Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen by: Terrance Dicks

 

Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen was written by Terrance Dicks, based on The Abominable Snowmen by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln.  It was the 10^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

The Abominable Snowmen is an interesting choice to adapt as the first Second Doctor novelization.  Stories like The Web of Fear, The Tomb of the Cybermen, and The Ice Warriors were no doubt more popular and The War Games had both writers adapting serials into the novelization.  But Terrance Dicks had no real connections to The Abominable Snowmen, not coming onto the show until The Seeds of Death and not writing until The War Games.  His adaptation is interesting, influenced by his and Barry Letts’ appreciation of Buddhism the novelization adapts character names to be closer to accurate with the spirituality though this was still a book written in the mid-1970s by a white man who was not a Buddhist.  It doesn’t attempt to be historically accurate to the past as the story was set in the 1940s (before the UNIT Dating Controversy began).  Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen is an interesting adaptation as it manages to take a six episode story and speed it up.  Six episode stories are something difficult to adapt into a short page-count and this was Dicks’ first six-part story novelized as before this he had only done Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion and Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks.  Each episode gets two chapters, making it a nice twelve chaptered book on pace, improving the pace of the television story which languishes in the middle while expansions to the early scenes and the final battle makes things feel satisfying.  The translation to prose also improves the Yeti themselves, on television they were far too cuddly, looking almost like giant teddy bears which would be redesigned for The Web of Fear in a much more effective way.  There’s also the fact that Dicks can make the setting work as a snowy mountain monastery, as on television rain washed away the snow that was supposed to make the atmosphere work.  Dicks is able to make the atmosphere work and turn the story closer to the horror story that it was intended to be, though Victoria is still reduced to a screamer as she is still hypnotized halfway through which is a shame and Jamie feeling more like his characterization in Season 6, which is the season Dicks worked on.

 

Overall, Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen may be an improvement from a fairly okay television story, it does feel like a bit of an oddity since Terrance Dicks didn’t really have a connection to the season this was adapted from, though he would adapt The Web of Fear to at least fandom acclaim as it is among the novelizations that people associated as the story until its recovery in 2013.  It’s good, but not perfect.  7/10.