I am celebrating the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who by reading a couple of novelisations of classic TV stories from the pen of the late, great Terrance Dicks. This is a novelisation of the second ever Dalek story, first broadcast in late 1964 after the show had been on for a year. It is also the last story for the Doctor's first companion and grand-daughter Susan. The plot is dramatic and there is room for a bit more expansiveness on characters' motivations and the descriptions of the extensive devastation of a London conquered and largely destroyed by the Daleks. Terrance just had a gift for telling a proper story without pretension or bashing the reader over the head with his views, and this is always very enjoyable. ( )

Warning: this review contains spoilers

****

This is a classic Target novelization of a classic Doctor Who story. The (First) Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan arrive in London several hundred years past the 1960s and discover that the planet has been invaded by Daleks and the human population enslaved and/or exterminated. It's a thrilling read and the plot is totally bonkers in a good way. I laughed out loud when the name of the plot to remove the Earth's core was revealed to be "Project Degravitate". Then of course I had to go around intoning "DEGRAVITATE! DEGRAVITATE!" in a Dalek voice for the next few minutes.

This is also an important story for the series because the Doctor's granddaughter, Susan, leaves him to stay on Earth with one of the resistance fighters. Or rather, the Doctor forces her to leave by locking her out of the TARDIS, because he knows she thinks she needs to look after him. Instead, he wants her to be happy.

Very much recommended if you like Doctor Who and Daleks. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1019617.html

Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth was the first Dicks novelisation of a Hartnell story. It leans a bit on the Peter Cushing film as well as on the originally broadcast version. Its most remarkable innovation, and improvement on the screen, 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.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-dalek-invasion-of-earth-by-jonathan-morris-a...

I was not entirely fair here. The opening paragraph is one of Dicks’ real crackers:

"Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man. His clothes were tattered and grimy, his skin blotched and diseased over wasted flesh. On his head was a gleaming metal helmet. He walked with the stiff, jerky movements of a robot—which was exactly what he had become."

And the prose is taut as 150 minutes of screen time are condensed into 142 pages. The cover is fantastic too (and unrealistically raised my ten-year-old expectations for the look of the original TV series). ( )