Ian Stuart Black (1915–1997)

A novelization of a "lost" episode that is a bit dated, but still enjoyable. The episode itself features - rather sudden in my opinion - the departure of one of the companions. Like the original Star Trek series episode "Space Seed" it would be quite interesting to return and see what the consequences of the Doctor's actions in this episode resulted in.

Without giving too much of the plot away, this story features the standard Sci-fi trope of a divided society between an urban elite and rural folk with the elite oppressing the rural people to maintain their elite structure. In some ways it reminds me of a 1960s adaptation of the silent film Metropolis.

Not the best story, but nice to have a novelization of a "lost" episode of early Dr. Who.… (meer)

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1028417.html#cutid4

I enjoyed this more than I had expected to, chiefly because of Black's characterisation of the Doctor, which seems to me to capture Troughton's performance better than any of the novels I have read so far. We do, of course, miss out on the superb soundscape of the original (alas, the video is no longer available), and poor Polly ends up screaming a lot. But it's a worthy attempt.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3359142.html

Rereading it, I felt that it possibly gets us closer to the spirit of the original production than any of the efforts at reconstruction have managed, working from a twenty-year-old script and Black's own intuition of what he had wanted to convey.… (meer)

http://nhw.livejournal.com/825455.html

Ian Stuart Black played around a bit here with the plot of The War Machines, and it is generally to the book's benefit. Whereas in the TV version, the Doctor rather incongruously walks straight into the heart of the British scientific establishment and is accepted immediately, here he engages in a combination of forging letters of introduction and invoking Ian Chesterton, now, we are told, a senior scientist (he must have achieved that pretty quickly in the year since the end of The Chase, but let that pass). Also the War Machines themselves, liberated from the clunky restrictions of television production, come across as distinctly more menacing. One feels that this is what Black really wanted the TV show to be like, and since in most cases he sticks fairly close to the script (including the Doctor's closing rant).… (meer)