Reading Doctor Who and the State of Decay is honestly a bit of a trip but it really shouldn’t have been.  State of Decay on television while in the back half of the hardline science fiction Season 18 overseen by John Nathan-Turner and Christopher H. Bidmead, Terrance Dicks had actually had the story in his back pocket for a number of years.  Originally it was to be the opening serial to Season 15, but the BBC was adapting Dracula and did not want a second vampire story to conflict, so it was replaced with Horror of Fang Rock.  When reading Doctor Who and the State of Decay it becomes apparent that Terrance Dicks is adapting almost a combination of versions of his story because this is a novelization that feels tonally unlike everything that Season 18 was.  This is honestly for the best, it means that Doctor Who and the State of Decay feels like a classic adventure.  Dicks clearly was a fan of Dracula because almost all of the vampire tropes that are associated with Dracula adaptations, especially the Universal and Hammer adaptations, are here and played up.  They were there during the original serial but largely pushed to the background with the serious tone and rather bleak direction.

This is a novelization that really wants everything to be fun: it’s a fantasy adventure where the Doctor and Romana are trading banter so delightfully throughout.  Dicks is sure to maintain that relationship between the Doctor and Romana as two very close friends where the Doctor is clearly the inferior.  It’s Romana who puts a lot of things together and has to roll her eyes when the Doctor eventually catches up to where she was several paragraphs ago.  Adding Adric to that dynamic makes this one of his stronger stories in terms of characterization, especially in the novelization where Dicks clearly frames it that when he betrays the Doctor and Romana, the reader is supposed to hate him.  Adric is treated very much like the young teenager that he is, and it works so well in prose because Dicks adds just enough to make you understand where Adric was coming from and not put Matthew Waterhouse’s performance at the feet of directors who often struggled in giving him proper direction.  With the lightness in tone it makes the sequences when the Three Who Rule go full vampire feel like a Hammer film version of gothic horror, you can imagine in your head the color of Hammer blood which is particularly fun.  It means when Aukon is summoning his servants it feels far more grand than it did on television and everything just slots in quite nicely.

Overall, Doctor Who and the State of Decay is a novelization that works because it doesn’t try to emulate the tone of the television story, letting what Terrance Dicks clearly intended for the serial to really shine through.  It’s a quick little novelization with a lot of fun behind it.  8/10.

This is the first time Doctor Who directly takes a plot idea from Star Trek, Brian Hayles clearly being inspired to write The Curse of Peladon as homage to the episode “Journey to Babel”.  That’s okay, Hayles having four episodes to fill means outside of the setup, King Peladon’s half-human heritage, and the commentary about global unity (this is all a metaphor for the UK joining the EU) there’s a lot here to make it just as original and engaging as the Star Trek episode that it takes its ideas from.  Peladon as a planet while depicted entirely in studio, this serial being made out of transmission order which is a massive milestone.  It feels alive and director Lennie Mayne makes it look great even with the fact that the tapes have had a lot of work done to restore them, the serial looks great.

Katy Manning as Jo Grant feigning royalty and being essentially an ambassador with the Doctor is in one of her absolute best appearances.  Hayles has pushed her characterization forward for the other writers to follow.  Manning plays off David Troughton’s King Peladon incredibly well as well, Manning completely selling by the end that she is considering leaving the Doctor.  Had Manning left the show at this point it’d be a great exit.  Troughton also plays the uncertainty of the king and the betrayal as this twisting of a knife throughout.  Pertwee is also just on top form, really engaging with the alien environment of the planet, and selling the Doctor’s own prejudice when it comes to the Ice Warriors.  When it’s revealed the Ice Warriors are trustworthy Pertwee and Alan Bennion have this great face off where Pertwee breaks.  Alpha Centauri is also the first explicitly non-binary character in Doctor Who which just adds to this sense of surprising progressivism.  It and Aggedor are iconic.

The Mutants is largely regarded as the weakest of Jon Pertwee’s serials and while I am certainly not it’s biggest fan, after reading Doctor Who and the Mutants I am genuinely wondering if it is this novelization that has weakened the original serial’s reputation.  This is largely because Doctor Who and the Mutants is quite a weak book, despite its evocative cover and Terrance Dicks attempting to add some depth to Solos as a planet (it’s more lush than the quarries and caves seen on television).  Dicks as an author is known for having a breezy pace to his prose and that should be present in a novelization written and published in 1977, yet Doctor Who and the Mutants is one that just drags.  Now this could be because Dicks is adapting a six episode script, but at this point he had done other six episode scripts including ones from eras he had no contribution to and The Mutants was right in the middle of his time as script editor.  Bob Baker and Dave Martin’s television script is largely an allegory against apartheid South Africa, something that translates to the novel but what is largely lacking is Christopher Barry’s direction.  Despite much of the serial being set in quarries and on futuristic sets, it is a serial with visual appeal, a similar decrease in quality happening when Barry Letts adapted his own script into Doctor Who and the Daemons.  There’s a lot in The Mutants that feels psychedelic, especially in the back half with the resolution after the twist that the mutations are just part of the natural life cycle of Solos as a planet.

Visually Terrance Dicks doesn’t actually render the sequences with any particular vision or passion, it just becomes a thing that happens.  There are issues transferring over from the original serial, the Doctor and Jo’s involvement comes from the Time Lords using them to deliver a package to an individual on the planet Solos.  This is someone they don’t know and the package will only open for them, having long sequences of the Doctor just handing people the package throughout the first episode and then there are random experiments the Doctor is roped into to open the package that honestly goes nowhere.  It works even less in the novel without the performance of Jon Pertwee to at least make it charming which for whatever reason Dicks just cannot recapture.  He recaptures it well in his other novelizations, even in many of those that came before like Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion and Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons.

Overall, Doctor Who and the Mutants while not adapting one of the best serials from the Jon Pertwee era, struggles to even make what worked on television work in prose.  At least much of the social commentary remains intact.  4/10.

Terrance Dicks in novelizing Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen he largely wrote it to include Buddhist philosophy closer to actual beliefs than what made it on-screen in Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln’s scripts, as well as being able to generally improve the pace and depth of the story.  It very much showed that Dicks could novelize a story that he had no involvement with on television, something that would eventually cement him as the main novelist for the range through much of the 1970s and 1980s.  His second commission for a story he had nothing to do with was Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster early in 1976, but it was a no brainer that after Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen Dicks would be brought back to novelize The Web of Fear into Doctor Who and the Web of Fear.  Now, this is another one of those novelizations that only would have had the scripts to work off, until 2013 most of the serial was missing apart from the first episode and this was even before the audit of the archive to see what survived.  Now the tricky part about talking about Doctor Who and the Web of Fear is that adding depth was something Dicks set out to do with Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen because it was a serial that desperately needed it, but The Web of Fear on almost every level is a stronger serial.  Dicks very easily could have gotten the scripts into prose format and called it a day much like he would do with later novelizations mostly due to overwork, and 1976 was very much a busy year for Dicks, between Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster and this Dicks had done Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen and Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks.

Instead of phoning it in, Dicks actually approaches Doctor Who and the Web of Fear with the intent on making it work as a book, using the pacing of a film almost as a blueprint for the way things are paced.  The depth added here isn’t the same kind of depth as Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen, outside of renaming the rather unfortunate Jewish stereotype in the first episode to be less so.  Some of the events in the first half of the story are rearranged to flow better into one another, the misunderstanding between Victoria and the Travers’ in particular is softened and from Victoria’s perspective so the audience knows just how nervous she has been in particular, and the Doctor actually has a part to play in the adaptation of the second episode.  This is the second novelization that Target had done that was adapting a story where a regular was missing from an episode, the first being Gerry Davis’ adaptation of Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet which was only hastily rewritten to accommodate William Hartnell’s illness. Dicks adds an in depth sequence of the Doctor meeting and coming to trust Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, complete with the omniscient narrator reflecting on how this will grow and what will become UNIT will become a bigger part of the Doctor’s life.  The novelization even ends with the suggestion being made off-handedly to form a sort of military organization to deal with alien threats.

Dicks as a novelist is also desperately having to compensate for the fact that he cannot emulate Douglas Camfield’s direction onto the page.  This isn’t without trying, Dicks is using the scripts after all and the first chapter is a great little horror story adapting the early scenes of the Yeti coming to life, and then that quickly spiraling out of control.  It wasn’t necessary to add the pieces on how long it took for the invasion to actually come in full force and brief touching on Travers being suspected in it, but it was very much appreciated.  Dicks knows when to compress and when to expand because he cannot emulate Camfield’s style in prose, he’s writing very much for the action and not the horror.  Dicks doesn’t really excel at horror, but the tension is there and the mystery while still probably the weakest aspect is there.  The exasperation of the story still comes through with how the characters behave.

Overall, Doctor Who and the Web of Fear is an excellent novel, it would have been at least enjoyable if Terrance Dicks had phoned it in, but he doesn’t.  There aren’t really plot additions, but Dicks actually had the time and care to look at how he could translate the story from the screen to the page while capturing why this was one that stuck in people’s minds for so long even when it turned out to be nearly entirely missing.  9/10.

Ten Little Aliens is a strange little book. The title is taken from the original title of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and in the 2013 introduction Stephen Cole wrote for the reprint, it’s made quite explicit that at the forefront of his mind was Christie’s general body of work.  That, combining it with Starship Troopers, and adding the gimmick of an extensive Choose Your Own Adventure section in the middle.  That’s three very different things that Stephen Cole is pulling from for what Ten Little Aliens is trying to do, this is a novel that is an identity crisis wrapped up in about 300 pages.  It’s also a novel featuring the First Doctor, Ben, and Polly set between The Smugglers and The Tenth Planet because Stephen Cole rightly wanted to use a TARDIS team that hadn’t been used in novel format before.  Tonally Ten Little Aliens is weird, although the novel is taking its name from one of the most famous murder mysteries of all time it only vaguely resembles a murder mystery that Agatha Christie would have written: there are already ten bodies, specifically of terrorists, and they start disappearing one by one.  Sure, Christie wrote stories where the murder has already happened and there has to be a reason to solve it, but And Then There Were None isn’t one of those.  And Then There Were None is one of Christie’s focused on class and British imperialism through the lens of ten well off British people who have all gotten away with murder and are picked off one by one as the veneer of well-bred British respectability is eroded away.  It’s a masterpiece.

Ten Little Aliens aesthetically resembles Starship Troopers, though it’s far closer to the Heinlein novel than Paul Verhoeven’s satirical adaptation.  The supporting cast is entirely space troopers who are all introduced early in the book literally through little character blurbs that tell the reader the stock soldier that they represent.  Cole doesn’t take any time in this book to explore the military mind or what the expansion of military force throughout the galaxy means.  He’s just drawing on the aesthetics of Starship Troopers because they are cool and they have worked for Doctor Who in the past, while the stock characters are just that, stock characters.  They don’t actively matter in the long run and could have been an interesting foil to the aspects of the Earth Empire to actually use an Agatha Christie style commentary at the very least, if Cole wasn’t able to go down the Verhoeven route.  Because it’s aesthetics of the military mind and expansion of empire it feels like Cole tacitly agreeing more with Heinlein over Verhoeven.  The Schirr rebels called the Ten-Strong are an interesting idea and indicate Cole almost had plans to go through Verhoeven over Heinlein, they believe themselves to be physically perfect though to human eyes they are grotesque and disgusting (Cole playing on some honestly ableist tropes throughout Ten Little Aliens in a lot of ways that I think are meant to make the reader uncomfortable but again Cole very much is a writer who likes his aesthetic references over examining them).

The biggest gimmick of the book is the Choose Your Own Adventure segment is actually the gimmick that is the most interesting: it’s presented as a neural net and its where you get glimmers that the stock characters have a little more than the stock they are given and you get insights into Ben and Polly.  Polly is a character Cole really wants to explore but sadly he reduces Ben to a stock Cockney sailor character.  Part of me gets why, this is 2002 and the only stories to really feature Ben and Polly that were readily available were The War Machines and in incomplete form The Tenth Planet (with the surviving episodes of The Underwater Menace and The Moonbase on VHS compilations while The Faceless Ones would not be released for a year).  Cole does characterize the Doctor well and gets the dynamic between the First Doctor specifically to Ben and Polly, though again that dynamic had the most material and it does reflect the two stories closest to completion.  Polly is a character who while occasionally reduced to a screamer does get to be more proactive than Ben who feels in a lot of ways dead weight.  It is nice to have this as an example of this TARDIS team, some of it does form the basis for what Big Finish Productions would develop years later with Anneke Wills on board.

Overall, Ten Little Aliens is certainly a novel with potential and Cole has definitely experienced everything that the novel goes out of its way to reference.  The biggest problem is that there are several gimmicks at the heart of the novel that are generally making it difficult to really flesh out, Cole needing to focus on one exact thing to really bring the novel to work.  Cole can be a great storyteller, but here he doesn’t seem to have the guiding hand to make this anything more than average.  5/10.

The Macra Terror is a bit weird.  It’s one of the later Target novelizations, being published in late 1987 so right on the border between novelizations as simple adaptation and novelization as early pitches for original Doctor Who fiction.  It’s also a novelization of a completely missing serial, the soundtrack being one of the early releases in 1992, however like Marco Polo and The Massacre, it has its original author coming back to novelize it based on his scripts.  Ian Stuart Black would actually novelize all three of the stories he wrote for the series, The Macra Terror being the second of the three to be novelized.  Despite this, the novelization remains quite close to the soundtrack of the television story, the dialogue is especially similar throughout with a lot of the lines that would be best remembered in the animated version remaining intact.  Black actually works quite well as a novelist, making it surprising that he never actually pitched anything for Virgin Books because he’d have made something good out of it.  The Macra Terror is a novelization that while keeping everything intact outside of making the structurally weak decision to let Medok live thus making the Macra less deadly a threat, feels quite a bit deeper in the way it characterizes the regulars.

The character dynamics of Ben, Polly, and Jamie as a TARDIS team were always a bit rough, since Jamie was quite literally a last minute addition causing last minute rewrites to The Underwater Menace and The Moonbase.  The Macra Terror was the serial where they actually clicked the most as a team, Ben being the working class everyman who succumbs to the influence of the Macra.  The novelization takes it one further, Black really wanting to delve into how Polly and Jamie react differently to Ben’s betrayal.  Jamie in particular holds a grudge which while not explored too much, this is a shorter novelization after all, what is explored is fascinating.  The trust is broken and Polly is the one worrying that Ben will be hurt by Jamie because of it, it adds this tiny little layer of drama that elevates this from simple novelization.  There’s some slight reordering of the events of Episode 1 in particular that add to this, the business with Jamie carrying a big stick actually feels more comedic in the novelization which works pretty well.  The Doctor in general is also emphasized as the total mythic trickster figure that was what Patrick Troughton excelled at especially.

Overall, The Macra Terror despite being a later novelization is mostly a match in terms of quality and engaging storytelling when compared to what remains of the television counterpart.  Black’s prose is quite slick and emphasizes the size and cunning of the Macra which was difficult to really portray on television and to get some actual deeper characterization in a way only prose really can do.  8/10.

Going back to read John Peel’s novelization of The Chase is honestly a weird one after having experienced his novelizations of The Daleks’ Master Plan and The Power of the Daleks, because this is the first book the man wrote.  It’s also the only novelization that Peel has a story to work with and in the forward to the book he apparently used Terry Nation’s original scripts which Nation’s wife Kate just had, before being script edited and tightened up for television by Dennis Spooner.  Structurally The Chase follows the same plot beats and episodes with minimal deviations, the proper deviations are more in terms of not following the script dialogue which in many ways is better and worse than what we got on television.  The biggest disadvantage to the novelization is the handling of Barbara Wright as a character.  Peel already just doesn’t have a handle on how Barbara works.  Now this possibly Nation’s original scripts, as a writer he did have a tendency to put female characters into one category but there are several points throughout the novel where Barbara is just reduced to a gibbering, screaming wreck.  This is especially apparent in the adaptation of “Journey Into Terror”, Peel using this as an attempt to really get the horror element down.  This is one of those things where it’s reduced to just Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, still in their Universal film guises, but to make them scary Peel has Barbara become this nervous wreck.

Barbara does give more background on the Mary Celeste, that sequence actually being extended because Peel desperately wants to include the historical details and then a further discussion between Ian and Barbara about how they may or may not be responsible for the deaths on the Mary Celeste.  If I had to guess this wasn’t a Nation original, but a Peel, Nation as a writer never really thought about time travel mechanics even though he wrote (or co-wrote) three serials with major time travel implications that are almost certainly from other people, mainly Robert Holmes and Dennis Spooner.  It’s a discussion that is circular.  The only other thing that really feels like a misstep is again in the middle sections, this time in the Empire State Building sequence where Morton Dill is no longer just a comedy yokel, but is presented rather cruelly by Peel as a total idiot who is treated with heavy handed ableism by Peel.  He is committed to an asylum at the end of his sequence which is meant to be funny but just comes across terribly.

It's now weird that I’ve spent so much time discussing what went wrong with The Chase, but here’s the thing.  Peel does a lot right.  The bookends of the story, Aridius and Mechanus, are converted to be played completely straight.  The opening scenes in the TARDIS genuinely feel like this TARDIS team is a family, some of the dialogue is toned down so Ian and Barbara aren’t really annoyed at Vicki for being a bored teenager.  It creates his great sense of domesticity and family, meaning that the Daleks are actually more of a threat.  The comedy of the Daleks is really kept to the occasional wry line, they are a complete threat, immediately slaughtering the Aridians while they are collaborators.  Peel makes the collaboration utterly pathetic, and rightly so, it’s out of self-preservation and only needs one of them to actually stand up and fight.  On Mechanus they are also immediately ready to kill, the duplicate of the Doctor being somehow darker and the idea that if Vicki was found she wouldn’t even be captured, just exterminated.  Okay in the end there are some injected bits of continuity into Steven’s backstory, something that feels more like a reflection on the idea of the Earth Empire that mentions the Third Dalek War and the Draconians, but it’s genuinely these great bits.

Overall, The Chase is one of those novelizations that feels so completely different from the television production.  There are plenty of negative things that John Peel brings to the novelization, some of which might be Nation originals or might just be Peel’s general problematic tendencies.  Still, I find this novelization to be better than the original serial, it’s not a rambling comedy and somehow the exit of Ian and Barbara hits harder here because they have passed through fire with the Daleks being an actual threat.  7/10.

After the success of “Old Flames” and The Scarlet Empress, Paul Magrs closes More Short Trips with “Femme Fatale”, an adventure for the Doctor, Sam, and Iris meeting Andy Warhol.  Oddly enough this is one of the ‘weaker’ Magrs stories, it lacks a lot of the depth that his novels do.  It is just as fun as “Old Flames”, if not slightly more so with the 1930s and 1960s period settings and the use of Andy Warhol as a character, though not by much as while Magrs is certainly one of the better writers when it comes to the use of Sam Jones, she is still Sam Jones.  This is also a story about the assassination attempt on Warhol by Valerie Solanis which has the typical Magrs twist, though I’m not entirely sure on how much I like the way it’s presented here, it reeks of an inexperienced writer not quite thinking through the implications.  “Femme Fatale” is still a great little story because Paul Magrs is almost incapable of doing a bad story.  7/10.

Peter Anghelides’ “Good Companions” is honestly a weird little story, it’s the one that features an unspecified future Doctor traveling with a companion called Anna, his housekeeper.  This is a story that also is told through the framing of an older Tegan Jovanka, married and widowed, having written up this encounter in Good Companions.  A lot of the appeal of this short story is the future Doctor, an incarnation entirely down to Anghelides who sadly feels a bit generic.  Unlike say The Infinity Doctors or the Merlin Doctor, this Doctor is more a composite of other Doctor’s traits up to that point, though there’s certainly room for development since Anghelides does use this Doctor in multiple Short Trips.  The big problem for me is actually the characterization of Tegan: she’s a bit too mellow in her old age that makes her feel more a generic companion, Anghelides not really reflecting on her exit in Resurrection of the Daleks or Adric’s death in Earthshock or the death of her Aunt Vanessa in Logopolis.  It honestly feels like she could have been any female companion who was left on Earth, leaving “Good Companions” more “Meh Companions”.  5/10.

“uPVC” is an unknown writer, Paul Farnsworth, who writes a near perfect examination of who the Doctor is through both the Second and Seventh Doctors and a window salesman.  That’s all I’m going to say because this is a story that nearly brought me to tears.  9/10.