Terrance Dicks (1935–2019)

This wasn't the first fourth Doctor novel; that would be Doctor Who and the Giant Robot (1975), but that one hasn't got a modern reprinting. It is, however, the second, and I think that comes through in that the personality, the force of Tom Baker does not come through on the page. In fact, I usually found it easier to imagine Jon Pertwee delivering the lines!

I assume that on screen, Tom put his own spin on it all, but Terror of the Zygons is a story I have only seen once, probably a little less than twenty years ago, so I was very much dependent on the novel itself to conjure imagery and sensation. I don't think Dicks does a bad job of this, especially at the beginning; I like the sequences of Broton observing our protagonists from a distance as they scramble across the moors. But I also don't think he does a great job of it, either. The Zygons are one of Doctor Who's great visual creations, and their spaceship interior an interesting one (I think, but if not, it's the kind of thing that in prose could be), but there's not a lot of atmosphere here in these parts of the story.

What's interesting to me is that while many of those early first Doctor novelisations were clearly novels, this is clearly a novelisation; there's a lot of cross-cutting between different locations in the same scene (usually Dicks puts one location's prose in parentheses), which is much more of a tv move, and the kind of thing you might expect a prose version to move away from. But Dicks very much embraces the fact that this originally went out on screen. I think this probably makes it less interesting to the adult modern reader, but I imagine it probably works well with kids; this is one I can imagine to handing over to my six-year-old reader of chapter books who is (we might say) "Doctor Who curious," which isn't so true of, for example, The Daleks (1964) or The Crusaders (1966)! I might be the _target audience of the 2012 BBC Books reprint I own, but I wasn't the _target audience of the original.

My reprint, by the way, has an introduction by Michael Moorcock; it's fun enough, but I see little in it that indicates he has much appreciation for or has actually even read the book in question! He clearly likes the tv serial, though.… (more)

This is a novelisation of the first Doctor Who TV story to feature multiple doctors, to commemorate the 10th anniversary season of the TV show in 1973. First Doctor William Hartnell was too unwell to make a full appearance, only taking part by offering advice from the TARDIS scanner screen. This novel doesn't expand greatly on the TV show, but adds extra colour to some of the characters' back stories and also adds more detail to Omega's world and the battles with the Gel Guards, which look and sound fairly risible on screen. The unique feeling of hopelessness the doctors feel when initially trying to work out how to defeat Omega was brought across well.… (more)

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/warmonger-by-terrance-dicks/

This is a really surprising Doctor Who novel from Terrance Dicks, a writer who one doesn’t normally associate with the word “surprising”. It’s a prequel to The Brain of Morbius, but set later in the Doctor’s timeline – Peri is injured one a random planet that they happen to be visiting, so the Fifth Doctor takes her to Mehendri Solon earlier in his career to get fixed up. The two get separated, of course, and the Doctor finds himself the military commander of a grand alliance of improbable partners against Morbius, while Peri leads guerilla resistance planetside. There is a lot about war and military strategy and tactics, and one feels Dicks perhaps working through themes that he was never quite able to explore in his other work – though of course he was the co-author of The War Games. This is a very different Fifth Doctor and Peri to those we are used to, and diehard fans may want to read it as an alternate timeline. But I must say I enjoyed it.

I was sufficiently intrigued by all of this to check out Dicks’ own military career. According to his obituaries, he studied English at Downing College, Cambridge and then did two years of National Service with the Royal Fusiliers. He was born in 1935, and National Service was abolished from 1957 to 1960, so he must have been in one of the last cohorts to do it, probably in 1956-58.

Two years in the forces don’t make you an expert on military history, but 1956-58 saw the Suez crisis, the intensification of the EOKA campaign in Cyprus, the climax of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the IRA’s underwhelming border campaign, and the independence of Ghana and Malaysia. From the law of averages, Dicks must have been involved with at least one of these, even if only peripherally, and I guess it gave him some thoughts that he worked out 45 year later in this book.… (more)