This feels ridiculously faithful, right down to the ending with the Time Ring and the tumbling through ‘spinning blackness’ to the Doctor’s final ‘echoing’ lines (by contrast, the next novelisation, Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, will completely skip over Salamander’s flushing into space at the start). Where The Revenge of the Cybermen cut out water-based escapades and brought in added political machinations, it feels like Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks has painstakingly preserved every capture, every escape, every move between Kaled city and Thal city via clam-infested tunnels, every where’s-the-time-ring?-there’s-the-time-ring moment (WARNING: This is probably not strictly true). Even the Doctor-on-a-landmine scene, described by Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood as ‘pointless messing about’ which the viewer can ‘safely fast-forward through’, is preserved despite its job of cementing the parallel between the Thal-Kaled war setting and World War I being made unnecessary by Dicks busily making the parallel explicit.

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Actually, the issue isn’t so much that Dicks keeps all these ‘adventure-serial moments’, as Miles and Wood term them, but that he takes them for granted. That landmine scene, for example, gets stripped down to barely a page so that it can’t offer the same tension it had on screen (am I the only one who actually quite likes that scene?). Where on TV there’s a sense of the old-fashioned Who format running smack into something much grimmer and bigger than usual, in the novelisation it feels like a regression to the era of Terry Nation Dan Dare-style fare. The one time Dicks does obviously tweak anything, it’s not to add any depth or mood to proceedings but to fix the timings of Davros’s visit to the Thal council, the Doctor and Harry now bizarrely choosing to grab something to eat before they rush off on the terribly important business of rescuing Sarah and giving Davros the chance to slip across ahead of them.

On top of that, Dicks also manages to channel the worst instincts of the next most significant Dalek writer after Nation, David Whitaker’s disquiet around deformity in Doctor Who storming back to the fore – Sevrin the muto is ‘a hideous shapeless something’ and the Dalek creatures are ‘hideously deformed’. The insistence on the hideousness of anything mutant, and, in the case of the second quote, the attribution of that perspective to the Doctor, is bad enough but it’s pretty fatal in a story that’s supposed to be busy demonstrating the dangers of Nazism. It’s a bit rich of the Doctor to react to Nyder’s insistence that ‘The Kaled race must be kept pure’ with ‘horror’ at the abandonment of the ‘genetic wounded’ (also unfortunate considering the real world connotations but more forgivable in-story) when he’s already described mutations to Harry as the stuff of ‘nightmares’.

This all gets especially problematic around Davros. Miles and Wood suggest that, in the script, the genetic purity-obsessed Kaleds’ deference to their great scientist is ‘a deliberate contradiction, in much the same way that Hitler wasn’t an Aryan’ so it’s a bit odd that the novelisation decides to articulate the horror of Davros through judgements on how he doesn’t measure up to Aryan standards. Apparently, ‘the most horrifying thing about [him] was his face’, which just makes you wonder which other aspects of his physiognomy Dicks is implying are ‘horrifying’. His ‘ghastly skull-like head’, perhaps? His one arm? His failure to continue below the torso? Certainly as far as Harry is concerned, Davros’s injuries, despite his still being mentally capable and physically independent (bar the odd idiotically-placed safe), have reduced him to an existence to which ‘death would surely be preferable’ and the narration itself seems to be responsible for describing a wheelchair-bound life as something that should properly render a person ‘pitiful’. Does Dicks think the biggest problem with Nazism was the hypocritical gap between their ideology and the appearance of their leader?

Where the novelisation does come together, though, is in clarifying the link between the story and its setting at the end of ‘a thousand years of war’. The Doctor enters the story secretly eager ‘to defeat his oldest enemies once and for all’ before being thrown into what on TV constituted a four-parter of grim nastiness culminating in the destruction of the Kaled city. Dicks goes further than the broadcast episodes in emphasising how like the ending of a war film this all is, with ‘Corridors, streets, squares and walkways […] jammed with excited revellers’, people going to kiss random strangers and food, drink and parties everywhere. And the Doctor stands apart ‘appalled’, confronted by ‘the corrupting brutality of war’ as the Thals cheer the deaths of ‘Thousands of their fellow-creatures’.

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Then the Doctor has his little chat with Davros. Unlike on TV, he paraphrases Davros’s insistence that ‘The Daleks are the power not of evil but of good’ back at him before proposing the ‘virus […] that could destroy all life’. This sets the discussion up as a test of Davros’s sincerity (or just a counterargument based on an instinctive distrust of justifying evil by the ‘good [that] may come’) and it’s one Davros gleefully fails, too exhilarated by the prospect of eradicating all life – just look at all those exclamation marks – to maintain the pretence of ‘reasoning’.

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Obviously, he’s mad but more is done than on TV to suggest his worldview is a product of his context. His near-death to an ‘atomic shell’, which it seems he survived through sheer force of will alone, has led to a desire to ‘perpetuate himself’ forever through the Daleks and the necessary self-reliance implied the manner he ‘clung to life, and himself designed the mobile life-support system in which you see him’ bred an aspiration to ‘total power’. His campaign to ‘set [himself] among the Gods’ is a battle against dependence and vulnerability.

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Beyond that, he’s in the middle of a thousand-year war that has persisted in stalemate for generations, and would have continued to do so without Davros’s interventions, so a craving for its end that trumps all other concerns is hardly extraordinary. This is a war in which being ‘afflicted with a conscience’ would be a ‘weakness’, an active obstacle to finding a way to end it. No wonder there’s even a suggestion that he’s operated on himself to make himself more ruthless. And even then his inability to see any tension between ‘good’ and ‘death on an enormous scale’ is mirrored in the Thals’ joy at mass slaughter.

After all this, the Doctor finally gets his chance to wipe the Daleks from the face of history. Crucially, it’s not just ‘the moral issue’ holding him back, as it seems to be on TV, but also ‘sadness’ at the prospect of what he’s about to do – he refuses to be like the cheering Thals, who he presumably views as ‘no better than the Daleks’ for (as far as they know) wiping out ‘a whole intelligent life form’, and he refuses to be like Davros, using the end of war as justification for any act. Sarah tries to persuade him he’s wrong to feel such qualms, insisting he wouldn’t hesitate confronted with a ‘bacteria that had caused some terrible disease’, but he’s learnt not to depersonalise the enemy in that way anymore. Dicks has turned ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ into an anti-war text. Good on him. Only problem is that it ends with the Doctor actually going back and blowing up the Daleks…

Presumably, there’s a deliberate echo in Sarah’s argument of the Doctor’s earlier proposition to Davros of ‘a virus […] that could destroy all life’. A lot is made of how the Daleks are ‘machine’ creatures ‘without feeling or emotion’ and, in that context, Sarah’s verdict on them as akin to a ‘disease’ makes sense – their only purpose is to perpetuate their own survival so the universe can never be safe as long as they exist and wiping them out’s not going to make them suffer because they can’t feel anything. But a lot is also made of how that’s a design choice on Davros’s part. Indeed, he’s shown still in the process of making the ‘changes’ necessary to reduce them to mere ‘weapons’, less a species more ‘the supreme war-machine’.

That’s why the Doctor favours Gharman’s solution, preventing the, as the scientist terms it, ‘enormous mental defects’ from being introduced to the Daleks’ make-up in the first place to blowing up the tanks and all their occupants. And that’s also why, when it’s clear Ghaman has failed, he returns to try and blow up the tanks without a moment’s hesitation. Yes, with hindsight, Sarah is right to lament that, had Gharman just ‘arrived a moment later[,] The Doctor might have decided to set off those explosives after all’ and everything would have been nicely done and dusted, but it is only once Davros has succeeded that her analogy with ‘bacteria’ becomes accurate and blowing up the tanks stops being mass slaughter and effectively becomes gun control.