Gerry Davis - Doctor Who and the Cybermen

There are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things. Things which are against everything we have ever believed in. They must be fought. To the death.

In 2070, the Earths weather is controlled from a base on the moon. But when the Doctor and his friends arrive, all is not well. They discover unexplained drops of air pressure, minor problems with the weather control systems, and an outbreak of a mysterious plague.

With Jamie injured, and members of the crew going missing, the Doctor realises that the moonbase is under attack. Some malevolent force is infecting the crew and sabotaging the systems as a prelude to an invasion of Earth. And the Doctor thinks he knows who is behind it: the Cybermen.

This novel is based on The Moonbase, a Doctor Who story which was originally broadcast from 11 February4 March 1967.

Featuring the Second Doctor as played by Patrick Troughton, and his companions Polly, Ben and Jamie

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9781446417058

www.randomhouse.co.uk

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Published in 2011 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
A Random House Group Company
First published in 1974 by Universal-Tandem Publishing Co., Ltd.

Novelisation copyright Gerry Davis 1974
Original script Kit Pedler 1967
Illustrations Alan Willow 1974
Introduction Gareth Roberts 2011
The Changing Face of Doctor Who and About the Authors Justin Richards 2011
Between the Lines Steve Tribe 2011

BBC, DOCTOR WHO, TARDIS and CYBERMEN (word marks, logos and devices) are trademarks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 849 90191 8

Commissioning editor: Albert DePetrillo
Editorial manager: Nicholas Payne
Series consultant: Justin Richards
Project editor: Steve Tribe
Cover design: Lee Binding Woodlands Books Ltd, 2011
Cover illustration: Chris Achilleos
Production: Rebecca Jones

To buy books by your favourite authors and register for offers, visit www.randomhouse.co.uk

Also available from BBC Books:

DOCTOR WHO AND THE DALEKS

David Whitaker

DOCTOR WHO AND THE CRUSADERS

David Whitaker

DOCTOR WHO AND THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN

Terrance Dicks

DOCTOR WHO AND THE AUTON INVASION

Terrance Dicks

DOCTOR WHO AND THE CAVE MONSTERS

Malcolm Hulke

Gerry Davis must have been a bit surprised that day in 1974 when the call came from Target Books. Would you like to novelise a script you script-edited for Doctor Who eight years ago? I wasnt there, but I bet the first thing he said was Er, why? and the second thing was When by, how long, and how much?

Today, we are much closer to the past than we were in 1974. In those days, television happened once (twice if you were really lucky this story wasnt) and then it disappeared into a vault or, more probably, into a skip. (For this story, it was half-vault and half-skip.) So poor Gerry must have been baffled.

Information of any kind about anything let alone a TV show transmitted once, in black and white was really hard to get back then. If you wanted to know something maybe the life cycle of the koala, the structure of a plant cell, what was Number 1 on the day you were born you had to look it up. Now I could look up all those things right now, in less than a minute, without even moving. In fact I just have. The answers are interesting, boring, and Young Girl by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. But in those days, you looked things up by going to a place where they were written down in books (they were called libraries) and searching, physically searching with your arms and hands, for them.

In the case of 1960s Doctor Who, you couldnt even do that, because the information was either stored in a BBC vault or junked in a BBC skip. Either way, you couldnt get at it.

So, information in general was precious.

Information about Doctor Who especially old Doctor Who was priceless. And to all intents and purposes, non-existent.

But, as Gerry sat down at his clattering manual typewriter, with a dog-eared copy of Kit Pedlers camera script of The Moonbase, a glass of Mateus Ros and a general sense of bewilderment, he wasnt to know the significance of what he was about to do. The moment his finger tapped the first key, he was no longer merely a writer. He was a magician, doing the impossible revealing lost secrets to rival the mysteries of Eleusis, rending skip and vault in twain to set the past free to conjure the library at Alexandria back from its flamey fate, to rehang the Gardens of Babylon, to hatch the Dodo once again

OK, I got carried away there, but Im not being facetious. That is what it felt like, to me and a generation of readers.

This book is a corker. It was my and many others first encounter with both Patrick Troughtons Doctor and the terrible Cybermen. The Doctor in this book is simultaneously distant as a star and reassuring as a teddy bear. He has an unreadable agenda of his own, working in the background, muttering to himself like Willy Wonka. The image of him crawling about on the floor of the moonbase literally getting under everyones feet like Columbo in space has stayed with me ever since (as anybody who saw The Lodger will know.)

The Cybermen here are shadowy figures, lurking through the first half creeping up on people, hiding, generally sneaking about until their glorious march on the moonbase. Gerry tells us they are there, from the very beginning, even giving the exact time and date of their arrival on the moon. This casualness is untypical of the Target books, giving the reader a headstart on the characters. Its not so much a question of whats going to happen, as when.

I was 7 when I read this book and my mind was full of Phantom Pipers, Gravitrons, acetone and Cybermen rolling their victims in barrels across the lunar surface.

That was the first stage of Gerry Daviss unwitting magic. Sat at that typewriter for, I imagine, not very long and for not very much money, he wasnt to know that he was performing another trick, an even better one.

Because Gerry Davis leads to Terrance Dicks who leads to Douglas Adams, who leads to Robert Sheckley, who leads to John Wyndham, who leads to Agatha Christie, who leads to M.R. James, who leads to Dickens, who leads to Shakespeare, who leads to everyone else.