Gerry Davis’s Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet adapts Kit Pedler’s serial featuring the first appearance of the Cybermen and the First Doctor’s regeneration. The story begins with the Doctor, Ben, and Polly arriving at an Antarctic radar base on Earth in the year 2000 (the original episode took place in December 1986, but the novel takes place in 2000 [pg. 20]). There, they find that the base is experiencing difficulty reaching a rocket in orbit due to a power drain. As the drain continues, a new planet appears in the sky: Mondas. The planet is the twin to Earth, previously pushed out of its orbit and only now passing into proximity. Mondas has used up its energy and begins to drain the Earth while its inhabitants, the Cybermen, seize control of the Antarctic base. They were once creatures of flesh-and-blood, but they exchanged their organic parts for metal and plastic, losing their capability for emotion. The Doctor, weakening and appearing to age, must help Ben, Polly, and the base staff to out-think the Cybermen and save the Earth.

Like all the Target novelizations, Davis takes advantage of the novel format to add detail not possible in the original televised serial. For example, he mentions color, which would not have been apparent to viewers as the original episode was in black-and-white. He successfully captures the body-horror element of the Mondasian Cybermen, building on their inhuman elements while using the the book format to make them more violent than television guidelines would have allowed in 1966. Most significantly, Davis alters the Doctor’s regeneration. In the episode as televised, the Doctor enters the TARDIS before Ben and Polly, only just having the energy to let them in before he collapses to the floor where he regenerates in front of them. Davis writes the Doctor entering first, but Ben and Polly can open the TARDIS on their own and find the Doctor resting on a couch, already transformed. Despite those changes, the novel will delight fans and offers one of the most complete versions of the story since some of the original film remains lost. ( )

The welcome reappearance of the chilling Mondasian Cybermen in last weekend's Doctor Who episode led me to reread this novelisation of their first appearance in William Hartnell's final story in October 1966. It's a good novelisation, though not one of the best; ironically, Gerry Davis, who co-wrote the screenplay, here downplays the Cybermen's distinctive features in favour of the flatter-voiced and more typically robotic style that would have been more familiar to readers and viewers from the recent TV story Revenge of the Cybermen, which was on TV in 1975, the year before this book was first published. The same events happen in the same order for the most part, though the Doctor's growing weakness leading up to his regeneration at the end of the story is given a bit more emphasis. Now all we need is for the lost final episode of the story to turn up so we can see the whole thing (though I thought its animation on the DVD was well handled). ( )

This is a current reprint from BBC Books of a vintage Target Books novelization of the Doctor Who story, The Tenth Planet, the First Doctor's final adventure. Target Books would release novelizations of just about every Doctor Who episode, though not necessarily in the order that they serials were released to television. For instance, Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet was released in 1976, while the serial it was based on was broadcast in 1966. I have not seen the episodes this novelization was based on, but I'm familiar with the events and feel like the novel did a more than adequate job of translating the story to print. In fact, I think given that the story was written a decade after the episodes aired, Davis was able to improve on the story in some ways, since the future that was being described in the 1960s episodes was far closer to the 1970s story being told here. In the afterword, it is revealed that there are some changes made to the story, replacing scenes where the Doctor was missing from the aired episodes (William Hartnell was absent from an entire episode of filming due to illness, so changes to the script had to be made to include that absence), slight changes in time (the television episodes took place in 1986, the novelization takes place in 2000), and changes to the way the Doctor regenerated.

This adventure was also the introduction to the Cybermen, who came from Earth's sister planet Mondas, and who were coming to destroy the Earth. Mondas was a dying planet, and when it came back into our solar system, it started to leech power away from the Earth, so that eventually Earth would be laid to waste and Mondas would be a strong planet again. The Cybermen come to Earth to keep the security forces of the planet from interfering with the energy transference to Mondas. Naturally, the Doctor and his companions, Polly and Ben, find themselves in the right place at the right time (or the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on how you look at it), and the Doctor seems to know exactly what's going on and helps to defend the Earth. Through the course of this adventure, the Doctor grows more and more weak, eventually resulting in his first regeneration.

I really enjoyed reading this novelization. One of the things that made it really work for me was how contemporary the writing and feel of the story is for something that was written 35 years ago. Had I not know when the story was written before I read it, I would have thought it had been written more recently. I felt that the changes Davis made to the story worked well, especially since he wrote the original screenplay for The Tenth Planet and is responsible for the creation of the Cybermen, and was asked by Target to write this novelization ten years later.

This is my first experience with the Target Books edition of Doctor Who stories, and I'm fairly sure I'll be picking more up as I find them. Recommended for Doctor Who fans! ( )

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This was the first new First Doctor book published by Target, and is of course both the last First Doctor story and the first Cybermen story. Davis made a number of changes, mostly minor and annoying, to the script he co-wrote with Kit Pedler. Most crucially, the Doctor's regeneration at the end takes place in a coffin-like cabinet rather than just on the floor of the Tardis; also the year of the action is shifted from 1986 to 2000. Bizarrely, considering that Pedler's involvement was supposed to bring a bit more scientific credibility to the show, the number of basic mistakes is legion - the South Pole is about the least suitable place imaginable to put either a space tracking station or a deadly nuclear missile, the terms 'nova' and 'supernova' are flung about with wild abandon, and the whole foundation of the plot makes as much sense as Velikovsky. Plus Davis is compelled to do some retconning of the Telos/Mondas confusion which actually makes matters worse. I enjoyed the screen version much more; it was easier to go with the flow and ignore the flaws is the story. ( )