The Ambassadors of Death by: Terrance Dicks: You Must Feed Them Radiation- Or They Will Die

The Ambassadors of Death was written by Terrance Dicks based on his story of the same name written with David Whitaker, Trevor Ray, and Malcolm Hulke.  It was the 123^rd story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

This one’s going to be a very quick Doctor Who Target Book Review.  Well it’s a Terrance Dicks novelization of a story that he helped write and Script Edit when it was aired on television, and he doesn’t really change much.  Yes this novel is one that doesn’t have a lot of differences from the original television story and while sometimes that makes the novelized version a better version of the story, this time it doesn’t work.  Dicks does the best work when he is adding in a bit of internal thoughts to some of even the more minor of characters which is done really well in the novel.  The fail however comes in the fact that some of the best parts of the original broadcast story come from the direction of the television serial and how exactly Ferguson decided to shoot the Ambassadors to make them feel scary.  Also the description of their touches really doesn’t do much where at least on television made a sound and had a flash of light before they died.  The novel just has them die with a vague explanation about how heat was given off from the people as they died.

 

To summarize, The Ambassadors of Death is a novelization that is hurt by its adaptation being direct from the television story.  It would be much better just to go and watch the television story than reading the novel as while still really good, it is a Terrance Dicks book after all, the book suffers extremely from changing mediums from a visual medium to the medium of print.  80/100