Obviously I want to start by picking a fight with a 41 year- old review that I never read which describes The Revenge of the Cybermen as possessing a ‘script-to-book-and-never-mind-the-detail style’. This is a perverse criticism of a novelisation that changes so many little details.

First up, the Vogans are actually quite good here and, considering how late in the day they were added to the story when it was recorded (according to Shannon Sullivan), I suspect a lot of this is down to Dicks instinctively wrangling to make them worthwhile. He puts Vorus’s bald statement towards the end that his rocket will lead to ‘a new rule for Voga. My rule’ in some context by throwing in a little cynical dig at political ambition earlier on, poor Sheprah, ‘who was no politician’, ‘baffled’ by Vorus’s actions until realises the man’s ‘ambition’ for ‘power’, as if such shenanigans are the sole preserve of and motivation for political involvement.

He also inserts some new material to make Tyrum a stronger contrast to Vorus, his office ‘smaller and far simpler than the one in which Vorus stood […] bare and functional, completely without ostentation’, his approach to the civil war with Vorus to ‘wait’ rather than ‘lose the lives of many of our people’ in an attempt to speed his victory and his plan when the Vogans are too frightened to confront the Cybermen to ‘lead the last attack’ himself. There’s a danger that Dicks is making Tyrum’s more conservative position somehow above politics but he also restructures their first confrontation to make the councillor more engaged in their power struggle, ripping the curtain aside to reveal the dead Vogan to punctuate his accusation of murder rather than before making it and no being the one to talk of proof rather than Vorus.

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Meanwhile, he uses internal monologue to show that Vorus really does feel that the Vogans are too timid, which adds a new layer of sincerity when he talks of ancient fears dropping away in the light. Alongside this, Dicks introduces an odd parallel with the Cybermen, Tyrums’s plea against Vorum’s plan that by remaining hidden the Vogans ‘survive’ now echoing the Doctor’s description of the tinpot tin men’s motivation as ‘a great determination to survive’. Vorus is rebelling against a living death akin to cybernisation, pursuing a desire to truly be alive, and that, in any Cyberstory, must at least put him somewhere near the right side of the debate. By the end, it’s Tyrum who looks the man motivated by personal ambition, reflecting that Vorus’s rocket ‘had come in useful after all’ and taking his rival’s death easily in his stride: ‘A martyr was so much more satisfactory than a political rival’. I don’t know if it was Dicks’s intention but it feels like a warning to beware mild conservative leaders and how wed they are to power over ideals.

And it’s not just the Vogans Dicks has a fiddle with. He makes Voga slightly less baffling, now a ‘meteorite’ rather than a planet that wonders between solar systems unnoticed. He also gives it a mythic weight, the ‘last fragment’ of the seemingly forgotten ‘Planet of Gold’ that was ‘broken up by the Cybermen’. There’s something of the El Dorado about it that was rather lacking on TV as well as a greater sense of the turmoil of the Cyberwar.

He improves bits of plot-sense too, like the whole business with the Doctor and the Cyberbombs. It now makes sense why the Doctor goes along with the Cyberplan as far as he does, seizing on the ‘one possible loophole’ he spies that causes no harm to himself, the Nerva crewmembers and Voga. Wonderfully, that loophole is revealed as a deliberate Cyberstrategy, a little glimmer of ‘hope of escape’ designed ‘to be sure that [the Doctor] would follow the plan’. It’s a tiny touch but it gives the Cybermen a nice moment to appear something other than totally cretinous.

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Then there’s all the stuff Dicks just improves with his prose. The early sequence when the Doctor, Harry and Sarah navigate a corridor of corpses, for example, is far more memorable in the novelisation than on screen thanks to adopting Sarah’s POV for the ‘nightmarish stumble’ and adding in a bit where one ‘fell suddenly toward her’. Unfortunately, Dicks later sort of repeats the trick when Harry reflects how his, the Doctor and Lester’s attack on the Cybermen would be ‘forever photographed on his memory’ but even then there’s the nice detail that ‘photographed’ means Dicks can effectively present a freezeframe of the action.

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Still, there’s plenty of other little gems to enliven the story, whether it be the Doctor introducing all the characters to each other ‘with all the aplomb of a vicar at a garden party’, the description of transmatting someone as like sending ‘a telephone message’ or Harry attacking Sarah’s manacles ‘with rather more enthusiasm than care’. There’s nice little comic juxtapositions, too, like the Doctor considering that ‘Maybe Harry and Sarah were safer where they were’ before a cut to Harry and Sarah running frantically through corridors to the sound of gunfire’ or the Cyberleader’s deadpan response to the Doctor asking Kellman if he’s betrayed Nerva for the gold: ‘There will be no gold’. Dicks even rewrites the whole Cyberarrival to give it much more momentum, the Doctor frantically charging around in a doomed attempt to deny them entry, and offers a fleeting insight into the primal fear the Cybermen represent to the Vogans: ‘The ancient nightmares had come to life. Cybermen had returned to Voga’.

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The only two things Dicks hasn’t actually done much with are Kellman and the Cybermen and I suspect that that’s because they’re both so incomprehensible as characters. The former is immediately hateful, having ‘refused to even attempt to help’ the overwhelmed remnants of Nerva’s crew and then luxuriating around all ‘plump and rested’ while taunting them with ‘his habitual sneer’. Added to that, he’s utterly lacking in remorse about the deaths he’s brought to the beacon, calmly looking down at Warner, a man he’s presumably programmed the Cybermat specifically to kill, ‘With a smile of quiet satisfaction’, not even giving the corpse ‘a second glance’ as he leaves. His sole motivation for this carnage is explicitly simple avarice, ‘the gold he hungered for’, rather than any desire to eradicate the Cybermen or help the meteorite’s inhabitants.

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All that said, Dicks manages to compound the problem by making both Vorus, who enlisted his help, and Harry, who barely knows him, treat him with such contempt. The latter, especially, is keen as he and Kellman crawl try to get to the Cyberbombs to shove him ahead ‘ruthlessly’ so that, should there be any danger, Kellman will encounter it first and then, when they do hit trouble and Kellman dies, feels ‘no sympathy’, judging that having ‘his neck twisted’ in a rockfall was ‘luckier than he deserved’ and proving utterly dismissive of the late professor when he relates events to the Doctor: ‘he copped it’. Frankly, Kellman doesn’t look so exceptionally despicable in such company.

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Those problems, though, are nothing compared with the insanity that whirls around the Cybermen. For me, and this really isn’t Dicks’s fault to be fair, the weirdest thing of all is the mention of Cyberclothes. I mean, I’d never really thought of the Cybermen as wearing clothes. Why would they? They can feel neither cold nor self-conscious. Clearly, they wear clothes on TV but I’d always just accepted that as an essential concession given that they’re, you know, men in costumes rather than a deliberate design decision. I’m genuinely not sure whether it’s me or Dicks being perverse here.

Putting that aside, they’re still bonkers. One minute they speak in a ‘sibilant, whispering voice’, the next a purely ‘mechanical voice’; one minute, they definitively ‘do not have feelings’, the next they’re speaking with ‘overtones of hate’ or ‘eager anticipation’ or taking a moment to ‘savour the horror on Sarah’s face’. When the Doctor decides to wind up the Cyberleader, its voice increasingly rises ‘in volume and intensity’ before one ‘childish insult’ riles the unfeeling giant so much he snaps and takes a swing at the long-scarfed bastard. How they have the gall to smugly assert that the ‘human element’ is the one thing undermining all their plans, I’ll never know.

If writing for the Cybermen on TV is a pretty thankless task, trying to make them both exciting and consistent in prose seems to be an impossible task. Maybe the problem is that the concept of the Cybermen is precisely unworkable in the context of action-adventure derring-do where your villains have to actually be entertainingly villainous and have exploitable flaws, which disturbingly suggests none of the writers see an emotionless adherence to logic as a flaw. I must admit though, the main problem does just basically seem to be the need to avoid using the blank phrase ‘he said’ too much.