Arcturus Books Doctor Who and the Daleks Omnibus

Written by	Terrance Dicks and Terry Nation
Illustrations	Radstock Reproductions Limited
Published	1976

• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by Finn Clark 19/5/04

This book's great! Admittedly most of its pages are given over to abridged versions of Terrance Dicks's novelisations of Planet and Genesis of the Daleks, but there's no shame in that. Those were good books. A modern fan might prefer this book to be all-original material, but as a piece of Doctor Who merchandise in 1976 it is what it is. It has good filler articles, decent production values and some terrific artwork.

That art is what you'll remember best about this Omnibus. It's gaudy and bombastic, with some spectacular use of colour that feels perfect for the Daleks. It has fewer illustrations than, say, Invasion from Space, but feel the quality. Images are often colour-shifted and reused, which isn't usually a problem but the picture of a fleeing Tom Baker on p81 pops up again in Planet of the Daleks! Twice! (See pages 112 and 121.) However despite this amusing glitch, I still admire the full-page spreads of the Seventh Galaxy (pp8-9), the Davros page (pp20-21), the Forbidden Planet (pp86-87) and more.

The abridgement isn't what I expected. I went through the first chapter of Genesis of the Daleks, comparing each version, and this isn't another Junior Doctor Who and the Giant Robot. It's still Terrance's work, not an editor's. I'd never have guessed about the abridgement if I hadn't read about it in David Howe's merchandise guide.

Instead it's more as if the Omnibus typesetters had been told to type out the Target novelisation word for word, but occasionally missed a paragraph. Chapter One has four snippages: (a) the exchange about intercepted transmat beams, (b) Harry saying, "I say, that was a pretty rough landing," (c) some examination of the dead soldiers in the trench, then finally (d) Harry saying "Seems to be locked solid" as he heaves on a door that's obviously locked solid. In total that's 17 lines out of 342, or almost exactly 5%. Enough to speed things up, but not enough to hurt the scene. On the general principle of "omit unnecessary words" it might even be an improvement.

The filler material is splendid, the best I can remember in this kind of book. There's a Terry Nation foreword, a sixties-a-like Skaro Facts page (this time about its neighbours in space), lots of big photos from the series, yet another Anatomy of a Dalek, a media history of the Daleks on TV and film and a bit of fun with "The Forbidden Planet" and "The Dalek Deep Space Cruiser" (oooohh...). We even get eight pages of the Genesis camera script!

Mind you, the two-page spread on Skaro's space neighbours is the only time in all these Dalek hardbacks where Terry Nation's background information contradicts itself. It's funky stuff, but you'll look in vain for Skaro's twin suns (The Dalek Book p84, The Dalek World p31+42), the satellite moon of Flidor (The Dalek Book p87) or the seven Colony Planets of Skaro (The Dalek World p85). Maybe all that was in a different era or something.

Then there's Invasion - the enemy within. In format this is a six-page comic strip, laid out in double-page spreads that look like fifties movie posters. It's overblown, splashy, psychedelically coloured and gives the Daleks a pop art world that out-spectacles Star Wars. I love it! My only problem is with its story. Splash pages don't leave much room for a plot... and then there's the ending. Let me type out the entire text of Invasion - the enemy within:

"BEYOND the BEYOND of BEYOND, at the DARK endless edge of ETERNAL SPACE, exists a LIFE FORCE that has neither FORM nor SUBSTANCE. For this INTELLIGENCE the universe holds FEW secrets - but some MYSTERIES remain! At an UNKNOWN point in elapsed TIME, the DALEKS launched the greatest WAR FLEET ever assembled. Its DESTINATION - a NAMELESS world, SAVAGE and PRIMITIVE!!!

"The CREATURES of the planet were RUTHLESSLY EXTERMINATED by GUNSHIPS of the first wave of the DALEK strike force..... A GREAT area of primeval forest was RAZED and gigantic excavators are LANDED. An enormous VAULT was carved DEEP beneath the SURFACE - into it came a MASSIVE army of DALEKS and their EVIL fighting machines....!!! The VAULT was SEALED... and the DALEK fleet moved on to conquer NEW galaxies. The jungle crept BACK across the RAVAGED landscape - HIDING all trace of the SECRET FORCE!!

"Time beyond COMPUTATION passed - intelligent, industrious LIFE evolved. NOW, the hour of the DALEK REACTIVATION is near. They will emerge to KILL, DESTROY, ENSLAVE and CONQUER!! It may be WEEKS or perhaps only HOURS before the attack BEGINS - all this we KNOW but are helpless to stop it. We have only a 'THOUGHT IMAGE' of what the place ABOVE the VAULT looks like - but we can not IDENTIFY it!!! YOU can IDENTIFY the place by TRACING the drawing, CUTTING out the squares and ASSEMBLING them in this order: 6, 11, 8, 10, 9, 1, 5, 12, 3, 4, 7, 2."

This is a lovely volume, though I can understand why it's been forgotten by fandom. At the end of the day, it's an abridged hardback edition of two Target novelisations. If we wanted to read those, we'd pull down the originals. However it's also a splendid book with (to use DVD terminology) show-stopping extras. Nifty.