In my teens, when I first discovered DOCTOR WHO, my family had a Friday night ritual. We’d go to the Ponderosa Steakhouse in town and, after dinner, I’d run over to the Rapids Mall to the B. Dalton Booksellers. It was a small store but at the time, being an ardent geek, the sci fi section was all I ever cared about. In particular, the small selection of DOCTOR WHO Target novelizations at the end of the section. This is where I made my beeline each week and if I’d saved up enough money, I bought a new book each week. (Back then, they ran $3.50 to eventually about $6.00…. Oy, listen to me. ‘Back then.’ Next I’m be reminiscing about my first Geritol.) They got to know me by name at B. Dalton and they happily got out their cobalt blue microfische to look up and order any WHO title I requested. To this day, I worry that booksellers can see “Easy Money” written on my forehead.
The Target (the name of the publisher) books were adaptations of the stories that appeared on TV, not unlike movie tie-in books. They were helpful in that I was able to read about the Doctor’s prior adventures that I’d never seen on TV (I started watching in the mid-80s and by that point, DOCTOR WHO had been around for almost 25 years) or I could get ‘backstory’ on recently screened eps. This was how I came to enjoy the concept of work. I had to babysit and clean my heart out to earn money but I knew that when I did, it meant being able to get a new WHO book every week. (Note: This did nothing to teach my fiscal responsibility or the virtues of saving. How could it, when there was the potential for a new WHO book every week?)
Target continued to produce these books, often written by the episode’s original writer, right until the very end of the Doctor’s original run (1989 with Sylvester McCoy’s final story, “Survival”). Recently, Mark Gatiss, the English actor and writer who has both written for and appeared on the most recent incarnation of DOCTOR WHO, wrote a loving tribute to this era and the books it published. With an air of nostalgia and a gentle mockery, he notes how the books were very much a product of “house style” writing, employing stock descriptions for each of the Doctors and broad characterizations of the Doctor’s most familiar enemies. Here’s one of my favorite lines form Gatiss’s piece:
“The hissing, green Ice Warriors were always described as ‘a once proud race’. I love that. I still long to create a race of aliens that were ‘once proud’ and are now… not.”
At one point, I had quite a nice collection of these books. They do prompt a certain nostalgia for the “old days” of DOCTOR WHO. I enjoyed reading the Gatiss piece, knowing that I wasn’t the only one with fond memories of these books and their (occasionally) cheesy covers. Today, I can’t stomach tie-in books. In the 90s, a series of “new” WHO adventures came out from a couple different publishers (today, the BBC has taken over publishing all new novels) and I gave up on them quite some time ago. I realized that they just weren’t canon and, therfore in my mind, not worth my time. Oh, it sounds like some interesting things have happened in these books. Gallifrey was destroyed (somewhat prescient of what would come to pass on the revived TV show) and some highly questionable “facts” about the Doctor’s past was revealed. But I stand by my own timeline which states if it didn’t happen on TV, it didn’t happen. (Although, I’ll admit to being quite fond of Big Finish’s audio adventures which use the original actors playing the Doctor and his companions to make all new stories. These I consider quasi-canon because I love hearing Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy recreate the roles I came to adore on TV.)
Still, I keep coming back to my fond memories of the Target books. They nurtured an almost insane amount of love for a property that, to this day, stokes my imagination and makes me proud to be a Whovian.
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