by David Whitaker, illustrated by Robert Hack

BBC Books, out now

 

A fully-illustrated hardback reissue of the first Doctor Who novel.

There can’t be that many 58-year-old children’s books outside of works by classic authors like Roald Dahl that get a deluxe, hardback reissue, but that’s exactly what BBC Books are treating us to, a year ahead of Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary.

I can’t imagine that there’s any Doctor Who fan of a certain age who in their youth didn’t pick up a copy of the Target or Armada paperback Doctor Who and the Daleks, written by the show’s script editor David Whitaker. Author Neil Gaiman was one such child, and his ‘…in an exciting introduction with the Daleks’ (reprinted from the 2011 Target edition) he speaks for many about how influential it was on his subsequent writing.

The book has subsequently been reissued in many editions, including a facsimile of the Frederick Muller hardback, containing line drawings by Arnold Schwartzman. The unique selling point of this version is the original drawings have been replaced with 60 new colour illustrations by artist Robert Hack, and they are gorgeous. Ranging from a detail in the corner of a page to a double-page spread, Hack has produced illustrations based on the text as written, rather than reproducing stills or screen grabs from the serial itself. Quite apart from being in colour, everything is bigger and better than the real thing (as the books always endeavoured to do) and we get a Dalek mutant and beasts from the Lake of Mutations far more thrilling than what was on TV.

Verdict: A lovely idea, beautifully executed, for you to Escape into Danger one more time. Much in the same way that the text exists in an alternative universe, where Ian meets Barbara on a foggy Barnes Common, this an alternative version (not a Target replacement) of a classic story. 9/10

Nick Joy

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