Doctor Who and the Daleks - how the novelizations got started

All this writing about the early years of Doctor Who made me decide to go back and reread Doctor Who and the Daleks, a slender little book that I read and reread more than a few times back when Target books were a big part of my Doctor Who experience.

It’s an interesting book to revisit. It’s more than just a novelization of the first story with the Daleks, a key part of Doctor Who’s history and Doctor Who’s success. It was published originally in 1964 but the success of its republication in 1973 helped the novelization of just about every Doctor Who serial from the original run.

The latest edition has an introduction by Neil Gaimon, which makes an interesting point. Back in the day (and that includes when I got into Doctor Who), those Target books were the only access folks had to so many of these stories. And Doctor Who and the Daleks got that started.

There were two things that really struck me about the book. First of all, since it was written as a standalone product, not meant to be an exact copy of the serial, it took some liberties with the story, particularly the beginning. Second, it is interesting to look at how the Daleks started out.

Doctor Who and the Daleks replaced all of An Unearthly Child with an alternate origin for how Ian and Barbara ended up with the Doctor and Susan. Instead of them being two schoolteachers checking out a weird student, they are strangers who meet due to a car accident.

Of course, with no other books and no Internet and VCRs, there was no reason to imagine that 1964 readers actually knew how Ian and Barbara ended up in the TARDIS. Doctor Who and the Daleks was not written to be part of the greater Doctor Who mythology. It was written as a standalone book. Sure, anyone who bought it was going to know who the characters were (why else would they have bought it?) but referring to a story that wasn’t a book would have been bad storytelling.

I will admit that I found it confusing when I first read it but now I think that its an interesting look at something that was written before there was even a second Doctor or that Doctor Who was something that would be going for decades.

Second of all, the first appearance of the Daleks was a far cry from the intergalactic conquerors that they would become. (Honestly, like by their second appearance when they took over the Earth)

They were confined to one city on a radioactive planet. Literally confined. If they lost contact with the metal floors that supplied them with the static electricity they needed to move, shoot and even damn well breathe, they died. Man, and the Cybermen’s vulnerability to gold seemed kind of extreme.

None of this is that unreasonable. They started off as a one-off alien monster (and I do love the fact that they aren’t robots but xenophobic blobs of hate. It adds a visceral level of impact to them) when the show was supposed to be educational. They needed a weakness that would serve as a science lesson and defeating them meant killing them all.

Not that killing them off is that shocking. How many times in the history of Doctor Who did the Daleks get wiped out? As long as Daleks get high viewer numbers, they will come crawling back to do some more exterminating.

Still, it is so strange to see them as such fragile and isolated creatures, more obsessed with desperate survival than war. Someone wrote that the original Daleks were little old scientists. They became a race of nightmare warriors pretty darn quickly but they had humble beginnings.

I don’t feel the urge to read any more of the old Target books. But this one, holding such a key position in Doctor Who publishing, was interesting to go back and look at again.