Doctor Who and the Daleks

Famously, this is the first Doctor Who novel of any kind, a novelisation of the first Dalek story (which pedants know as The Mutants but most modern viewers call The Daleks), released on the eve of the Daleks' return to television in The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Since it was not seen as the first of a range of tie-ins, but rather as a standalone novel, it was designed to work on its own. Story editor David Whitaker took Terry Nation's script and appended a couple chapters on the front explaining how the Doctor, Susan, Ian, and Barbara all ended up journeying to Skaro together—in a way not at all consistent with An Unearthly Child—and also added a short chapter at the end where the characters decide to continue to adventure together. show more You could take this book and hand it to someone claiming it was the first Doctor Who story and they would totally believe you. (Maybe I will try this on my kids someday.) In addition, it's designed to work as a book: Whitaker novelizes the story in the first person from Ian's perspective, so it doesn't read as a tv tie-in, but a proper adventure novel.

Anyway, it's a really strong read. The opening chapters are intense and atmospheric, Whitaker really capturing Ian's disorientation and fear. This is a much more forbidding introduction to the Doctor than we got on screen, but it works well as a lead-in to an intense story. I am not a big fan of the original Dalek story, but telling it in the first person makes it creepy and unsettling. When you encounter it for the first time, a Dalek isn't an outer-space robot monster, but an inscrutable alien—this is true of their first story and no other, and the novelisation captures that fairly well. The description of the Dalek mutant is unsettling, and the glass Dalek at the story's climax is amazing.

In prose, a lot of the story is streamlined to positive effect; we don't spend twenty-five minutes with various characters jumping across a chasm, and the tight focus on Ian means some of the story gets related secondhand, which usually works well. I was surprised that this takes out all the references to radiation from the tv story; it's just vague "poison," even though the weapon used in the past is eventually established as an atomic bomb.

Ian of course is the star here. He's always been one of my favorites, and I'd love to hear William Russell's audiobook version of this story. (I once got it from the library but had to return it before I finished the first chapter, I think!) The book also does well by the Doctor, working in a nicely done character arc across the story about him and Ian coming to trust each other. I think Susan comes across better here than she does on screen; divorced from Carole Ann Ford's somewhat histrionic performance, she's more of a cool, collected, mysterious girl. The one regular the story does poorly by is Barbara, who mostly comes across as Ian's love interest, and only because she's the girl one. I think Jacqueline Hill's performance did a lot for the character in her early days.

I read the 2011 reprint, which has a new introduction by Neil Gaiman, the original illustrations by Arnold Schwartzman, and an afterword by Steve Tribe. The Gaiman intro is all right, and the Schwartzman pictures are nothing to write home about; he picks a surprising number of banal moments where the regulars are standing around to illustrate. Whitaker gives great descriptions of the Dalek city and its environments, but Schwartzman doesn't bother to illustrate that! The afterword by Steve Tribe does a great job of giving historical context for the book, but as an American, I found the pedantic explanation of what "feet" and "inches" were hilarious. The thing I needed explained was the oft-used term "gasometer"! show less

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1014627.html.
There was a time when this was literally the only Doctor Who book in existence (under its excellent original 1964 title of Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks); indeed it was the only commercially available representation of any Doctor Who story, in those days long before video-recorders (let alone DVDs). So we have Whitaker taking much greater liberty with Terry Nation's TV script than almost any other novelisation (John Lucarotti's treatment of The Massacre differs even more from the story as broadcast, but he was reverting back to his own original script).

And the result is quite possibly the best of the novelisations, judged as a novel. The opening of the story is show more comprehensively rewritten, Ian being an unemployed research scientist who accidentally encounters Barbara, who has been tutoring the mysterious Susan, and gets involved with the Doctor and his Tardis. So much time is invested - wisely - in setting the scene that we are a third of the way through the book before we reach the equivalent point to the end of the TV story's first episode (out of seven).

The biggest novelty, for those of us who have read almost any of the subsequent hundreds of Who books, is that the whole story is told in the first person, from Ian's point of view. (It's not unknown in later Who literature, but it is very unusual.) This does require a certain amount of narrative juggling, but Whitaker gets away with it better than I remembered from when I first read this, three decades ago.

Today's generation of fans will squee at the pronounced sexual tension in the Ian/Barbara relationship here - the TV story has Barbara close to flirting with Ganatus, one of the Thals, but he barely gets to look at her on the printed page. Poor Susan rather fades into the background as well after she has done her mercy run to the forest. The characterisation of the Doctor is much more harsh and edgy than Hartnell's depiction; since Whitaker was the story editor, perhaps this was what he had originally in mind? (A possibility supported by the surviving first cut of the first ever episode.)

And the Daleks themselves are pretty memorable here, though Whitaker seems a bit confused about their size - three feet high at one point, four foot six at another, though the illustrations are of our 'normal' sized pepperpots. However, this confusion is compensated for by the glorious description of the mutants within the metal casings, and their glass-enclosed leader. The TV show has never managed such memorable presentations of the creatures inside, though it has occasionally tried. (The versions encountered by the Ninth Doctor come closest.)
Anyway, this is an excellent read, well worth hunting down. show less

This is the novelisation of the very first Dalek story and was the first such book, being published in November 1964 just under a year after its original broadcast. It differs considerably from the TV version, being intended as a self standing novel, so Ian and Barbara join at the beginning of this story (no An Unearthly Child story), and don't know each other beforehand, Barbara being Susan's private tutor and Ian an unemployed scientist. The story is told in the first person from Ian's point of view, so the narrative is correspondingly restructured around his actions, with other plot strands (e.g. the fact of the Doctor using mirrors to blind the city's detectors being told to Ian after the event). David Whitaker spends a lot of time show more exploring the Thals' pacifism, with Ian trying at great lengths to persuade them to fight for their own survival. The Daleks are quite uncharacteristically expansive in explaining their motives to the travellers. The story also contains a (short-lived) glass Dalek as their overall leader. Overall, while different in many details, this is essentially the same story and a good piece of writing. show less

This is a mostly faithful novelization of the second Doctor Who serial, The Daleks. The biggest change comes about because there is no novelization of the first serial, and so the story of how Ian and Barbara first met the Doctor, and his kidnapping them, is instead adapted and crammed into the first couple of chapters here. The other alterations are mostly small omissions as a result of the story being told from Ian's perspective rather than the shifting perspective of the show.

Thus, if you're particularly fond of the aforementioned serial, or if you've never seen it and want to see how the Dalek story began, then you'll probably enjoy this book. I agree with something Neil Gaiman alludes to in his introduction: that the novel is more show more interesting from a cultural history perspective than as a story in its own right. Back in 1964 if you missed a show then you had missed the show. There were no second chances. The novelizations, when they began to appear, were the first chance many people had to catch up on missed episodes. In this age of DVD boxsets and iPlayer and Sky and VCRs and the like it's a nice reminder of the impermanence of things. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to the kitchen before my flatmate decides to remind me of the impermanence of cake. show less

This is a mostly faithful novelization of the second Doctor Who serial, The Daleks. The biggest change comes about because there is no novelization of the first serial, and so the story of how Ian and Barbara first met the Doctor, and his kidnapping them, is instead adapted and crammed into the first couple of chapters here. The other alterations are mostly small omissions as a result of the story being told from Ian's perspective rather than the shifting perspective of the show.

Thus, if you're particularly fond of the aforementioned serial, or if you've never seen it and want to see how the Dalek story began, then you'll probably enjoy this book. I agree with something Neil Gaiman alludes to in his introduction: that the novel is more show more interesting from a cultural history perspective than as a story in its own right. Back in 1964 if you missed a show then you had missed the show. There were no second chances. The novelizations, when they began to appear, were the first chance many people had to catch up on missed episodes. In this age of DVD boxsets and iPlayer and Sky and VCRs and the like it's a nice reminder of the impermanence of things. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to the kitchen before my flatmate decides to remind me of the impermanence of cake. show less

This is an adaptation of the second "Doctor Who" serial from 1963-4, which introduced the famous Daleks. The book is adapted by the original script editor, David Whitaker, who turns his own little flair for Victorianized science fantasy up to about eleven. He seems to have a great time writing a brand new introduction for the characters (basically, making this their first adventure), and he chooses to present it all as a first-person novel for the character of Ian Chesterton, one of the original companions, and ostensibly the "lead" of the show for about the first year. Great stuff; highly recommended for the '60s Who fan.

In more recent years, William Russell (the actor who played Ian Chesterton) has recorded this as an unabridged show more audiobook. 40 years on, Russell - who always had a strong, steady voice - has certainly aged; he's a little wavery and at times slightly frail, but he can still pull off the Ian characterization marvelously. Better still, he's the perfect age to enact the Doctor, too. Highly recommended as a great way to either re-experience the novel or enjoy it for the first time. show less

As a Doctor Who fan, this was a must have book. I've seen the first season of the Classic Who so Ian and Barbara are familiar for me as companions.
It was interesting to read a book through Ian's POV. Ian is well developed character and the Doctor seems much better character in the book.
I feel like the book was much stronger than TV story.