Resurrecting Resurrection

After spending so much of my early years as a Doctor Who fan obsessively seeking to complete my collection of the Target novelisations, I could perhaps be forgiven for feeling just a bit disappointed in the end that Target came ever so close but never quite managed to cover the entire run television stories (well, the first seven Doctors as there were back then), in book form.

There were just five stories that never made it into print (four, if you happen to think that the incomplete Tom Baker story Shada doesn't count as part of the series). Twenty years ago this year, myself and my good friend (and fellow obsessive Target collector!) Jon Preddle started out on a fan publishing project aimed at completing this quintet of missing stories. Armed with a handwritten transcript and an incomplete copy of the BBC scripts, I novelised Resurrection of the Daleks in fits and after many long delays it finally saw print in 2000.

Many more years later, with the print edition now long out of print, we've added the book to the online TSV Archive. As with the previous 'missing Target' ebooks, the online version is presented as both a set of HTML pages and a downloadable PDF, accompanied by a background article about writing the book and a cover artwork gallery.

The collection's not yet quite complete; City of Death still needs to be added to finish the set. I intend to make that available in a few months' time.

Read Resurrection of the Daleks here.

Completing the Key

Doctor Who and the Pirate Planet, a novelisation written by David Bishop, is now available online as an ebook.

This adaptation of a television serial by Douglas Adams was one of a handful of Doctor Who TV stories never published by Target Books (I'm talking about the 1963-1989 run here). The omission of The Pirate Planet was particularly irksome to avid Target collectors - and I count myself as one - as it formed part of the six story Key to Time sequence. I still recall as a young and uninformed fan staring at the back of The Armageddon Factor novelisation and wondering why there were only five, not six, books listed in the Key to Time sequence.

The novelisation was first published in 1990 by the New Zealand Doctor who Fan Club. The author was David Bishop, an unknown name in fandom at the time, but now well-known as the author of several Doctor Who novels and Big Finish audios. Seventeen years ago this month, David was hard at work writing the first draft of this book.

I revised and expanded the novelisation for a new edition in 2001, with David's approval, incorporating a large number of sequences from the rehearsal scripts that had been cut from the televised story. For the new ebook edition, I dug out the notes I made in 2001 and attempted to document the changes for a editors' commentary.

After struggling through a few chapters, trying to convert numerous notes into readable prose, I decided that a far simpler solution was to present the deleted scenes from the rehearsal scripts as extracts from the novelisation and leave it at that. This proved to be a fairly straight-forward task, but to my surprise I discovered that I'd omitted a few of those scenes from the 2001 edition, so these segments appear for the first time ever in this ebook.

The ebook is also available as a downloadable PDF file and is accompanied by several 'special features', including an article about the book's publication history, a guide to the 'deleted scenes', a gallery of cover artwork, and David Bishop's notes from the original edition.

Doctor Who and Shada

I'm delighted to announce that my novelisation of the lost Season 17 Doctor Who story Shada is at last available to read online.

This TSV book has been unavailable since late last year and I've since received many requests from fans wanting to read this and the other TSV 'missing Target' novelisations. Over time, the remaining four novelisations will be added to the website.

This e-book version will also appeal to those who have previously read the book as I've created a set of 'DVD-like' special features, including a chapter-by-chapter commentary detailing the various changes and additions made to the adaptation and also the variances in the book's three print editions.

Very few of my working notes survive from the previous editions of this book, so the creation of the Author's Notes section involved combing through the three print versions, the rehearsal scripts and the handwritten video transcript to identify the changes and alterations I made many years ago.

From the time that I started collecting the Target Doctor Who books (some twenty-five years ago), I decided I wanted to be a writer and to write my own novelisation of one of the stories. Shada was the realisation of this dream, and as such it is immensely satisfying to see this book finally immortalised online for all to enjoy.