Doctor Who and an Unearthly Child (novelisation)
Doctor Who and an Unearthly Child was a novelisation based on the television serial An Unearthly Child. This novelisation was written some eighteen years after the publication of the novelisation of TV: The Daleks, published as Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks. The two books, if read chronologically, do not maintain continuity.
Publisher's summary
1981 edition
FIRST PUBLICATION OF THE VERY FIRST DOCTOR WHO STORY
A strange girl who knows far more than she should about the past – and the future...
Two worried teachers whose curiosity leads them to a deserted junk yard, an extraordinary police box and a mysterious traveller known only as the Doctor...
A fantastic journey through Space and Time ending in a terrifying adventure at the dawn of history...
DOCTOR WHO AND AN UNEARTHLY CHILD
THE BEGINNING OF A LEGEND
1990 edition
23 November 1963: The Birth of a phenomenon.
Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright are teachers at Coal Hill School in London. One of their pupils, a girl named Susan Foreman, intrigues them: she displays strange knowledge and an uncanny intelligence. They follow her to her home-- and she leads them to a police telephone box, incongruously parked in a junk yard, where they meet a tetchy, white-haired old man. Susan calls him grandfather, but he says he is known as the Doctor...
This was the public's first glimpse of the dimension-hopping Time Lord, and the beginning of a television legend. More than a hundred and fifty adventures and a quarter of a century later, the Doctor and his Tardis are still travelling through time and space.
Terrance Dicks, who was the Doctor Who script editor for five years, has written more than sixty novelisations of Doctor Who television stories. This is a new edition of his novel based on the first Doctor Who story ever shown on television.
Doctor Who - An Unearthly Child is available as a BBC Video, and will be broadcast on BSB television during 1990.
Chapter titles
- The Girl Who Was Different
- Enter the Doctor
- The TARDIS
- The Dawn of Time
- The Disappearance
- The Cave of Skulls
- The Knife
- The Forest of Fear
- Ambush
- Captured
- The Firemaker
- Escape into Danger
Deviations from televised story
- The Doctor specifically states that his name is not "Doctor Foreman" rather than just implying it.
- The Old Mother is said to be the mother of Za. The father of Za is named Gor.
Writing and publishing notes
- Suggested by producer John Nathan-Turner as a tie-in to the broadcast of the serial on TV as part of a series of repeats (The Five Faces of Doctor Who), author Terrance Dicks was given only a fortnight to complete the book. There were delays incurred in securing the writer's permission, given by his widow.
- A guaranteed success because of the TV broadcast, this title had an increased cover price and the first edition featured a red foil logo.
- Cover artist Andrew Skilleter starts an unbroken run of twenty-one covers of artwork with this title, whose artwork he completed over a weekend without being requested to provide any roughs, describing this cover as "a weekends work" in his book Blacklight.
- It was the first book published in the Target Books Doctor Who novelisation schedules after a six month gap caused by a Writer's Guild strike.
Additional cover images
1982, 1983 & 1984 editions
Cover by Andrew Skilleter
1990 edition
Cover by Alister Pearson
British publication history
First publication:
- Hardback
- W.H.Allen & Co. Ltd. UK
- Paperback
- Target
Re-issues:
- Paperback
- Target / Virgin Publishing Ltd. UK February 1980 Cover by Alistair Pearson (£2.50 UK)
Editions published outside Britain
- Published in France in March 1987 interchangeably titled Docteur Who Entre en Scène (Doctor Who enters the scene) or Le Docteur entre en scène (The Doctor enters the scene) on the cover. It was translation by Jean-Daniel Brecqueis and is the first in a eight volume collection created by Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff.
- Published in Germany as Doctor Who und das Kind von den Sternen (Doctor Who and the Child from the Stars).
Docteur Who Entre en Scene; cover by Jean-François Pénichoux
Doctor Who und das Kind von den Sternen
External links
to be added
