The joy of Dicks is pace. Here’s the rebels: Boaz is ‘fiercely brave, but too highly strung’, Shura is ‘full of a fiery idealism’, Anat has ‘Fierce courage […] cunning and caution’ and all are ‘eager’ (3). They might not be the most complete characters you’ve ever encountered, but they’re clearly differentiated from each other and the reader can map possible behaviour onto those traits. Here’s food in the future: ‘coarse bread, tough meat and a mish-mash of strange vegetables’ and a comment that ‘Few people eat so luxuriously’ (4). You might not get any actual detail, but there’s such a weight to food so clearly signified as from a time of hardship, especially when rationing is just over 20 years past, being framed as a luxury.

    What makes Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks a bit special is the manner in which Dicks also picks up Hulke’s baton of underlying theme-weavery and improves the televised story whilst in no way compromising the page-turning prose style. As with Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, the point is defining humanity. Here, it is qualities such as ‘courage’, ‘persistence and cunning’ (5), as personified by the rebels. There is even the hint, following on from Hulke, that what they fight for can never die even as the individuals do: ‘that handful seemed immortal’. This is contrasted with what the Daleks have brought to the Earth: hopelessness, a sense that the struggle is ‘ultimately all for nothing’. The Doctor, as in the previous novelisation, is allied with the side of hope, it not being in his ‘nature to give up for very long’ (6), while the Controller represents the crushed humanity of the future, hopelessly reflecting that resistance is ‘ultimately all for nothing’.

​    But the Controller’s position shifts through the course of the story. To begin with he is simply the contrasting reflection of the rebels, as when he is seen ‘Unconsciously copying the tactics of Moni the night before’ (7), but there are hints that he is not wholly settled psychologically on the Daleks’ Earth, feeling ‘a twinge of unease at the thought of those of his fellow humans who were less fortunate’ (8). A spark of hope seems to ignite in him when he witnesses for the first time fear in the Daleks (9) and he immediately starts behaving differently, exploiting ambiguities in his orders when ‘anxious to meet the man who could actually produce fear in the Daleks’ (10), and feeling a new pricking to his conscience (11). His close brush with death provides his final transformation, allowing him to dare dream of ‘freedom’ (12), losing ‘the cowed slump of slavery’ (13) and facing death with ‘no attempt to escape’ (14).

    This is the innovation Dicks brings to Hulke’s storytelling in the last two books. Where Hulke offered a firm ethical stance, his plots have only allowed it to function as an aid to those striving for a better way, whether Morka, who already had the capacity to feel sympathy for other species, or the colonists, who had already turned their backs on the corporate Earth of the future. Dicks, however, building on something quite low in the mix in Louis Marks’s scripts, takes a similar ethical stance and shows it transform an antagonist because it is actually better than the alternative.

​    Emboldened, Dicks then turns his sights on David Whitaker, rewriting the theory of time outlined in Doctor Who and the Crusaders. On a human scale, time remains an inescapable force bending incidents to history’s will, as when it conspires to get Shura in position to blow up Austerly House (15), but ‘the Daleks managed to pervert the course of history’ and the Doctor is ‘able to intervene and put history back on its proper tracks’ (16). This, much like the Controller’s emotional journey, isn’t necessarily a battle Dicks has chosen – he is after all novelising someone else’s story – but, as with the Controller’s journey, he’s chosen to play the emphasis differently to the episodes. Yes, Marks’s script meant history had to be malleable, but it’s Dicks who has suggested that humans are stuck on the path of history, harking back to Whitaker’s model, and so highlight the Daleks’ and the Doctor’s ability to shape it.

    Between them then, Dicks and Hulke have set out the stall for the Target range. They’ve taken the strengths of the Frederick Muller publications, taken on their weaknesses and, whilst I might be sad at the loss of the more literary approach, established an action-adventure prose style that generates a more consistent tone than managed even between the two Whitaker novels.