Full Circle by: Andrew Smith

 

Full Circle was written by Andrew Smith, based on his story of the same name.  It was the 71^st story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

It’s always been interesting to me that in 1980 Barry Letts, John Nathan-Turner, and Christopher H. Bidmead allowed Full Circle to enter production.  Not because it is some terrible story that should never have seen the light of day, on the contrary it’s quite a good story about cyclic evolution and bureaucracy interfering in societal development, but because it was submitted by Andrew Smith who was only 17 at the time.  A teenager writing for a professional television project is something you wouldn’t really expect, but since the Doctor Who production office accepted open submissions and Letts, Nathan-Turner, and Bidmead were looking for new talent (only two authors for Season 17 would have contributed before, David Fisher and Terrance Dicks, both having ideas ready to go and easily adaptable to the vision plus Dicks’ close friendship with Letts) Smith’s proposal was accepted on its strengths in the form of Full Circle.  What makes this especially interesting is that two years later a 19 year old Smith would also write the novelization, his only novel.

 

The novelization of Full Circle is another perfect example of how Doctor Who changes from television to prose, mainly in expansion.  On television, despite being four episodes, the story is actually quite short with the middle two only coming to 22 minutes instead of the more common 24 to 25, though the story is bookended by 24-minute installments.  A lot of the expansion to the story doesn’t come from adding any events, but Smith really gets to show off his skills as a worldbuilder.  While on television the bureaucracy of the Starliner’s society is there, in novel form it is brought to the forefront since you get a lot of the internal motivations of the other Deciders.  Take for instance, Draith chasing Adric in the swamp before Mistfall, on television we don’t actually get much of who the character is but in Smith’s novelization he feels more caring for Adric, trying to catch him to help and calm him.  Or for instance the bond between Adric and Varsh, who don’t actually feel like siblings for much of the television series, but here there is a tender bond between the two and the symbol of his rope belt is also vitally important to who Adric is and why he joins the TARDIS in the end.  Finally, you have the Marshmen themselves are actually given a culture and language whereas on television they were just sort of there.

 

That being said, Full Circle is far from a perfect novelization.  It does improve on the worldbuilding, but there really isn’t as much capturing the personalities of the Doctor, Romana, and K9, they’re kind of background characters in the story already, Romana being taken over by the spiders in particular really feels like a damselling made worse here by the way Smith writes it.  Still it is a genuinely great time of a novel but is still a little uneven in places from being written by a 19 year old based on a story written by a 17 year old.  8/10.