Doctor Who and the Terrence Dicks Novelisation of the Earth!

June 23, 2009 2:34 PM

On The Outside It Looked Like An Old- Fashioned Police Box - Mark Gatiss presents a Radio 4 documentary on the Target novelisations of Doctor Who stories. Free Doctor Who eBooks.
posted by Artw (14 comments total)

...annoyingly it's iPlayer, but it should be available everywhere, for the next seven days at least.
posted by Artw at 2:42 PM on June 23, 2009

For a second I thought Target the US chain store was now producing Doctor Who novelizations and was filled with confusion, excitement, and fear all at once.
posted by kmz at 2:52 PM on June 23, 2009 [6 favorites]

They do nice knock-offs of designer decor, according to my wife.
posted by Artw at 2:54 PM on June 23, 2009

Ah, I remember these well. My public library in North Carolina had a giant collection of them, and I read almost all of them--or at least all the ones with Tom Baker on the cover. I also remember being surprised that the actor who played Harry Sullivan had written a number of them.
posted by Rangeboy at 3:06 PM on June 23, 2009

Who's written the most Doctor Who books?

(Ian Marter wrote 9 of them)
posted by Artw at 3:18 PM on June 23, 2009

Many of the covers were illustrated by Chris Achilleos, who has a gallery of them (and other Who-related art) on his website.

The ebooks are from a period after the Target era: they were released under the Virgin label between 1992 and 1997 and include Paul Cornell's Human Nature (which Cornell later adapted for the new TV series) and Gatiss' own Nightshade.
posted by Electric Dragon at 3:33 PM on June 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

Electric Dragon is too polite too say that I pipped him to the post with my shoddy FPP, and that his one would have had better links by the looks of things.

BTW Chris Achilleos may have been a bit of a Fantastic Four fan.
posted by Artw at 3:39 PM on June 23, 2009

I just used Google Books to put my collection in, so I can safely say I own more Doctor Who books than Terrance Dicks has written.

Can't wait to listen to this one. Grew up loving these books back when it was pretty darn near impossible to get much other than Tom Baker episodes in the States...until Iowa Public Television starting being more awesome (which happened within a couple of years of my fandom starting, but still felt like forever as an 10-12 year old)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 3:53 PM on June 23, 2009

Most of Terrance Dicks' novelisations are pretty much the dialogue copied from the shooting script with "he said" or "she said" inserted as appropriate, but he also wrote "Timewyrm: Exodus" which easily makes up for all that came before.
posted by John Shaft at 4:32 PM on June 23, 2009

The novelisations by Donald Cotton were terrible. I was an obsessive Doctor Who fan as a kid (and my parents are probably storing a couple hundred of these books in their garage), but I could never seem to even get through the few that he wrote.

I also had a couple copies of Doctor Who magazine that I picked up at a junk shop. One of them had a cartoon about how to properly transform an episode of the show into novel form: "Write 128 pages, and then stop!" If you check a few of the books, you'll see that it's pretty accurate.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 4:54 PM on June 23, 2009

And this blogger is doing a series of mini-reviews of "Doctor Who: The New Adventures" paperback novels that helped keep the franchise alive in the 1990s. (I don't know how I stumbled onto "postmodernbarney", but he is one of the preeminent gay nerds in blogging today, and an expert on Subtext.)
posted by wendell at 5:01 PM on June 23, 2009

Possibly of interest: the current winner of the Woot t-shirt reckoning.

My zany t-shirt budget is tapped out or I would totally be wearing one to the anniversary meetup.
posted by orrnyereg at 5:34 PM on June 23, 2009

Wendell: I've been doing the same with the 8th Doctor novels. Part One, Part Two (including the ahem, porno). Must get back to that at some point.
posted by feelinglistless at 4:00 AM on June 27, 2009

i09 feature on Target Books with an insane amount of covers.

So first forieng holiday as a kid... reading Genesis of the Daleks I had borrowed from another kid in the hotel just about made up for the sun burn.

The Web Of Fear (the Yeti in the London Underground one)... plotted out the, well, 'plot' on a Tube map I found in the back of an old diary - drawing along the tube lines with grotty felt-tip pens to plot the webs advanced as each station is mentioned in the story.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:31 AM on June 29, 2009 [1 favorite]