The Horns of Nimon

Target novelisation Doctor Who and the Horns of Nimon

Author	Terrance Dicks
Published	1980
ISBN	0 426 20131 0
First Edition Cover	Steve Kyte

Back cover blurb: In the great maze of the Power Complex dwells the dreaded Nimon, a fearsome monster with immense scientific powers. The Nimon has promised to restore the Skonnan Empire to its former glory. But first it demands sacrifice - youths and maidens from the peaceful planet Aneth. The Tardis collides with the space ship delivering the victims, and the captured Romana is condemned to be sacrificed to the Nimon. Aided by the faithful K9, the Doctor goes to the rescue. In the heart of the maze he confronts the Nimon and uncovers a terrifying plot to enslave the galaxy.

• Myth and mania by Tim Roll-Pickering
• Never Bet Against Terrance by Jason A. Miller
• What the Nimon did I just read? by Matthew Kresal

Myth and mania by Tim Roll-Pickering 20/10/08

On screen, The Horns of Nimon is an unabashed party, appropriately transmitted at Christmas time. The novelisation didn't take long to follow, but by the time it arrived the series had become distinctly more serious. Here in print, there are signs of both the old and new approaches - the flippant attitude of the Doctor to his foes is preserved, but there are moments of serious contemplation, showing up the unquestioning approaches of some of the characters such as Soldeed. A prologue explains the rise and fall of the first Skonnan Empire, and how a middle-aged laboratory technician became the ruler of his people when a sphere arrived, helping to place the story in context. Soldeed is presented as slightly more seriously than on screen, but it would be near impossible to reproduce Graham Crowden's performance in print; it's a fair trade off for also losing the weak performances by the Anethans. There's still plenty of madness from the TARDIS being used like a cricket ball to the way the Doctor runs rings around his opponents time and again.

As with so many of its contemporaries, Doctor Who and the Horns of Nimon is a solid short read, faithfully adapting the camera script. However, when adapting a story that is very much rooted in performances, this approach can fall flat. Much of the story is absurd even by the series' normal standards and so the Doctor's actions in putting the TARDIS at risk at the outset, the complete failure of the once rulers of a galactic empire to question why the Nimon is helping them or the risky nature of the Nimon's plan that relies on them being able to build multiple transmat stations in time before Crinoth is destroyed are all gaping absurdities that now stand out in full. The mythic roots of the story remain acknowledged, with the Doctor now wondering, as in both the televised and novelisation versions of Underworld, if the myths aren't confused retellings of the past but predictions of the future.

What emerges is a solid, if not particularly exciting, book. But then The Horns of Nimon is an especially distinctive adventure that would always have been a challenge to adapt well, and certainly not suitable for merely transcribing the camera scripts. 4/10

Never Bet Against Terrance by Jason A. Miller 25/5/19

For decades, the rap against Terrance Dicks' novelizations was that his books were too short and that they were merely transcripts of the shooting scripts, not adding anything interesting -- purely juvenile fare, and not worthy of the lofty heights of other writers in the Target stable.

I bought into this criticism for a while. I mean, just on the pure math alone, it's easy to assume that a guy who wrote eight novelizations a year, most of them barely cracking a hundred pages each, was going to cut corners and put out pretty rote, unmemorable work. Doctor Who and the Horns of Nimon came out in October 1980. Target put out 11 books in 1980, and Terrance wrote 10 of those alone -- including a junior novelization of The Brain of Morbius. Only Philip Hinchcliffe with Doctor Who and the Keys of Marinus got a book in to keep Terrance from monopolizing the year all to himself.

What amazes about Doctor Who and the Horns of Nimon, then, is that, coming towards the end of a stretch where Terrance wrote ten books in 13 months, he still manages to be a wizard of clever, economic word choices, sly jabs at the original script and razor-sharp character insights. This is a short, short book, but it's got something to get you to nod your head vigorously with nearly every page.

Terrance starts off with a Prologue, which is something he typically reserved for more "epic" stories. Nimon on TV was most decidedly not epic, but it was based on Greek mythology, so the Prologue casts the backstory in overtly classical terms:

The aggressive streak that had brought them success was to cause their downfall. The noble families fell to fighting amongst themselves, Emperor followed Emperor in quick succession, rival Emperors set up against each other, and soon the Skonnan Empire, like Ancient Rome before it, collapsed from within.

Names are given to the Skonnan battle cruiser pilot (Sekkoth, who isn't around for long), and co-pilot (Sardor, who is). I don't know if these names came from an older Anthony Read draft or if Terrance made them up, but now every named Skonnan character starts with an "S", which tells you lots about the Skonnan mindset. We also learn that Soldeed was a lowly lab tech who stumbled into his role as Skonnan leader quite by accident. Soldeed later grows his "pointed beard in an effort to add authority to his otherwise undistinguished features". Hopefully Graham Crowden didn't read that bit and shout out "I'm not undistinguished!"

You will find that the characters in this book are more muted than on TV, as it omits any changes to the script added in rehearsal (and rehearsal videotape of Tom Baker and Graham Soldeed egging each other on to more and more scenery-chewing excess would be something I'd watch, like, every other day). Sardor doesn't repeatedly shout "Weakling scum!" to the Anethans' faces, and Soldeed doesn't try to pull his face off while shouting three, he has seen three! Tom Baker doesn't pin a rosette on K-9 or give him mouth-to-mouth, but there's enough wit in Read's original scripts that the book is still funny without those extra ad-libs. And Terrance does call K-9 "the Doctor's valued, if sometimes irritating, companion", which is great.

On the other hand, Terrance really burrows into Sorak's head, and walks us thought by thought how Soldeed's second-in-command becomes disenchanted with his boss and looks for ways to relieve him of command. On TV, the Doctor says that Sorak won't be much better than Soldeed as Skonnos' new ruler, but in the book, Terrance leaves Sorak with a more optimistic fate -- which is justified by all the Sorak-POV scenes. Of course, Soldeed doesn't do too badly either; we learn that he's "merely bluffing" with his shows of confidence. Terrance basically turns Soldeed into Greek tragedy. When Sorak questions the Nimon's generosity, we learn that "Soldeed had sometimes wondered the same thing, but he pretended to be outraged". On TV, you feel sad when Soldeed dies because Graham Crowden played him so vividly; in the book, you feel sad when he dies because Terrance makes him quite the unfortunate sap.

Chapter 2 opens, "It was a dark and stormy day". I mean, I can't even. Remember that 1980 was the height of Charles M. Schulz's ongoing Snoopy-as-writer storyline, where every single one of Snoopy's manuscripts began "It was a dark and stormy night". So way to go for Terrance, both honoring Mr. Bulwer-Lytton, and reveling in the late '70s cultural zeitgeist.

Terrance restructures the Part One cliffhanger to remove the Nimon's appearance, and pushes it back into the Part Two material. The first description of the Nimon compares it to a buffalo or a "bull that had learned to talk and walk upon his hind legs like a man". The description of the Nimon's head having "no suggestion of a neck" is another clever cover for the Nimon's neckless on-screen costume. Not to mention covering the prolonged silence of all those non-Equity extras playing the Anethan sacrifices (who are in nearly every scene on TV but never say a word) with a "they're too frightened even to talk" zinger.

Terrance also continues his trend of whitewashing... at least as far as describing brunettes as "fair-haired". He had Harry Sullivan as fair-haired in several earlier books, and here the raven-haired beauty Janet Ellis is also "fair-haired" playing Teka. Seth also tells her to "shut up" at one point, which was thankfully never part of the TV episodes. But Terrance also provides a description of K-9's battery cycle, regenerative powers and fear of heights, which almost makes up for his weaker portrayal of Teka.

The ending includes Terrance adding material to cover up some plot holes from the rushed ending ("They hadn't left immediately after the explosion") and has the Doctor advising Sorak on how to be a better leader. The Doctor also tells Romana (and all the nine-year-olds reading the book in 1980) the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, making more obvious in print what was only heavily alluded to on TV.

In short, this is a little book, but Terrance doesn't waste a word. Character insights, classical allusions, lots of wit. It's not as farcical or whimsical as the TV episodes, but Terrance brings Anthony Read's scripts to life all the same. And all that in less than a hundred pages. Terrance can be the ruler of my own Power Complex any day.

What the Nimon did I just read? by Matthew Kresal 25/3/26

In the age of home video and streaming, the Target novelizations that were a staple of early Doctor Who merchandise and fandom can seem like quaint artifacts of another time. Why, after all, would you really want to spend the time reading something you can watch? Especially given how many of them that Terrance Dicks wrote at such speed that they can sometimes come across as transcripts of serials with a minimum of description. Or in regards to lesser regarded serials? Because every so often you come across something like Doctor Who and the Horns of Nimon and rethink what you know about a particular story.

Though, in all fairness to those reading this review, it's worth mentioning that this reviewer has had a mixed relationship with the TV version of The Horns of Nimon. It was a story I came to comparatively early in my time as a Doctor Who fan, purchased at the tail end of 2007 as part of the mammoth End of the Universe VHS collection and watched within a few weeks of its arrival. It was the first time I encountered what this site's editor has called "the Tom Baker comedy half-hour". It was a diverting way to spend ninety minutes or so, but watching Lalla Ward as Romana acting her socks off to sell the part two cliffhanger only to have Baker come in and depth charge her efforts the next episode and Graham Crowden's performance as Soldeed left me unimpressed. Viewing the VHS again a couple of times did nothing to change that, and I skipped out on the DVD release. It wasn't until I was gifted the Season 17 Blu-Ray for Christmas many years later that I gave it another serious look and found more to enjoy, especially from Ward's performance and the odd moment here and there, but it was still a less-than-stellar example of Classic Who in the Tom Baker era. Something that left me with less than high hopes when I gave the novelization a try.

I'm glad I did.

In looking at novelizations such as Frontier in Space (sorry, The Space War) and The Power of Kroll over the past few years, a trend has emerged among a number of the Target books. Cases where original writers in some cases but adapters such as Dicks in others were able to go back to what was intended rather than what was produced on-screen. This is something that fans tend to associate when the McCoy era novelizations such as Remembrance of the Daleks (which improved upon an already strong TV serial) or stories such as Ghost Light or The Curse of Fenric (where material cut from broadcast could be reinstated). These "writer's cuts" can make one look at a serial in a new light. Dicks' novelization of The Horns of Nimon is just a case.

Speaking to Doctor Who Magazine in 1999, Dicks noted that the Nimon script had been "a problematic one" and a case where he "had to try and make sense of [it]!" That attention to detail and trying to resolve plot holes is clear throughout the novelization from its opening page. Dicks launched this prose re-telling with a prologue, a seemingly favorite device of his, to tell the history of both the Skonnan Empire with its collapse ala Rome but also the arrival of the Nimon and how Soldeed ended up in the improbably position of power he occupied in the TV serial. All of which adds some valuable context to what was broadcast across the 1979-80 holiday season. If it had been just for that, Dicks' work would have gone a way toward offering a better version of the same story.

Dicks, however, as that 1999 Doctor Who Magazine quote alluded, continued to work his magic. There are expanded characterizations throughout of the Skonnans such as Soldeed, who is an out-of-his-depth laboratory technician elevated to a level of power by encountering the Nimon, forcing him to bluff about how much he knows to maintain his position. Sorak, captain of the Skonnan military, we learn is not only skeptical of the Nimon as he was on TV but warily tolerating Soldeed until he can overthrow him. Or, in the first half, there's the Co-Pilot who was a comedy character on-screen that scriptwriter Anthony Read had intended to be much younger but still hotheaded, longing nostalgically for the days of imperial glory, something that Dicks preserves alongside actually giving the character the name of Sardor. Coming to these characterizations in 2025, there's something that feels oddly timely about the vision that Dicks (and Read as the original scriptwriter) offer of a cast of characters ranging from out of their depth to simply over ambitious and under-talented trying to turn nostalgia into reality. Beyond that, the rushed ending gets expanded upon, explaining the aftermath between the final confrontation in the Power Complex and that final TARDIS scene that goes a long way to clear up some messy leftover plot points that the TV version passed over. Even the Nimon themselves come across quite differently, with a physical description that makes them feel like intelligent but primal beasts rather than the bulky and cumbersome costumes that were on-screen. The sum of these parts is a different vision of what The Horns of Nimon could have been.

Not that Dicks can or does change everything. A number of those "Tom Baker comedy half-hour" moments remain, especially in the TARDIS scenes across early chapters. That depth charging of tension at a cliffhanger still happens with Dicks recreating the on-screen effect on the page by putting it at a chapter break. The intentional comedy remains but some of the more infamous moments, such as the death of Sardor or Romana forcing Soldeed's admission that the Nimon have deceived him, are played as Read originally intended. Yet the moments that remain still hamper the narrative in moments, something that remains apparent on the page.

Is The Horns of Nimon a case where the production team bungled a good script? There's an argument to be made that was the case, given how much material Dicks restored. There's also no doubt that Dicks went a long way to filling in some of the gaps that Read, script editor Douglas Adams and the cast's performances left behind. Imperfect though it remains, Doctor Who and the Horns of Nimon offers a vision of what the TV serial might have been in a different season. Meaning that, like me, you'll likely not look at the TV story the same way again after reading this.