As far as titles go, this book has one of the more straightforward ones around. Doctor Who, along with Sarah Jane Smith and UNIT, must battle a giant robot and save the Earth from destruction—all while the Doctor is settling into his fourth incarnation.

This is a novelization of the Fourth Doctor story “Robot”, and it is excellent. This is the one where the Doctor tries out the Viking costume (“You’re right, this might attract attention”) and includes a well-known line about the word “impregnable” — “It reminds me of the Titanic. As the Titanic said to the iceberg, ‘glub glub glub’!” These familiar bits from the show made me grin like an idiot while reading this on the bus, and the story as a whole made for an extremely pleasant day’s worth of bus reading. Recommended if you’re looking for a quick fix of Classic Who. ( )

I believe this is the debut of The Fourth Doctor. I love his interactions with UNIT (and the rest of us earthlings)--he utterly confounds them. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1041222.html#cutid1

Oddly enough, Dicks is not especially good at making his own stories transition happily to the printed page. There are some good bits added/changed here, especially the characterisation of the new Doctor, but in general it is competent rather than exciting.

One point that struck me on reading this (rather than on watching the TV original) was the similarity between the Robot and the Hangman in Roger Zelazny's Hugo/Nebula winning novella, "Home is the Hangman". The Who story came first, but I would be surprised to learn that Zelazny had had a chance to see it; both he and Dicks were, of course, drawing from many other sources going back at least as far as Mary Shelley.
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I read somewhere once-- I forget where-- that this book was written before Tom Baker had been chosen as the 4th Doctor, and that his descriptions had been added in at the last moment. Whatever the case, this book is classically bad, and not just because it seems to have been written for a generic non-Tom-Baker kind of quasi-Pertwee Doctor, but because it's genuinely terrible.
However, no one reads these things because they want good literature. I bought this for nostalgic reasons and I'm pretty sure almost everyone else does too.
Remember watching the show as a kid? I never read any of these old books back then but I'm sure I would have enjoyed them. My friends and I would have eaten this thing up back when we were eight or so. ( )