Ian Marter (1944–1986)

The author of this novelisation is no ordinary author; it's the Target debut of Ian Marter, who played Harry Sullivan on screen and would go on to write ten Doctor Who books for Target in total, more than anyone other than Dicks. (Though, of course, Marter is a very, very distant second. I don't have any of Marter's other novelisations, but two decades ago I did read Harry Sullivan's War.)

Almost certainly because of this, we get a strong sense of Harry here, much more than we saw in the show more earlier The Loch Ness Monster (1976) or The Genesis of the Daleks (1976), where Harry often felt like an extra body in the room. Here, he is usually the viewpoint character for the strange discoveries on the Terra Nova (what Marter's book dubs the tv serial's "Space Station Nerva"), and while sometimes flabbergasted, he also occasionally contributes good ideas to the proceedings. I particularly liked a segment (added by Marter) where, while Sarah Jane is crawling through the space station ducts with the power cable, he tugs out an encouraging-but-patronizing message on it in Morse!

Equally, though, Marter has a good command of Tom Baker's Doctor in his flippant but foreboding mood, continuing the improvement we've seen in this area since The Pyramids of Mars (1976). It makes sense—standing alongside Tom Baker for a year's worth of recordings would probably give you a pretty good sense of the way he plays the Doctor!

The weak spot here is thus probably Sarah; Marter uses the Doctor and Harry as his main focalizing characters (sometimes switching which one within a paragraph, which is a bit jarring to a modern reader used to these things being more clearly demarcated), and tends only to use Sarah when there's no other option. Though as someone else pointed out to me, Sarah often has little to do in the actual stories on screen; it's only because of Lis Sladen's performance that she comes across as a strong character, Lis being a gifted actor who could do a lot with a little!

I don't know anything about Marter as a person, but based on this, I wonder if he read science fiction growing up; I feel like this book demonstrates an affinity for sf lingo and concepts you don't quite see in Terrance Dicks, whose interests seem elsewhere (in the adventure and the action and the history). I couldn't tell you why exactly, but in the book's somewhat moody, somewhat elliptical tone, it made me think of Fritz Leiber's sf from the 1950s and '60s, like The Big Time and The Wanderer; Marter is certainly the right age to have read Leiber growing up. Anyway, I sometimes found transitions confusing, but otherwise this is a solid piece of atmospheric sf; like some of the first Doctor books I read for my previous project, I think you could (Doctor and company aside) imagine this standing alone as a novel in a way that's not quite true of a Terrance Dicks effort. show less

This is a novelisation of the second Doctor Who story in the first season featuring Tom Baker as the 4th Doctor, broadcast an unbelievable 50 years ago. This story was the beginning of the famous "Gothic horror" era of the show where Philip Hinchcliffe was producer and Robert Holmes script editor in Tom Baker's first three seasons. This novelisation was the first written by an actor in the show, who played companion Harry Sullivan in Baker's first season or so. The body horror of Noah's show more conversion into a Wirrn is much more horrific here than on TV, where the monster effects were largely achieved through the use of green-painted bubble wrap. I was never quite as keen on this story as many other fans, but this is an effective novelisation, where there is a grim and claustrophobic atmosphere and all three regulars are well used in the plot. Marter's novelisation style was gritty and very different from that of all others who adapted Doctor Who series into book form, and his very early death was a tragedy. show less

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The TV original of this story has just been released on DVD. This was an eight-part story when first broadcast, here cut down to 160 pages, so a rather extreme rate of compression. But somehow Marter makes it work as he failed to with "The Enemy of the World"; better material to work with, true, but I actually found the plot somewhat easier to follow in the novel as well. The villainous Tobias Vaughn, brilliantly brought to life by Kevin Stoney on show more screen, is better in some ways here, with several hints that he has already become more (or perhaps less) than completely human, and his change of heart at the end of the story (when he takes on the Cybermen) more consistently portrayed as a fanatic changing targets rather than as a human being brought to his senses we saw on TV. At the same time, no written description can possibly convey Stoney's sinister drawl. show less

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This is the novelisation of a rare two-part story, intended purely to introduce the first new companion to join the show since its beginning, Vicki - one of two survivors of a spaceship crash on an apparently hostile planet. I thought after watching it a few months ago that this was a plot which could manage a great deal of filling out of back-story; the Doctor's past relations with the natives of the planet, the story of what had actually happened to show more the human settlers. In fact Marter delivers much more than that. For once, the printed page is superior to the screen. The twenty-something Maureen O'Brien could never really pass as the young teenager that Vicki was meant to be; Marter is not restricted by the actor's appearance. The monsters of the planet were among the least compelling aspects of the original TV story; again Marter can just make them up and does indeed bring in at least one more. We get loads more banter between the Doctor and Ian, with Marter for once putting comic dialogue in rather than taking it out. And the entire story is topped and tailed by the rescue ship which is supposed to be coming for Vicki and her fellow-survivor, so that one feels that this planet is one that fits into a wider history. show less