Doctor Omega

by Jean-Marc Lofficier (Adaptor, Translator), Randy Lofficier (Adaptor, Translator), Arnould Galopin

France, 1905. In a quiet Normandy village, amateur violinist Denis Borel meets a mysterious white-haired scientist known only as Doctor Omega, who is building an amazing spacecraft, the Cosmos. Doctor Omega invites Borel to accompany him on his maiden voyage - to Mars!

This prophetic classic novel features one of the first journeys to Mars in science fiction literature. This special edition also includes 22 illustrations from the original 1906 French publication.

Genres: Science Fiction, Doctor Who, Pulp, Aliens

260 pages, Paperback

First published October 13, 1906

About the author

Jean-Marc Lofficier is a French author of books about films and television programs, as well as numerous comic books and translations of a number of animation screenplays. He usually collaborates with his wife, Randy Lofficier

Reviews

[Warren Fournier · Rating 4 out of 5]

When friends ask me to name an example of science fiction that captures the spirit of the Radium Age era, I feel compelled to name something they have experienced or heard of before, because these days, citing "The Amphibians," "We," "R.U.R.," and even "Buck Rogers" only illicits confused blinks. So I tell them to check out classic era of Doctor Who. Yes, the staple BBC drama didn't start until the day Kennedy was assassinated, but it's roots are deep in Radium-Age ideas, from the scientific romances of H.G. Wells to the space operas of E.E. Smith.

The couple of Jean-Marc and Randy L'Officier must have felt the same way, and on doing research for a science fiction encyclopedia, they unearthed a French Radium-Age novel from 1906 that seemed remarkably similar to the premise of Doctor Who. The book is called "Doctor Omega" by Arnould Galopin, which features a mysterious figure very similar in description to William Hartnell's First Doctor, who travels in both space and time. The good folks at Black Coat Press, noted for their excellent line of previously untranslated French science fiction classics, were the obvious choice to bring back this lost classic to nerd fandom. In fact, I believe this publication was responsible for the very founding of this wonderful imprint.

However, the L'Officiers took some liberties with their adaptation, throwing in a few more Easter Eggs into the original story for Doctor Who fans to drive home that this could be a previously unknown adventure of the famous Timelord that took place sometime before we were officially introduced to the character in a junkyard at 76 Totter's Lane.

I have mixed feelings about what Black Coat Press did to the French original. In a way, I can't blame them. Their publications tend to be for a very niche market of loyal readers like me, but here was an opportunity to market a product to a larger fan base. And indeed, the L'Officier adaptation was sold at Doctor Who conventions and other merchandise retailers. Even famed Doctor Who writer "Uncle" Terrence Dicks seemed convinced this novel was an uncredited inspiration for the TV series, and he was recruited to write a foreword to the Black Coat Press edition.

Now, I am not a conspiracy theorist, but even I started to believe that the L'Officiers were on to something. Even if Sydney Newman and the creators of Doctor Who had never seen a tattered copy of this French novel in their lifetimes, it almost seemed like this character known as The Doctor was some kind of living consciousness aching to have his story told, inserting himself into the creative minds of those receptive enough to receive him so that this story of a madman in a box could be immortalized. Could Doctor Omega really be Doctor Who? The hairs on my arms stood up when I realized that the symbol for Omega is OHM. Take a good look at that word and flip it around in space--what do you get, my fellow Whovians?

But perhaps in answer to all this sensationalism came American artist and author Ron Miller. Like Brian Stableford with Black Coat Press, Ron Miller is the force behind Black Cat. Yes, two publishing teams with similar names printing lost classics. Ron Miller's Conquest of Space line-up of rarities is equally as extensive and intellectually stimulating as Stableford's French Science Fiction collection. I am a huge fan of the work of both these geniuses of the genre. But this time, the American translation was more faithful to the French original.

Now there are numerous versions of this book out there to choose from. If you don't care about Doctor Who and want to simply read a more faithful adaptation of this vintage story, get the Ron Miller version. If you want to have fun finding all the references to Doctor Who to expand your head cannon, get the Black Coat version for a few dollars more. If you read French like I do, Black Coat has a sister imprint called Rivière Blanche where the original French text has been available since 2009. This is certainly one of those books that I think is worth me rereading in the original language. To make things more complicated, Galopin himself completely revamped the story for children as "The Fantastic Adventures of a Young Parisian" in 1908, and here he included a teenage protagonist. And just to really confuse you, the Miller translation was used for a four disc audiobook read by actor John Guilor, who plays the First Doctor in other audio media.

For this review, I read through the two standard English editions. Below are my thoughts comparing the two. If you've already read your preferred copy and/or want my own detailed analysis of the two versions, read on. SPOILERS AHEAD!

1) "Doctor Omega" is it's own thing. I really don't think it inspired Doctor Who at all. It doesn't mean that Whovians can't find interest in this story and even make it part of their own head-canon of their Doctor Who saga. But we didn't need extra references to tie in two otherwise unrelated properties. We didn't need the sonic screwdriver. We didn't need Mademoiselle Susanne studying in Paris. We didn't need TARDIS sound effects when Omega's ship takes off. We didn't need winks and nods to the Mandragora Helix or the Ice Warriors. Our own imaginations would take us there should we want it.

2) "Doctor Omega" vindicates my choice to use "Doctor Who" as a poster child for Radium-Age goodness. Here we have a novel from the era that captures everything that is awe-inspiring, charming, kitsch, and thoughtful about the Radium-Age, a pastiche of Burroughs and Wells, that was responsible for the lasting success of the television programme. Reading "Doctor Omega" is like going on your first Epcot or Disneyworld ride. I was particularly impressed with the descriptions of the alien landscape under the Martian polar seas, full of glowing forests of hydras and jellies, giant cetaceans and other aquatic wonders inspired from the most exotic trances of the Moulin Rouge opium dens and absinthe bars. Curl up in your favorite cozy blanket, sip your favorite drink, play some ambient music, and enjoy this trip!

3) The writing is very descriptive and evokes vivid imagery in the mind's eye, but doesn't linger where it is not wanted, making this a very lean and well-paced thrill ride for lovers of classic adventure. Essentially, the story is broken into three parts. The first consists of our introduction to the main characters in France. The middle third consists of a series of vignettes detailing various perils they encounter on a Martian exploration. Finally, the last act is kind of a utopia, detailing life in a Martian city. The Black Coat version feels very much like a Doctor Who Target novelization, so it has a more kid-friendly appeal and simplicity than the Ron Miller version. If you do have children that you want to get into reading, you can't go wrong here. Though there is nothing here that is groundbreaking, this is the kind of story that I would have buried myself in as a kid.

4) There are three main protagonists, Doctor Omega himself, his assistant Fred, and the narrator Denis. The latter two are who we are supposed to identify with, seeing the adventure through their eyes. They are stock characters, but fairly well fleshed out and likeable. Denis got a little annoying. He would cry and cuss at the Doctor when stressed out, which got tedious after a while, though probably most people in those situations would react the same way. Denis does redeem himself at the end, acting as the more diplomatic voice of the trio in their interactions with the North Martian king. The Doctor is exactly what you would expect from the first seasons of the classic series. The Black Coat version tries harder to emulate the speech of Hartnell, but the similarities are there in either version. However, this does not mean that Hartnell possibly modeled himself after the Omega character. His performance and look was meant to emulate that of a typical Edwardian gentleman. You see illustrations of such characters by G.K. Chesterton in other books from the period, down to the checkered trousers and hairstyle. Hartnell's Doctor was a Radium-Age stock character, and that is where the similarities with Omega arise. However, readers in 1906 were not originally to know if the Doctor was supposed to be a hero or a villain, so Galopin really played up his sinister qualities in the first two chapters. If you like your Doctor Who closer to how he was portrayed in the first season as opposed to the more cuddly and grandfatherly hero of the latter television arc of the first incarnation, this will be the book for you. The Black Coat edition tries to give the Doctor an origin story as a key scientist who developed time travel for his "people" before being ostracized and escaping his world in a stolen ship. We are led to believe his original ship that brought him to Normandy was no longer operable on Earth because of a certain "signature" of it's construction, so he had to reconstruct a model of his own design, the "Cosmos." This homemade ship lacked the chameleon ability, but was kind of like a Transformer, able to switch between space shuttle, submarine, and ATV modes. In the Ron Miller version, the "Cosmos" is simply the invention of a mad scientist to explore Mars, but the L'Officier adaptation implies that he uses the "Cosmos" as a test experiment to eventually repair the full functionality of his old ship. This backstory, when applied to Doctor Who, gives wings to the idea that the Doctor is "far from just another Timelord," and that his name, Doctor "Omega" is not just a pseudonym. Perhaps he is supposed to be the "Omega" from Timelord history that gave the Gallifreyans the secret of time travel. You Whovians know that this theory had already been explored during the Wilderness years in books like "Lungbarrow," but which got twisted in a most disappointing way by "The Timeless Children" episode of the recent Series 12. So you can see how a very simple character from 1906 was shoehorned into the more complex Doctor Who mythos by the L'Officier version.

5) The story gets some criticism for being largely a travelogue that could easily have been set in any earthly unexplored region. I disagree. Galopin does a fantastic job portraying an entire alien ecosystem. Too many scifi novels fail to give us any sense of scale of the diversity of a habitated planet. The reader is rarely taken beyond the little village or civilization upon which the plot is centered. Wells and Burroughs were just as guilty of this, but not Galopin, who does not expect us to believe that an entire planet looks exactly the same no matter where you are, or that you can get from one country to the other by a sweaty romp through an alien jungle. His Mars is a vast place with snowy tundra, plains of pink grass, mountains, and oceans. There are myriads of different life forms adapted to various environments, and all are equally strange and hard to comprehend. It is true that Galopin is not as political or philosophical as his contemporaries, but his world-building still abounds in creativity.

So here are my concluding thoughts. I wish Black Coat had simply left the original intact. Some may argue that if it hadn't been for the played up Doctor Who connection, Doctor Omega would have remained in obscurity. But the L'Officier duo could still have made a faithful translation while adding their own fan theories about how the story could be part of the Doctor Who universe as part of a translator's introduction along with Terence Dick's foreword. I think this would have had the same appeal to the Doctor Who market without angering other scifi fans who were left with the impression that Black Coat was trying to pull a fast one. But no one was fooled. Don't get me wrong, I had fun with the Black Coat edition. But when it comes to preserving works of literature, I am a purist. So while my hat goes off to Jean-Marc and Randy for their shared love of my favorite scifi series, my preference goes to the American version.

Overall, I give "Doctor Omega" a solid four stars. It's fun and delightful no matter how you look at it.

So what are your thoughts? Is there a version you would most like to read? Have you listened to the audiobook performance? Have you read the French original? Any thoughts on how the two English language versions compare? And do you believe in Jungian archetypes? Is there really a metaphysical connection between William Hartnell's Doctor and The Doctor written by Arnould Galopin? Please share in the comments.

[Wreade1872 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another book in the vain of The First Men in the Moon, which of course was famously sued for plagiarism by the author of a A Plunge Into Space but nobody cares about that because the latter is terrible.. and is itself derivative of Across the Zodiac anyway.

This one has all the dryness of a victorian novel but without the scientific interest and all the pulp of later sci-fi without any of the excitement. Its slock, nonsense, drivvel. It also takes elements of From the Earth to the Moon, 20,000 Leagues, The Master of the World and Gulliver's Travels.

Its not all bad, the aliens are more like 1950s martians than you might expect, it also might be losing a little in translation but i doubt it.
Any attempts to equate Dr.Omega with Dr.Who are spurious, although i wouldn't be surprised if both characters received some influence from Moriarty of the Holmes stories.
Some small elements of scifi interest but barely worth the reading effort.

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine if Jules Verne had written Doctor Who. That's what this translation of a French novel from 1910 feels like. Course the translators of this new edition added a few tweaks to strengthen that impression.
A wonderous space/time machine takes young Denis, the mysterious Doctor Omega and Fred ( who they never really explain) from Normandy France to Mars, where they encounter the usual kinds of creatures that lived on Mars back in Victorian and pulp literature.

Lots of fun, full of big sci-fi ideas, adventure and a very dry sense of humor.
Blackcoat Press keeps talking about doing a series of New Doctor Omega stories and I would love to read them as the characters have so much potential.

[Matthew Kresal · Rating 3 out of 5]

For years as a Doctor Who fan, I've been vaguely aware of something called Doctor Omega. No, it isn't a spin-off of the long-running British science fiction series. In fact, it predates the BBC series by more than a half-century. Originally published in French as Le Docteur Oméga in 1906, this early science fiction novel with its tale of interplanetary exploration featuring a title character who is an old man with white hair certainly would seem on the surface to be quite like William Hartnell's First Doctor. Yet is there more to it than that? Is Doctor Omega the predecessor to Doctor Who?

Well, it depends on which version of it you happen to be reading. Most readers (including many of my fellow reviewers here on Goodreads) will have read the 2003 edition published by the Los Angeles based Black Coat Press, the one "adapted and retold" by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier. Rather than being a straight translation, that edition appears to have played up the Doctor Who angle and made quite a few changes (as per the "adapted and retold" line). It is that edition, more than the original work, that seems to have led to numerous spin-offs involving the character. It's a move that's proven quite lucrative if not perhaps utterly faithful to the original work.


Knowing this, I decided to track down the straight French to English translation if one was even available. Thankfully Black Cat Press put it out in time for Doctor Who's fiftieth anniversary in 2013. Reading that recently has been an interesting experience though not the one I was quite expecting.

There are some similarities with Doctor Who it has to be said. The title character, an eccentric older man with white hair, definitely has shades of the First Doctor to him just from that description alone though the novel makes it quite clear he is a Frenchman and not a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous. That's something even more striking given the illustrations included from 1906 which shows an even more remarkable resemblance to actor William Hartnell. Doctor Omega's dialogue also has a ring of Hartnell First Doctor to it much of the time, making it even more striking.

There are additional moments of familiarity as well. The large portion of the novel set on Mars also has some of the travelogue feel found in many of the longer stories from the era such as Marco Polo or The Keys Of Marinus. The fact that the story is told in the first person by one of the Doctor's companions, a middle-aged French violinist named Dennis Borel, brings up memories of Doctor Who and the Daleks, the first ever Doctor Who book which was likewise told the first Dalek story that was told from the point of view of Ian Chesterton. With all that in mind, it isn't hard to see why the Lofficier's and so many others have drawn connections to the BBC series.

Yet in reading the original work without it being "adapted and retold" what struck me wasn't the connections to Doctor Who at all. Instead, Doctor Omega as a novel seems far closer to 1906 than 1963. That would be HG Wells' SF classic The First Men in the Moon which author Arnould Galopin is almost certainly doing a pastiche (if not outright rip-off) of Wells' tale with his depiction of the journey to Mars and the encounter with the Martian monarch late in the story. There are shades of Jules Verne as well as the Doctor's craft Cosmos being very much like the famous Columbiad seen in From The Earth To The Moon and its sequel Around The Moon. If anything, Doctor Omega has far more in common with those works than a BBC TV series.

What is also clear is that Galopin's novel is very much a product of its time. While his Mars owes much to Wells and it has the prerequisite touches of genre fiction, it might as well be the Africa of countless adventure novels of the same period much of the time. Indeed for all of his similarities to the First Doctor, our lead character has no problem making the occasional reference to primitive peoples while carrying a gun and threatening to massacre the short grey Martians at one point. Elsewhere, the narrator has no problem making similarly vaguely racist comments that, while not out of place in polite society in 1906, very much date the novel more than a century later. All works of "art" are of course the product of the era in which they are created so if one can look past that, there's an interesting read.

So is Le Docteur Oméga the long-lost predecessor to the BBC's Doctor Who? For my money, the answer is "no". While there are points of similarity, there aren't enough for me to draw a direct line between the two and the fact that the work didn't appear in English until after the turn of the twenty-first century further undermines the case. That said, it certainly feels like a proto-Doctor Who story at times in the same way The First Men In The Moon does today. So for those who are interested in early SF or stories that inspired the steampunk genre, I wholeheartedly recommend the novel.

Just don't be expecting a TARDIS or a sonic screwdriver.

[Gökhan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bilimkurgunun ilk örneklerinden olması sebebiyle tür için bir önem arz ediyor olsa gerek Doktor Omega. Dr. Who maceralarını detaylı bilmediğim için Dr. Omega'dan ne kadar ilham alındığını da bilemiyorum. Uzay seyahatini sağlayan şeyin bir roket itişi değil de , doktorun keşfi olan anti-yerçekimi malzemenin olması kitabın bir diğer ilginçliği. Tabii uzay boşluğundaki gidiş o malzeme ile nasıl sürdürüldü orası biraz muamma :) Mars'ın hayat dolu oluşu maceramızı renklendirmiş. Ancak maceracılarımızın orada vahşi barbarlar gibi davranmasını kınadım doğrusu. Jules Verne sosuyla tatlandırılmış ,50'lerin uzaylı filmleri tarzında eğlenceli bir okuma.

[KDS · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun read, very much in the vein of a Verne, Wells or Conan Doyle adventure, except more readable - perhaps due to the translation. This edition is the Lofficier adaptation which makes several changes to the text and rewrites entire chapters.

The big attraction of it of course is the speculation that it acts as some inspiration or precursor to Doctor Who. The problem is that some of these connections have been forced into the modern text by those who translated and remastered it. The allusions to The Doctor being an alien who escaped from his planet in a stolen craft, the sonic screwdriver, the grandaughter and the swirling effects as they travel through a "continuum", are later additions to link it to the well known franchise upon its 21st Century reprint.

That isn’t to say some of the parallels aren't there. Doctor Omega does pass an uncanny resemblance to Hartnell's original look and he does travel in space with companions and see strange, wondrous sights. But beyond that, it is much more in keeping with the traditional adventure story of those bigger names and in fact stands pretty sturdily on its own two feet without the myriad of textual changes, although I felt there’s a bit more depth to the remastered edition which is lacking in the original.

This isn't going to wow the modern science fiction reader, but connoisseurs of the genre who like to explore its early origins, will find much to admire in a story well ahead of its time. Lots of uniquely imagined aliens (for the time), a voyage to Mars, pseudo-science, battles, weird extra-terrestial sights are way ahead of the likes of Burroughs' John Carter stories and keeps a suitably pulpy feel to it all.

Go in looking to explore one of the earliest Radium-Age science fiction stories and you might find a hidden gem despite the adaptations. Trying to connect this to Doctor Who is fun, but a tenuous exercise and for the most part not in keeping with the original translation (which I own, albeit have only skimmed through for comparison).

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This public domain ebook presents the original 1906 version of the novel rather than one of the later altered versions.

It’s a very early pulp sci-fi with all the crowd pleasing gimcracks. It’s written in a surprisingly modern breathless style with very short paragraphs, sometimes of only one sentence. Everything is overdone, with a wild cliffhanger at the end of almost every chapter, but there’s some great sci-fi elements here. We have an archetypal mad scientist (no relationship with Doctor Who, whatever the English language publishers might claim), a dilettante adventurer, a hulking assistant, an anti-gravity material, a multi-purpose spacecraft reminiscent of modern NASA probes, proper interplanetary navigation taking into account rotation and orbits … the list goes on. But then any semblance of reality is thrown away when we reach Mars and meet all manner of bizarre Martians, some advanced, some barbaric. All this came long before the Golden Age of pulps. Here’s a true forgotten classic.

However, this is shameless popular entertainment, invoking on the one hand alchemy and sorcery in the local population’s suspicions about the scientist (what a familiar theme), and jingoistic pride on another (with a good old poke at Jules Verne).

There’s certainly a lot of chauvinism. The three heroes massacre their way through the barbaric Martians and kidnap a few of the advanced Martians on their way home, without a glimmer of compassion. That’s a little disturbing, but fits with the imperialism of later pulps.

Overall it’s not a bad read, quite interesting as to its place in the genesis of modern sci-fi, but it’s not worth revisiting.

[John Peel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very early French SF adventure, concerning the trip to Mars by the mysterious Doctor Omega. Very inventive, but rather problematic - the attitudes of the main characters are rather unpleasant at times. This edition also suffers from a large number of typographic errors and sections of missing words. The afterword about the history of space travel in SF is very illuminating, though.

[DavidO · Rating 3 out of 5]

5 stars for being useful for learning French without being overwhelming, but only 2 stars for the story. it really didn't hold up to the test of time.

[Callum Phillpott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Note: These thoughts are on the Black Coat Press translation which differ greatly from the original intent of the text.

I had an absolutely lovely time with this book, just this antiquated sci-fi story with a few Doctor Who references thrown in and alot of the rather unfortnate aspects of the original thrown out. I do wonder what this has done for Doctor Omega as a character since he now seems to be consistently used as a standin for Doctor Who (even I've done this) as opposed to his own character... so yeah, there's that.

The Doctor Who references range from obscure to very blatant (the fish people on one of the covers are actually described as just the Ice Warriors) and it can be fun spotting them all, but at what cost?

Anyway, fun read.

[Sol]

Black Coat edition is """""enhanced""""" per Warren Fournier's review, Black Cat is not.

[Paul McNamee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doctor Omega is a bit of a novelty, especially for Doctor Who fans. A lost French scifi novel from 1906, it has some vague similarities to the later television show. Mostly due to some editions' illustrations that look a lot like the (First) Doctor (William Hartnell.)

The story is a fun, light, quick read. Typical turn-of-the-last-century style with a first-person narrative of Mars exploration - various weird flora and fauna along the way, and a few perils and escapes.

This novel was "adapted and retold" which means the translators (who are also Doctor Who fans) took liberties to add additional ties to Doctor Who - making it seem that perhaps Doctor Omega is an alternate or perhaps the Doctor himself in some form of exile. While that is enjoyable, I would still like to read a straight translation (I can't read French) so I could see the original similarities for myself.

I did enjoy it, and look forward to Doctor Omega and the Shadowmen - a modern anthology of Doctor Omega tales from the same publisher (Black Coat Press.)

[Taksya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Il secolo e passa di età di questo racconto si sente e pesa tutto sulla storia e sull'intreccio della trama. Sulla falsa riga di Verne e di Wells, anche Galopin racconta un viaggio immaginifico verso una destinazione ancora oggi irragiungibile dall'uomo: Marte. Niente omini verdi o creature dalla salute fatiscente e facili al raffreddore... ma esseri comunque pittoreschi in una ambietazione carica di fantasia. Ma, a differenza di Verne e Wells, nulla di quanto scritto si è rivelato precursore di vere invenzioni.
Si lascia leggere, ma non entusiasma.

[Lucas Garrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved it. Definite worth reading for any Doctor Who or adventure enthusiast. You won't be disappointed.

[Eivilys · Rating 3 out of 5]

La manière dont les gens imaginaient mars avant est plutôt drôle!

[Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

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