October 26, 2023
Celebrate the release of Frazer Hines' novelisation of the classic 1967 adventure with an exclusive extract.
The Evil of the Daleks, the 1967 serial featuring the Second Doctor, Jamie McCrimmon, Victoria Waterfield and the infamous Daleks, has received the novelisation treatment from none other than one of the story's cast. Frazer Hines, who played the Doctor's Highlander companion Jamie, has adapted the story as his first Doctor Who novel.
To celebrate the release of The Evil of the Daleks, you can read an exclusive excerpt from the novel below.
Get your copy of The Evil of the Daleks here.
Read on for an exclusive extract from 'The Evil of the Daleks'...
Jamie stared out across the desolate landscape of the planet Skaro. All around him stretched a seeming endless range of mountains. Unlike the crags of Scotland, these peaks were bare, jagged rock, scoured of all life by the icy winds that keened around them.
Below him, in a wide valley carved through the mountains by ancient glaciers, lay the Dalek city, the angular metal buildings as harsh as the landscape they sat in. Beyond the city, Jamie could see a vast forest but it too was lifeless and drained of colour, the trees little more than blasted trunks emerging from ash-grey soil.
Above him a huge, ponderous moon illuminated everything with a pale bluish light, the craters on its surface picked out in sharp relief by the distant sun. Nothing about this place was comforting.
Their journey across space in the Dalek time machine had been terrifyingly rough – Daleks didn’t bruise after all – and the Doctor said it was lucky that Skaro’s time-space location had been stored in the machine’s travel log or they might never have found the right place and point in history.
To his surprise, that journey ended with them materialising on a rocky outcrop hallway up a mountainside. Jamie had mistakenly assumed that the Doctor would transport them directly to the city.
‘I offset the spatial coordinates by a few degrees,’ he explained, ‘so that we arrived a short distance outside the city rather than inside it. Now we can enter on our terms, not arrive as prisoners.’
Waterfield was already weakened from his tussle with Maxtible, and the journey took its toll on him. Jamie had offered to go and see if he could find some water. It was a vain hope. There was a muddy lake in the valley below, but the path down to it looked so narrow and treacherously steep that Jamie had no desire to break a limb attempting to traverse it. Besides, even if the path had been pass- able, the brief glimpses he had gotten of the huge, misshapen creatures living in the water had been enough to convince him that it would have been a foolhardy and probably fatal expedition.
Retracing his steps, he made his way back to where the Doctor and Waterfield were waiting. Waterfield seemed to have recovered somewhat, and he was staring down at the strange architecture of the Dalek city. Somewhere in that city was his daughter, and Jamie could only imagine what the man must be feeling at the thought of her being trapped in such a terrible, alien place.
‘I’ve scouted around, but I couldn’t get any water.’
Waterfield glanced up at him with a weak smile. ‘Oh, please don’t bother. I feel much better.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked the Doctor, regarding him carefully.
‘Yes.’ Waterfield nodded, straightening his cravat and smooth- ing out a crease in his frockcoat.
‘Come along, then. We must get along.’ The Doctor set off abruptly along the mountain path, in the opposite direction to the one that Jamie had taken.
Get your copy of The Evil of the Daleks here.
