Well, here we are, sandwiched between two Cyberadventures. Brian Hayles is back and, with a far more sensible story than ‘The Curse of Peladon’, it becomes clear how he not only lacks the charming turns of phrase and instinctive grip on pace that Dicks’ll bring to the next book but also the complete abandonment of sense that allowed Davis to make the last book so fun. On top of that, he’s adapting a story broadcast nine years back, which means a quite pedestrian, faithful proto-DVD approach was not only appropriate but probably desirable, leaving nothing but slight shifts in little details to look at.

Luckily, there’s one change that has inadvertently wide-ranging ramifications. Hayles improves on the science of his TV scripts, where ‘No plants’ equalled ‘no carbon dioxide’, attributing the CO2 decline instead to ‘recycling’ and ‘depollution’. Now, to get the obvious out of the way first, this is unfortunate. Whilst it might be more scientifically plausible, it also delivers the lesson that what the world needs is a constant pumping out of greenhouse gasses in order to avoid ice-age apocalypse and you should be wary of all this new-fangled concern for the environment. Within Doctor Who, it’s doubly unfortunate as it comes off the back of all those Pertwee novelisations that took the ecological issues that were moving into the mainstream in the 1970s to heart, making Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors look positively regressive.

Putting that aside, though, it also alters the emphasis of ‘The Ice Warriors’. The disaster the base is dedicated to fighting is now entirely attributable to the scientists the story is so obsessed with and their obeisance to the Intercontinental Computer Complex – when Storr describes them as ‘destructive meddlers’, he’s actually being completely accurate. That puts a whole new spin on the moment when Walters snaps and rails against ‘that damned machine’ – on TV, this can be read as fear finally getting the better of him as the computer becomes paralysed by the crisis or even as anger at Clent for his rigid insistence on deferring to the computer even as it proves incapable of a decision but in the novelisation it’s clearly an eruption following years of bottled-up frustration. With ECCO, as the computer’s christened in the book, implicated in the creation of the new ice age, his accusation that it’s brought them ‘Nothing but trouble’ has clear meaning and an undeniable truth.

This changes the balance between Clent and Penley. In the broadcast episodes, Clent may have a point when he judges that Penley, however necessary to Brittanicus base’s successful operation and however much Clent should have worked harder to keep him happy, gave in to ‘weakness’ when he ran away from his responsibilities, valuing his personal need to feel ‘a man’ over his duty to ‘Five thousand years of civilisation’. In the book, however, Penley is merely voicing and acting upon perfectly reasonable feelings, what with the computer having cocked everything up in the first place, that seem to be shared, if suppressed, by others at the base, Walters outburst sitting alongside Arden eye-rolling reference to ‘that blessed computer’ and even Miss Garrett’s failure to protest resulting only from her being ‘was too ambitious’ to risk her career rather than any deeper allegiance to the manner of operations (no further examples spring to mind but then no other base-based characters really do either).

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The reasonableness of Penley’s position is further reinforced by the parallel between him and the Doctor getting more brightly spotlighted. As on TV, the Doctor shares Penley’s resistance to the base’s reliance on ECCO, muttering that he works with computers ‘No more than necessary’, insisting on the supremacy of ‘human beings’ and even getting upset that they run calculations through the computer, demanding ‘an apology’. But the novelisation also adds texture to their first meeting, both described identically as ‘bizarrely dressed men’ as they quickly eye each other up and share a moment over Clent’s body, side by side, Penley giving the Doctor a whiff of a smile, the Doctor offering his ‘approval’ to Penley’s prescribed course of action.

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This all leaves Clent far out in the cold, especially without Peter Barkworth’s performance. However dedicated he might be to his mission, gaining ‘respect’ from the Doctor for his resolve in the face of hardship and from Penley for his courage in the face of disaster, and however effective his leadership might be, his ‘strength of personality’ the only thing pushing forward a team facing overwhelming odds, he is, as Varga points out, basically a middle manager, dependent on ‘the experts’, those with actual ‘valuable skills’, for the work.

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Even more sadly, he’s not any good at managing people. The idea that anyone might be ‘the equal of his beloved computer’ irritates him, perhaps because he’s utterly hostile of any individuality, dismissing the concept of ‘freedom of thought’ with a brusque ‘Creative poppycock!’. Penley, seemingly the key member of his team, appears to have left ‘under a hail of sarcasm’ hardly likely to encourage him to stay and, despite Clent’s attempts to pin the blame for this on Penley’s character, it’s implied that Penley isn’t the first to have been lost to the mission, Miss Garrett worried Clent will ‘reject’ the Doctor ‘as he had rejected Penley and so many others before him’. Despite his reliance on them, it seems that he has a barely concealed resentment of ‘experts and their crazy ideas!’.

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What he wants is people who will blindly do what they’re told even when what their told is a vacuous demand for the impossible, as when he declares Miss Garrett ‘must balance those readings’ even as the Ioniser is on the verge of exploding (it’s only the Doctor’s intervention with an actual solution that saves them and Clent’s immediate response to that is to order his guards to ‘Get these scavengers out of here—quickly!’). This is a man more concerned with his authority than in the mission, responding to the fact that they ‘need Scientist Penley’ with the simple insistence that ‘That person is no longer a member of this Base’ – the leadership structure seemingly trumps having the necessary personnel. And then, when it comes to the crunch, Clent’s revealed as little more than a petty bully, greeting Penley’s return to the base not with relief or gratitude at his return but by having him tranquillised and tied up on the pretence that the scientist was attacking him even though ‘Everyone present knew the truth—including Clent’.

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Thanks to the glimpses inside his head afforded by the novelisation, Clent’s behaviour can’t even be excused by the stress of the situation and a tunnel vision brought about by the importance of keeping the glaciers at bay. No, his first thought when it looks like everything might go tits up is how ‘his own career would be in ruins’ following such an event and his expectation after the day is saved at the end to face only ‘scorn and humiliation’ fills in some of the detail on show he’s used ‘scientist’s skulls as stepping stones to the top jobs’, presumably exploiting others’ failures to secure a cushy niche for himself.

What’s odd about this portrayal of Clent as actively obstructive to the success of his mission is that Hayles provides little hints that he is actually quite a sharp scientist himself. He’s the first to follow the trail of logic the Doctor’s on when speculating on the dangers posed by an alien spaceship in the glacier and is quick to recognise the Doctor’s trained scientific mind. The problem seems to be his ‘addiction to the rule book’. Though ECCO’s the one who visibly suffers a meltdown, Clent goes through the same process, one moment insisting they must follow World Central Control’s orders ‘without question’ and use the ioniser, the next stating they must obey the computer and wait. There’s a strong hint that, had Miss Garrett not insisted they consult the computer, he’d have happily ploughed on and risked the alien spaceship exploding but now he feels compelled to inaction even as he makes clear that he understands not only why ECCO has instructed that they wait but that it will never be able to give any other instruction.

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This could just loop back to the main concerns of the TV episodes, with, as Phil Sandifer articulates, its ‘triangle of loyalties among Clent, Penley, and Garrett’ (though with diluted Garrett) and its ‘end crisis […] about humans solving an internal conflict inside the base’ and ‘rejecting the computer and thinking for themselves’. However, separating out Clent the career-minded, brown-tonging, people-riling little worm and Clent the computer-consulting, procedure-wedded scientist makes it all look less like a simple personality clash and more like an ideological split. Penley and the Doctor represent a scientific spirit that’s inquisitive, compelled to constantly ask questions and prod at things, and that doesn’t fit the regimented order that Clent, and indeed the whole world he stands in for, can tolerate. This is the end result of changing the cause of the new ice age – this is a political system, seemingly a worldwide one, ruled by the computer-worshipping elite (who not only rely on computers but aspire to a computer-like process as a model for society) and they’ve transparently fucked up but are ploughing on regardless.

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This makes sense of the strangely strong language used to describe Penley’s departure from the base, with Jan thinking him ‘treacherous’, Clent labelling him a ‘traitor’ and the Doctor under the impression he ‘defected’. This isn’t just someone who’s quit his job, this is someone who’s gone over to the enemy (oddly, since Brittanicus base is so clearly Western, that makes the desire to assert your humanity over regimentation and computer control the equivalent side to the Soviets as well as suggesting the scavengers are a lot more organised than Penley and Storr ever appear to be). It might also explain the steely edge Penley gains in the absence of Peter Sallis, looking even at first glance like a man who ‘would let little stand in [his] way’ and displaying a distressingly casual attitude to death, jocularly commenting on Davis’s body that ‘There’s one over there who’ll be staying on the mountain for good’ (mind you, the story’s full of the death of colleagues being easily taken in people’s strides so maybe I shouldn’t read too much into that).

Penley’s grittiness, though, pales in the face of Storr’s outright brutality, which not only sees him, for example, insisting that Penley should knife Miss Garrett when she turns up at their hide-out, but ‘disgusted by [his] weakness’ when he doesn’t. It all seems a bit much if he’s they’re just struggling to survive but makes much more sense if he’s viewed, as Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles point out, not as a ‘survivalist in the rugged American mould but as someone resisting a government demand to leave his home and make way for “progress”’. Wood and Miles make an analogy between the base personnel’s desire to evacuate scavengers to Africa for ‘rehabilitation’ and the Highland Clearances and this would make Storr anything but a paranoid nutter for believing everyone’s out to get him, explaining the extremes to which he’s willing to go to remain under the radar (though that still doesn’t explain Victoria’s instinctive disgust at the prospect of going to Africa).

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Storr is a ‘Loyalist’ because he’s fighting to preserve an old regime toppled by World Computer Control and he views the power of the new regime as ‘degrading’ because they’re seeking to deprive him of the means of his preferred, independent way of life. It’s only unfortunate that Hayles removes the suggestion that the base personnel are themselves conscripted. That’s why he’s so happy whenever Penley’s provoked into pouring scorn upon the base – that hatred is a reassuring sign of his ideological conversion. And that’s why an alliance with the Ice Warriors doesn’t immediately seem ludicrous to him, partly out of desperation because he’s losing this war and partly because, like a US politician from the 1960s or 70s, he can’t appreciate there could be any allegiance but to one of two ideological stances. As far as he’s concerned, if they’re against Brittanicus base, and they clearly are, then they’re bound to help Jamie once they realise ‘he’s not a scientist’ and they’re bound to join him.

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Unfortunately for him, the Ice Warriors couldn’t give a toss. Ironically, this is because they come from a time before great global powers. Trapped in the ice ‘thousands of years ago’ during ‘the First Ice Age’. They’ve even outlived their civilisation. All the humans’ talk of ‘an ancient warrior’ and contemplation of ‘Viking raiders’ is actually quite apt – Varga is ‘a Martian warlord’ and his only interest is in conquest in pursuit of a personal fiefdom. If the Brittanicus base stands for some future plutocracy and Storr stands for Hayles’s idea of 20th-century democracy then the Ice Warriors are basically feudal (or you could follow Wood and Miles’s Highland Clearance analogy and say that Storr’s problem is that the Ice Warriors turn out to be just another load of aristocratic profiteerers who don’t even feel the need to dress their plan up as progress).

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If anything, the Ice Warriors show up where Storr’s been going wrong. They’re far more brutal than he’s willing to be, Zondal ever eager ‘to kill again’ once he’s got a taste for Earthling slaughter, and far more uncompromising, Varga’s final scene showing him salute his comrades who’ve accepted only death as an alternative to conquest and declaring ‘No... surrender!’. That’s the only way to take on a global hegemony.

You know, I may have talked myself into it but I take it back – this is a brilliant novelisation.