The Monster Series, printed by BBC Books in the 1990s, has been re-issued for the 50th Anniversary. It is good to have something to sustain us during the series hiatus and lovely to read an old Who adventure that isn’t all dog eared and decaying from acid paper.
Anachronism happens. I am not usually a fan of movie and television spin-off books. Too often the stories are “Mary Sues,” that is, they are someone’s personal fantasy in which the author is a protagonist interacting (often sexually) with the series’ characters. Mary Sue fan fic is frequently terrible stuff and we shouldn’t have to pay to read it. Almost as bad is when the film or series is entirely unfamiliar to a professional author who has taken a quick look at some guidelines and then cranked out a story in which the details are wrong and the adventure is unsuitable. I read a manuscript not long ago that should have replaced every mention of The Highlander with the name James Bond; the story would have made better sense. So, even when the publisher is legitimate, I approach all program-based books with deep suspicion. Especially Doctor Who: I enjoy Doctor Who and I don’t want to see it profaned.
If you are a fan, I expect you feel the same way. I think that when we read Doctor Who books, anything that isn’t absolutely right will jar us clean out of the story. For example, the terminology and action should be in character: if the Doctor pulls a space blaster out of his pocket and blows a locked door to smithereens, we’re going stop reading to wonder why he didn’t just use the sonic screwdriver. When we read something said by the Doctor or a companion, we should hear that actor’s voice in our heads as clearly as if we were listening to it on television. Then there are the anachronisms, a problem especially difficult to time travel. The Whoniverse is a complicated place: did an event actually happen in our familiar time line or did it happen in a parallel Whoniverse or was it deleted when “the Time line was restored?” Not to mention what happened in the real world! Who fans have to be forgiving because with a real fifty year history, fictional anachronism will happen, but the author has to prevent it from happening too often. So, now you know: I approached these books very warily...
The Monsters Collection
Oddly, images of the new versions of old villains are on the 'Monsters' covers. It has been argued that the choice of the new images was because the original cover art was poor or that the new images are intended to bring in younger readers. The fear might be that young viewers aren’t familiar with the early low-budget look of Doctor Who and might be turned off by it. If you are a purist about matching the cover to the text, you’ll need to slap some duck tape over the images.
Doctor Who: Shakedown by Terrance Dicks (1995; 2014) BBC Books
In order of publishing, the first book is Shakedown. This one is an easy, pleasant read. It’s predictable, you’ll probably see the plot twists coming, but we generally saw them coming in the early episodes of Doctor Who, so that adds to the nostalgia. The basic plot is: the Sontarans discover that the Rutan Host has a secret weakness that might allow the Sontarans to win the 50,000 year old war between the two species. I had forgotten the Rutan: it’s a giant, neon hive-minded jelly fish. Gobbets of the main blob can move around independently and with a bit of study of a victim’s corpse, a gobbet is capable of morphing into a convincing human being.
It’s hard to forget Sontarans, but, my, they’ve changed! They’re used to be cloned, potato-headed warriors with little red eyes. Some of them looked like spoiled meat. Today they’re still potato-heads, but now they have lips, nice eyes and are a true Idaho potato tan. The book was written prior to the new breed of Sontarans, so the description doesn’t match the cover. Curiously, the Sontaran personalities are still similar. One can actually like a Sontaran; Rutans, not so much. (As an aside, have you ever noticed how many Who villains are armies of physically similar simpletons lead by one or two intelligent ones? The Doctor seems to fight a universe inhabited by Army Ants.)
Terrance Dicks, the author, writes well and gives us a good description of the various species in the story. Over all, though, he assumes we know the basic Whoniverse and doesn’t bother to tell us things like what the interior of the Tardis looks like or what the Time Rotor is. Dicks also does an excellent job of writing the Doctor so that you hear and see the Doctor as you read. I mean, a really good job. For some reason, without prompting or prior-knowledge, I thought the story was about the Seventh Doctor and I started off with Sylvester McCoy in my mind, but with echoes of Jon Pertwee in there too. That was indeed the right Doctor, so, two points for Dicks… (however inappropriate that may actually sound!)
It’s worth mentioning that Shakedown has a history that is more interesting than those of the other books. I don’t often read introductions until I’ve finished a book because they are full of spoilers. Besides, if a book is any good, it should be self-contained enough to be read without a lot of explanation. The intro to Shakedown is an exception: yes, it’s full of spoilers, but it is interesting reading. If you are a thorough Who scholar, you’ve probably seen a video called Shakedown: Return of the Solarans. It is a fan production written by Dicks, set in the Whoniverse minus the Doctor. In the introduction, Dicks explains how that video came about and how later he had to rewrite the story to include the Doctor so that it could be published.. The cast and crew of Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans are all listed on the acknowledgement page.
Doctor Who: Scales of Injustice by Gary Russell (1996; 2014) BBC Books
Scales of Injustice is more like a novel than Shakedown is and less like a TV show. The plot is a splendidly paranoid story that asks, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Who is guarding the guards? It also asks, who is monitoring the scientists? (Today we would ask, who is guarding the computer scientists?) Consider the alien technology acquired by UNIT: is it being studied and used in an ethical fashion? And, inevitably, what happens when an evil genius gets hold of it? When dealing with ultra secret government agencies, no one seems to know who is monitoring anyone.
In Scales..., we are reading the Third Doctor - Jon Pertwee - and again the voices are true to the actors. Russell is clearly a fan. The familiar “monsters” in this book are the Silurians. In the story the Silurians are the early Creature from the Black Lagoon version with a third eye that will fry your brain. There are several subspecies, so we can allow for variation in the way they look. The cover has one of the modern Silurians that looks like a scaled insect. The handsome, humanoid ones that interacted with the Doctor must not have been deemed monstrous enough. You may not feel that the story itself is true to Who: although Russell uses Who events, characters and conceits very liberally, almost as if he were name dropping, the feel of the story is more Torchwood than Doctor Who. It is true to the Whoniverse, however, and I enjoyed it. It is a good, twisty story, but if we were to watch it on television, it would make a long, Y2K story arc rather than a single-episode 1970s tale.
If you are desperate for something Who to tide you over until the next series starts, these books will do. Some of them are better than others, but even the bad ones are better than nothing, and it is nice to have the old Who books back with intact covers and pages that aren't rotting way from acid. Go for it.
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