The Ice Warriors

Target novelisation Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors

Author	Brian Hayles
Published	1974
ISBN	0 426 10866 3
First Edition Cover	Chris Achilleos

Back cover blurb: The world is held in the grip of a second Ice Age, and faces total destruction from the rapidly advancing glaciers. DOCTOR WHO, with Victoria and Jamie, lands at a top scientific base in England, where they have just unearthed an ancient ICE WARRIOR. Aliens from Mars, preserved in the ice for centuries and now revitalised, the Ice Warriors feel ready to take over... Can the Doctor overcome these warlike Martians and halt the relentless approach of the ice glaciers...?

• Not as good as Hayles' first novelisation... by Tim Roll-Pickering
• A Review by Jason A. Miller

Not as good as Hayles' first novelisation... by Tim Roll-Pickering 12/1/04

Brian Hayles returns to Target for his second and final novelisation. Like Gerry Davis, Hayles brings to life a 1960s story written by him that might otherwise have gone unnovelised for many years. Hayles had already delivered a strong effort in Doctor Who and the Curse of Peladon, but here he is novelising a television story which was stretched from its natural four parts to six and settles into the "base-under-siege" format all too quickly.

Fortunately the novelisation works better. The story feels more naturally paced, almost as though Hayles has structured it as he would have intended rather then elongating it to fit the requirements of the story length available. For much of the book Hayles seemingly follows the course of events onscreen, adding in little details such as giving the computer a name - ECCO. However he never explains what this stands for, whilst elsewhere there are some noticeable lapses. The scene where Clent quizzes the Doctor on how to tackle the glaciers with the equipment available now becomes absurd as the Doctor has only just witnessed the Ioniser in action and so the solution to Clent's puzzle is all too obvious. Hayles also fails to take the opportunity to flesh out the backstory more, though the explanation for the collapse in carbon dioxide levels that caused the Ice Age now makes a lot more sense than it did onscreen.

Whilst the book feels well paced, all too often it feels like a straightforward rendition of the transmitted story with opportunities to expand upon the events and concepts being ignored. No attempt is made to date the story, though it feels like it is set in the near future, whilst the computer's logical dilemma is not expounded upon as much as possible, with the result that when it is given the additional information about the Martians' spaceship reactor it suddenly crashes even though this makes little difference to the course of (in)action it has already been proposing. The ideological divide between Clent and Penley was a major element onscreen, even being the key focus of the original trailers, but here it is not really built up leaving only the odd moment of confrontation between the two and the moment at the end where it is clear that Clent now respects Penley to show the strong character struggle.

The characters feel a little crude, as though Hayles has not attempted to bring their performances to life. In particular Troughton's Doctor does not spring to life in the same way that Terrance Dicks and Gerry Davis achieved in the earlier novelisations, Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen, Doctor Who and the Cybermen and Doctor Who - The Three Doctors. Here is perhaps the earliest indication of how some prose authors can find this incarnation difficult to write for. Jamie and Victoria are also weak and the book is missing the wonderful scene where the former starts fantasising about how the latter will look in a short skirt. Hayles' descriptions of the charecters are limited, making them harder to envisage and little details such as Clent's walking stick are now lost. He is also inconsistent in referring to Jan Garrett as variously "Jan" or "Miss Garrett", making her difficult to keep track of at times.

Although there is much to fault this novelisation for, the plot does nevertheless remain strong, with a real sense of danger throughout. However Brian Hayles' first novelisation was a very strong effort and living up to it was always going to be hard. Sadly his second and final novelisation is a much weaker book that does not serve either his memory or the original story well. 6/10

A Review by Jason A. Miller 22/1/19

Brian Hayles only lived long enough to novelize two of his six credited Doctor Who scripts. His adaptation of The Curse of Peladon, printed in January 1975, includes several extra scenes not seen on TV, but the prose is choked by extra verbiage that, as Hayles might have put it, would be a daunting challenge for even the most courageous audiobook narrator to orally record for the impatient stalwarts in the captive listening audience. But, being one of the few Pertwee-era four-part adventures, the scripts were fairly tight, with nothing much to "fix" for the novelization, and so the book is fairly straightforward. However, Hayles' other novelization, The Ice Warriors, released in March 1976, manages both to vary greatly from what was on TV and to actually impress with less overwrought prose.

The Ice Warriors on TV is problematic, even though the story concept, production design and acting are all first rate. As with the rest of Season 5, six scripts produced in cramped little Lime Grove Studio D result in a "base under siege" story with lots of padding. The middle episodes especially have to resort to marking time in a thimble-sized studio, which could barely house Totter's Yard, let alone a huge chunk of England. Hence, much of Episodes 4 and 5 (or, as they were called for this story, FOUR and FIVE) contain lengthy static dialogue exchanges about uncomplicated moral concepts; Frazer Hines and Peter Sallis, in pre-filmed inserts, give reaction shots to stock footage of tigers and bears. A recipe for success, this is not.

Given the chance to tighten up the budget- and studio-space-imposed failings, Hayles writes a much more efficient book. The first two episodes take up literally half the page count; Varga's awakening, at the end of Episode 1 on TV, comes nearly a third of the way into the book, and the Episode 2 cliffhanger, where Varga exhorts his frozen comrades to "Awake from the dead!", comes just after the halfway point. Episodes 3 and 6 both take up, appropriately, about one-sixth of the page count. That leaves, you'll notice, very little page space for Episodes 4 and 5.

The compression means that some of the flavor of the TV story is lost, but this is neither unfortunate nor fatal. On TV, Storr and Penley live in a "plant museum"; this term is applied in the novelization but never quite described visually. FOUR loses lengthy dialogue exchanges between the Doctor and Leader Clent, and Penley and Storr, but these are mostly circular arguments with nothing of Shakespearean quality. The cliffhanger to FOUR, with the Doctor trapped in an airlock, is much condensed, with both peril and resolution confined to the same sentence. Jamie is removed entirely from FOUR and FIVE, with the on-screen wilderness "adventure" (complete with the aforementioned reaction shots of Messrs. Hines and Sallis) omitted entirely. We also lose the Doctor making several detours en route to the Ice Warriors' spaceship. Episode 6 is preserved mostly intact, to round out the book; Walters' murder is simplified, and, while Varga loses the awesome line "At least I will live to regret it," he is also given a more dramatic and satisfactory death, saluting the potency of the enemy's Ioniser in his final moments.

Apart from the restructuring of the TV scripts, there is a lot to like about the writing style, especially compared to the Peladon book. The world Hayles describes is faintly dystopian, with a hint of "Brave New World" about it. All humans in Brittanica Base are rigidly categorized; Miss Garrett is a "First Class Technical Organizer", although the security sergeant, Walters, is still described as "burly"; as with every Target book ever written, you can't describe a sergeant as being anything but burly. Storr, the scavenger, was played on TV by wee Scottish actor Angus Lennie, whose most famous movie character was nicknamed "The Mole", but here he's "big" and (again) "burly" with a "wild shaggy beard" and has an ominous physical presence; he even knocks Penley unconscious at one point in the book, in a way that the character did not do on TV. This knockout blow, by the way, spares us the adaptation of one of the interminable dialogue exchanges mentioned above.

The Ice Warriors are memorably portrayed. As Mark Gatiss depicted in Cold War, they wear bionic armor here -- something never explicitly stated in the classic series. Varga is described as "forever struggling to snatch in precious air, with the result that every breath, every word it uttered, hissed snake-like from that menacing head." The armor is more interesting on TV, too, with sonar capability on the breastplates which "glowed and pulsed", and much is made of Varga having superior and more Lordly armor to those of his comrades (this from a story written before the TV series separated the Martians out into Warrior and Lord castes). We don't, unfortunately, get many hints from Varga's POV about life on Mars, other than that Frequency Seven on the Warriors' sonic canon was used as a form of aversion punishment in prison. For a full description of life on Mars, the world would have to wait 20 years, for the publication of Craig Hinton's New Adventure, GodEngine... Of course, after that book came out, the world probably wished that it had been allowed to keep waiting.

The violence quotient is upped considerably, with Arden's death being particularly gruesome:

Arden took the full brunt of the massive burst of sonic power. His body seemed to shimmer, almost disintegrate, beneath the invisible blast of energy. For a split second, he seemed suspended like a broken puppet, his face crumpled in agonised surprise. Then he slumped to the ground... as though hurled there by a giant hand.

Mr. Roll-Pickering is also confused about the author's use of both "Jan" and "Miss Garrett" to describe the only female guest character. Tim says this makes her "difficult to keep track of at times". I didn't see this as much of an issue as did Tim Roll-Pickering, as she's introduced the first time as "Miss Jan Garrett", and it's not unusual for a competent author to refer to a character in multiple fashions. Therefore, I can't echo the complaint made by Mr. Tim Roll-Pickering in this instance.

So that's it for Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors. The remaining Ice Warrior adventures were not novelized until the '80s, both rather rotely by Terrance Dicks. No more inside information was coming, alas, from their creator. Brian Hayles died, only 47 years old, in October 1978. Several more Ice Warriors tales followed, both in the original novels and in the New Series, but, if I could take only one Ice Warriors story with me, were I to be marooned on Mars, this would be the book.