Earthshock

Target novelisation Doctor Who - Earthshock

Author	Ian Marter
Published	1983
ISBN	0 426 19337 6
First Edition Cover	Photographic

Back cover blurb: A group of palaeontologists have been savagely attacked while carrying out a study of fossilised dinosaur remains in an underground cave system on twenty-fifth-century Earth. A party of troopers and Professor Kyle, the only survivor of the attack, are investigating the deaths of her colleagues when they discover the Doctor and his companions at the site of the massacre. The time-travellers are immediately suspected. In trying to establish their innocence and find out who - or what - was responsible for the killings, the Doctor is confronted by an old enemy...

• A Review by Jason A. Miller

A Review by Jason A. Miller 13/2/22

Although Eric Saward had previously novelized his first Doctor Who story, The Visitation, he was unavailable to adapt his second story, Earthshock, probably because he was busy script editing the TV show. Stepping into the breach was Ian Marter.

This is the beginning of Marter's golden age of novelizations. He'd adapted three Tom Baker scripts in the 1970s (two of which he'd appeared in on TV), and The Enemy of the World for good measure, after David Whitaker died. But, from this point on, he'd find himself a regular in the Target stable. Beginning with Earthshock, he'd publish a novelization a year, with The Rescue coming out posthumously in 1988, and with Harry Sullivan's War in there as well.

All of this is a long way of saying that Marter is an odd choice to adapt a Peter Davison story. Marter acted on the show during Tom Baker's energizing first season and would later establish a niche as almost the Stephen King of the Target line, someone who loved describing gouts of blood and other novelly horrific death scenes. These are all admirable traits, surely, but don't match up well with Davison's genial if occasionally harried old soul of a 5th Doctor.

So I wanna talk about the aspects of Marter's writing that make this book stand out: the behind-the-scenes detail, the graphic content, the portrayal of the TARDIS crew, and his literary style.

[1]

The most remarkable feature of the Earthshock novelization is that this is not the story you watched on television. Oh, the main plot beats are there, but the scene structure and dialogue are radically different.

No, this is not Ian Marter tearing up Saward's scripts and trying to improve them; this is Marter novelizing the camera scripts, which was the Target house style at the time. In this instance, though, director Peter Grimwade had performed some pretty radical surgery on the scripts that Marter later adapted, doubling the scene count in order to increase the story's pace. Single scenes in the novelization (such as TARDIS scenes in the Part Three material) took up four separate scenes on television. Grimwade evidently truncated a lot of dialogue and reassigned a lot of the who-says-what. You'll also be interested to see which lines from TV didn't make it into the book, most notably the Doctor's Black Orchid callback, the Captain Oates quote from Part One, and "I know that object".

As with the novelization of The Visitation, Saward's cliffhangers just don't play well with the novelization format. Here, the Part One Cyberman reveal is buried in mid-chapter, and Marter doesn't come out and actually say the word "Cyberman" until later on. Other odd screen-to-print differences are the Cyber Lieutenant on TV being called the "Deputy" here. The names of the disposable troopers and freighter crew are different in print. And Tegan doesn't burst into cry-laughter when Adric dies.

[2]

In terms of the splatter content, Marter and Saward end up being a surprisingly great fit for one another -- Marter being associated with the gothic Philip Hinchcliffe era, with Saward being more or less the anti-Hinchciffe. But Marter knows what tone Saward is looking for and gives it to us in spades. The opening shot of the novelization: "The towering cliffside resembled a gigantic human skull with the dark openings of caves gaping like empty eye-sockets and nostrils." Already we're a long way removed from Terrance Dicks (who would have opened this book with the punchier, but far less ominous: "It was a barren wasteland"). Marter has the expedition crawl through the caves for "several hundred meters", which obviously couldn't be realized on TV.

Even the appearance of the TARDIS is portrayed as a hideously freakish disaster, as the caves' "deathly silence" is invaded by a "harsh scraping and whirring noise" and "a final series of raucous shrieks", at which point the "battered" TARDIS is enveloped by "a dense cluster of swirling black drapery". Again, light-years from Dicks.

And then we get to the android massacre. In what was Doctor Who's freakishly prescient restaging of "Aliens" four years before James Cameron made it to London (albeit with a much higher budget), Eric Saward kills off several soldiers in Part One at the hands of the two Cybermen androids. The TV deaths were quick and bloodless, but Marter draws out each one in, at times, nauseating detail:

"She was standing in a shallow pool of steaming, viscous liquid in which were floating the scorched and tattered uniforms of two troopers. A sickly smell hung in the crackling air."

"Snyder's empty uniform collapsed into a puddle of sticky oozing froth".

"[H]is uniform crumpled like an empty sack amid billows of rubbery smoke."

This is a story with an immense body count and a huge number of disposable soldiers. Even Ringway, the story's sniveling human traitor, dies in horrific fashion:

"A sudden devastating bolt of energy sent him reeling against the console and his broken body slid to the deck, his face fixed in horror."

That's not how Peter Grimwade directed it on TV, that's for sure.

[3]

One unfortunate element of Marter's writing style is his portrayal of women. This is a glaring issue 35 years later, as it was with Terrence Dudley's novelization of The King's Demons. Professor Kyle is described "a rather plain plumpish woman". Later on he describes her "ample bosom", which... NO! Just... NO! Snyder, one of the disposable Earth troopers from Part One, is a "dumpy little figure".

Marter does enjoy writing for the Fifth Doctor, whom he describes as a "self-possessed young man dressed in carnival clothes". In fact, reading the Davison books in story order, he's the first writer to fully describe each character's wardrobe -- so much so that you expect he had access to JNT's private design files.

However, the Fifth Doctor does not have his finest hour here. In the book, he inadvertently triggers the awakening of the Cyberman whose actions seal Adric's fate. He also hesitates too long when the Cyberleader threatens Tegan's life, to the point where Adric believes the Doctor will let Tegan die in order to prove a rhetorical point. The Doctor's youth and helplessness, and a concealed violent rage against the Cyberleader, are all given considerable emphasis over what we saw on TV. At the end, this Doctor gives up on saving Adric even before the freighter crashes into Earth.

In retrospect, you can see why Saward replaced the Fifth Doctor with the Sixth; the Fifth is helpless in this violent world, quite unlike Colin Baker's Doctor in Attack of the Cybermen. The next Saward Cybermen story would not feature a Doctor this conflicted about violence.

Marter also finds the Cybermen fascinating. The script didn't do much with the notion of Cybermen as decayed humanoids kept alive through cybernetics; Saward refers to them as "robots" several times on TV and, Marter uses the word "automatons" a lot. However, he does refer to them as having "weirdly hypnotic" eye pods -- one of many times that Marter uses the words "weird", "bizarre" or "strange" to describe the action.

[4]

Marter's main literary technique is in using the language of the five senses to set the scene -- something the novelizations don't often do. Marter revels in describing smells and sounds that could not be realized on TV. Laser pistols whir. The Cybermen constantly emit mechanical noises, whether moving, thinking, or just standing still.

"The Cyberleader moved closer and the Doctor could not help recoiling slightly from the sweet, oily vapour that came from the ventilator grille."

*****

So Earthshock is a chore to read. The level of detail is immersive, but Marter's universe is violent, too loud and smells awful. It's an exhilarating book in short bursts, but many of his character descriptions are unflattering. Matthew Waterhouse in his autobiography took great issue with Marter's portrayal of Adric's final scene.

One funny side note comes at the end, though, as Tegan is "more concerned with the fate of Adric than the history of the dinosaurs". That's one character trait about both Tegan and Janet Fielding that Marter definitely got wrong...