Doctor Who - Earthshock by Ian Marter

Published: August 1983

Edition read: Target first reprint, 1983

Coolest Cover: I’ll go for Alister Pearson on this occasion- there’s something about a slightly out-of-focus shot of Peter Davison aiming a gun which is badly wrong. And Eighties Cybermen look good.

The BBC Budget Wouldn’t Run To: "...they suddenly found themselves entering a large, lofty cavern. Its walls were marbled with beautifully coloured strata and twisting veins of mineral deposits, and pockmarked with weird knobbly fossil fragments." (p.28)

Purple Prose: "The towering cliffside resembled a gigantic human skull with the dark openings of caves gaping like empty eye-sockets and nostrils." (p.7) This is a book about Death. With a capital D. And a capital E, A T and ultimately an H because otherwise it would look silly.

Crimes Against Literature: None as such, but it’s amusing from a 2006 perspective that the Cybermen all have "eye-pods". Now that South Park is old hat, Professor Kyle doesn’t raise quite as much of a giggle as she used to, although I always thought she was quite cute rather than Marter’s "plain, plumpish woman". Also the strange non-sequitur "...at the moment she was out of her depth. Her name was Tegan." We all have our crosses to bear, love.

The TARDIS materialises with... "a harsh scraping and whirring noise"

...and dematerialises with... "a hideous scraping noise"

Childhood Recollections: My hardback copy (remaindered) was signed by David Banks at the opening night of The Ultimate Adventure in Liverpool.

Ramblings: Ian Marter’s return to the Target range is an interesting choice of story, particularly given that Eric Saward had already adapted ‘The Visitation’ for Target; presumably however his script editing duties meant that he was happy to take his cut and let Ian Marter do the job. The end result is, however, something Saward could probably never have written, and is further proof of the revitalisation of the range coming from the variety of approaches. More imaginative than most of the Target writers, Marter rejects the shock tactics of the televised story, rationalising that by mid-1983 the story would have been seen twice and both the reappearance of the Cybermen and Adric’s demise would have come as no surprise to anybody interested enough to make the effort to actually read the book. So the first two cliffhangers are moved to mid-chapter, and if anything the impact (no pun intended) of Adric’s death is understated, with no attempt to render Nyssa and Tegan’s reactions.

As with his previous contributions, Marter’s adaptation of ‘Earthshock’ feels as if it was written for a different readership- it’s aimed, I think, at teenage boys who will relish the descriptions of troopers being reduced to sludge, or a Cyberman’s fist cracking somebody’s skull like an egg. To an extent that’s disappointing, because it feels as if the story is cheapened by a kind of dumbing down, but it does also show that Marter probably put more thought than most into who was most likely to read his books and what would keep their attention. Beryl Reid’s casting as Briggs was of course one of the most controversial issues surrounding the original televised story, but it’s interesting that Marter makes no attempt to distance his version of the character from Reid’s performance, so much so that it’s impossible to imagine Briggs’s lines being spoken in any other way. Similarly, most of the supporting cast are rendered faithfully, although Ringway is rather weaker than portrayed on television. But in the end, one of the reasons why this book is particularly interesting is that it takes a good, exciting story and adapts it in a dark and suitably unremitting way to create an end result which is in its own fashion just as good as the source material, but in a different and more ambitious way.