At least as far as Ian Marter could recall by 1984, novelising ‘The Sontaran Experiment’ was his idea (3), though I’d imagine the recentness of Doctor Who and the Time Warrior can’t have hurt. His motivation, it seems, was that, having chosen the ‘excellent’ ‘The Ark in Space’ for his first go, he should turn next to ‘its sequel’ (4), almost as a duty. While this might not inspire great confidence in his enthusiasm for the task, it does at least see a return to the charming old days of Target continuity merrily ignoring what was on TV – Marter follows up on his own divergences from the broadcast episodes in Doctor Who and the Ark in Space, such as, for example, having the Doctor, Sarah and Harry arrive in the Tardis rather than by transmat (5) and having the Doctor’s scarf still split in two (6). The extent to which Marter expects a fresh memory of his previous novelisation is hinted at by the manner in which the severed scarf is introduced, with reference simply to there being a ‘knot’ in it under the Doctor’s chin (7) leading at least me to mistakenly picture him doing up like a massive woolly cravat until the later clarification, and later confirmed by mentions of Terra Nova and Vira without even an asterisk of explanation (8).

    As well as recalling that Doctor Who and the Sontaran Experiment was his idea, Marter suggests no one else had any interest in novelising a two-parter (9). That, whether Marter intended it or not,  sets the book up as an exercise in demonstrating how viable 50 minutes of TV is for adaptation. The answer, sadly, seems to be “not very”, but this actually has more to do with Marter’s own idiosyncrasies than with the project itself.

    Marter employs three tactics to meet his page count. The first, the relentless deployment of adjectives, is evident from the very first sentence (10) – no noun is allowed to go unaccompanied, and the ‘landscape’, in a final flourish, gets to be both ‘deserted’ and ‘wasted’. Next on show is the stretching of onscreen events, with the Tardis taking a whole paragraph to materialise (11), first looming, then wobbling, vanishing and reappearing, groaning, fading, flashing its light, finally becoming distinct but then hovering, swaying and dropping before coming to rest, then switching its light off, then going quiet. Last up is the addition of new material, first seen in a prolonged bit of slapstick involving Harry and Sarah’s exit from the disappearing Tardis. Initially it disappears to leave Harry supporting a suddenly mid-air Sarah (12), then the Doctor decides it’s all a baffled Harry fault whilst in the midst of clearly causing all the confusion (13) and the Harry disappears to leave Sarah to a cartoon plummet (14). You could argue this last tactic is just a different type of stretching (the TV episodes open with everyone appearing and disappearing all over the shop), but I’d suggest that, by taking a gag and reworking it to quite this extent, Marter has effectively created a new scene (and, yes, the Tardis materialising is new to the novelisation but, in that case, he’s taken one event and simply made it take up a lot of words).

    The last tactic is the most interesting. While, unlike the earliest Who novelisations, Marter doesn’t fundamentally change anything in the story, he does, unlike at least the more recent Dicks, rework material from the broadcast episodes in quite significant ways. For example, the Doctor survives his first encounter with the Sontaran on TV thanks to a ‘Piece of synestic locking mechanism’ he happens to have in his pocket (15), which leads into a little gag where the Doctor advises Harry to ‘Never throw anything away’ while throwing away the life-saving bit of metal (16). In the book, the Doctor survives this clash because of some innate trait, or possibly thanks to ‘An old Tibetan trick’ (17), with the line ‘Never throw anything away’ now applied to a piece of Terullian that the Doctor thinks might offer a clue to the reasons for Styr’s presence on Earth (18) and serving as a punchline to the Doctor’s other advice to Harry, ‘Never hoard unnecessary junk’ (19), rather than a set-up for chucking away the piece of metal. Meanwhile, escape-from-certain-death-thanks-to-a-pocketed-piece-of-metal motif gets transferred to the climactic fight, the Doctor surviving his plummet down a ravine thanks to ‘a fragment of the Scavenger’s levitation system’ (20).                               

    This reworking is where things go wrong. Perhaps the most obvious example is the tantalising promise of depth offered

by Harry’s observation that Styr ‘looks like the

Golem’ (21), an analogy which simply peters out

as the novel goes on. It’s certainly true that

Sontarans look like the Prague golem, that Styr’s

rampant inflation at the end of the story (22)

echoes at least one story of a golem ‘growing

larger and larger’ (23) and that the Sontaran’s

demise leaves just a ‘congealed [heap] of

smouldering and wrinkled metal’ (24), just as the

golem left behind nothing but the dust from which it had been made (25), but that’s as far as the parallels seem to go. At a stretch maybe, the Catalyser Filter Programme (26) could stand in for ‘the Shem, the magic charm, destruction of which would render the creature lifeless again’ (27), but then the stream of technobabble that follows the mention of the Catalyser Filter Programme rather kills any hint of the mythic and suggests Marter doesn’t really see it standing in for ‘the Holy Name’.

    More significantly, while stories of golems present the creatures as ‘perfectly obedient’ with a tendency to follow ’instructions literally’ (28), Marter puts a considerable amount of work into ensuring these are not traits that can be attributed to Styr. On TV, the reason for the Sontarans endlessly delaying and eventually abandoning their invasion of an uninhabited world, and indeed for sending a solitary scout to recce the planet for so very long in preparation, is something of a mystery, labelled ‘silly’ by David J Howe and Stephen James Walker (29) and prompting simple bafflement in Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping (30). In the book, the reason is clear – Styr has found a ‘sadistic delight’ in his experiments, the satisfaction of which has trumped his ‘true purpose’ (31) and led to him deceiving his controller in pursuit of more time to indulge his urges (32).

    And this introduces the biggest problem with the novelisation. Unsurprisingly, especially if you’re as familiar with Doctor Who and the Ark in Space as Marter expects, a lot of the extra detail and description in Doctor Who and the Sontaran Experiment tends towards the gruesome. Zake isn't just caught round the neck by the scavenger, they’re ‘jerked’ off their feet, their neck giving a ‘sickening crunch’ as they die with a ‘piercing scream’ and ‘a hideous, throttled gasp’ (33); the Doctor doesn’t just get strangled, his eyes bulge out of his head, his scarf biting into his neck (34); Styr doesn’t just melt, his eyes burn ‘like blowtorches’ and ‘oily froth’ spews from his mouth’ (35).

    None of this is necessarily a flaw in itself – it wasn’t, after all, in Marter’s first novelisation. However, ‘The Sontaran Experiment’ isn’t the visceral body horror that ‘The Ark in Space’ was, and that leaves goriness feeling gratuitous and, frankly, a bit adolescent, an accusation Doctor Who Magazine would later throw at Marter’s writing (36). More importantly, Marter has specifically taken the enjoyment of such lurid action, given it to Styr as his main bit of characterisation and painted him as grotesque for it, his quickening ‘wheezing’ breath and ‘gurgle of delight’ as he watches Sarah’s torment on his monitor (37), even zooming in to get a better look (38), coming across as seedy and sexual in an unhealthy way.

    In such a context, how is a reader supposed to approach the seeming relish with which Sarah’s torments are enhanced (compared with the broadcast episodes) and written? What response is appropriate to passages about ‘her skin splitting and crackling’ (39), her ‘contorted and rigid’ body with a ‘face streaked with tears and dust’ (40), and two references to her ‘shrivelled eyes’ (41)? What image exactly is a reader supposed to conjure when discovering the scavenger is gripping her hand so tightly it has been left ‘withered’ (42)? Marter seems to have forgotten that the story at its heart is, as Rob Shearman observes, trading on memories of Nazi scientists and their human experiments (43) (something, to be fair, reflected in the ‘cold, contemptuous amusement’ (44) Styr derives from his actions) and so that events are supposed to inspire disgust far more than horror.

    The problem lies in the same writing style that made the body horror Doctor Who and the Ark in Space so effective – Marter is prone to the visual, focusing in on a ‘black and hideously swollen’ tongue (45) here and welling-up blood ‘from a deep gash’ there (46), but, with the focus on genuine torture rather than fantastical transformations, the out-of-body voyeurism of his descriptions tips into fetishising the abuse of prone victims, indulging the same thrill that inspires all Styr’s deep breathing. Which raises the question, why is this novelisation not more strongly written as if from Styr’s perspective? That would turn a lot of these disadvantages immediately into advantages. It feels almost like, despite all his reworking of the broadcast episodes, by still sticking so closely to the TV presentation of the story, Marter is throwing away all the advantages of being a book. Considering how similar this sounds to the weaknesses in Dicks’s last two offerings, however, it seems more likely this is a problem inherent with the direction of the Target range than with Marter or Dicks themselves. It seems what they want isn’t books any more so much as prose renditions of onscreen events, however poorly they translate.