City of the Daleks (comic story)

City of the Daleks (comic story)

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City of the Daleks
Main enemy:	Daleks, Dalek Emperor
Main setting:	Skaro
Release details
Format:	full-colour, 6 pages plus fold-out cutaway, "Anatomy of a Dalek"

City of the Daleks was a full-colour, painted comic story that detailed Jeff Stone's adventure on Skaro. Though short on plot, it affords an incredibly rich view of Dalek society, culture and technology. Written when The Daleks was the only televised story of which the public were aware, it offered the first in-depth exploration of the Dalek capital city. Many of its concepts about Dalek culture are highly unusual from the perspective of 21st century readers — such as the notion that Daleks were secretly behind the work of some of Earth's most important figures, like William Shakespeare and Albert Einstein.

Summary

Jeff Stone covertly lands on Skaro near an extinct volcano. He pops down inside and finds access to the lower levels of a Dalek city. He explores the city fully, and is detected only by a single Dalek. Nevertheless, he is able to rush out of the city and return to Earth to report his findings to his colleagues.

Characters

• Jeff Stone
• Dalek Emperor
• Daleks

References

to be added

Notes

This story is extremely short on plot. It literally is as simple as "Jeff Stone walks around the Dalek city". But it's very, very long on details about Dalek society, culture and technology. Here are some of the highlights:

• The city is awash with lifts that work via pressurised gas — very similar to the kind of technology employed by the Silurian tribe in The Hungry Earth
• The city uses nuclear power.
• Daleks require great amounts of vegetative matter. When mature, the plants are pulverised and turned into a gas form that Daleks then absorb through an intake valve. In essence, the story claims that Daleks are vegetarians.
• The city's interior is filled with lots of sloped "highways" which conduct electricity — not static electricity, as in The Daleks. Stone remarks that his "space boots will insulate" him.
• The city has a "radio telescope visualiser room" which takes radio waves and converts them to light waves so that the Daleks can see anything that's happening around them, even millions of miles away.
• There is a part of the city called the "war office". It records the positions of every Dalek and ensures their actions are co-ordinated for maximum efficacy. The office is led by a red dalek known as the War Leader Dalek.
• Another area of the city offered Daleks target practice against humanoid shapes. Daleks in this area were led by a red Dalek called a Storm-Blast Dalek described as a kind of sergeant-major.
• Stone also encounters a laboratory of sorts — a place called the Dalek Invention Hall, where the Daleks created new weapons. At the time of his visit, the Daleks are perfecting a weapon that will prevent the Sun's rays from hitting the Earth.
• A portion of the city is a dedicated museum space, showing off things related to their various conquests. Stone is naturally drawn to that portion having to do with the Solar System. There, he finds a Venusian spaceship from before the time of the Dalek invasion, a methane gas ship from Jupiter, a Mercurian sun-hopper, and the remains of a Dalek craft that landed on the Moon in 1971 and captured some humans. The last item is particularly interesting as the story was written in 1964.
• Stone eventually makes it to the Emperor Dalek's quarters. There, he discovers the Emperor taking his regular constitutional of a burst of revitalising rays.
• Quite separate from the "command and control" area of the city is a domed building dedicated to Dalek sciences and culture. There, Stone learns that Albert Einstein based his theories on "Dalek cosmology", that the Dalek Emperor wrote William Shakespeare's body of work, and that Daleks invented the Wright Flyer. He also sees how Daleks can remove the ego from humans with their schizoid accelerator and insert a Skaro mesmeristor into their brains so as to achieve complete control of them.
• Stone finds a booklet in this part of the city called Anatomy of the Dalek. It's pretty much what it purports to be. Readers of The Dalek World were, on the next page of the story, given a fold-out diagram of Dalek anatomy.
• Taking one of the lifts deep into the bowels of the city, Stone discovers a workshop where Daleks are working on a plan to house Daleks in fake asteroids so as to orbit the Solar System undetected. He also found finds Daleks using a machine to extract the truth from a Dalek — the truth that he has seen Jeff Stone lurking around the Dalek city.

Continuity

to be added

Timeline

Precise dating is awfully difficult with this one, but there are a few clues. It must be after 1971, because Stone encounters a museum placard with that year on it. This Dalek city runs on electricity, not static electricity, so it's different from what the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan encountered. The Daleks, by this point, have thoroughly infested our Solar System, so that suggests a time period of at least the 2260s, the date of the first Dalek invasion of Earth by the original, pre-Time War Dalek Empire. (DW: The Dalek Invasion of Earth) One could arbitrarily assign it a chronological placement between the stories in this book – so between The Secret of the Mountain and The Humanoids – but its placement in the larger body of Doctor Who fiction is much harder. One can only guess at a point sometime after the 2290s when the Daleks return to Earth. (BFA: Lucie Miller)