Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster

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 show more 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. show less

This is a novelisation of the Doctor Who TV story Terror of the Zygons, broadcast just under 50 years ago this summer. This is a highly rated story, though it is not one of my particular favourites. The Zygons are an imaginative creation, but did not appear again in the TV show until the Peter Capaldi era in the mid 2010s; the story offers an explanation for the Loch Ness Monster as being a cyborg used by the Zygons in their plans of conquest. This novel sticks pretty closely to the TV version and is a fairly workmanlike read, though with a few touches that add some minor depth to some characters and situations.

Read this review, and many more on my blog October Tune!

I have read quite a few Doctor Who books in the past year, but this is the first Classic Who book that I’ve read. I found this one interesting, because of the Loch Ness Monster, and I had been meaning to watch a couple of the Fourth Doctor’s episodes, but there are so many that I had no idea where to start. Now that I’ve read this book, I really want to see the episode(s) that this book was based on.

At first, I was reluctant to read this book, because I thought it might be too ‘hard’, like I had found a lot of classic books (like The Great Gatsby, Alice in Wonderland, etc), with words that we don’t use anymore nowadays, but this book really surprised me, because it was show more really fun and very easy to read. I started it yesterday night, and finished it just now. It might also be because I was genuinely interested in this book, and the story was actually really interesting.

Like every other Doctor Who book, this one is written in multiple POV’s; the Doctor’s, Sarah Jane’s, Harry’s, the Zygons’; there were a lot, and like with every other DW book it didn’t bother me much. It was actually needed to tell the story, to tell you what was really going on.

There was a tiny issue with two character names though. There was a (human) character called Benton, and the Zygon character called Broton, and I got really confused whenever the humans were interacting normally with Benton, because I had the idea it was the Zygon. Other than that, I really enjoyed this book, and I will probably try to read more Classic Who books (and watching some of the episodes, of course).

The Classic books are all based on the episodes I believe, so if you don’t feel like looking up and watching a lot of episodes, I suggest you try the books instead! And I recommend Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster! show less

#266 in our old book database. Not rated.

Nessie really an alien

http://nhw.livejournal.com/972833.html

This is one of the good Terrance Dicks novelisations, of the 1975 TV story Terror of the Zygons, the second Season 12 story to be written up (after Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, and one of the good early Dicks efforts: decent efforts at background characterisation given for Sarah, Harry and the Brigadier, and much entertaining back-chat between the Doctor and both his allies and his enemies. Obviously I got it as an exercise in nostalgia after reading Sting of the Zygons, at a cost of UK£3.95; worth every penny, I tell you.