World Distributors The 1976 Dalek Annual

Published	1975
SBN	7235 0339 7

Starring Joel Shaw, Reb Shavron, Mark Seven and the Daleks

• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by Finn Clark 22/5/04

I can't say for sure, but I think Terry Nation himself wrote this book. All the signs point that way.

Nightmare has a character called Tarrant. There are sixties-like expansions of Dalek lore, such as the island of Sezam in Skaro's Sea of Death and the goofy Earth-Skaro timescale on p49 in which Daleks seem to be responsible for the Black Death, the Great Fire of London, the Krakatoa eruption, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the sinking of the Titanic. Mark Seven is just like Agent Seven from the 1966 Dalek Outer Space Book. Terry Nation's TV ideas get recycled. And most importantly the book's set-up screams Blake's Seven so loudly that it hurts.

I've heard it said that the seventies Dalek annuals were based on the Dalek TV proposals Terry Nation took to America in the late sixties. I have no evidence for this claim, but I believe it. This is a new Dalek genre in spin-off terms, but it's smack in line with Terry's TV formulae. Earth is at war with the Daleks (so far, so familiar) and we're losing. The Anti-Dalek Force (ADF) is a guerilla force of commandos which takes the fight to the Daleks in a series of gritty, macho adventures. Okay, Timechase is kiddie nonsense, but the other stories are dark slabs o' bleakness in which innocents die and the Daleks are scary and ever-present.

On page 6, "any ship that comes within a thousand miles of Skaro will be blasted out of the sky". A far cry from Skaro as a tourist hotspot in The Dalek World, eh? The scariest tale is Nightmare, a horror story with a savage ending that basically says "the Daleks have won and mankind is screwed". Terror Task Force and Exterminate Exterminate Exterminate feel like suicide missions that our heroes happen to survive. The comic strips are lighter fare, but only because it's hard to be scared by the art of Edgar Hodges (last seen in the 1975 Dr Who Annual).

The ADF has superficial similarities with the SSS and the presence of Mark Seven suggests that it's not set long afterwards (4076?), but it's a much darker organisation. Its missions aren't James Bond so much as the Dirty Dozen. What's more, for the first time in a spin-off the Daleks talk like Daleks! Their dialogue is authentically repetitive ("pursue pursue pursue!") and is full of dashes in an attempt to evoke their mechanical voices.

Timechase is basically an inverted The Chase, in which two boys follow time-travelling Daleks to the Marie Celeste, Pompeii and a World War One battlefield. The Daleks' appearance causes the Marie Celeste's crewmembers to jump overboard in terror, thus contradicting both TV continuity (,a href=chas.htm>The Chase) and the annuals' continuity (The Mystery of the Marie Celeste in the 1970 Dr Who Annual). Terry Nation recycling his old stories again? Whatever gave you that idea?

The filler articles are more challenging than usual, including a history of SF literature and an SF film quiz that only serious movie geeks could expect to complete. There's an illustration glitch on p5 in which Reb Shavron is black for the first and last time ever, but for the most part the pictures are fine. Edgar Hodges draws a good Dalek, which is the main thing. This is a fairly slim book, as you'd expect from a 1976 annual, but it has more text stories (four) than any of its three successors. It's well written and its universe is more characterful than in the sixties Dalek books. Pretty darned good. Recommended.