Much of El Sandifer's take on 'The Brain of Morbius' (eruditorumpress.com/blog/sheer-poetry-the-brain-of-morbius) feels truer of the novelisation than the broadcast episodes. The key bit, I think, is:
The Doctor eviscerates the Sisters of Karn for being unchanging, and thus for never progressing. He implies that in some fundamental sense this is why their precious Elixir of Life is drying up - that they do not progress. And we are told that death is the price of progress
What's crafty here is the suggestion that the Doctor implies the sisters are at fault for the drying up of the elixir and so for their own doom (they should have progressed to the point where they understood the geology that gave rise to the flame and been able to fix such a simple problem for themselves?). The problem with this reading is that the Doctor actually offers no reason for their lack of progress except the presence of the elixir.
By explicitly labeling Maren 'autocratic' and stating her active desire that things not change, Dicks makes her the problem; the problem with flame-fuelled immortality isn't so much that people never die, it's that those in charge never relinquish power to a newer generation.
In that sense, the novelisation tightens up the parallel between Maren and Morbius, who's gone one step further and wants to reconstruct a long-gone regime. And that ties in with Sandifer's teaming up of a reference to About Time 4, 'Miles and Wood observe that a large number of the Hinchcliffe stories deal with the return of a thought-dead enemy', and a positioning of 'The Brain of Morbius' as the 'culmination' of that trend (actually, she positions it as the culmination of 13 years' worth of stories, but I'm not so sure about that).
It's no so much that Morbius is the most dangerous of the Doctor's thought-dead foes but that this is the story which makes clear why they're such a menace. All these evils from the dawn of time are fundamentally antithetical to progress. Worse, they tend to want to wind the clock back, often to chaos or desolation. In that sense, Doctor Who, especially in the hands of Dicks, is pretty much literally progressive.
Anyway, the page for this novelisation is now up here...
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