Doctor Who and an Unearthly Child by: Terrance Dicks: Enter the Doctor

Doctor Who and An Unearthly Child was written by Terrance Dicks, based on An Unearthly Child by: Anthony Coburn.  It was the 65^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

The Target range of Doctor Who novelizations are famous for not actually adapting An Unearthly Child until the 1980s.  Terrance Dicks chose to novelize the story before the 1983 anniversary special and surprisingly breathed some life into a story that was initially flat on broadcast.  The first part of the televised story is as perfect as an episode can be and Dicks’ novelization was simply taking the episode and writing it in novel form while adding in some of the thoughts of the characters which you can’t get when watching a television script.  He even manages to characterize the policeman seen wandering through the fog at the beginning of the story.  When we actually get to Parts Two, Three and Four, Dicks still goes with the standard novelization, differing on two main points.  First we learn more of the backstory of the tribe with Za’s father being killed while hunting and the Old Woman being a superstitious old bat.  Second when Za gets himself attacked by a tiger Dicks actually details the attack whereas on television they never could have had enough of a budget to decently portray a saber tooth tiger without completely blowing the budget right out of the water.  The novel also doesn’t suffer from the pacing problems of the original as everything is limited to about 90 pages or so to keep everything snappy.

 

To summarize, Doctor Who and an Unearthly Child is a definite improvement on the original story and Terrance Dicks’ writing style makes it easy to get through the tedium of the original plot.  Nowhere near perfect, but definitely an engaging read for everything to work out in.  75/100