Souvenir Press The Dalek Outer Space Book

Illustrations	Richard Jennings, John Woods, Leslie Waller and Art Sansom
Published	1966

Starring Sara Kingdom, Jeff Stone, the SSS and the Daleks

• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by Finn Clark 17/5/04

1966's Dalek Outer Space Book is less enjoyable than its predecessors, hitting neither their excellence or their goofiness. The Daleks themselves are strangely inconspicuous and at times the book seems almost embarrassed by them.

The chief inspiration for this book wasn't Doctor Who or the Daleks. No, 'twas James Bond. Back in 1966, Sean Connery ruled the world. The four Bond films thus far (Dr No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger and Thunderball) had appeared at the rate of one a year and You Only Live Twice was in production. The Dalek Outer Space Book is oddly uninterested in its headline villains, lavishing far more attention on the Space Security Service. The Outlaw Planet shows us the creation of this anti-Dalek task force, which deals in spies, secret missions, coded messages and Top Secret files. Its agents include Colonel Marc Forest, Kurt Soren, David Carson, Agent Seven (quite possibly the same robot that we knew as Mark Seven in the seventies Dalek annuals) and Sara Kingdom. Yes, that Sara.

Most Bond-ish of the stories is Sara Kingdom: Space Security Agent, in which Sara (who apparently has "the strength of ten men") is sent on a ruthless undercover mission to the planet Vara. Her orders are to rescue Professor Lomberg, the alloy expert, or else to kill him! What's more, she nobbles three guards with a machine that chops you up with four-foot-long blades. Admittedly we don't actually see anyone get turned to giblets, but I don't see them getting away with just a haircut and blow dry.

The Daleks are Ernst Stavro Blofelds, hatching evil schemes behind the scenes instead of inflicting their usual death and destruction. Check out the Supreme Dalek's first lines in The Living Death: "No doubt you are wondering, Mr Hardwicke, why you are with us and, in fact, how you and the missing body came here?" Supreme goes on to explain in an urbane fashion that demands a seven-foot-tall henchman and a white Persian cat. Earth may be at loggerheads with Skaro, but it's an espionage-heavy Cold War rather than the more overt kind we're used to.

The Daleks are sidelined in The Dalek Trap, though there at least you don't realise until afterwards. They're quite imposing in The Living Death while The Secret of the Emperor briefly imitates the TV21 strips, but otherwise they're waiting in the wings. In three stories (The Sea Monsters, The Unwilling Traveller and Chris Welkin - Planeteer) they're never even mentioned!

I wouldn't mind if the stories were good. They're not. David Whitaker didn't write for this book and the new guy (Brad Ashton) doesn't have a clue. He doesn't know what to do with the Daleks! Whenever they become the focus of a story, the plot grinds to a halt for a slideshow of Skaro's interior or Historical Dalek Defeats. I loved the first halves of The Dalek Trap and Secret of the Emperor, but they soon turn to mush. The Super Sub is so throwaway that the contents page puts it in Special Features rather than Stories & Strips. (I see their point.) The Outlaw Planet chokes to death on its SSS info-dump and destroys its Dalek armada with a handwave. The Brain Tappers is bleah, Diamond Dust is worse and even The Living Death isn't great.

The comic strips are better than the prose stories yet again. Sara Kingdom: Space Security Agent, The Sea Monsters and Chris Welkin - Planeteer won't rock anyone's world, but they're okay. Sadly, they're better for not having Daleks in 'em. The Unwilling Traveller starts fantastically, but then wrenched my brain by alternating between pages of prose and comic strip. Weird experiment. Doesn't work.

Mind you, this book experiments with form more than anything else I can think of. It has comic strips, prose stories and The Unwilling Traveller, i.e. both at once. Fully painted comic strips casually drop in full-page "exploded diagram" illustrations about The Strata of Skaro, The Super Sub or The Emperor's Brain. It even reprints old newspaper strips. Chris Welkin - Planeteer was created by Sansom and Winterbotham in 1951 and even appeared in the likes of Tarzan comics. John Romita has described it as a space-age version of Terry and the Pirates, a strip and radio series which was created by Milton Caniff in the thirties.

(Personally I thought Chris Welkin was quite fun. Its script isn't anything to write home about, but it has lovely stylised art and a gorgeous blonde called Amaiza. Good name.)

This book's stories clash with each other, unlike those of its predecessors. We have Sara Kingdom and the SSS from The Daleks' Master Plan circa 4000 AD. (The Sea Monsters reinforces this with mutant sea monsters spawned by an H-bomb lost in Spanish waters 2000 years ago.) However The Super Sub and Diamond Dust star Jeff Stone from The Dalek Book and the 25th century! (There's yet more time travel in two stories: Secret of the Emperor and The Unwilling Traveller.)

The Strata of Skaro is funky, though. Among other surreal details, we learn that Skaro has an ice heart and volcanoes of frozen ice. Is there anything in Planet of the Daleks that wasn't regurgitated from the sixties? Skaro's radius is about 10,000 miles, which is much bigger than Earth's 4,000 miles. Thus the Earth-Skaro scale factor is 40% (radius), 16% (surface area) and 6.4% (volume). Skaro's surface area is three billion square kilometres, for instance. However its extraordinary internal structure (you wouldn't believe the half of it) explains why its gravity is similar to ours.

This book has bright spots, but they never last long enough to make a good story. It's dull and surprisingly Dalek-free, though that's arguably a blessing given how poorly the writer uses 'em. It has some lovely art and a few familiar characters (Sara Kingdom, the Golden Emperor and possibly Agent/Mark Seven from the seventies Dalek annuals) but it's sadly lacking in that all-important entertainment factor. I can have fun reading bollocks, but this is the wrong kind of bollocks.