‘In the void between time the devils waited … patiently … to be summoned again … to pass judgement on the Earth …’
KATE LETHBRIDGE-STEWART is summoned by an old friend, Douglas Cavendish, to help him with a problem he has with ghosts and voices in his head. But when Kate arrives, she finds more than she expected. Aided by a time-traveller from the future, Kate must outwit both the ancient race of Daemons, and the Sodality, a human cult-like organisation from the future, which is intent on gaining control over time.
Daemos Rising is based on, and expands upon, the Reeltime Pictures drama production Daemos Rising originally released in 2004 and available from www.timetraveltv.com. It also spins off from the 1971 BBC Doctor Who adventure ‘The Daemons’, and is a prequel to the Telos Publishing Time Hunter novella ‘Child of Time’. All characters used with permission. This book has not been licensed or approved by the BBC or any of its affiliates.
Daemos Rising is written by David J Howe, noted Doctor Who collector and historian who wrote the original script for the film.
125pp. B-format paperback novelisation.
ISBN 978-1-84583-978-9
Published April 2020
REVIEW BY RICHARD ROBINS
One of the challenges, but also the pleasures, of writing about Doctor Who is that it’s history is less a linear progression from A to B to C, and more a great big ball of wibbly wobbly timey whimey stuff. (That’s so good a phrase that I might copyright it…just so long as no one’s got there first…) The wibbly wobbly nature of Doctor Who’s history is never more obvious than when it comes to reviewing David Howe’s novelisation of Daemos Rising.
I’ll try to set the scene as simply as I can. In the years after the end of season 26 in 1989, there was a brief period of hope that there would be a season 27, but it swiftly became apparent that Doctor Who would never return. The notion that it would be revived as a major television series, still less one that would still be going strong a decade and a half and five Doctors (six if one includes the War Doctor) later, would have seemed hopeful to the point of delusional. The loss of Doctor Who as an ongoing series created a void. Into that void came the original books, audio plays and intermittent films.
The films were mostly astonishingly good, given that they were made on a minuscule budget to be sold directly to fans on video. One of those films was Downtime. Made in 1995, Downtime was the story of the Great Intelligence’s third attempt at invading the earth. Amongst the stellar case was Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier, Elizabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith and Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield. There were also two newcomers. The first was Miles Richardson (best known to Big Finish fans as Irving Braxiatel) as Captain Cavendish. The second was Beverley Cressman playing a newly devised character, the Brigadier’s daughter, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart.
The play was a success; not a major commercial hit, but well-received by its target audience. That was sufficiently so that a sequel featuring the sea devils was planned some years later. Unfortunately, the timings were that little bit out, and they clashed with the preparations for the launch of the revived series of Doctor Who on television As a result, the rights to the sea devils were unavailable. The rights to the Daemons had already been acquired, however.
So it was that, in 2004, we had released Daemos Rising which was, take a quick breath, a sequel to Downtime which was itself a sequel to the two Yeti stories from the late 1960s, and also a sequel to ‘The Daemons’ from 1971. If that were not enough, it features the return of Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, and it also ties in with a range of novellas from Telos publishing.
To get a sense of how intricate is the connection to different strands of Doctor Who’s history, consider that, when Daemos Rising was released in 2004, Kate was an inconsequential character, known of only to die-hard fans. Almost a decade later, she was to became a major character in the Smith and Capaldi eras of the modern series. The original script for Daemos Rising was written by David Howe several years before Kate’s inclusion in the modern series, and so at a time when he was unaware of how the character would later develop. The book, however, was written after the modern version of the character had become established.
Added to that is the character of Olive Hawthorn. She was not a character in the original story when it was released in 2004, but the actress who played her has since reprised the role in Olive Hawthorn and the Daemons of Devils End, and so she appears in the book, albeit briefly.
To make this work well as a novel required a writer sufficiently familiar with the convoluted history I’ve described in brief above to make it work, whilst also having the sense of which parts of the mythology to follow, and which to jettison. It’s perhaps fortunate that David Howe’s background is as a historian of the show since it gives him both the background knowledge that he needs, but also the confidence to know which bits of the mythology to use, and which to quietly ignore.
The character of Kate is as good an example as any. Beverley Cressman’s Kate bears only the most tangential relationship to Gemma Redgrave’s version. It goes beyond being played by a different actor; the character of Kate the single parent, estranged from her dad and living in a houseboat, bears no resemblance to Kate the scientist determined to follow in her father’s work by heading up the new UNIT. Rather than trying and failing to reconcile the irreconcilable, Howe has the sense simply to side-step the issue altogether. The Kate seen here is the Cressman version with the Redgrave version quietly ignored. Not altogether ignored, though. In a loving riff on The Changing Face of Doctor Who which used to appear at the start of the Target books, he gives us The Changing Face of Kate Lethbridge-Stewart!
Howe’s love of the Target books (he wrote the book on them -literally!) shines through elsewhere. His writing style is very much akin to Terrance Dicks’, spare simple prose with enough description to allow the reader to picture the scenes, but not so much that it gets in the way of telling the story. Given the tendency to over prolixity that crept into the Virgin and BBC Doctor Who ranges, that focus on story telling is no bad thing, and makes for an enjoyable read. He also has the sense to recognise that, although this book falls in the middle of a bigger story told elsewhere, it needs to be self-sufficient. He concentrates on telling a self-contained story whilst throwing out enough unanswered questions to whet the appetite for more.
The book stands as a tribute not to one moment of Doctor Who, but many. It tells a sufficiently tight and exciting story to be enjoyable in its own right whilst being part of the wider mythology. Terrance Dicks was the master of the engaging read, and on this form Howe is a worthy successor.
David J Howe has been involved with Doctor Who research and writing for over thirty years. He wrote the book Reflections: The Fantasy Art of Stephen Bradbury for Dragon’s World Publishers and has contributed short fiction to Peeping Tom, Dark Asylum, Decalog, Dark Horizons, Kimota, Perfect Timing, Perfect Timing II, Missing Pieces, Shrouded by Darkness and Murky Depths, and factual articles to James Herbert: By Horror Haunted and The Radio Times Guide to Science Fiction. Another notable work of fiction is talespinning, a collection containing David’s many short story pieces and screenplays. www.howeswho.co.uk
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