Although for legal reasons the Daleks never appeared in the Virgin books, that series still did a great service to Terry Nation’s creations. Because the authors could not show them directly, by the end of the series the Daleks became something more frightening than the space Nazis they often were on television. They were the unknown, unseen enemies. They decimated hundreds of worlds but were never seen in the light, lurking just offstage. Their unseen presence in Lucifer Rising, GodEngine, and Return of the Living Dad was more threatening than their onstage appearances in pretty much every surviving Dalek story save “Genesis” and “Remembrance.” Unfortunately, War of the Daleks changed all that.
I wanted to be able to say I liked this book, because of the retcon. If you’ve stumbled onto this review while looking for information on shingles treatments, or pictures of nude celebrities, you won’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about—in fact, this entire review will probably be of no interest to you at all, so you can pretty much stop reading—but within Doctor Who fandom the retcon was a big deal at the time. It all started when Skaro, home of the Daleks (“over 5 million exterminated”) blew up at the end of the well-regarded TV serial “Remembrance of the Daleks” in 1988 or so. John Peel hated it. He brooded over it for many years and, lo, in 1997 he took a terrible vengance! The retcon is too long and too silly to go into at this point, but suffice to say that it completely invalidated “Remembrance,” causing heated arguments on internet discussion groups even before the book was released. After the ill feelings, it would have been nice to be able to say that Peel had come up with something as good in its own way as “Remembrance.” It isn’t, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the Daleks are once again just a bunch of dull space Nazis.
War of the Daleks opens with a battle between some Daleks and some Thals. There are a lot of Daleks we’ve never seen before. Now we have Spider Daleks, Strider Daleks, Underwater Daleks, and probably Daleks with Kung Fu Grip. If War of the Daleks was a TV show, it would be called “Extreme Daleks!” and this would be the episode that introduced all the new toys for the young audience’s parents to fight over in the stores next Christmas. The battle scenes are tedious, and the book has several, all of which seem to go on forever.
Next thing we know, the TARDIS has been picked up by a garbage collection ship. The Doctor and Sam are embroiled in romantic tension between the captain’s son and the chief engineer, Cheyn. It’s handled with the kind of delicate maturity you’d expect from a fourteen year old fanfic writer who’s never talked to a girl. Consider these lines:
Sam could see that [Loran] wasn’t blind to the effect the Doctor’s presence seemed to have on Cheyn, and he was clearly jealous. Was Cheyn his woman?
“Oh.” Loran almost groaned. “You and the Doctor…”
“Certainly not!” Sam exclaimed. It’s just that I’m…” She lowered her voice. “Under-aged. Just a child, really. I know, I’m very mature for my age, but sad to say…” She let her voice die out, as if regretfully.
Loran withdrew his hand instantly. “I had no idea!”
“I know.” Sam sighed theatrically. “It’s a curse, being so young and looking so…” She paused, as if seeking the right word.
“Desirable?” Loran suggested.
Aside from these moments of mild yet queasy prurience, the characterization is bland. The Doctor and Sam could be anybody, and ultimately aren’t even important; events in the book would likely have turned out the same whether they were there or not. The Doctor has one un-Doctorish moment in which he insists that the Daleks have no culture. It doesn’t sound like something he’d say, and is in any case completely wrong—it’s impossible for any society not to have a culture. The secondary characters have one distinguishing feature each, with no other history or personality—Cheyn is the ice queen who inexplicably falls in love with the Doctor the first time she sees him, Ayaka (one of the Thals) is the soldier doubting her cause, and so on.
At this point there’s a cut to a totally unrelated fight between a Special Space Security agent (as seen in “The Dalek Master Plan”) and a Dalek.
There are three or four of these interludes in the book, all of them dedicated to some sort of fight scene. Theyhave no relevance to the plot and no intrinsic interest of their own.
The garbage ship is soon picked up by a Thal warship that wants its cargo, which happens to be Davros. (How did he get here from 1963?) The Thals are once again a brutal, warlike race. Incredibly, we later discover that they’re still wearing those outfits from “The Daleks” under their uniforms. The Thals kill a few people to show they mean business and Ayaka begins to have doubts about the rightness of her mission. At this point the story tries to inject a moral message, but it’s as clumsy as the “romance” in part one. The Doctor, Sam, Cheyn—anyone who’s handy, basically, whether it fits their character or not—recites page after page of plodding dialog in an enthusiastic attempt to make sure that the readers Get The Point. And the point is merely that “war is bad”… which is generally true, but also obvious, inane, and lacking in nuance.
Using dialog to convey a philosophical point is a valid writing technique which most writers use, but it has to be done well. It shouldn’t take over the narrative, it shouldn’t be trite, and it shouldn’t sound unnatural coming from the character who is speaking. Here, all three rules are broken.
In the third part of the book, the Daleks show up and drag Davros and the Doctor back to Skaro. Here, the Dalek Prime sits the Doctor down and, in a drawn-out exposition sequence, politely explains the retcon to him. The retcon was the entire reason that this book was written, and is the absolute hands-down stupidest plot twist in the entire series. We’re expected to believe not only that Skaro was not destroyed, but that the war with the Movellans that a couple of the TV stories hinged upon was a hoax. This is a classic “idiot plot,” requiring that the characters—in particular the Doctor himself—be idiots. How could the Doctor and Davros miss the fact that this supposed war never happened? And just how were the Daleks smart enough to outmaneuver the seventh Doctor in “Remembrance”? This is, you will recall, the species that was defeated by a mechanical Dracula statue in “The Chase.” If you’re a fan of the series, this is just silly. To someone who came into War with no knowledge of the series, it would be completely incomprehensible. I can’t believe Peel intended anyone to take this book seriously.
The worst thing is that War of the Daleks introduced nothing of value to replace what it swept aside. We already had a perfectly good conclusion to the Dalek subplots in “Remembrance.” The new situations it set up—with Skaro gone and Davros apparently on Earth in 1963, presumably separated from the Daleks for good—would have been excellent jumping off points for new stories. War sets the story back to the state it was in before the mid-seventies. When “The Deadly Assassin” and Lungbarrow rewrote some of what the audience thought it knew, they replaced those concepts with something more imaginative and interesting than what had gone before. War of the Daleks isn’t even in the same league as Ben Aaronovich’s “Remembrance,” or even Terry Nation’s “Destiny of the Daleks,” which was poorly done but at least had some interesting concepts backing it up.
After the retcon, Peel, his mission accomplished, seems to lose interest in his own book. At this point, War is just marking time until the last of the BBC-mandated 280 pages come around. Davros is killed, and the Doctor is threatened by a couple of Daleks and a bomb as he leaves in the TARDIS. None of the events affect the Doctor or Sam, and I couldn’t bring myself to care about anyone else in this book. Which is a shame, because in England the Daleks were a cultural phenomenon at one point, and in 1997 they could still bring in new readers. If any story in the first run of books from the BBC needed to be brilliant, this was it.