Bill Strutton Doctor Who and the Zarbi (1965)
This would have been the third or maybe fourth book I ever read, excepting Asterix, Tintin and stuff like Where the Wild Things Are in which the pictures are either equal to or more important than the text. Being a children's book, this one features a token line illustration every few chapters so as to sweeten the pill, I suppose, but I'm not counting those. I'm guessing I would have been about eight. I was ill with something or other, and my mother had let me spend the day - or possibly days - convalescing in my parents' bed, probably because it was more comfortable than my own. On one of these days she came back from Stratford, our nearest town, with a copy of Terrance Dicks' Target novelisation of Spearhead from Space, probably because I'd spent so much time gaping at the cover in WHSmith. So that was, in theory, the first novel I ever read, and the other four Who adaptations then in print followed soon after, although I'd presumably recovered from whatever had struck me down by that point.
The Web Planet, here retitled so as to remind us that our purchase shall be rewarded with monsters, had accumulated the reputation of being amongst the worst Who tales ever to disgrace the screen last time I looked, although that was admittedly a while back. It was too long, too slow, and the effects were comical, leading to the Zarbi being sarcastically described as pantomime ants by Steve Lyons and Chris Howarth. I never shared this view, having enjoyed the VHS release on several occasions. It was slow, but I felt the weird pensive, atmosphere more than compensated; and whilst it's true that if you look very closely, you can see they're in a television studio rather than actually on the planet Vortis, and those creatures are really just underpaid human actors in costumes knocked up on the cheap, I never really saw why this should be considered a problem.
The novelisation worked better for my eight-year old self than it does now, probably because it duplicates the television script so closely, specifically identifies the star as Doctor Who at every opportunity - just like the strip in TV Comic - and is mostly a cycle of our heroes being captured then escaping, over and over until someone explains that they've just invented what may as well have been named the anti-Animus-gun and saves the day, the Animus being the entity which is controlling the Zarbi and causing them to behave like a set of cunts*.
In its favour, someone had actually bothered to teach Bill Strutton how to write a sentence, so it's competent, reasonably paced given the somewhat repetitive structure of the story, and with none of that tedious reliance on full-stops and non-sentences as an easy source of dramatic tension, the usual ham-fisted attempt to imply the cadence of a portentous voice-over. Also in its favour is that the original six telly episodes were at least trying to do something different in a peculiarly alien environment populated by creatures trying hard to be something stranger than yet more humans with knobbly foreheads. Subsequent authors have found Lovecraftian overtones in this one, which actually isn't too much of a stretch; and whilst a bit slow for me, the novelisation has a weirdness which very much reminds me of van Vogt, albeit in simplified form; so in summary, it's nothing amazing, but I've read worse.
*: The Animus isn't identified by that name in the book, and I don't remember if it was named as such on the telly, so probably that detail came later courtesy of Virgin publishing. Similarly, whilst I'm sure Hartnell's Doctor may well have referred to the Zarbi as a set of cunts, this wasn't in the book either.
This would have been the third or maybe fourth book I ever read, excepting Asterix, Tintin and stuff like Where the Wild Things Are in which the pictures are either equal to or more important than the text. Being a children's book, this one features a token line illustration every few chapters so as to sweeten the pill, I suppose, but I'm not counting those. I'm guessing I would have been about eight. I was ill with something or other, and my mother had let me spend the day - or possibly days - convalescing in my parents' bed, probably because it was more comfortable than my own. On one of these days she came back from Stratford, our nearest town, with a copy of Terrance Dicks' Target novelisation of Spearhead from Space, probably because I'd spent so much time gaping at the cover in WHSmith. So that was, in theory, the first novel I ever read, and the other four Who adaptations then in print followed soon after, although I'd presumably recovered from whatever had struck me down by that point.
The Web Planet, here retitled so as to remind us that our purchase shall be rewarded with monsters, had accumulated the reputation of being amongst the worst Who tales ever to disgrace the screen last time I looked, although that was admittedly a while back. It was too long, too slow, and the effects were comical, leading to the Zarbi being sarcastically described as pantomime ants by Steve Lyons and Chris Howarth. I never shared this view, having enjoyed the VHS release on several occasions. It was slow, but I felt the weird pensive, atmosphere more than compensated; and whilst it's true that if you look very closely, you can see they're in a television studio rather than actually on the planet Vortis, and those creatures are really just underpaid human actors in costumes knocked up on the cheap, I never really saw why this should be considered a problem.
The novelisation worked better for my eight-year old self than it does now, probably because it duplicates the television script so closely, specifically identifies the star as Doctor Who at every opportunity - just like the strip in TV Comic - and is mostly a cycle of our heroes being captured then escaping, over and over until someone explains that they've just invented what may as well have been named the anti-Animus-gun and saves the day, the Animus being the entity which is controlling the Zarbi and causing them to behave like a set of cunts*.
In its favour, someone had actually bothered to teach Bill Strutton how to write a sentence, so it's competent, reasonably paced given the somewhat repetitive structure of the story, and with none of that tedious reliance on full-stops and non-sentences as an easy source of dramatic tension, the usual ham-fisted attempt to imply the cadence of a portentous voice-over. Also in its favour is that the original six telly episodes were at least trying to do something different in a peculiarly alien environment populated by creatures trying hard to be something stranger than yet more humans with knobbly foreheads. Subsequent authors have found Lovecraftian overtones in this one, which actually isn't too much of a stretch; and whilst a bit slow for me, the novelisation has a weirdness which very much reminds me of van Vogt, albeit in simplified form; so in summary, it's nothing amazing, but I've read worse.
*: The Animus isn't identified by that name in the book, and I don't remember if it was named as such on the telly, so probably that detail came later courtesy of Virgin publishing. Similarly, whilst I'm sure Hartnell's Doctor may well have referred to the Zarbi as a set of cunts, this wasn't in the book either.
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