The Dalek Book

The Dalek Book

Souvenir Press' Dalek Annuals

"Greets from Skaro. You people of Venus have been freed from the bondage to your Earth masters!"

— Invasion of the Daleks

Digitally Archived

Status: Endangered

Although The Dalek Book holds the distinction of being the first published work in Doctor Who's expanded universe, the Doctor himself is almost entirely absent from its pages. Published on the 30th of June 1964, at the height of Dalekmania, it was the first in a line of Dalek Annuals co-written by Terry Nation (creator of the Daleks) and David Whitaker (series writer), with art throughout by three main artists - AB Cornwell, Richard Jennings and John Woods.

The book introduced the character of Jeff Stone, a human protagonist who would recur across the annuals, but more significantly it gave us the first Dalek Emperor - an individual best known as the Golden Emperor for his distinctive golden casing, and later developed further as the Dalek Prime. He makes his first appearance here, in a children's annual, before the television show had developed anything approaching that level of Dalek politics.

The book opens with Dalek Planetarium, a piece of art showing the solar system, human settlements in the future and the beginning of the invasion force, which comes out full force in Invasion of the Daleks. Before the Daleks can invade Earth, they begin to destroy or enslave the inhabitants of the other planets in the solar system, and it falls to three sibling scientists on Venus - Andy, Jeff and Mary Stone - to stop them. Their exploits across Red for Danger, The Oil Well, The Secret of the Mountain, Break-Through! and The Humanoids follow a fairly consistent pattern of the Daleks hatching a plan and the Stones foiling it, building toward the book's culmination in Battle for the Moon, where humanity across the solar system rises up to defeat the invasion force.

We also get some nice world building, such as The Small Defender, in which an unsuspecting mole defeats a small platoon of Daleks simply by digging tunnels and collapsing the ground beneath them, while The Monsters of Gurnian are dinosaur like creatures on a planet inhabited by the Daleks. City of the Daleks, meanwhile, shows the temporary war Dalek Cities in a lush comic strip.

The only odd story out is The Message of Mystery. Here we go back in time to Skaro, where the Daleks have received a message they cannot decode. Meanwhile, Susan steals her grandfather’s TARDIS to take a solo jaunt to Venus. Instead, she lands on Skaro and she gets captured by the Daleks. After some back and forth, she agrees to decode the message, using her self-invented “Dalekode” (later in the book there is a task where the reader can decode it too). After decoding it, she begins to laugh with delight, which confuses the Daleks and they start malfunctioning. She escapes back home, leaving the translated message behind - “Peace and Good Will to All”. The story, unlike others in this book, is created using stills of images from the serial The Daleks. This type of strip is commonly known as a fumetti comic strip.

Although physical copies are available to buy, they are rare and quite expensive. However, this archive has high quality digital copies.