The Chase

John Peel The Chase (1989)
Here's another Target I bought for the sake of completism, sad fucker that I am, and fairly recently too. I hadn't read one in years and noticed that I had all but about fifteen of the things, so I hit eBay on the grounds that most of them were still affordable and it would give me a massive hard on to see them lined up in order on a shelf.

Something like that anyway, and it's nice to have the option of re-reading them given that I no longer have the patience to watch it on telly. It even feels a bit weird watching the old ones which I once loved, although that's more to do with me and television in general than me and Who. At the risk of repeating myself, Who was once very special to me, and if I squint a bit - at least enough so as to occlude everything since about 2005, particularly the fans - I can still sense a bit of the magic.

When I was a kid, it felt like something which got made almost in spite of the company responsible, something which bordered on horror - as it did in the early seventies - and a fairly extreme existential horror to anyone under the age of ten. The 1973 Radio Times special was mind blowing because it hadn't occurred to me that there might have been Who before I'd started watching, or that there had been monsters I'd never heard of.

Anyway, I think The Chase may have been the first Hartnell I watched on VHS, simply because I'd taken to renting a VCR and I happened to see it in a sale. It probably wasn't a great place to start, but I thought it was wonderful regardless; and if I still frequented such places, virtual or otherwise, which rated Who stories in order of artistic merit, I'm sure I'd still be getting massively defensive over this particular dog's dinner. For those who spent their youth engaged in healthier pursuits, The Chase was apparently plotted by giving action figures to a couple of three-year olds, setting them out in the garden, then seeing what they came up with. So they start off in the sandpit, which all goes pear-shaped when someone gets their bollocks out; leading to brief experiments by the pond, or pretending the garden shed is haunted; ultimately ending up in the flower bed with a load of ping pong balls brought into play because of reasons. This at least saved Terry Nation the embarrassment of recycling the usual plot, I suppose.

All the same, The Chase bulges with beautifully stupid ideas, even if they're strung together in a rhythm which suggests everyone's treading water until Peter Butterworth can get time off from whatever Carry On they were shooting back in June 1965. Nation's script did more than we saw on the screen, and Peel's adaptation makes use of this, filling in details for which neither time nor budget allowed first time around; and it's hardly Stephen Baxter, but considering the extended Crackerjack sketch which Peel attempts to pummel into something vaguely less ridiculous, it's not half bad either.

The first part, as you may be aware, occurs on the planet Aridius, inadvertently presenting a harsh lesson in nominative determinism; but where the screen version was cut to the essentials of amusingly theatrical aliens and the notorious ballbag octopus, here we get something that could almost have been Richard Shaver thanks to just the slightest expansion of this first third of the story. After Aridius, it's mostly business as we probably expect, and not even Peel can make Morton C. Dill either funny or interesting but, you know, we're already off on a good foot, and I kept on reading, and nothing insulted my intelligence like some of the recent stuff, and mostly it reminded me of why I had once been so endlessly fascinated by Who.

See! Sometimes I do have something nice to say about it.

Revelation of the Daleks

Eric Saward Revelation of the Daleks (2019)
As you may recall, Doctor Who was a children's science-fiction serial on the telly back before the advent of the video recorder, meaning that if you wanted to catch up on older episodes, you had to buy the novelisation published by Target. Happily, at least for persons such as myself who require everything to exist within the context of a neatly ordered set, Target eventually novelised everything seen on the box, even a few which would have been on the box but weren't due to the lazy, work-shy BBC sponge-monkeys being on strike that year because the tea served in the staff canteen was the wrong colour.

Anyone still reading?

Never mind.

Anyway, by the time Target went tits up, they had published all but five of the Who serials seen on the television, notably two by Eric Saward who supposedly didn't want anyone else adapting his work - although I may have remembered that wrong. It could have been something to do with the estate of Terry Nation, but really - who gives a fuck? Revelation of the Daleks was unofficially novelised by Jon Preddle back in 1992 as part of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club's campaign to fill in those five terrifying gaps in our collections. I didn't know of this until many years later, by which point, copies of Preddle's version were impossible to find unless you count eBooks, which I don't.

Well, I'm nearly fifty-fucking-seven, older, probably wiser in some poorly defined capacity, and with a general suspicion* regarding almost everything sprung forth from Who since he came back on the telly played by an Easter Island statue in 2005; and yet my devotion was once so deeply ingrained that, even now, I still feel the need to fill those five gaps in a collection of books I may never read again because I'm no longer thirteen.

Revelation of the Daleks was an odd story, although one for which I recall some affection. I think I may have watched a VHS copy at some point back in the nineties, but I'm otherwise so unfamilar with whatever it did as for this to be an almost new thing, now that Eric has finally found time to write it.

Saward seems to be regarded as one of those problematic Who writers, probably meaning he wasn't afraid to point out when some sacred fan cow was actually a pile of shite, or at least that's how it usually works. For my money, he wrote some decent stories and did a good job of keeping things interesting during his time as script editor on the show. I've seen him criticised as a Douglas Adams knock off, which I don't quite see given the lesser level of annoying self-conscious whimsy.

Converted to prose, Revelation of the Daleks serves as a strong reminder of Who having been developed back when television was still pretty much theatre with cameras pointed at the actors. Everything here occurs within what may as well be a couple of rooms with a cast of eight or nine chasing each other from one set to the next; and if it's not exactly Shakespearean, it's closer to being a twentieth century Billy than it is to either Star Wars or Asimov's Foundation. Revelation reads very much as a telly script novelised for the benefit of thirteen-year olds or younger, which doesn't mean that it's bad so much as that certain narrative weaknesses seem amplified and they're difficult to overlook.

The strengths of the original story were arguably its big ideas regarding what's really going on at Tranquil Repose, but here - even without the Dalek connection already spunked away by the title - everything is signposted from almost the very beginning with clues so fucking obvious as to what's coming that the eventual revelation of what's really going on feels redundant. All the running around therefore seems designed to keep us busy as we wait for certain discoveries to be made - even though we've already guessed what they're going to be - and accordingly lacks drama. This leaves us with just the humour, which I assume would be the DJ, played on the box by Alexei Sayle, and which could have worked as a linking device in the vein of Lynne Thigpen's DJ in The Warriors, but didn't because the whole thing may as well have been an episode of fucking Rentaghost; and Dave Lee Travis in space is not an inherently funny idea if you've actually mistaken Dave Lee Travis for anything genuinely cool; and in case you've forgotten and were wondering, the DJ's weapon by which he blasts his foes with - sigh - concentrated rock'n'roll is also corny as fuck on the printed page, and not even in an entertainingly ironic sense, as it might have been had Saward specified that, for example, such and such a Dalek had been obliterated by the mighty force of that fucking terrible I Like It song by Gerry & the Pacemakers.

So, I'd say I'm too old to get much from this adaptation, except I routinely read all sorts of juvenile shite, most of which works just fine for me; and it's really, really difficult to work out just who it's aimed at, given that I found it in the science-fiction section at Barnes & Noble, as distinct from the children's section. It's a shame because some of it works, and a quick peak at other Sawards suggests he may simply have rushed this one to get it over and done with. An even greater shame is that a quick peak at Jon Preddle's unofficial online version leads me to suspect that he probably did a better job.

*: I say general suspicion but I actually mean uncompromising hatred.

The Chrysalids

John Wyndham The Chrysalids (1955)
Without it really having resulted from anything resembling a plan, it seems I've been reading my way through the oeuvre of John Wyndham during the course of the last decade, and so - barring a few oddities and outliers such as Plan for Chaos, of which I've never seen a copy - it seems I've saved the best for last. This one's a cracker.

The Chrysalids occurs in a puritanical post-apocalyptic society reduced to a mediaeval way of life. We've survived nuclear holocaust but mutation is rife, and mutants are to be driven out with evangelical zeal; so the novel tells the story of a couple of those mutants with an emphasis which one might regard as owing a debt to van Vogt's Slan, and which certainly foreshadows Chris Claremont's X-Men comics. In fact, The Chrysalids seems to foreshadow one fuck of a lot, more or less everything Terry Nation ever wrote, quite a few subsequent takes on life after the bomb, The Handmaid's Tale and so on. The years 1949 through to the publication of this novel saw a significant upsurge in nuclear weapons research and testing across the globe, and it seems very clear that the potentially terrible consequences occupied Wyndham's thoughts.

As ever, his great strength as a writer is in the global picture as seen through the eyes of a minor player, at a more personal, almost provincial level, and so The Chrysalids doubles up as a classic children's novel about a boy saving his younger sister from a bullying father. Even better is that Wyndham held back from any of the stuff which spoiled at least a few of his books, the creaking humour and the tone which unfortunately inspired Brian Aldiss to coin the term, cosy catastrophe. This one is more than just a yarn.

'Purity,' I said. 'The will of the Lord. Honor thy father. Am I supposed to forgive him? Or to try to kill him?'

The answer startled me. I was not aware that I had sent out the thought at large.

'Let him be,' came the severe, clear pattern from the Zealand woman. 'Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled, they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature.'

See? That one still works today. In fact I'd say it's quite pertinent right now given the upsurge of those who want to ship the rest of us off to labour camps or worse.

I've read a ton of science-fiction over the last decade or so, and I think I'm approaching the point at which I will have read just about everything I'm ever going to feel inclined to read of the genre; so my future may hold significantly fewer crappy seventies paperbacks with airbrushed spacecraft on the covers, and if this turns out to be the case, I'm fucking glad this one made it onto my shelves before the shutters went down, because it's one of the very best.

The Death of Grass

John Christopher The Death of Grass (1956)
A classic, I was reliably informed, and so - having already been impressed by two of Christopher's Tripods novels - I kept an eye open, eventually finding a US edition retitled No Blade of Grass with a cover promising the heaving of bosoms and stuff; and it is a classic, and a classic very much in the mold of a John Wyndham novel wherein stiff upper lipped types try to get by in a world ruined by agency of a massive global disaster. The difference, as Brian Aldiss clearly took great pleasure in pointing out, is that the upper lips of Christopher's protagonists soon lose their stiffness. In Trillion Year Spree, his history of science-fiction literature, Aldiss berates Wyndham for writing cosy catastrophes wherein the central characters have a jolly old romp despite the alien invasion, end of civilisation, or whatever, additionally praising Christopher for putting his own cast of survivors through a genuinely harrowing meat grinder of a tale.

Anyway, what we have is the destruction of the ecosystem through a virus which kills grass in all of its forms, notably including wheat, corn, and rice. So humanity is fucked, no more bread, and not much upon which livestock can graze, and civilisation collapses, and it looks as though the government have dropped atomic bombs on the larger cities in hope of reducing the population to numbers which might stand a better chance of long term survival. We follow Christopher's protagonists across country as they make for the sanctuary of an isolated valley one of them recalls from childhood. They have guns, they pick up strays, they encounter other roving bands of scavengers, and then it all turns unexpectedly bleak as they meet Jane's family, kill them in self defence, then debate whether it would be kinder to kill the aforementioned Jane than leave her to be raped by the next bunch to stumble upon the house. So it's a long way from being anything you could describe as cosy.

That being said, I think the cosy catastrophe label is a little unfair, and while it might apply to some of Wyndham's writing, I really don't see it with Triffids or Kraken; and on the other hand, whilst the people of The Death of Grass find themselves thrust into a world in which conventional morality will get you killed, we're nevertheless dealing with persons who would romp under other circumstances, and whose post-apocalyptic survival strategies serve as contrast to a lost golden age of traditional middle class values. Chaps are in charge and hoping things don't get too beastly, whilst women are to be protected because they can cook and bear children. The novel takes a dim view of humanity bordering on misanthropic whilst being slightly hamstrung by its harking back to moral values which arguably weren't that amazing in the first place.

Of course, it's still a great novel, and significantly one which was rewritten by Cormac McCarthy as The Road - a genuinely harrowing trawl through a similar apocalypse with a better grounding in basic humanity, less of the retired colonel, and which otherwise makes The Death of Grass look like some bloody awful Terry Nation effort.