Doctor Who - Fury from the Deep by Victor Pemberton

Published: October 1986

Edition read: W.H. Allen hardback, 1986- have you seen how much the paperback is on Amazon?!!!

Coolest Cover: David McAllister and the Tagliatelle of Death.

The TARDIS materialises with... "an undignified flop"

...and dematerialises with a... "grinding and grunting sound"

Childhood Recollections: The night I got this, I read it through from cover to cover. My copy was signed by Victor Pemberton at a convention a year or two later, and I still like the fact that he signed autographs in fountain pen.

Ramblings: Among those stories which are missing from the archives in their entirety, ‘Fury from the Deep’ must surely be one of the greatest losses, not least because, with its near-future scientific complex setting, it’s another of those stories which point the way to the series’ direction in the next couple of seasons- as much an influence as ‘The Web of Fear’ or ‘The Invasion’. From the surviving clips, we can have a reasonable confidence that those early fans who remembered the story’s chilling atmosphere were almost certainly in the right, and so as the novelisation was announced and ultimately published, there was always a sense of something special on the way, not least when Pemberton’s overlength manuscript was finally published as a 189-page bumper volume.

The first and probably most important thing to say is that Pemberton’s prose itself is distinctly unremarkable- it’s good solid prose, but there aren’t really any stylistic flourishes or tricks to it. Not even in the brief moment when we find out about the death of Robson’s wife does the prose rise above the steady. Pemberton’s strengths are in atmosphere and in character; the first is apparent from the beginning, as he makes a particular effort to convey a sense of the story taking place in winter, with snow, frost and weak winter sunlight effects all adding to the sense of a specific place and time. The Weed Creature itself is at its most effective when barely glimpsed; in the absence of any reliable reference material until recently, we’re entirely in Pemberton’s hands as regards its appearance, and while this is described in terms of fronds and tentacles, far more potent is the sense of something in the dark at the bottom of the pipeline. For much of the story, the weed is however unknowable and the story is driven by the conflict between the human characters, and this is another area where the author comes into his own.

I’ve been trying to work out whether there’s a character in Doctor Who before Harris who has to decide whether his priorities lie with his job or with his wife. The idea of a work-life balance was almost certainly unheard-of in 1968, however it’s a mark of the maturity with which Victor Pemberton approached the task of writing for the series that he found a suitable place for this kind of dynamic in his story. Similarly, the Robson-Harris conflict based on hard experience versus theoretical learning comes across well and is only enhanced by the small scene where we understand that Robson’s guilt over the circumstances of his wife’s death are feeding his antagonism towards Harris. At the core of the drama, there’s a strong central network of relationships between the characters, whether it’s the careerist Megan Jones, the independence of van Lutyens or the loyalty of the Chief Engineer- it all adds to the sense of the regular characters interacting with a group of well-defined supporting personalities. It’s perhaps not the most revolutionary of the novels, but its main achievement is in recreating the respect with which Victor Pemberton approached the original task of writing for Doctor Who in 1967/8 with an equally considered and unpatronising adaptation of his story.