Arc of Infinity

Target novelisation Doctor Who - Arc of Infinity

Author	Terrance Dicks
Published	1983
ISBN	0 426 19342 3
First Edition Cover	Photographic

Back cover blurb: When the Doctor returns to Gallifrey, he learns that his bio data extract has been stolen from the Time Lords' master computer known as the Matrix. The bio data extract is a detailed description of the Doctor's molecular structure - and this information, in the wrong hands, could be exploited with disastrous effect. The Gallifreyan High Council believe that anti-matter will be infiltrated into the universe as a result of the theft. In order to render the information useless, they decide the Doctor must die...

• Not as good as the Title by Andrew Feryok
• Not As Bad As the Episode by Jason A. Miller

Not as good as the Title by Andrew Feryok 2/10/08

"We're too late," said the Doctor defeatedly. "Omega controls the Matrix."
- Part 3 cliffhanger, page 89, Chapter 9

The novelization falls within Terrance Dicks' script-to-book category. In fact, it's almost embarrassing to call this a "book" at all. It is basically a translated script of what was seen on screen with no additions or expansions whatsoever. In fact, Dicks hasn't even bothered to add any real descriptions beyond what is minimally necessary. The result is a book that has to rely more on the quality of the original story instead of prose style, and given the quality of Arc of Infinity's story, this results in a book that drags miserably. This is not good when it is only 117 pages in large text! Every line seems to exude a general lack of enthusiasm from an author that was overburdened with a nearly impossible writing schedule at the time. Dicks seems to be struggling to get the story even into this small page count.

This is a real shame because I could see an enthusiastic author having a lot of fun with this story. A deeper exploration of the High Council could have been welcome, exploring their backgrounds in more detail and discovering how they came to this appalling conclusion that they must kill the Doctor. Certainly, an exploration of the Castellan would have been nice. Compare this to The Deadly Assassin. In that story, the Castellan believed the Doctor innocent even when the Doctor was seen firing the gun that killed the President of the High Council in front of a large crowd! Now the Castellan, on almost no evidence, is convinced the Doctor is a traitor who is involved in a conspiracy with the President to destroy the universe with Omega! I could also see an author like Ian Marter having fun with Omega's transformation at the end. Terrance Dicks feebly makes a stab at describing the body horror of Omega's transfer into matter and then his decay during the chase through Amsterdam at the end. Marter would have lovingly described every detail of that transformation in all its gory detail.

Without the wonderful performances of Davison, Baker and Gough, the characters really do end up becoming bland and unexciting. I had a hard time picturing the Doctor, Nyssa or Hedin as they were on the TV screen and this was just after I had watched the story! The subplot involving Tegan and her cousin in Amsterdam drags the story down even more than it did on screen. In fact, when I got to the part where the two were spending the night in the crypt, I got so bored I put the book down for several weeks and moved on to some other books before I forced myself to come back to it.

So, are there any positives in this book? Well, I do have to admit the horribly designed Ergon monster comes across better in this story. Instead of a giant chicken zombie, we now have a humanoid lizard that is a bit more terrifying. That is, it would be if Dicks had bothered to put in any effort to the descriptions. The sequence where Nyssa attempts to rescue the Doctor from his execution by holding the High Council at gunpoint is still a very effective sequence. For the first time, I really felt that the character had some guts and motivations. She is normally such a gentle character and for her to resort to gunplay shows just how much she cares about the Doctor and how far she is willing to go to save him. After all, her father, mother, planet and Adric are all dead, Tegan has left, and the Doctor is the only friend she has left in the world. I could easily see why she would snap and threaten the High Council!

On the whole, a disappointing adaptation of a mediocre Davison story. It is clear that Dicks was just writing this one for the schedule. He puts the minimal effort into adapting the story and just presents the plot and dialogue. You are much better off watching the television version. At least then you'll get to see the great performances of Baker, Gough and Davison, particularly Davison's wonderfully underplayed take on Omega when he is relishing life as normal person again. 3/10

Not As Bad As the Episode by Jason A. Miller 9/9/22

I'm sure Andrew Feryok is a good soul, beloved by children and puppies, and a pillar of his community. But I cannot read his review of Terrance Dicks' novelization of Arc of Infinity and accept that he actually read the book. My only conclusion is that he's missing a great story.

Check this out. Mr. Feryok writes: "The novelization falls within Terrance Dicks' script-to-book category. In fact, it's almost embarrassing to call this a "book" at all. It is basically a translated script of what was seen on screen with no additions or expansions whatsoever. In fact, Dicks hasn't even bothered to add any real descriptions beyond what is minimally necessary."

Exactly none of that statement is true.

No, the novelization does not merely fall into Terrance Dicks' "script to book" category. I mean, you could believe that, but you'd have to ignore almost everything in the book in order to draw that conclusion.

Now, what I'm not saying is that this is Terrance's magnum opus. In some respects, it's a little formulaic and rote. Terrance wrote about 60 novelizations, and this one is probably in the bottom half of his efforts. Giving away the surprise Omega reveal from the Part Three cliffhanger, right there in the table of contents before even Page 1, is a mistake, for example.

But, at the same time, isn't Johnny Byrne's script a bit formulaic and rote? Doesn't that put almost any author behind the eight-ball, when they get the commission to novelize the script? Look at Byrne's cast of zero-dimensional Time Lord councilors, I mean. Borusa is here, in by far the least interesting of his four TV appearances. Zorac and Thalia get nothing to do on screen and have exactly zero good lines between them. They're clearly just Luvic and Katura carried over from The Keeper of Traken... similar names, similar lack of dimension, virtually no plot utility, but at least in Traken, Luvic and Katura had something to do in Part Four. Beyond fetching pulse loops, that is. In Arc of Infinity, they remain meaningless throughout. So this can't have been a very interesting story to novelize.

Terrance, however, does his best with the meager offerings, getting off his trademark one-sentence descriptions of meaningless tertiary characters: "[Zorac] was dark and thin-faced and always seemed aggrieved". That's a much more interesting description of Zorac than Max Harvey achieved in the role on TV, that's for sure. Dicks also has Nyssa compare the Time Lords' robes to "rare exotic birds", which I doubt is a line stolen from Johnny Byrne's stage directions. I'm less fond of his referring to Thalia as "handsome" (twice!), but, hey, you've got to describe her somehow, and it's not like Elspet Gray did anything with the part on TV worth writing about.

So all Terrance can do with the Gallifrey plot is add continuity references to spice up the prose. And who better to write Gallifreyan continuity, in 1983, than Terrance? Remember, he literally co-created these guys. He throws in a reference to The Invasion of Time, adding details about the Time Lords' past that Byrne might not even have known. And when Dicks drops in recollections of Omega's previous villainy in The Three Doctors, remember that he literally commissioned that story and wrote its book. Omega is at least interesting in that he's not really a villain per se, and he's one of the few Doctor Who villains who actually mourns the death of his henchman, his stooge, his toadie, Hedin. And Terrance is the one who adds a backstory for Hedin and explains exactly why he's gone over to Omega' s side to begin with. You wouldn't find that on TV.

Terrance has even more fun off Gallifrey, writing the Amsterdam half of the story with one tongue firmly planted in cheek. He refers to its "tolerant citizens" ignoring the appearance of the TARDIS. And check out this passage, which completely explodes Feryok's theory:

Wearing jeans and anorak, loaded down with a great bulging pack like a turtle carrying his own home, Robin Stuart looked exactly like all the other young people who spend their summers wandering around Europe. There aren't quite so many of them these days. Some of the big capital cities have become cold and unwelcoming. But not friendly old Amsterdam. The Dutch are a tolerant people, willing to turn a blind eye to such crimes as being young and hard-up.

The Amsterdam youth hostel featured in the story is described by Terrance as "a clean, well-lighted place" -- there's a nice literary callback, taking a Hemingway short-story title and sneakily working it into the prose. I'm reminded of Terrance working Shakespeare's "happy band of brothers" phrase into the Power of Kroll novelization.

Terrance also has a remarkable ability to take nothing moments on TV and spin them into tense chapter-ending moments, little cliffhangers. I'll talk about this a little more when I come to his novelization of Snakedance, the next TV story. But he ends Chapter 1 here with Colin Frazer having misgivings about spending the night in an Amsterdam crypt: "Colin had seen horror movies about young people spending the night in graveyards and haunted houses. Something always happened to them - something frightful. Telling himself he was being silly, Colin got on with his preparations for the night -- unaware that this particular crypt held terrors beyond his worst imaginings".

That's not a moment from TV, not something Terrance could have just adapted from the script. That's creating a page-turning chapter-ending, from what was just a meaningless reaction shot on TV. Nicely done.

Now, there is plenty of room for improvement, had there been more time to write and a higher allotted page count. Terrance doesn't do much with Amsterdam's geography; he doesn't name any of the streets or canals, or give the reader the sense that he's actually been there. But, at least there's humor -- Tegan realizes that her cousin Robin has been possessed by Omega because he's able to operate a computer, where at home he "couldn't so much as change a light-bulb without making a mess of it".

Terrance wrote many epic novelizations; at his best, there were few better with painting the word-picture, and at his worst, he still gets off memorable asides or phrases to keep the book moving. Arc of Infinity is far from his best book. But it's certainly not guilty of the crimes of which Feryok accuses it.