Terrance Dicks’s Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks adapts the story of the same name from the ninth season, with Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor. Louis Marks wrote the shooting script, but Dicks served as editor, which gave him the insight to adapt it as a novel. The story focuses on Sir Reginald Styles, who is attempting to organize an international peace conference, only to have strange apparitions threaten him. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, the Doctor, his companion Jo Grant, and the rest of UNIT investigate to make sure nothing interferes with the conference. It turns out that guerillas from the twenty-second century are trying to kill Styles in order to prevent a third world war that will enable the Daleks to conquer Earth. Dicks’s adaptation ably conveys Pertwee’s portrayal of the Doctor while adding the greater depth and scale that a novel provides as compared to the limited budget available for individual Doctor Who episodes. Target Books original published this novelization in 1974 and this 1979 Pinnacle Books copy is the first American paperback edition. Prior to the widespread accessibility of home video, this was the only way for fans to relive past episodes or catch up on storylines they’d missed. ( )

This is another one of the (regrettably small number of) novelisations of classic Doctor Who stories that have made it into e-book form, here presented with the original line drawings, and with a postscript usefully detailing the differences between novel and TV versions. The TV story, starring Jon Pertwee and broadcast in January 1972, suffered by having to make three or four Daleks look like an army that had conquered the whole of the planet and, surprisingly, there are no more Daleks present here in the novel, and the 22nd century Earth they control is not presented in much greater depth than on the TV screen. But the novel succeeds as there is still more back story and motivation and some characters come across in more sympathetic depth than on screen, especially Anat and the Controller. Not one of the best novelisations, but very good all the same. ( )

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This is the most owned Doctor Who novelisation on LibraryThing, and certainly one of the best ones. Ian has written of the sharp contrast between the tense novel, especially the excellent characterisation of the Controller, and the much less convincing TV original. Well worth it. ( )