A significant bit of news that has slipped under the radar for the past few weeks (because nobody who knew about it bothered to report it) is that the long-awaited novelization of the 1984 Peter Davison-era story Resurrection of the Daleks looks finally set to happen, on audio. In fact, the product is already up for pre-order at amazon.co.uk. This doesn’t appear to be a reading of the shooting script, but an actual novelization, as the author credited in the attached link is Steve Lyons, who did not write the original story for television but has written many original Doctor Who novels and audio plays since the original series ended. The writer of the script was the series script editor at the time, Eric Saward, who, while having novelized several of his own scripts for the Target book series, originally balked at novelizing his two Daleks scripts for the television series (the other being the Colin Baker story Revelation of the Daleks) because of demands made upon the royalties by Dalek Creator Terry Nation’s agent. Fast forward to the 1990’s, Saward agreed to have these two scripts novelized by some of the New Adventure writers (including current tv episode writer Gareth Roberts) but, rumour has it, apparently changed his mind upon seeing the quality of the sample work initially provided.

Now it would appear a deal has finally been made, otherwise this new novelization of Resurrection by Steven Lyons (who wrote several of the New Adventures) would not be happening. If a CD version is happening, one can’t but help hope that we will also see a print version which has just not been announced yet (this “announcement” has almost been classified information, strangely), and presumably, a novelization of Revelation of the Daleks can’t be far off either. With Shada getting novelized for 2012 (in both print and audio) by the aforementioned Gareth Roberts, this would make two of the five “missing” Target novelizations seem set to materialize, something that long time fans like myself have been waiting for since the mid-1980’s! And as the other three are all written by the same two authors (the aforementioned Revelation by Saward and The Pirate Planet and City of Death by Douglas Adams (who declined to novelize them because the publishers of Target novelizations wouldn’t offer him the typical royalty rate he got as one of the world’s best-selling authors), it would appear that the impediments to getting these stories novelized have been removed. The dream of having every classic series story officially novelized might actually come true!

And then we can proceed to start pestering the BBC to do novelizations of the new series stories…..