The Ice Warriors
Contents
The Changing Face of Doctor Who
1. Battle against the Glaciers
3. Creature from the Red Planet
10. On the Brink of Destruction!
About the Book
The world is in the grip of a second Ice Age. Despite a coordinated global effort, the glaciers still advance. But they are not the only threat to the planet.
Buried deep in the ice, scientists at Brittanicus Base have discovered an ancient warrior. But this is no simple archaeological find. What they have found is the commander of a spaceship that crashed into the glacier thousands of years ago. Thawed from the ice, and knowing their home planet Mars is now a dead world, the Ice Warriors decide to make Earth their own...
Can the Doctor and his friends overcome the warlike Martians and halt the advance of the glaciers?
This novel is based on a Doctor Who story which was originally broadcast from 11 November to 16 December 1967. This was the first Doctor Who story to feature the Ice Warriors.
Featuring the Second Doctor as played by Patrick Troughton, and his companions Jamie and Victoria.
About the Author
Born in England in 1930, Brian Hayles spent time in Canada as a sculptor and an art teacher before returning to Britain. He continued his career as a teacher for a while, writing in his spare time until he gave up the teaching to write full-time.
He wrote for radio, including many episodes of The
Archers
, as well as for television and film. As well as writing for various series such as
United!
and
Z Cars
, Hayles’s work on
Doctor Who
included adventures for the first three Doctors. His first story was the well-remembered The
Celestial Toymaker
, though Hayles’s scripts were extensively rewritten several times. After his historical adventure The
Smugglers
, Hayles wrote The
Ice Warriors
– introducing the creatures for which he is best remembered. He wrote three further Ice Warriors stories, the last two featuring the Third Doctor and set on the feudal planet Peladon.
Hayles’s last work for television was the acclaimed children’s serial The
Moon Stallion
– which starred Sarah Sutton, who later played
Doctor Who
companion Nyssa.
Brian Hayles died in 1978. His novel
Goldhawk
was published posthumously in 1979.
Also by BBC Books
DOCTOR WHO AND THE DALEKS
David Whitaker
DOCTOR WHO AND THE CRUSADERS
David Whitaker
DOCTOR WHO AND THE CYBERMEN
Gerry Davis
DOCTOR WHO AND THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN
Terrance Dicks
DOCTOR WHO AND THE AUTON INVASION
Terrance Dicks
DOCTOR WHO AND THE CAVE MONSTERS
Malcolm Hulke
DOCTOR WHO AND THE TENTH PLANET
Gerry Davis
DOCTOR WHO AND THE DAY OF THE DALEKS
Terrance Dicks
DOCTOR WHO – THE THREE DOCTORS
Terrance Dicks
DOCTOR WHO AND THE ARK IN SPACE
Ian Marter
DOCTOR WHO AND THE LOCH NESS MONSTER
Terrance Dicks
INTRODUCTION
BY
Mark Gatiss
Time travel is real
.
There, I’ve said it. I make no claims, however, for cooking up something with mirrors and static electricity, achieving faster-than-light speed or even for having ironed out those annoying teething problems with the Zigma experiments. Nevertheless, what you hold in your hands is a time machine. A Target
Doctor Who
book!
Show a copy of any one of these glorious novelisations to people of a certain age and they are transported back to a simpler, cosier age. Some of my memories of them are imprinted with Proustian clarity, like my very own, Time Lord-flavoured Madeleine cakes. The
Three Doctors
(white spine) read as I lay tucked up in Dad’s Hillman Minx in the car park of Strike’s Garden Centre. Watching
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
the Saturday night Mam came back from a shopping trip to Leeds, bearing The
Auton Invasion
(brown spine) in her mittened hand. The genuinely unsettling, hard-edged face of the First Doctor gazing out from the cover of
Doctor Who and the Daleks
(purple spine) in Binns, Darlington. It became a wonderful ritual, saving pocket money, then deciding which Target book to go for. I devoured them. Not literally. Though I did live in the north and was always hungry.
Faithful to the show they certainly were, but there were things the books – being books – could do better. After all, a typewriter can take you anywhere in the universe, not just to a Home Counties quarry. Doomed minor characters were brought out and developed. Alien races developed intriguing back-stories (‘They became aware of the lack of love and feeling in their lives and substituted another goal – power!’). Then there was the joy of the house style. The multitude of chapters headed ‘Escape to Danger’. The classic description of the TARDIS materialising with a ‘wheezing, groaning sound’. The wonderful stock descriptions of the Doctor himselves. Hartnell was usually in the ‘crotchety old man in a frock coat with long flowing white hair’ area, whilst Troughton had ‘baggy check trousers and a mop of untidy black hair’ with ‘a faraway look in his eyes’, which were either green/blue or blue/green and which were ‘funny and sad at the same time’. My Doctor, Jon Pertwee, had an ‘old/young face’, a ‘beak’ of a nose and ‘a mane of prematurely white hair’, while the new (!) Doctor, the great Tom Baker, routinely had a ‘mop of curly hair’, a ‘broad-brimmed hat’ and a ‘long, multi-coloured’ scarf which always contributed to a ‘casual bohemian elegance’.
Perhaps my fondest memory, though, is my encounter with the book you’re now holding. I had already revelled in the majesty of The
Abominable Snowmen
(blue spine) and completely fallen for the Second Doctor’s impish charms. The snowy wastes of Tibet had taken an immediate, Yeti-like grip on my imagination and now here was another icy adventure. As icy, indeed, as it was possible to get. The
Ice Warriors!
Featuring Viking-like Martian reptiles described elsewhere as ‘a once-proud race’, they instantly became one of my favourite monsters. I’d seen them, of course, on TV in glorious colour in the two Peladon stories, but here was their first, long-ago adventure. What absolutely fired my imagination as a child was the wonderful, wild world of possibilities Brian Hayles’s story suggested. A distant (but not impossibly distant) future in which Mankind’s meddling had plunged the Earth into another ice age. The south east of England choked by glaciers and roamed by scavenging wolves and bears. And, within it all, a base housed in a Georgian mansion where a team of hard-pressed scientists attempt to stop the remorseless advance of the glaciers. It’s also an extremely prescient story, anticipating something of our current anxiety about global warming and with each side of the debate neatly characterised. The coldly logical scientists with their misplaced faith in technology and the less conventional voices who mistrust change and prefer to remain on the outside of society. It’s no wonder that Troughton’s scruffy, gorgeous, self-deprecating Doctor is immediately mistaken for a scavenger and threatened with transportation to Africa!
All the elements are here for a classic
Doctor Who
story, even though the idea of such a thing was really just being formed. An isolated base, a ticking clock, an unknown menace threatening life on Earth. But it’s the idea of the Ice Warriors themselves that really stands the test of time. With their hissing, asthmatic speech and vaguely Nordic names, they’re fierce and warlike but with strong codes of honour. The sort of alien Mars deserves. Although it is, quite rightly, the immortal Terrance Dicks who wears the Target laurels, Brian Hayles’s writing here is terrific. Simple, clear and never patronising, he’s also capable of as perfect, spooky and moving a moment of exposition as this: ‘Suddenly, one year…’ Clent paused, still remembering the terrible event, ‘… there was no Spring.’
We never got to see Hayles’s mooted sequel, the marvellously named ‘Lords of the Red Planet’, but the Martians did return to menace the Doctor and, in so doing, deservedly cemented their place at the top table of
Doctor Who
monsters. A
still
–proud race, you might say. And, surely, somewhere out there in the freezing, snowy wastes, the Ice Warriors are still waiting…
The Changing Face of Doctor Who
The Second Doctor
This
Doctor Who
novel features the second incarnation of the Doctor. After his first encounter with the Cybermen, the Doctor changed form. His old body was apparently worn out, and so he replaced it with a new, younger one. The scratchy, arrogant old man that had been the First Doctor was replaced with a younger and apparently far softer character. The First Doctor’s cold, analytical abilities give way to apparent bluster and a tendency to panic under pressure.
But with the Second Doctor more than any other, first impressions are misleading. The Doctor’s apparent bluster and ineptitude masks a deeper, darker nature. But there are moments too when the Second Doctor’s humanity also shines through. There is ultimately no doubt that his raison d’être is to fight the evil in the universe.
Jamie
James Robert McCrimmon is the son of Donald McCrimmon, and a piper like his father and his father’s father. Coming from 1746, Jamie is simple and straightforward, but he is also intelligent and blessed with a good deal of common sense. Almost everything is new to him, and while he struggles to understand he also enjoys the experience. Jamie is also extremely brave, never one to shirk a fight or run away.
Ultimately, Jamie sees the Doctor as a friend as well as a mentor. While he relishes the chance to travel and learn and have adventures, he also believes that the Doctor really does need his help.
Victoria
Victoria Waterfield is a reluctant adventurer. She travels with the Doctor through necessity rather than choice after her father was exterminated by the Daleks, leaving her stranded on Skaro. Until she was kidnapped by the Daleks, Victoria had led a sheltered and unsophisticated life. But she is clever and intelligent.
Despite the fact that both tease her at every opportunity, Victoria cares deeply for the Doctor and Jamie. But while she enjoys her time in their company, she still misses her father. She remains forever an unwilling adventurer.