#i personally really like donald cotton's writing and he scripted my 2 favourite hartnell era stories but he's so different from other

[fangirlinglikeabus]

hello, here is part three of ‘i decided to read every dr who novelisation and now i’m making it other people’s problem’

galaxy 4 by william emms see, i like the tv version but even then i kinda had an inkling that this dude just Does Not Like women, and unfortunately the book only confirmed that! not just through the weird obsession with the drahvins’ beauty and the way the characters think about them, but i’m pretty sure there’s some added dialogue about it too. rip steven, whose character is assassinated once again by an author arbitrarily deciding he’s going to be a misogynist. also, bizarrely, this is the second novelisation where he’s been described as blond (or ‘fair’, this time). like, what? absolutely don’t recommend this one lol, which is a shame because i do actually like the whole idea of having a sympathetic alien race which looks really horrifying from a human point of view, and everything around that. uh...maybe if you’re super into reading the few references to regeneration that william emms put in?

the myth makers by donald cotton not quite as Out There as the romans which i thought was a shame but the myth makers is a fave of mine so even though there are a few points that i didn’t like (cassandra’s compared to a man in drag, pederasty is referenced in the context of achilles/patroclus, there’s a reference to rape which might seem blasé, there’s a conversation where the trojans are sarcastically called reactionaries and the greeks progressives which left me a bit ???is this an attack on progressive politics??) i still had a lot of fun. it’s told from the point of view of homer, taking some of the role of cyclops in the original, and as such we get his sarcastic commentary and slightly rejigged elements of the plot to explain how and where he’s getting his information. he even gets a bit involved at points, although he is by and large a commentator. this also leads to an epilogue that i really liked, personally. one random comment: it’s a bit bizarre that the dr’s trying to get vicki and steven to the 60s - maybe there was a bit of miscommunication there from production team to writer on where they’re from? anyway despite some reservations i do think this one’s worth reading, if only for the most...original description of the tardis materialising that i’ve come across yet. oh, and the terrible chapter puns. 

mission to the unknown by john peel two parter baby! despite its flaws, there’s something in me that finds an obnoxiously long dr who story fundamentally appealing, so i am a Fan of the daleks’ master plan. and for the most part this is a solid novelisation! however, john peel has decided to get Weird about women in it, which manifests in an uncomfortable number of comments on their attractiveness and the decision to make 1) katarina’s dress skimpier 2) sara’s uniform a form-fitting catsuit, so there were lines in this that made me cringe in on myself and hindered my enjoyment more than i’d’ve liked. plus there’s a line where mavic chen’s like ‘he had never felt the attraction of women himself’ so ig we’re getting queercoding added to ‘cruel compassionless and megalomaniacal asian man out to destroy  the planet which is otherwise exclusively represented by white people’ in terms of Unfortunate Tropes he embodies. other than that, we get a recap of the escape from troy, a few things that are slightly expanded on like bret’s confrontation with sara, her argument with steven ‘he was my brother’ scene in a cave instead of walking, and For Some Goddamn And Slightly Disturbing Reason, the implication that at least FOUR separate characters have been/are about to be eaten by native wildlife. 

the mutation of time by john peel this had less creepy stuff with women (although that did pop up occasionally) so it’s already better in my book. sara’s explicitly been travelling in the tardis for a few months and i liked that the story kept her thoughts of bret a bit more central than on tv! steven has a crush on sara which i’m uh. indifferent to and basically goes nowhere except for being mentioned in like 2 scenes. there are a lot of little things there, like a few references to earlier stories, a change in the egypt stuff so that one of the daleks gets killed, naming the police officers after z cars actors. dr who no longer wishes the audience merry christmas and steven doesn’t list the names of the dead at the end but we do get 2 extra scenes, one on skaro with the dalek prime and one where chen’s collaborator gets arrested. a few continuity points: the reason the tardis keeps going to earth is that the doctor spent so long trying to get ian and barbara there that it got stuck in a pattern; the doctor claims he’s over 700 but this directly contradicts the second doctor in tomb of the cybermen so i guess we’ve got more evidence of dr who lying about their age for the records. 

the massacre by john lucarotti oh this one is interesting. i know there was behind the scenes stuff in the 60s that led to this one being rewritten - did not realise that with the changes undone we’re given an entirely new plot thread! and it’s one that explains the burning question of the television version - where the hell was the doctor for all that time? he gets caught up with the huguenot apothecaries as they flee to the catacombs, and ends up being roped in to impersonate the abbot in order to gather information, all while steven is mostly kept in the dark. also, the tardis gets burned at the stake now. i think all that added stuff definitely makes this one worth reading, although honestly i don’t like the ending so much as the one on tv - the intensity there works better for the subject matter, imo, whereas here it’s bizarrely upbeat for a story about a religious massacre where several characters we meet are confirmed dead. the doctor does definitely intervene to save anne though, so that’s nice. oh, and the time lords get an appearance in both the prologue and the epilogue, in case you wanted to see those guys.

the ark by paul erickson ngl was not a fan of this one. it tries a bit to emphasise the monoids being mistreated and the dr criticising it but really this highlights a problem with the original: an ‘everyone was wrong’ moral doesn’t work when one side is ignorantly patronising and the other wants to commit genocide. like, the guardians are wrong, yeah, but the monoids are too over-the-top villainous for it to ever feel balanced. there’s a lot of expansion on the world (both on and off ship) in the first half that’s mildly interesting (even if the statements about genetic engineering are a bit disturbing - you bred aggression out of predators?), including a trek to several different ‘zones’, but after that all the stuff added in the second half just drags the plot (and also has this weird bit where the refusians adopt earth names? i guess aliens are just rushing to assimilate with the earth culture that’s going to colonise their planet). plus there’s way more criticism of the way dodo speaks, which i don’t like. this does technically mean that dodo never gets an introduction in the target books though, because her entrance was cut out of the last one and it’s not here either - instead there’s at least one line that gives the impression she’s been around a while.

the celestial toymaker by gerry davis and alison bingeman  this is written by two whole people and it’s still one of the most unremarkable novelisations i’ve read since an unearthly child. on the one hand, you’ve got a book that seems largely to have been churned out at an industrial speed (although i do like the description of the toymaker’s study as merging with space, and it gives us some nuggets of information like dodo being a ballet fan and steven reading military history books). on the other hand, at least they don’t include the racial slur this time? there’s this one line about soldiers liking the fair sex though, and i’m like...she’s sixteen. i don’t particularly recommend this one, but i do feel compelled to tell you all that one of the few significant and easily marked on changes to the original is that the dance floor now compels dodo and steven to dance to several different styles of music, including tango, foxtrot, and, uh, disco. 

the gunfighters by donald cotton it’s a deep tragedy in my life that they didn’t work out a way to keep the ballad of the last chance saloon, but after the last book i was glad that this one at least had a distinctive prose style to it - although the narrator’s slightly less remarkable, since he’s just someone writing up an account of what happened after interviewing the dying doc holliday. like cotton’s other works he plays a bit fast and loose with what happens on screen (expanded/altered dialogue, there’s a few scenes added to or curtailed, some stuff summarised, extra background) - and there’s like, sex jokes in this one?? they’re not particularly extreme at all but given that kate’s also allowed to say the word bastard as an insult i do suspect the bbc had stopped caring about overseeing these children’s books. there’s a few uncomfortable references to people thinking dodo might be in relationships with grown men (it’s 1881, i guess, so that might explain it cos they’re all made by 19th century characters but i don’t think it needed to be there in this light-hearted dr who book) which i didn’t like. wyatt is super religious now, also? highlights include johnny ringo, classicist; the phrase ‘steven, who had not hitherto realised he had a jib to cut’; dodo deciding that love doesn’t seem all that great and she’s just fine without it, thank you, which made my aro heart happy. not my fave of cotton’s novelisations and there’s definitely bits that made me go Um, but i don’t think you’ll be wasting time with it either!

the savages by ian stuart black my notes are so lacklustre for this because basically nothing of note gets changed. i like black’s prose when he writes it, but this is another one with large swathes of dialogue and not much flourish to them. not even things that the original could do with, like a more focused justification of steven’s stay, are there. steven says ‘not even dodo could be that silly’ instead of ‘stupid’, which is good because he already spends a fair bit of time delegitimising her viewpoint in this without attacking her intelligence so directly. i think having the narrator refer to the oppressed underclass as savages kinda undermines the moral - sure, they’re called savages by the people who want to view them as inferior to justify the way they treat them, but why does the neutral voice have to when we know what the implications of the word are? mainly i just wish black had written more, because there are some genuinely nice moments when he’s not just using what was there in the original.

the war machines by ian stuart black it was fun reading this back to back with the savages because it definitely doesn’t have the same problem: this feels like an actual proper novel with thought put into it, rather than a script with some bits added. i really liked the fight scene, it actually makes an effort to substantiate dodo’s departure (although she still doesn’t get to say goodbye, it mentions the doctor suspecting she’s wanted to go home pretty much since steven left), and ben no longer accuses polly of leading on a man who was harassing her - a minor victory, i guess, but there are definitely novelisations that haven’t cut dodgy parts of the original out even when they were written years later, so i’ll take what i can get. ian gets referenced too, which is nice, although given the progress he’s made in his career and references to things he did ‘at the beginning of the decade’ and the doctor’s belief he’ll have trained today’s scientists, it gives the bizarre impression that black’s backdated ian and barbara’s travels slightly. aside from this weird line near the beginning that implies ‘womankind’ value the ‘primitive safe space’ more than ‘mankind’ (???) i would really recommend this one.