Doctor Who: Galaxy Four

Doctor Who Target Books (Numerical Order) #104

by William Emms

Learning that the planet will explode within two days, Doctor Who must decide which of two warring alien species to rescue, the beautiful Drahvins or the repugnant Rills

Genres: Doctor Who, Science Fiction, Fiction, Audiobook, Media Tie In, Time Travel, Science Fiction Fantasy

141 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a novelization of the first adventure from the third season of Doctor Who, which was broadcast in September and October of 1965. William Emms wrote the adaptation, which is based on the original teleplay he had written twenty years earlier. The original iteration of The Doctor is accompanied by Steven Taylor, a futuristic space explorer, and Vicki (who was never given a last name), an orphaned teenager also from the future. The book is a moral fable illustrating that things are not always as clear-cut as they appear, as two forces oppose one another on a planet soon destined to destruct. One group is comprised of beautiful young women, the Drahvins, and the other are hideous but friendly Chumbley robots, servants of the reptilian warthog-like Rills. There are some somewhat misogynistic attitudes in the book, but it's a fair adveture, typical of the time.

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most interesting take from reading the target novelisations in serial order is instantly noticing the ones that were written in the 80’s.
I’ve notice a few stories mention The Doctor being a Timelord (this hadn’t been mentioned on screen at that point) but this is the first time an author has used regeneration.

With a story about appearances it’s a great addition to a mostly lost story, as The Doctor ponders that this body is wearing a bit thin adds extra context to the adventure.
I also liked that the book was also divided up by four chapters for the corresponding episodes.

The original idea for the target books was for fans to enjoy these stories in a pre-DVD age, even though the off air audio recordings exist - I felt that this was the best way to consume this story.
That’s what these books should set out to achieve, I’ve now got a new appreciation for this story.

[F.R. · Rating 1 out of 5]

A novelisation of a kid’s science fiction show of the 1960s done with a minimum of style and finesse and in a distinctly workmanlike fashion.

It’s a real shame, as the actual TV show has long been wiped from existence, and so a novelisation would be one of the best ways to appreciate it. Written twenty years after broadcast, it’s therefore irritating that Emms has done so little to develop his own story; that he didn’t stop to realise that most people reading this wouldn’t be kids under the age of ten; and that he didn’t show a little more ambition than just quickly slapping his screenplay into prose and then picking up his cheque. As what we have here is far from inspired. A particularly gruesome example of his lack of care is the fact that the henchwomen aren’t given any names, simply labelled One, Two and Three. You might get away with that when three recognisably different actresses are playing them, but in book form it just looks unspeakably lazy.

What makes it even more galling is that there is stuff in this book about The First Doctor coming to the end of his life and awaiting regeneration, as well as having two hearts. Neither detail would have been even hinted at in this story when the TV version was broadcast. It’s truly annoying that Emms felt the need to add that window dressing, but saw no need to add the greater depth his story so obviously needed.

On a dying planet there are two crashed spaceships: one piloted by beautiful women who are actually evil; one piloted by monstrous creatures who turn out to be good. Appearances can be deceptive is the moral here.

The story originated in the 1960s and in its portrayal of beautiful women, who have moved past men, and now brainlessly follow orders while dismissing any creatures who aren’t like them, one can see a kick in the shins to feminism. Indeed, reading this one is surprised that the term ‘femi-nazi’ was still a couple of years away from being coined. Surely if Emms had thought of that in relation to ‘Galaxy Four’, he’d have been right proud of himself.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

While a lot of Doctor Who fans would love to see "Marco Polo" or "The Tenth Planet" returned complete to the archives, I have to admit part of me would like to the chance to see the long-lost season-three premiere story "Galaxy Four." A lot of that credit goes to fond memories of this novelization that I read during my formative days as a Doctor Who fan.

This isn't necessarily the best first Doctor story, but William Emms' adaptation of his story works well on the printed page. Free of budget limitations, my imagination ran wild.

I'm excited that an episode of this long lost story has been recovered. And while I'm sure it can never live up to the images in my mind from the original novel and BBC audio release of the story, I still can't help but be a bit excited to finally see it whenever the BBC sees fit to put it on DVD.

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a joy to read, which is also surprising. This story no long exists on film or video, aside from one episode, from the television series. The only way to see it is as a reconstruction by means of surviving audio tracks and still pictures. And as an amazing job that was done by those who painstakingly accomplished it, the story is difficult to watch. However, this book does a terrific job of conveying the story in an enjoyable way, while also adding some flavor to the character of the Doctor and his companions. It has changed my opinion of the story, and I am excited to revisit the reconstructed video telling. I have a feeling I will like it better this time around.

[Aylin Houle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two alien spaceships have crashed on a planet. Located in Galaxy Four. The Drahvins and the Rills. Doctor Who and his two companions have come upon this planet with the TARDIS. They soon come to learn that the planet is going to explode. According to the Maaga (leader of the Drahvins) they have 14 days. According to Doctor Who they only have 2 days. Their ship does not work but the Rills does. Or, is in the process of. They ask Doctor Who for help against the evil Rills and to leave the planet to go back into space.

However, there is a big turn in events once Doctor Who and his companions meet the Rills and their servants the Chumblies...

Another fun adventure with Doctor Who ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

[Fimbley Fimbledon]

Fun lil classic Doctor Who story. Very of its time writing style but overall I actually really enjoyed it.

[Trevor Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this. A thrilling read and a fantastic ending.

[David Layton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Galaxy Four has several interesting ideas to keep it going. One is that a society run by women will in the end not automatically be more loving and virtuous than one run by men. Another is that outward appearance bears no correspondence to personal virtue. In other words, Galaxy Four is effective in conveying its anti-prejudice theme by showing that prejudices run in several directions, not just the usual brands of racism and sexism. Its defects are that the situation of the story makes it difficult to sustain for four parts, so that we get a drawn out hostage scenario merely by changing hostages midway through.

[Jason Bleckly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Based on his own script with cover art by Andrew Skilleter. This is number 104 in the Target catalogue. I’m not sure what it is about this cover, but it’s one of my very favourites. Whether it’s the firey background of the planet about to go kaboom, or the aggressive stance of the Drahvins. It’s just a really great cover and suits the story.

It’s a pity this is missing so much of the original broadcast version, though it has now been animated. I really like this story. And I think this novelisation is even better than the broadcast version.

There are a few differences between the broadcast and the book. In the TV version when Steven attacks Maaga she does a Darth Vader and grabs him by the throat lifting him off the ground one handed. In the novelisation Steven throws her to the ground and gets her gun away from her. The Rills are physically a lot different in the book than the TV version, but that’s due to special effects and the lack of them back in the 60s. There is also a whole scene where Steven and the Doctor fall into pit trap created by the chumblies that they then escape which isn’t in the broadcast version. But I think the best addition in the inclusion of the philosophical thoughts of the Rills and the Doctor.

This will probably be in my top 10 favourite novelisations. Admittedly I’ve still got a hundred or so more to read, but this is one of the best.

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow this guy doesn't like women. Makes even the good parts hard to get through because I never know when I'm gonna be faced with the Doctor complaining about 'female arrogance' or Steven remarking to himself that he likes old fashioned women (he's from Earth's future. What does 'old fashioned' even mean in that context?).

[Melenia · Rating 2 out of 5]

So so story. Audio is awful.

[MrColdStream · Rating 3 out of 5]

🙏🏼52% = 👍🏼4 ✊🏼6 👎🏼2 = Average!

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After recently watching the four-part Doctor Who adventure Galaxy 4 in its full-colour animated glory, I decided to give the 1985 Target novelization, written by the same writer who penned the original script 20 years earlier, a go to see whether it is the definitive version of this adventure.

POINTS OF INTEREST:

Structurally, Galaxy Four closely follows the televised story from 1965, down to almost every scene, character, and line of dialogue.
 
There are some additional scenes, such as the hole-trap scene with the Doctor and Steven. It adds some level of danger and trouble to the plot, but it feels like it doesn't quite get the characterizations right.
 
I'm in two minds about this adaptation: it faithfully recreates a mostly missing serial but could do with more depth and less of a streamlined, clumsy, and almost script-like structure.
 
Steven gets a bit more of an active role here compared to the original version, but the Doctor feels very different from Hartnell's grandfatherly take. I like how Emms takes us inside the Doctor's mind, though, as we read about him rationalising about his old body.
 
The adaptation adds little extra value to the televised version, other than to briefly explore the mental states of the Drahvins and the Rills that are never seen on screen.
 
The climax in Chapter Four feels a bit more fleshed out and exciting here, even if the end is just as brief as in the TV story.

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[Mitchell George · Rating 2 out of 5]

Much like the episode that inspired it, Galaxy Four is a thoroughly uninspiring, frequently boring, and utterly repetitive novel. That's not to say William Emms did a particuarly bad job - he just failed to elevate the already weak source material. The Doctor, Vicki, and Steven all arrive upon a planet in it's final death throes, uninhabited except for two crashed spaceships - one occupied by the violent, aggressive, yet beautiful Drahvins, the other by the seemingly peaceful, yet apparently horrifying-looking Rills. Of course, this being a Doctor Who novel, whilst the Doctor could decide to just leave this godforsaken rock, he gets caught up in the conflict and various circumstances just happen to pop up to stop him from getting the hell of this nigh-doomed planet.

Up until the last moments of the books, the death of a planet has never felt so unimportant, when more time can be spent critiquing the women's rights revolution in the form of the beautiful, yet threatening (and frequently bumbling) Drahvins. Seriously, this books goes out of it's way to describe Maaga (interesting name, in today's times) as beautiful, dangerous, nightmarishly evil and utterly bigoted (both towards men and the Rills) at any chance it gets. Throw in some pretty basic ideas about not judging people by how they look, Galaxy Four doesn't really do anything particularly interesting, though I say this with the benefit of reading the book nearly forty years after publication.

The writing around the Rills, their genuinely gentle nature, and any description regarding the antics of the Chumblies are a highlight, but they do little to offset the boring, repetitive descriptions of the Drahvins. The book does kick into a decent high gear in the last few pages, especially in regards to Maaga's last stand, but by then, I was pretty much checked out.

Galaxy Four isn't atrocious, but an already weak story doesn't help this adaptation. Read it for the Rills and the Chumblies, or if you can't stand the audio or animated versions of the story - otherwise, there are literally dozens of other Doctor Who Target novels to better occupy your time, as Galaxy Four would rank pretty lowly in my personal selection.

[Michel Siskoid Albert · Rating 1 out of 5]

Galaxy 4 might well be the worst First Doctor story, so having its scriptwriter actually adapt it (as Galaxy Four) isn't really going to fix its problems, is it? I was kind of hoping his vision had been twisted by the production, but if it has, William Emms is describing things pretty much as produced, especially those infernal beeping machines, the Chumblies. The rampant sexism and the woeful science fiction clichés are all still here, and worse, when we get into the three leads' heads, THEY come off as terrible people too. Rough stuff. Emms seems to wake up towards the end and gives us a bit more background on the Drahvins and the Rills, and the action beats (including at least one new one) are stronger in prose than on television, but the story just can't survive its rotten core concepts. I sometimes imagine myself reading the Target books as bedtime stories for my fictional children, but this is one I would skip. The only thing that kept me reading was that I knew The Myth Makers was next...

[Ezekiel Thorp · Rating 2 out of 5]

A novelisation of the opening story from Doctor Who's third season in 1965, starring William Hartnell as the Doctor, Peter Purves as Steven Taylor and Maureen O'Brien as Vicki. It was the first proper outing for this threesome after their initial adventure in The Time Meddler, and has since become one of the many Doctor Who stories missing from the BBC's archive (although an animated reconstruction is soon to be released).

It's an alright book, and that's all I can really say. This is no fault of the author, being a novelisation it has to be more or less faithful to the slightly dull original TV story. But Emms does his best with it, there's a beautiful simplicity to the prose in places, even though some slight revisions to the text to fit it better into Doctor Who history may not sit too well with some readers.

It's a slender volume, and might take about two hours to read. If you see it for a couple of pounds, great. But don't make a special effort to look for it.

[Gareth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Between a 3 and a 4 for me this one. Quite some fascinating concepts in here, from a dying planet to some quite differing aliens, with the idea of appearances being deceptive in here as well being driven home quite well.
Quite a bit of action, and fun with the Chumblies, but it is somewhat let down by the characterisation of Steven at least, who comes across less than enlightened, compared to what he is normally like, and the somewhat repetition of how the Drahvins think / act, with no real payoff for it, as at times it did feel that perhaps things would go differently between Maaga and the soldiers.
But outside of that, I did enjoy the overarching plot as such. It is just a shame that the TV episodes outside of 1 are missing so don't really get to compare it to the TV version.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

60th Anniversary Read Through. A basic Don’t Judge a book by its cover story, where the ugly aliens are good, and the pretty aliens are evil. The story has some good moments and a few good lines although there is a moment, where I am like “where did this come from?” There is an aside paragraph that describes the procreation practice of the aliens. There was nothing pornographic about it, or inappropriate for younger readers, but it came out of nowhere and didn’t do anything for the story other than help show the aliens as more alien. Next, I will read the first few chapters of the Dalek master plan mission to the unknown #141, and move to the myth makers #97, and then finish mission to the unknown, to follow the original broadcast order.

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doctor Who : Galaxy Four (1985) by William Emms is a novelisation of the first serial of the third season of Doctor Who. The Doctor is accompanied by Vicki and Steven.

The TARDIS crashlands on a planet with mysterious but seemingly threatening robots and a crew from a planet of beautiful females who are the Drahvins. It turns out the women are from a planet that is warlike and like A Brave New World while the robots are the emissaries of a race of highly intelligent peaceful reptilian creatures.

Galaxy Four was a four episode TV serial but only one TV episode was found.

It’s a run of the mill Dr Who serial. One for the completionists.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's been many years since I read a Doctor Who book. 30 years ago I read many of them and enjoyed them along with the British Doctor Who TV shows. While I liked this book, it was rather a lot of fluff. As usual the Doctor lands his TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimensions in Space) time machine on an alien planet. Unbeknown to him, the planet only has a few days before it disintegrates. There are two other time traveling space ships on the planet, both disabled. The beautiful women on one ship are ruthless. The other ship has ugly creatures who are kind.

[Ivana Richards · Rating 3 out of 5]

With only episode 3 of the tv series surviving I had very little visual stuff to go off. I actually really enjoyed the novel - adapting his own scripts let Emms flesh out both the villain Maaga and the Rills. The book is very well written, and surprisingly the episode-long chunks work quite well as opposed to the usual shorter chapters. Despite all this, I can't help thinking it would have made a rather dull story on tv - hopefully one day it'll all be recovered ( or at least animated) though.

[Derelict Space Sheep · Rating 3 out of 5]

42 WORD REVIEW:

Galaxy Four is perhaps the closest Doctor Who ever came to straight-up exploration science fiction, complete with doomed planet and rampant xenophobia. William Emms, novelising his own script, delves into the characters’ thoughts and so adds considerable depth to the on-screen action.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this even though it was a script. I found it easy to read and to visualise and I only wish they’d recovered the film so that I could watch the episode. Interesting story for the 1960s and has some ties to early feminism but I’m unsure if it’s portraying female independence in a good or negative light.

[Ian Banks · Rating 3 out of 5]

A workmanlike retelling of a story that has been lost to history. Emma gets the details of his own script across, fleshing out characters a little more than we would get on screen, but leaves out a lot of details about the home worlds of the opposing sides that the Doctor and friends find themselves caught between that might give a reader a little more context.

[Emilou · Rating 4 out of 5]

The ending was kind of abrupt, but I liked the pacing, the characters and the storyline. It also had a nice moral at the end. I've reading about fifteen of the 1st Doctor series, and this has been one of the better ones.

[trijnewijn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ik overwoog even om 4 sterren te geven, want duur, doctor who, maar omdat er vrij veel stereotypen in zaten die niet meer oké zijn en vrij veel duiding nodig hadden voor de meeluisterende jeugd, is 3 sterren terechter.

[Danny Butler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very much of its time, this is a straightforward novelisation that deals with interesting themes and concepts. And it’s beautifully written. I enjoyed it. And I like all the characters.

[Jason D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love this lost episode with William Hartnell as the first doctor.

[Savannah Streger · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an ok book, it took awhile to get into it. It got better as you read through

[Jazza1971 · Rating 2 out of 5]

The attitude to women in this book lost it rather a lot of points from me.