Shada by: Gareth Roberts

 

Just a quick disclaimer about this review before I begin.  Trans rights are human rights and those who disagree are definitively on the wrong side of history.  Gareth Roberts has made his transphobia clear through numerous Twitter posts and reviewing his work will always have that mark of transphobia on it.

 

Shada was written by Gareth Roberts, based on the television story of the same name by Douglas Adams.  It was the 165^th story to be novelized by BBC Books.

 

There doesn’t seem to be another Doctor Who story that has as many options to experience as Shada.  Left incomplete in 1980 due to industrial action, it was originally meant to close the seventeenth season of the show, ending instead on the lackluster The Horns of Nimon.  This was meant to be Douglas Adams’ magnum opus on the show as he would leave the script editor position of the show giving way for Christopher H. Bidmead while producer Graham Williams would be giving the job to John Nathan-Turner.  Footage would be used in The Five Doctors, there would be a VHS release, an audio version, no less than three official and one unofficial animated version, and today’s version, the novelization published in 2012 just in time for the 50^th Anniversary of the show under the pen of Gareth Roberts who won acclaim for his trilogy of Season 17 novels The Romance of Crime, The English Way of Death, and The Well-Mannered War.  Roberts does far more than attempt to simply emulate Adams’ style and copy the script word for word, at this point there was already the VHS release, audio, and an official and unofficial animation.  Shada was a story that people knew, and Roberts knew that a simple Target style novelization wouldn’t make it worth it.  The Target novelizations mainly were motivated by the fact that you couldn’t just watch a story, and even Shada, the unfinished story, had a DVD release approaching remastering the VHS release.  The book clocks in at 400 pages and expands every element of the story with Roberts crafting intricate motivations and backstories for all of the major players and quite a few of the bit parts, something that makes this feel not like a simple novelization, but a full novel.

 

The novel is presented in six parts because the television serial would have been six parts, but the six parts aren’t as evenly spaced as six 25 minute episodes, some are longer, some shorter, all given just enough time to explore the plot points they need to explore.  This isn’t perfectly done, there is a point where Skagra has just arrived on Earth and he is propositioned by this closeted gay man which just feels really off, playing on some very negative stereotypes about LGBT people in general.  Luckily, it is a small moment and serves more to get into what makes Skagra work as a villain, as he is a villain that only works through the performance of Christopher Neame or Andrew Sachs (depending on the version).  Here Roberts excels at making him feel off but not so off that the reader doesn’t understand what his motivations are and what makes him tick.  They are absolutely absurd motivations, but these motivations are distinct from the first page and there is more depth in the explanation of the opening scenes as well as a lot of the climax than any of the other versions of the story simply because this is a book.  It’s a book that makes brilliant use of its prose while homaging Douglas Adams’ very distinct style of writing, which amps some of the absurdism up to the highest level.

 

Overall, Shada is a novelization that injects as much character that can be through expansion of the rather simple story in tribute to the era that it was written in.  While it is a story that has been superseded by other releases, it is still a really good time and easily readable.  The characters jump off the page and the pace moves along rather quickly with the extended page count working really well although there are some genuinely poor tropes added in that weren’t in the original script and a few moments that just don’t work and indicate some of the views of the adapter rather than Adams.  9/10.