World Distributors Adventures in Time and Space

Published	1981
SBN	7235 0968 9

Starring the first four Doctors and assorted companions

• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by Finn Clark 6/4/04

Adventures in Time and Space wasn't the first reprint spin-off from the annuals, but it was the most comprehensive. The Amazing World of Doctor Who (1976) took the best bits of the 1976 annual and added new material, but this simply reprints great swathes of the 1966-79 annuals. (Its cover may boast the first five Doctors, including Davison, but the editor of this collection seemed to regard anything post-Leela as too fresh to reprint.)

There's nothing new here, but as an anthology it has plenty of merit. If you don't want to spend hundreds of pounds acquiring a complete set of all twenty Doctor Who annuals, this is a decent selection from ten of 'em. It reprints short stories, comic strips and even some of the filler articles! The mind boggles... until one realises that they've also included Who-related features from The Amazing World of Doctor Who. The collection opens with Who's the Doctor?, a run-down of Who mythology up to 1976, and also includes photo-features on the Ice Warriors and Cybermen. I call that a good decision.

In fact I'd say that subject to certain self-imposed constraints, whoever edited this collection did an impressive job. It's not just a random grab-bag, but an intelligent selection that was clearly the result of rereading all the available material. The real meat of this collection is the stories and going through by year, they are:

1966 - Peril in Mechanistra
1967 - Mission from Duh, Ten Fathom Pirates
1968 -
1969 - Death to Mufl, Mastermind of Space
1970 - The Vampire Plants
1971 -
1973 - Hunt to the Death, The Claw, Saucer of Fate
1974 -
1975 - Dead on Arrival, Fugitives from Chance
1976 - A New Life, The Sinister Sponge
1977 - Double Trouble!, The Time Snatch, Menace on Metalupiter, War on Aquatica
1978 - The Sleeping Beast, The Traitor, A New Life
1979 - Flashback, The Power, Emsone's Castle, The Planet of Dust

...plus the two original stories in The Amazing World of Doctor Who (1976) - The Vampires of Crellium and On the Slippery Trail.

That's an intelligent selection, but a flawed one. Its biggest problem is that most of its stories star Tom Baker, not surprisingly given its publication date of 1981, but unfortunately the 1976-1979 annuals were distinctly ordinary. (Theoretically this compilation could have run infinitely superior stories from Tom's early 80s annuals, but it's easy to see why the editors didn't want to reprint anything that recent.) The best late seventies stories are here, including such lunatic ravings as The Sinister Sponge and War on Aquatica, but personally I'd have liked to see more Paul Crompton comic strips. The Body Snatcher, Neuronic Nightmare and The Psychic Jungle may be insane and hard to read, but they're visually astonishing by any standards, not just Doctor Who's.

A further drawback of a 4th Doctor bias is that over the years the annuals got shorter, so the pool of 4th Doctor stories from 1976-1979 is surprisingly small. About half of the available Tom Baker stories reappear here, while for the first three Doctors it's a much smaller ratio. For Hartnell it's one in five, for Pertwee it's one in six and for Troughton it's under one in ten!

Hartnell was obviously problematic since the 1966 annual has TV monsters and the 1967 annual was dropped as a baby, but it's still a shame not to see more David Whitaker. Where's Sons of the Crab, eh? It has no TV monsters and it's fantastic! Maybe they thought it was too depressing. And as for the 1967 annual... okay, Ten Fathom Pirates is the best of a dodgy bunch, but I love that brain-damaged spastic collection of stories.

The 2nd Doctor selection is good as far as it goes, but that's not exactly a long way. Where's Starlight Grows Cold? There's a reprint of Masterminds of Space, admittedly the most humanistic of its Mystical Troughton sub-genre, but I still love The Dream Masters and 'The Celestial Toyshop. And why choose The Vampire Plants as the token comic strip? Come on, three cheers for Atoms Infinite! Admittedly it's the most lunatic story in anything ever, but that's why it's cool! The three stories chosen are a fair representation of this era, but it seems a shame that so much more was excluded.

The sixties annuals posed a particular problem for this volume's editors because they're not really Doctor Who as we know it. (See also my upcoming review of Invasion from Space.) Both Hartnell and Troughton get:

(a) one not particularly good comic strip.

(b) one story that's as near as the editors could get to ordinary Who, again not wildly good.

(c) another story that's more representative of what the sixties annuals got up to, which on its own is guaranteed to make a modern child go "what the hell"? For Hartnell that's Peril in Mechanistra, while for Troughton that's Mastermind of Space.

Finally there's Pertwee, two of whose four annuals get overlooked completely. Pertwee's era was so good that you could pick with a pin and still get the best stories in this collection, but even so I was sad not to see some favourites. Where's The Time Thief? (Obviously I mean the 1974 comic strip, not the 1975 short story.) And while I can't pretend that the weirdness of 1975 isn't represented, I'd have still liked to see Revenge of the Phantoms or The House that Jack Built.

This is a huge, attractive volume that does a reasonable job of covering the first fifteen years of the annuals, but its Tom-centric bias doesn't give it enough room for the better stuff. David Whitaker gets overlooked for being too grown-up and having TV monsters. And as for the annuals' eighties renaissance... well, it was still happening when this collection came out. The stories were either too recent to reprint or hadn't been written.

A subtler problem with an anthology like this is that it squidges all of the Doctor Who annuals into one big homogeneous mess. You read 'em through without recognising all the interesting eras in the annuals' history... David Whitaker, the 1967 whacko-jacko, Troughton mysticism, the Season 7A of 1971 and so forth. It thus becomes harder to see one-off representatives of their era for what they are, instead of as part of a lumpy block of Who.

However I'm still impressed that they published this collection. It's an impressive book that I'd heartily recommend, even if it's far from the best of World Distributors. If nothing else you get to laugh at two 4th Doctor and Sarah stories called A New Life...