Doctor Who Novelisations: Difference between revisions

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During the 70s and 80s, in the days before video took off, the way to catch up on previous ''[[Doctor Who]]'' stories were the novelisations from Target Books, which retold (and frequently expanded on) the stories on TV.

The first three ''Doctor Who'' novelisations (based on "The Daleks", "The Web Planet" and "The Crusade") were originally published by Frederick Muller in the 1960s, before becoming the start of the Target line. The last novelisation, for the Eighth Doctor TV Movie, was published by BBC Books.

 

 

In later years, Target also novelised non-series stories, including the spin-off ''K-9 and Company'', three audio dramas (''The Pescatons'', ''Slipback'' and ''The Paradise of Death''), and three stories written for the original never-made Season 23 (''The Nightmare Fair'', ''The Ultimate Evil'' and ''Mission to Magnus''). The half-filmed and never-aired ''Shada'' was, at the time, kept from being novelised by the same issues as [[Douglas Adams]]' other stories. ''K-9 and Company'' was in fact the third in a series of "Companions of Doctor Who" novels featuring companions as solo protagonists after their travels with the Doctor, preceded by two original novels: ''Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma'', by Tony Attwood, and ''Harry Sullivan's War'' by the character's actor Ian Marter.

** In the novelisation of "The Time Monster", the device with which the Master pulls soldiers and weapons out of the past to attack UNIT is compared to the Time Scoop from "The Five Doctors".

** The novelisation of "Shada" nods to the TV Movie (temporal orbit), "The Shakespeare Code" (Carrionites), "The End of Time" (visionaries and time locks), and "The Doctor's Wife" (the Corsair), among others.

* [[Fourth Wall]]: Played with in the novelisation of "The Mind Robber", the adventure in which the Doctor and his companions visit the Land of Fiction. The novelisation is set entirely within the Land: it begins with the scene where the Doctor wakes up there (filling in earlier events through flashback), and ends when the Doctor and his companions leave.

* [[Framing Device]]: Each of Donald Cotton's three Hartnell-historial novelisations: ''The Mythmakers'' has [[Homer]] deciding to tell, just this once, the story of what ''really'' happened at the Siege of Troy; ''The Gunfighters'' has Doc Holliday on his deathbed telling a journalist the story of what ''really'' happened at the OK Corral; and ''The Romans'' is presented as a collection of contemporary documents telling the story of what ''really'' happened in the lead-up to the Great Fire of Rome.

** The second most famous example was that ''Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon'', based on the TV story "Colony in Space", has the Doctor and Jo meeting each other for the first time at the beginning, reusing not their actual first meeting from "Terror of the Autons" but the scene later in that story in which the Master hypnotises her and sends her into UNIT HQ with a bomb.

* [[Typo On the Cover]]: The novelisation of "Delta and the Bannermen" has a typo on the spine, where there is only one Bannerman. (This is nothing to the typo that occurs within, at a point where one of the characters is ''supposed'' to be ''peering'' over a shelf.)

* [[Writing Around Trademarks]]: In "The Green Death", the evil chemical company is Global Chemicals in the TV version but was changed to Panorama Chemicals in the novelisation because there was an actual company called Global Chemicals, which complained.

* [[You Gotta Have Blue Hair]]: In ''Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon'', Malcolm Hulke's novelisation of "Colony in Space", it's mentioned in passing that a young woman had dyed her hair "dull blue, as was the fashion that month".

 

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[[Category:Doctor Who Novelisations]]

[[Category:Literature]]

[[Category:Whoniverse]]