Published: November 1982

Edition read: Target first reprint, 1984

Coolest Cover: Andrew Skilleter by default, but are those Babel fish behind the Collector? Like the light coming up from the keyboard, though.

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

Childhood Recollections: The copy of this which I borrowed from my local public library had the word "shit" written inside the front cover. Rather a harsh criticism in my view.

Ramblings: I can remember what a strange choice this book seemed when it came out in 1982; while visually, with the 1980 logo and Andrew Skilleter artwork, it seems to belong with the output of its time, the story itself seemed like a throwback to another way of making Doctor Who. In retrospect, of course, it was simply left over from Tom Baker’s period and happened to be held over until the new approach had set in, however it’s difficult not to feel that ultimately this is to the book’s advantage. Yet again, Terrance Dicks shows an instinctive understanding of how to adapt a Robert Holmes script, allowing the natural humour and joy in words to come to life on the printed page while keeping the drama genuinely dramatic. So while the jokes and puns about the P45 escape route and Gatherer Pyle are there and have time to sink in rather than being one-off remarks disappearing into the ether, there’s a genuinely unsettling feel to the scenes where the Doctor fears that Leela may be dead and contemplates bringing down the Company’s regime out of revenge. Otherwise, it’s generally faithful to the original story (surprisingly for Dicks, most of the "business" with Leela and K9 is left in) and has a certain sharpness of execution which the televised version perhaps lacked in places, although of course the stylised visuals are missing and Dicks doesn’t really find anything to replace them. So satirical and comic a script probably deserves to be adapted in this way to bring out the full impact of the writing, so it’s reassuring that Holmes’s story is so well-served- thankfully Dicks adapted this story when he was on top of his game, and so the end product is an engaging light read and quite frankly a pleasure from beginning to end.