Daleks have converged on a junkyard in 1963 London, hot on the trail of a renegade Time Lord who possesses an amazingly powerful weapon from ancient Gallifrey. The Daleks' quarry has left Earth after being discovered by a pair of curious humans, but unknown to the aliens, that same Time Lord has returned to conclude his business, six lives hence. The Doctor and Ace quickly throw their lot in with Group Captain Gilmore and his team of soldiers and scientists, who have discovered the Daleks and are trying to flush them out of hiding. Gilmore begins accepting the Doctor's strategic advice, which is devised largely to keep the human race out of trouble - but the Daleks have already found like-minded allies on Earth, in the form of a group of fascist sympathizers led by Mr. Ratcliffe. The Daleks themselves are divided along a line of loyalty or disloyalty to the Emperor Daleks - who, as the Doctor discovers, has changed a little bit over the years too. The Doctor is actually playing a dangerous game, trying to ensure that the Hand of Omega does fall into the wrong hands - but which faction of the Daleks is actually worthy of this kind of power?

Though written by the same author as the television scripts, the novelization of the Doctor Who season 25 premiere Remembrance Of The Daleks takes an already well-crafted story and elevates it further.

Not unlike the novelization of The Curse Of Fenric, this book is almost half adaptation and half new material. The new material takes many forms, almost lending the story a Winds Of War-style multi-perspective flavor to the proceedings. "Excerpts" from the histories of UNIT, the Daleks and the Doctor are interspersed with the story itself, expanding it to not only fill space, but give it a greater context. The TV episode drops a couple of broad hints about the Doctor finding Group Captain Gilmore similar to the Brigadier, but the novel brings that hint home with a hint of its own that the Shoreditch incident involving the Daleks may have had a direct bearing on the formation of UNIT.

There's another glimpse of things to come, as the history-of-UNIT segments are attributed to a character we'd never heard of before, Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart. Though that character is introduced here as a name on a page and nothing more, author Ben Aaronovitch dragged that name, kicking and screaming, into a life of its own in such New Adventures as Transit, among others. It's no exaggeration to say that the seeds were being sown for the NA range.

Fortunately, the book also fleshes out and justifies some of Ace's overblown angst, doing a better and more subtle job of setting up her intolerance for racism than the TV episodes' sometimes overbaked dialogue on that subject. The focus on guest characters like Alison, Rachel, Mike and others also translates well to the page, giving them more depth than there was time for on television. That the creator of those characters also wrote the book helps - you may even pick up on a few new things the next time you watch Remembrance Of The Daleks after reading the novelization.

Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com webmaster

• Year: 1989
• Author: Ben Aaronovitch
• Genre: franchise science fiction

• Publisher: Target Books