Terry Nation's Dalek Annual 1977 (1976)

Where to begin with a review of the Dalek annual 1977, except that it is yet another example of a fantastic opportunity wasted.
Young people receiving this book expecting heaps of facts and trivia surrounding their favourite sci-fi monster would have been a little disappointed; but knowing that kids in the 1970's were happy with whatever they could get, they probably smiled anyway. The fact that over a third of this book has nothing to do with Daleks whatsoever, not withstanding.

What they were treated to was a collection of mediocre stories loosely based on the Doctor Who universe without actually putting him in any of the stories directly. The stories themselves I had assumed to have been put together by the usual hack writers who have little or no interest in what they are writing about. My first guess was that Terry Nation would have had no input as far as I could imagine in the production of this annual. However, I am now not so sure he was *guilt free.

'The Doomsday Machine':
Two soldiers from the Anti-Dalek-Force volunteer to go on a mission to sabotage a new Dalek weapon with the power to reduce the size of all organic life on Earth to miniature dimensions.
Plot oversight: clothing would not have miniaturised along with the people in the story.
*interesting fact - Written prior to 1976, the story opens on a character named Cal Tarrant, a name Terry Nation would recycle four years later on his other television Sci-fi series Blakes 7 with the chatacter Del Tarrent, introduced in the spring of 1980. Yet another signature is in the name of the character 'Mark Seven'.

'Report from an unknown planet':
Is similar to Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes story mechanism in which a message is sent into space warning of a disaster (Replace chimps with trash can wheely bins - end).

'The Fugitive':
A couple of schoolboys stumble across a Dalek hunt for an escaped prisoner and save the day - Hurrah!

In with the mix are the usual selection of unwelcome editorial intrusions:

'The Monsters from Inner Space' is a reminder that creatures dwell beneath Earth's oceans that often exceed the imagination of the sci-fi writer (certainly true of the writers in this book).

'The Greatest Computer of all' is another patronising attempt by someone's ill-conceived sense of duty to inform the reader that no computer on Earth could ever hope to match the intellectual power of the human brain (so, why are you wasting it reading this nonsense).

These two articles do nothing but take up space that should have been concentrating on celebrating fantasy and the power of imagination rather than doing their best to quench it. Unfortunately they are not alone.

Added to this monotonous and uninspiring book are page after page of puzzles and mind games, and a boardgame titled Escape from Skaro! Which I admit I have never played (so, it may well be absolutely worth the price of this book alone! Although I seriously doubt it be the case).
Three pages are then dedicated to introducing us to a 'Visiograph print' of new alien monsters who are siding with the Daleks. However, it turns out to be nothing more than a 'hack' black and white collage of ten monsters from other movies such as Roger Corman's X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, to name but a couple I could be bothered to recognise (plus a generic Dalek thrown in). This is then followed by another two pages of wasted space made up of eight, thirty word descriptions of various lands on the Dark Side of Skaro such as 'The Land of the Mutants', 'The Land of the Lost', and 'The Rocks' etc. There is nothing of value here.

Even an excellent 22 page comic strip (in three parts) is merely a reprint of David Whitaker's earlier work. Sadly however, due to printing costs, the final instalment only exists in monochrome black and white in this issue. Instead they wasted eight pages of colour printing illustrating 'The Doomsday Machine'. Why? In the name of Davros. Why! ( )