Read a deleted scene from 'The Robot Revolution' from the new Target novel

Discover Belinda Chandra's origin story in the full first chapter of this exciting novelisation.

Out now are the latest novelised Doctor Who adventures from the Target range. You can now add Season 1 finale Empire of Death, plus Season 2 stories The Robot Revolution, Lux and The Well to your collection in paperback or audiobook.

As an exclusive preview, we have the first chapter from The Robot Revolution, written by Una McCormack, below. We follow Belinda Chandra in her early life as she discovers her destiny, meets her boyfriend Alan Budd, and has several run-ins with a mysterious disappearing man...

Get your copy of The Robot Revolution, plus more Doctor Who Target novels released in 2025, here.

The Robot Revolution 

Chapter 1 - Written in the Stars

Do you believe in destiny? Do you believe in fate?

Once upon a time in Croydon, a little girl was born, surrounded by people who loved her and wanted everything that was best for her.

There was her mother and her father – and one of her mother’s aunts, Manju, who had her own thoughts about how you protect a little girl. When the baby was six days old, Manju came to see her and, with a makeup pencil, she drew a little dot on the baby’s forehead.  

‘On the sixth day,’ said Manju, ‘we place the kala tikka on the child. To ward off evil. And keep her safe.’ Mum and Dad looked at each other over their beloved baby girl.

Her dad winked and her mum smiled. 

They didn’t believe in fate – or destiny, for that matter – but they did love Manju Babu, who was getting old, and deaf, and perhaps a little odd, but who loved them very much in return.  

Which was why, when the baby was about a month old, Manju was the guest of honour at the baby’s naming ceremony.

Belinda Chandra. That was the little girl’s name.

All the family had gathered to celebrate their new member, and it had been a delightful party, full of love and character and memories-in-the-making, but now the guests were gone and only Manju remained. Manju, and the tidying-up. Manju was here for a purpose (which was not to do the washing-up). Among Manju’s many talents, she was the family astrologer. She was here to give the jathakam, her predictions for the child.

Lakshmi sat cuddling the baby. Belinda had, she thought, coped with the busy day very well, cooing and smiling and being the most beautiful of babies. She had the kala tikka once again, this time on her tiny cheek, and there was a black string tied around her midriff.  

‘Belinda, Belinda, pretty little Belinda!’ said Manju, tickling the baby’s chin. ‘Does she cry?’

‘Like a thunderstorm,’ said Lakshmi, who was by now feeling very tired. ‘She’s so loud!’

‘That’s a good sign,’ said Manju. ‘Make yourself heard. Ring like a bell, Belinda!’ 

She drew some papers from her capacious handbag and unfolded them carefully. They were handwritten, like a letter, although if you looked more closely you would see that they were covered in symbols and pictograms as much as script.

‘I spent a long time over this, darling,’ Manju said. ‘Back in the old days, I’d write it out on a palm leaf, but the modern world rolls onwards, ever onwards …’  

She snorted, as if to pass her opinion on the ever onward rolling of the modern world. ‘Still, I think this jathakam is really very good. Quite striking!’

Lakshmi – who was thinking about the dishes that needed washing and the mess that needed tidying up and the many small but constant and repetitive tasks that surrounded taking care of a newborn baby – suppressed a yawn. ‘I’m not worried about her horoscope. As long as she’s healthy, that’s all I care about.’ She blinked, tiredly. She really hoped Belinda was going to sleep for more than an hour tonight. She really hoped that she was going to sleep for more than an hour tonight.

A wind brushed gently through the room. The curtains drifted. So did Lakshmi, half-listening to Manju Babu muttering over her papers. And then, all of a sudden …

‘What?’ said Lakshmi.

There was a man, standing there – right there! – in the middle of the living room. A very handsome man, yes, and he looked as surprised as Lakshmi felt. They stared at each other.

‘What?’ he said.

‘What?’ said Manju, looking up from her papers.

Lakshmi blinked. The man was gone, as suddenly as he’d appeared. ‘I thought …’ she murmured. ‘There was a man …’

‘Speak up, darling!’

‘There was a man,’ said Lakshmi. ‘In this room!’

Manju didn’t seem particularly interested in this news. The jathakam was her interest, and she did not intend to be diverted by stories of disappearing men. ‘That’s nice, dear,’ she said, absently, and tapped the paper she was holding. ‘As I was saying. The jathakam. The prophecy for your child is remarkably straightforward. It says … she will travel. I’ve never seen a fortune quite so strong! But that’s what it says. Your little girl is born to travel!’

Travel, thought Lakshmi. She had come all the way from Kerala in her childhood, all this long way, here, to Croydon. In my opinion, it’s more than a little overrated. Still, she held Belinda tight, as if worried that somehow she might slip away.

* * *

Once upon a time very far from Croydon, a star was born. For aeons, there wasn’t a star, and the matter that would eventually become this star had been quite happy getting by as a nebula, a cloud of gas and dust swirling around in outer space. But as time passed (quite a lot of time, it must be said), mavity did its inexorable thing, and the cloud gathered more dust and particles, pulling it in greedily to itself until – one day – there was so much of this stuff that—

Bam!

And so (although if we’re being scrupulously honest we must be clear that this didn’t exactly happen overnight) a protostar was born – a baby star. This baby star was as hungry as any baby, and kept on and on gathering up mass from the cloud around it, getting bigger and hotter and hotter and bigger until—

Whoomph!

And so (although you must imagine that ‘whoomph’ taking a very long time to happen, say about half a million years) a young star was there, full of energy and promise. Stable now, confident in its identity, it set about the business of being the best star in the neighbourhood. And surely what every self-respecting star needs is its very own set of planets.

Time passed, more time – a very long time. The rest of the stuff, the gas and the dust particles that still lingered, couldn’t quite shake free from the pull they all exerted on each other and started clumping together into big pieces. And these, in turn, pulled towards that new star, spinning round and round it in even bigger chunks until—

Ta da!

A whole planetary system was there: half a dozen worlds, some with moons, some without, and one of these planets was particularly interesting. Not just because it really was very pretty – a beautifully swirly orangey-red sort of planet – but because, as luck would have it, the conditions on this planet were ideally suited for the formation of life. It doesn’t happen everywhere (although it does happen more than you might expect).

And the primordial broth bubbled, and nascent life took its chance, and the world turned round its sun, and the sun shone brightly, and all they had to do now – this star, these worlds, these tiny single-cell organisms, so full of potential – was wait for someone to notice them.

Wait for someone to name them.

Life proceeded smoothly for young Belinda Chandra.

She went to school, where she did very well, much better than average. Belinda was not by any means an average sort of child. The teachers liked her, because she was hardworking and asked good questions, and her schoolmates liked her because she was kind and funny. Everything went like clockwork, especially once Belinda realised she was never going to become a ballerina and (much to her parents’ relief) decided she would become a doctor instead.

Yes, life was safe, and straightforward – and if sometimes Belinda thought it was perhaps rather boring, there was the jathakam. True, there was no sign yet of that travel she’d been promised by the stars, and if you’d asked her the most exciting thing ever to happen to her, she would tell a story about when she was seven years old and ran carelessly and unthinkingly out onto the street. She spied the car zooming towards her and was about to cry out when a man popped up from nowhere, just in time to pull her to safety.

‘Careful!’ said the man, and then he was gone, as quickly as he’d arrived.

Whenever Belinda told this story, she used to finish by saying, ‘Lucky escape!’ As if there really was something called luck, or fate, or destiny.

Belinda told this story to Alan once. About the man who appeared out of nowhere and saved her life. As her tale unfolded, Alan started shaking his head.

‘People don’t appear from nowhere,’ said Alan, in a very definite voice. 'He must have been standing nearby already. I would guess that he saw you running up the garden path and thought that because you were so small, you might not be keeping an eye on the road. So he put himself in place, just in case.' He became, if possible, even more definite. ‘There’s nothing complicated or mysterious about it, Belinda!’

Alan did a lot of headshaking when people spoke, and often used a very definite voice, which Belinda suspected Alan thought made him sound much older than seventeen.

They’d met in the school library.  

Belinda was scanning the shelves and not really concentrating on where she was going. She bumped into Alan coming the other way. He dropped his book and Belinda reached to pick it up for him.

‘Sorry,’ she said. Then, looking at the cover, ‘Ooh, Richard Dawkins.’

Alan blushed, rather sweetly. ‘You’ve read him?’

‘Yes,’ said Belinda, though she didn’t quite agree with Dawkins on several things.

‘That’s… amazing,’ said Alan.

‘Is it?’ said Belinda.

Belinda read everything that passed her way, with curiosity and delight. This came from her dad who, although he might spend all day dealing with taxes, came home every night to a stack of books that he ploughed through in his off hours. (Non-fiction, mainly; her mum was the one who read novels.) Every so often, he’d shout out, ‘Belinda, come and look at this!’ and fill her in on some detail of his latest obsession. So far (non-exclusively) these had covered: hand-building radios (given as presents to baffled friends and relatives); roasting his own coffee beans (bagged as presents for considerably more grateful friends and relatives); collecting every recording of Dvořák’s Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 53 (which used to be his wife’s favourite and wasn’t any more); and the history of the design and production of the Ford Capri (an interest mercilessly extinguished by his wife the day the first engine part appeared on the kitchen table).

‘I mean, in this place,’ said Alan. 'I didn’t think anyone else here read. Books, I mean.'

Belinda laughed. ‘Well, some of us do!’

Alan’s face was beetroot red by now. He tucked Dawkins under his arm and stuck out his hand. ‘My name is Alan,’ he said. ‘Alan Budd.’

‘Okay,’ said Belinda. Very formal, this one. Polite, though, which was a pleasant change. She shook the hand he’d offered. ‘I’m Belinda. Belinda Chandra.’

‘Would you like to come and get some ice cream with me, Belinda?’

Raspberry red now, his face. Raspberry ripple. Belinda suppressed a giggle. She wasn’t being mean, but this whole situation struck her as faintly comical. ‘Ice cream?’

‘Yes. We could … we could carry on talking about Dawkins.’

Why not, thought Belinda. ‘Okay,’ she said.

So they did, after school that afternoon. Alan was nice. Interesting. Read a lot, and his head was full of ideas. They met again, a couple of evenings later, and then it became a regular thing. They had some great conversations, although he didn’t have much time for what he called Belinda’s ‘flights of fancy’. He got on with her dad, although once, after he’d been over for Sunday lunch, her mum asked, ‘Does he ever laugh?’

‘Sometimes,’ said Belinda, though she couldn’t quite recall the last time.

Once, she showed him the jathakam, but he wasn’t impressed. He wasn’t impressed at all.

‘It’s a horoscope,’ she explained. ‘It says that I’m going to travel.’

‘A horoscope?’ Alan shook his head. ‘Belinda, you know better than that!’

‘Better than what?’ she said.

‘I mean – horoscopes?’ he sneered. ‘That kind of thing – it’s rubbish, isn’t it?’

‘Do you think so?’ Belinda didn’t believe in horoscopes, not particularly, but she also had a stubborn streak, so she was prepared to give defending them a go. She’d also hoped he might ask something about the history of the jathakam, who’d created it, what it meant to her and her family – but Alan was getting those pink spots on his cheeks which meant he was getting excited or, more accurately, wound up. Belinda was starting to regret showing him the daft thing.

‘I mean,’ he said scornfully, ‘do you really think that our future is written in the stars in some way? That where the planets happen to be lined up when we’re born can predict how our lives will turn out?’

Belinda didn’t think that at all, but her mind immediately began to run through all kinds of potential explanations, which she knew Alan would shoot down on sight.

‘I guess you’re right.’ She put the jathakam aside. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I like it.’

There was a short, slightly awkward pause.

‘I just think,’ said Alan, in a more subdued voice, ‘that’s not how the universe works.’

‘I know. It’s okay.’

‘It’s, um, pretty though.’

‘I think so,’ said Belinda. ‘Shall we head off? The film starts in twenty minutes.’

She was well aware of how much Alan hated being late. Heaven knew, he’d told her that often enough.

Get your copy of The Robot Revolution, plus more Doctor Who Target novels released in 2025, here.