Doctor Who and the Cybermen by: Gerry Davis

 

Doctor Who and the Cybermen was written by Gerry Davis, based on The Moonbase by Kit Pedler.  It was the 12^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

This is an interesting novelization to really look at.  It’s the second Patrick Troughton story to be novelized and the third story to be novelized with missing episodes.  Now unlike The Abominable Snowmen which is currently missing 5 of its 6 episodes or The Crusade which was adapted before any of the episodes would have been junked, the two existing episodes of The Moonbase are two episodes which have always existed in the archives (and there was a chance Episodes 1 and 3 existed at the time Gerry Davis novelized the story).  Doctor Who and the Cybermen is the result and as the first novelization to feature the Cybermen, the title was changed to reflect this.  Gerry Davis served as script editor for the era and cowrote The Tenth Planet and The Tomb of the Cybermen with Kit Pedler as well as writing The Highlanders with Elwyn Jones and at the time of novelizing The Moonbase, writing Revenge of the Cybermen around the same time.  Doctor Who and the Cybermen is an interesting read since it’s early enough that the Target novelizations were able to experiment with how they would be adapting the stories and what exactly would be changed before Terrance Dicks became the dominant author and novels became fairly clear cut adaptations of their television counterparts before warping again towards expansions in preparation for the publishing of original Doctor Who novels.

 

The Moonbase as a plot is largely unchanged, most of the dialogue is retained, but anything that might have been adlibbed by Patrick Troughton and company is nowhere to be seen as it’s clear Davis had access to Pedler’s original scripts for the story.  Things are slowed quite a bit, something that will be repeated in Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen which I had an issue with and while it is an issue here, it isn’t as bad as the first half of The Moonbase is more of a slow burn mystery about what is happening on the base.  It doesn’t quite work when the title is changed to Doctor Who and the Cybermen so the reader knows that the Cybermen will be in the novel so the twist is lessened somewhat.  There is also a great attempt to get Jamie integrated into the plot better than he was on television as this was a story where he was written in at the last minute by adding him in to the back half of the story as he is still forced with an illness to keep the TARDIS team on the moon.  The second half of the story also isn’t as poorly served as Davis’ adaptation of The Tomb of the Cybermen, partially due to the slightly longer page count, although it is only 10 pages, those 10 pages make up a lot.  Some of the language also hasn’t aged well with some 1960s/1970s sexism still being there and a slur being used at one point during the book (though that slur was medical terminology of the time and is used in that context).

 

Overall, while Doctor Who and the Cybermen has a reputation for being one of the all time great classic novels, it doesn’t quite live up to that reputation due to some minor changes that slow things down and just not adding enough to proceedings.  It is still quite a lot of fun as a novel as Davis does well with the characters and gives them voice, partially due to being so involved in the making of the story more than the writing which was not the case for The Tomb of the Cybermen whose novelization suffered as a result.  8/10.