EDA #5 War of the Daleks

War of the Daleks by John Peel

In Brief: Daleks. Thals. Spider-Daleks. Davros. Battle-Daleks. Evil Plans. Things go BOOM. Daleks daleks daleks. And then they all go home.

It would be very easy to just state that War of the Daleks is complete rubbish and move on. Actually I'd actually *like* to just state that War or the Daleks is rubbish and move on. The problem is that it's not *quite* awful enough to hate, I more just feel a bit of pity for it. Author John Peel obviously has a serious literary hard-on for all things Dalek, unfortunately the result is just too much hot and messy textual self-love.

However despite being well below-average the book is not boring. After a long-winded prelude detailing a Thal/Dalek battle, the Doctor and Sam find themselves on a garbage-ship in space, the Quetzel. Initially it seems like the story will be about the crew of this ship being caught up in a massive space-war, with lots of macho battles and guns. With flat characterisation and Peel's rather terrible prose style the first act of the book is rather painful.

However a recovered pod on board The Quetzel turns out to contain one Davros, creator of the Daleks.

And so the insanity begins.

First Davros/The Doctor/Sam are captured by the Thals. Then they're captured by the Daleks. Then they're taken to Thal/Dalek home-work Skaro to meet with the "Dalek Prime".

Why don't the Daleks just exterminate arch-enemy The Doctor on sight? Who knows?!!

Well so that the Dalek Prime can spend a chapter recounting a nonsensical plot that somehow kept Skaro from being destroyed in 1988's "Remembrance of the Daleks".

Of course

Then there was something about finding out about which Daleks were still loyal to Davros...
...a battle on Skaro...
...stuff blew up...
...capture, escape, captured...
...bombs in the Tardis...
...a disguised Dalek in the Tardis...
...sea-Slythers...
...Davros ranting...
...The Dalek Prime ranting...

and

and

and...

It just doesn't make any sense. Not a bit of it.

There is no plot or really even purpose to War of the Daleks. It's essentially John Peel's love-letter to the Dlakes. The problem is that what Peel wants is the Daleks as they were in 1960s comic-strips rather than what was ever seen on television.


The comic-strips in question.

This isn't a book finding a new way to use the Daleks in Doctor Who fiction (and remember they never appeared in a New Adventure), this is John Peel spending 200 pages re-writing almost every previous Dalek story so that his vision of what they "should be" can come to pass. Unfortunately his vision is a group of characters meant for a mid-60s comic-book, not a late-90s novel. As much as I complained that Terrance Dicks was trying to force the series back to the early-70s in The Eight Doctors at least he's a semi-competent writer (most of the time) who actually worked on the show proper. John Peel just isn't up to the task. While none of the ideas in War of the Daleks are particularly poor (other than the desire to re-write the past) the author had nowhere near enough ability or talent to putting a comic-book sensibility in a book. The result is just a huge mess.

Despite War of the Daleks being a poor entry in the series I'm still enjoying reading the Eighth Doctor books. However unfortunately the quality so far has been well below that of the New Adventures, despite that series' occasional fumble. There's been too much of a move into the past (every book so far has included an old aspect/character from the show) with an almost seemingly deliberate reaction to the New Adventures shifting Doctor Who away from what it was when on TV. Unfortunately the problem is that removing these changes forces the series to go backwards, which is not a good thing for Doctor Who. Again the series needs to find its way forward, and to stop relying on random authors who seem to only want to rely on nostalgia for their stories.