‘Doctor Who: Inferno’ – Terrance Dicks (Target)


Page Count: 126 Pages

You can always tell when I’ve been in the office, the commute gives me a chance to finish what I’m currently reading and then (fingers crossed) read a large chunk out of whatever is next on the list. ‘The Light Fantastic’ was finished on the bus home from work, and reviewed Here, and then it was straight onto ‘Inferno’. I saw the TV serial a few years ago but it has been a lot longer since I read the book (a slightly sobering 38 years, damn I’m old…) so when I found the copy I won on eBay, it was way past time that I gave it another shot. And...

Inferno is the name of a top-secret drilling project to penetrate the Earth’s crust and release a major new energy source. A crisis develops when a noxious liquid leaks out as drilling progresses – the green poison has a grotesquely debilitating effect on human beings…

As the Earth’s plight worsens, the Doctor is trapped in a parallel world, unable to rescue the planet and its inhabitants from the destructive force of Inferno…

True to form, ‘Inferno’ was one of the first books that I picked up in the school library and this bleak tale of mutation, and a world’s ending, freaked me right the hell out. I knew that the Doctor faced some real challenges but until now, he’d always managed to win through. Not this time though, he only managed to get half the job done and there was nothing he could do about the rest. Seeing it all end under a wave of lava really stuck with me so my mission was clear, to see if the book could do all of that again.

Yes, yes it did.

With ‘Inferno’, Terrance Dicks is clearly in one of those moods where he’s happy to step beyond just recounting a tale and have a little fun with it instead. Whether it’s the horror of forced mutation, the Doctor trying to get his head round the fact he’s in an alternate dimension where all his friends are suddenly fascists or an impending doom that absolutely cannot be stopped; Dicks really goes all out to show us how terrifying this all is and it works. To be fair, all the ingredients were already there but it’s the little flourishes that make all the difference, they really flesh things out, and Dicks is more than happy to provide these. I knew how ‘Inferno’ ends but while I was reading it, I had to keep reading and that’s as much down to Dicks as it is the source material he was working with.

Reading ‘Inferno’ was definitely time well spent then. I really mustn’t leave it as long, as I did last time, before I read it again.

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