Doctor Who - The War Machines (drumroll, drumroll) by Ian Stuart Black (clash of cymbals)

Published: February 1989

Edition read: Target first, 1989

Coolest Cover: A collaboration between Alistair Pearson and Graeme Wey here- perhaps one could do an uncanny Hartnell and the other was really, really good at drawing circles.

Crimes Against Literature: "‘Test number one, okay’ said the Doctor with satisfaction." (p.12)

Okay? Great heavens, dear boy, we really must get you some English lessons one of these days...

The TARDIS dematerialises with..."a whirling noise"

Childhood Recollections: I’m really not sure that I read this all the way through at the time.

Ramblings: The last of Ian Stuart Black’s adaptations for the Target range is a particularly good example of how a writer going back to a story after twenty years can discover things in his story which didn’t quite come out right at the time, or which perhaps occurred to him on looking at his story again. As seen on television, ‘The War Machines’ is a curious story which in hindsight appears to be somewhat out of its era, with its contemporary Earth setting and military back-up, however Black handles his material in such a way that rather than simply feeling "contemporary’, there’s a real power to the writing when he describes the Doctor looking at the London of the 1960s as a new generation rebuilding their war-scarred city, and it communicates something of what it must have felt like to be in London at the time. It’s also curious that Black has the Doctor use Ian Chesterton’s name to get himself an interview with Professor Brett- although very little that happens in the first seventeen pages of the book actually appeared on screen, not only does it show that Ian Stuart Black presumably went back and looked at the Hartnell era again before writing this book, but one of the story’s more curious features (the way in which the Doctor is suddenly accepted into the heart of the scientific establishment) is given more explanation.

Strangely, then, there’s not much of a sense of William Hartnell’s Doctor in the book’s pages- as I’ve pointed out above, he doesn’t always speak characteristically, and neither is there much sense of what turned out to be one of Hartnell’s last great moments as the Doctor, facing down the War Machine at the end of Part 3. Black’s sympathies are clearly more with Ben and Polly, up to a point his own creations, and given the clear affection for Swinging London that Black shows in the early chapters, it’s hardly surprising that he seems to write with more feeling for them than for any of the other characters- Professor Brett and Krimpton seem strangely devoid not only of personality but of motivation. It’s only when taken over by Wotan and called upon to articulate the computer’s conclusion that machines are the next evolutionary stage that Brett is given much to say or do, otherwise it’s a given that the worldwide computer network exists for the sake of having one. Black’s conception of the War Machines themselves is also rather different- described at one point as being in outline like a deformed primitive man, they’re named rather than numbered (although Valk is the only one named and is the one which goes on the rampage before the Doctor turns him against Wotan. There’s also an interesting angle in the form of the War Machines evolving as the first ones are completed and tested, with the alloys used and their equipment getting better and the machines starting to learn from their experience, and it’s a shame that the television scripts never had the opportunity to do much with this idea.

Overall, ‘The War Machines’ is another one of those novelisations which proves the worth of getting original script writers to adapt their stories for Target- somebody like Terrance Dicks might have fleshed out some of the supporting characters, but it would have been at the cost of a lot of Ian Stuart Black’s enthusiasm for the story’s setting. When ‘The War Machines’ was transmitted, much of its impact came from the story taking place in contemporary London, something Doctor Who does several times a year even today but which was fresh and exciting to an audience living through a period of deep and fast-moving change, and to its credit, the book does capture something of that in a way which would probably now be considered a historical approach. And there are certainly worse ways of passing a three-and-a-half hour train journey.