Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet

The TARDIS brings the Doctor and his friends to a space tracking base in the Antarctic - and straight into trouble. A space mission is going badly wrong, and a new planet has appeared in the sky. Mondas, ancient fabled twin planet of Earth has returned. Soon its inhabitants arrive. But while they used to be just like the humans of Earth, now they are very different. Devoid of emotions, their bodies replaced with plastic and steel, the Cybermen are here. Humanity needs all the help it can get, but the one man who seems to know what's going on is terminally ill. As the Cybermen take over, the Doctor is dying...

First thing to like about this ebook was the introduction by Tom MacRae (he who wrote Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel and the wonderful The Girl Who Waited) where he recounts a conversation he's had with an 8 year old fan. And this fan is astonish to discover we lived in an age before DVDs, iView, Red Button, BBC3 (or ABC2 or UK-TV), downloads... an era where you saw a Doctor Who story once (maybe twice if it was repeated) and then it was never seen again in the case of some stories, forever). So it you missed it, that was it... until the novelization was published (and sometimes that was years after the original broadcast). Which goes to show just how important these books were.

But what of the story itself? Having seen the three and a bit episodes that exist of The Tenth Planet I can say that Gerry Davis' novelisation of his and Kit Pedlar's scripts is faithful and enjoyable. He tweaks a few things here and there (like when Ben's watching a Roger Moore James Bond in the projection room. Remember the TV story was broadcast several years before Moore took on the role) but not the extent that David Whittaker did in Doctor Who and the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Crusaders. But that's not a criticism. Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet is a cracking read and a faithful retelling of one of the most important stories in Doctor Who's history (being the first story to feature the Cybermen and the first regeneration).