Written by Ian Marter, based on Robert Holmes’ scripts for the 1975 TV serial.

This opens, like the TV episode, with a prologue featuring the Wirrrn Queen’s incursion into the Ark (here called Terra Nova), its exploration of the station, its anger and pain after it is fatally wounded by the automated defence systems, and its discovery of the sleeping humans. In general, the novel closely follows Robert Holmes’ scripts, which makes sense given how excellent they are, but adds in Marter’s own hallmark obsession with proto-splatterpunk horror. This is The Ark in Space if it had been made by John Carpenter in 1982.

Given he played Harry on TV, Marter resists the temptation to make his character more prominent in the adaptation. True, we experience the TARDIS’ arrival on Nerva and the exploration of the space station through Harry’s eyes, but even this feels screen accurate. I love these sequences, which evoke for me the eerie desertion of Skaro or the Earth ship in orbit of Sense Sphere. with a menace glimpsed in the corner of the eye. It’s if Holmes is taking the show right back to basics as something haunting and unsettling. Marter addresses one of the things that bugged me as a teenager – how come Nerva looks like it spins to create gravity but everyone walks on the walls – by confirming that rotation has been replaced by an “electrostatic field gravity system”.

Marter quickly flips from eerie to gross-out, with some truly astonishing scenes of gory horror, well beyond anything even Philip Hinchcliffe could have got away with. Noah’s transformation is breathtakingly grisly: “As he tried to speak, a ball of crackling mucus welled out of the dark slit that was his mouth and trickled down the front of the suit. He stumbled forward. ‘Vira… For pity’s sake… Kill me now,’ he pleaded… Then he reeled back with an appalling shriek as, with a crack like a gigantic seed pod bursting, his whole head split open and a fountain of green froth erupted and ran sizzling down the radiation suit, burning deep trenches in the thick material.”

Marter is also great at capturing Doctor Tom’s turn-on-a-penny mood swings, and offhand manner with his companions. There’s a wonderful moment late on when Noah threatens him and the Doctor reacts “not with anger or hate, but with a kind of infinite weariness.” Sarah Jane’s bravery is also well illustrated in an enhanced sequence of her struggle through the Ark’s service ducts, and a terrifying moment where a Wirrrn attacks a translucent section trying to bite through.

As this was one of the novelisations that neither Pershore Library nor local bookshops stocked in the 1980s, it’s one of the few I’d never read before this pilgrimage. It is as good as everyone says: one of the all-time great Doctor Who stories becomes one of the all-time great Doctor Who novels. Grade 1.

Next Time: Doctor Who And… The Brain of Morbius.