't have gotten to know any of the Thals.

On TV the Thals were a little weak. It didn't help that they all looked like they were on their way to a gay bar in 1978. There's apparently some wacky half-formed idea behind them all being beautiful blondes, a sort of Nazi role-reversal: on this world the Aryans are persecuted pacifists! It doesn't stand up to very close scrutiny. The book Thals look the same as their TV counterparts, but they and their outfits only have to be described once. The audiobook narrator has some fun with that bit.

The novelisation does a much better job than the TV version of making the Thals people. This is partly thanks to the writing, and partly because the audiobook narrator is a good enough actor that he can breathe some life into these minor characters.

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