Published: December 1986

Edition read: Target first, 1986

Coolest Cover: Tony Masero- Ice Warriors look good.

The TARDIS dematerialises with... "a wheezing, groaning sound"

Childhood Recollections: Don’t think I ever read this, for reasons I’ll go into below.

Ramblings: The curious thing about Terrance Dicks’s adaptation of ‘The Seeds of Death’ is that it hit the shelves after the BBC Video of the story had been on the shelves for several months. Indeed, at the time there were several voices within fandom saying "what’s the point of adapting it when the video’s already out?". It’s a valid argument, I suppose, but then again most fans with video recorders had probably already taped Season 22 and bought the books- and if there’s an awful lot of difference between £1.60 and £25 nowadays, that was almost certainly more so in 1986. And it has to be said that if anything, the absence of a novelisation made watching the video of ‘Seeds’ all the more exciting- it was almost certainly the first and probably the only time I watched a story from the series’ past without any real knowledge of what was going to happen and when, although I’m fairly sure that when bought, the book went straight onto the shelf and has stayed there for the last two decades.

If the video hadn’t happened until a couple of years later, Dicks’s adaptation of ‘Seeds’ would probably be thought of as a superior example of his later work, again going back to scripts with which he had an involvement. The adaptation runs to 149 pages, and one of the things it does emphasise is just how much happens in the story- twenty pages after arriving in Professor Eldred’s museum, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe are being rocketed into space, and the story continues at much the same pace for the rest of its length. For a 1960s story, this is not far short of miraculous, and it’s one reason why the pace never really lets up- there’s no point at which it really feels padded in spite of the constant going back and forth to the Moon as the plot requires, and it’s only on reflection that you realise that the Doctor and Slaar only have two scenes together. Dicks even has a good stab at adapting some of the chase sequences from the original story, with all their hall-of-mirrors directorial affectations, although from the point of view of 1986 it’s interesting to see just how many Ice Warriors the Doctor kills himself using the portable solar power device- perhaps the Sixth Doctor’s mistake was in using weapons which looked like weapons.

The pace of the story does however mean that there isn’t necessarily all that much room for the supporting characters to come to life- unsurprisingly, Fewsham is probably the one who comes out of it best because of the psychological interest in his determination to stay alive at any cost. Miss Kelly tends to come off worst, perhaps because she’s a 1960s idea of the empowered woman of the future filtered through the 1980s and therefore comes across as rather more ruthless and career-focused and less charismatic than the original character. Neither is there all that much description, although I suppose it could be argued that with the video in circulation, this could be dispensed to an extent to save space. Nevertheless, it’s a faithful adaptation of a decent action story- perhaps a touch old-school for 1986, but still a good way to complete the Ice Warriors’ televised adventures in print.