List of Doctor Who novelisations
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This is a list of Doctor Who novelisations, in order of publication.
The first three Doctor Who serials to be novelised were the William Hartnell stories The Daleks as Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks by David Whitaker, The Web Planet as Doctor Who and the Zarbi by Bill Strutton and The Crusade as Doctor Who and the Crusaders by Whitaker. These three books were published in 1964 to 1965 by Frederick Muller Ltd.
Between 1973 and 1991, Target Books published almost every Doctor Who television serial as a novelisation, starting with new editions of the Frederick Muller Ltd. books. When Target was taken over by Virgin in 1991, three further serials The Power of the Daleks and The Evil of the Daleks by John Peel and the radio serial The Paradise of Death by Barry Letts were added to the range.
The only serials never to have been officially novelised are The Pirate Planet, City of Death, Shada, Resurrection of the Daleks and Revelation of the Daleks, due to licensing issues with the original scriptwriters (unofficial fan novelisations were published by the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club between 1989 and 2000). The Children in Need special Dimensions in Time and the Comic Relief spoof Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death have also not been novelised.
The novelisation of the 1996 Doctor Who television movie by Gary Russell was published by BBC Books. There are currently no plans to novelise episodes of the revived series with Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor or David Tennant's Tenth Doctor.
In addition to the television serials, three scripts from the cancelled Season 23 were novelised, The Nightmare Fair, The Ultimate Evil and Mission to Magnus (details below). Also a short series entitled The Companions of Doctor Who was published — this comprised the novelisation of the pilot of K-9 and Company, and the original works Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma and Harry Sullivan's War.
Besides Paradise of Death, Target also novelised two additional non-televised stories: the radio play Slipback and the audio story The Pescatons.
A novelisation by Barry Letts of a further radio drama, The Ghosts of N-Space, was published as part of the Virgin Missing Adventures range in 1995, as was the novelisation of the independent spin-off Downtime; that same year, the Virgin New Adventures range published a novelisation of Shakedown: The Return of the Sontarans. The most recent novelisation to be published was an adaptation of the webcast Scream of the Shalka published by BBC Books in 2004.
[edit] Publication details
Although target endeavoured to commission the original scriptwriters to novelise their own stories, this was not always possible. As a result, many books in the Target line were written by Terrance Dicks. During the late 1970s-early 1980s Target, which classified the novelisations as children's fiction, imposed a page limit of 128 pages on the novelisations. Some books (particularly several by Dicks) even fell short of this limit and nearly fell into the category of novellas. By the late 1980s, however, the page cap had been lifted, although John Peel was still required to split his novelisation of the epic 12-episode The Daleks' Master Plan into two volumes because the manuscript was too long.
Target began numbering its novelizations in the late 1970s, with the novelization of The Abominable Snowmen being given the #1 position. Target's numbering did not initially reflect original publication order (which would have placed David Whitaker's Doctor Who and the Daleks book first), but rather was conducted in alphabetical order. The numbering likewise had no connection with production or broadcast order.
In 1988–1989 W. H. Allen's Star label published a number of the Target novelisations in a format of two novelisations in one book. The pairings were:
- The Gunfighters and The Myth Makers
- The Dominators and The Krotons
- The Mind of Evil and The Claws of Axos
- The Dæmons and The Time Monster
- The Seeds of Doom and The Deadly Assassin
- The Face of Evil and The Sunmakers
