Published: October 1982

Edition read: Target first, 1982

Coolest Cover: Andrew Skilleter really starting to find his feet now- that image of Ainley and Logopolis behind him said it all in 1982.

The TARDIS materialises with..."a chugging noise"

...and dematerialises with..."a chuff and a whirr"

Childhood Recollections: Back in the days when Doctor Who Monthly didn’t promote every single book as if their lives depended on it, it was quite a surprise to see this on the shelves in W H Smith in Liverpool with no advance warning.

Ramblings: If Clarke’s Law famously states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, on the basis of reading Christopher H Bidmead’s adaptation of his scripts for ‘Logopolis’, I’m prepared to propose a Bidmead’s Law, which states that whenever a writer presents his readers with reams of impenetrable pseudo-science, he may as well be writing about magic. The televised version of ‘Logopolis’ had a great deal to do- introducing Tegan and the new Master, setting up the regular cast for the following season and of course regenerating the Doctor- and being part of the Bidmead-era philosophy of bringing more hard science into Doctor Who, also had to comply with the need for big, cutting-edge concepts. Hence all the stuff with block transfer computations and CVEs- now I have no idea whether it’s possible to bring physical objects into being simply by chanting numbers (although that sounds suspiciously more like magic than science to me) or whether it’s possible to create a CVE in order to relieve pressures on this universe, but the problem with Bidmead’s adaptation is that what made for plausible-sounding scientific dialogue on screen simply doesn’t make for good prose. In fact, much of Bidmead’s prose style is deadly dull, taking itself far too seriously without attempting to make his concepts understandable to the general reader. I have no idea whether what he’s on about is sound theoretical physics or isn’t, but my point is that if you’re going to try to bring more hard science into the format, then you also have a responsibility to distinguish between the science and the technobabble which just makes you sound clever.

Otherwise, there are a couple of interesting deviations from the televised story here and a few oddities; the Doctor’s lines are if anything written for a sharper and wittier Fourth Doctor with a few retorts and observations which wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the previous season. Bidmead’s cause isn’t helped by being obliged to use Adric for his point of view character much of the time- Tegan, although we do get a fair bit from her point of view, simply doesn’t understand enough of what’s going on, and Nyssa’s actual role in the story is minimal- and it doesn’t really do him that many favours. But while it’s a fair adaptation of Bidmead’s own scripts, it’s really hard going rendered into prose and it probably says something that it took me the best part of a week to read.