Dalek, p.1
Dalek, page 1
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Authors
Title Page
INTRODUCTION
Ambush
George Mann
CHAPTER ONE
THE CREATION OF THE DALEKS
How the Daleks were created for TV
George Mann
Davros Genesis
Terrance Dicks
CHAPTER TWO
SKARO – THE PLANET OF THE DALEKS
Changing Dalek designs
George Mann
Safe Haven
George Mann
CHAPTER THREE
THE DALEKS IN HISTORY
The voice of the Daleks
Nicholas Briggs
Empire of the Daleks
Mark Wright
CHAPTER FOUR
DALEKS IN THE MODERN WORLD
The Dalek invasion of toyshops
David J. Howe
Abduction
Paul Magrs
CHAPTER FIVE
BUILDING AN EMPIRE
Print of the Daleks
Mark Wright
Cyber Crisis
Cavan Scott
CHAPTER SIX
THE DALEK WARS
Daleks in movies and stage shows
George Mann
Infection of the Daleks
Mike Tucker
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE GREAT TIME WAR
Daleks in audio and exhibitions
George Mann
Lost Patrol
George Mann
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE FINAL END
The Dalek invasion of pop culture
Cavan Scott
War and Peace
Eric Saward
Acknowledgements
Picture Credits
Index
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
Dalek is the never-before-told history of the Doctor’s most dangerous enemies, the famous ‘Outer Space Robot People’ of the planet Skaro – from their genesis in the thousand-year conflict between Thals and Kaleds, to their survival of the Time War and (as foreseen by the Time Lords) their conquest of the universe. Along the way, the authors also reveal all-new stories about these legendary creatures – terrifying near-mythical adventures, startling visual recreations of never-before-seen conflicts, and more. Each of them helps shed new light on what has become the most feared alien race in the universe.
With full-colour illustrations, concept art, cutaways, diagrams, comic strips and more, Dalek is a dramatic retelling of the ascent of the ‘supreme race’, and the story of the mysteries that lurk in unexplored corners of the universe. It is the ultimate celebration of all things Dalek.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
George Mann is the author of the bestselling Doctor Who: Engines of War and Newbury & Hobbes steampunk mystery series, as well as numerous other novels, short stories and original audiobooks. He has edited a number of anthologies including The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, The Solaris Book of New Fantasy and a retrospective collection of Sexton Blake stories, Sexton Blake, Detective. He lives near Grantham, UK, with his wife, son and daughter.
A celebrated writer and Creative Consultant to the BBC Books range of Doctor Who books, Justin Richards lives and works in Warwick with his wife and two children. When he’s not writing, he can be found indulging his passion for inventing, reading and watching far too much television.
Number One Bestseller Cavan Scott has written for such popular series as Star Wars, Star Trek, Vikings, Warhammer 40,000 and, of course, Doctor Who. He’s the writer of Titan Comic’s ongoing adventures of the Ninth Doctor and was one of the 2016 World Book Day authors.
INTRODUCTION
The Doctor once described the Daleks as ‘living, bubbling lumps of hate’. These warlike creatures from the planet Skaro have been his most dangerous and tenacious enemy since the very beginning of his adventures in space and time. Their cry of ‘Exterminate!’ has echoed across the universe, inspiring fear on every planet as they sought to spread their empire far and wide.
From the moment of their creation on Skaro by the Kaled scientist Davros, the Daleks have been embroiled in conflict with the alien races they encounter. Their fascination with humankind has led to countless forays to Earth, where traces of Dalek aggression can be found throughout recorded history … and where this time-travelling race has already intervened in the planet’s future.
For humankind, the Daleks have become creatures of legend, with rumours and stories of this formidable enemy abounding. They have entered the cultural psyche in many countries around the world, with representations in comic strips, novels, audio adventures and films. The history of the Daleks would not be complete without an account of how they have been depicted – on television, on stage, and in merchandising – by one of their sworn enemies, the human race.
They have travelled across the universe to conquer other planets, subjugating inhabitants they deem inferior to their supreme race and expanding the reach of their empire. No matter the setback, the Daleks have pursued their agenda of conquest and destruction.
The Time Lords claimed to have foreseen a time when the Daleks would have destroyed all other life forms and become the dominant creatures in the universe. To thwart their plans, the Time Lords sent the Doctor back in time to try to prevent the Daleks’ creation. He didn’t succeed, and out of this act was born the Last Great Time War, a conflict that threatened the very fabric of time itself. With the conflicting timelines now sealed to prevent the universe from being inadvertently destroyed, the chronology of this devastating conflict remains shrouded in mystery to this day.
Although we cannot be sure whether the Dalek race will ultimately triumph or be exterminated themselves, we can take comfort from the knowledge that their greatest enemy – the Doctor – has defeated them time and time again.
The Daleks in their classic grey and black livery. Whatever the colour scheme, the Children of Davros were feared the galaxy over.
An aerial shot of a Dalek invasion fleet captured by an Imperial Earth Spydrone. Military analysts were intrigued to see a Spider-Dalek in the assembled force, a configuration that, until this point, had never been seen in intelligence reports.
THE ORIGINS OF THE DALEK RACE
The Dalek race was forged in a crucible of war, hate and genocide.
Such inauspicious origins are perhaps unsurprising, given the Daleks’ proclivity for such violent endeavours, but the truth behind their creation can, in part, help to explain some of what drives them as a species.
Surviving records from the Daleks’ home planet of Skaro are scarce and fragmented, and at times contradictory. What is certain is that once, many thousands of years ago, Skaro was home to two dominant species – the Kaleds and the Thals.
Both the Kaleds and the Thals were bipedal humanoids, although their internal physiology differed greatly from the people of Earth, whom they outwardly resembled. It is thought that both races stemmed from a common ancestry, and that at some point in their prehistory the species diverged. It is this division that inevitably gave rise to the escalating hostilities between them, as they competed over land, resources and differing ideologies, each becoming increasingly isolationist as time went on.
In appearance the Thals were tall, fair and muscular, typically blond, with startling blue eyes, whilst the Kaleds were shorter, slimmer, with a genetic bias towards dark hair and pale complexions. Where the Thals were initially aggressive and militaristic, the Kaleds were more thoughtful and studious. They were renowned as teachers and philosophers, but over time this thoughtfulness gave way to wretched bitterness, and in turn, that bitterness evolved into a rampant xenophobia, directed at the Thals.
The Kaleds became ever more inward-looking and suspicious of the Thals. When they saw that the Thals had erected a massive protective dome over their capital city, they followed in kind, furthering their isolation, committing themselves to centuries of subterranean living, from which they rarely emerged.
It is no longer clear which side committed the first act of outright aggression, with some legends claiming the warlike Thals were responsible, while others cited a pre-emptive strike by the Kaleds. The two races engaged in a series of tireless wars that spanned a thousand-year period – a terrible, world-shattering conflict that left Skaro desolate and irradiated, and both Kaleds and Thals depleted, desperate and irrevocably changed.
During this Thousand Year War, the Kaleds turned their keen scientific intelligence to developing increasingly horrific chemical, biological and nuclear weapons to use against the Thals, and an arms race ensued, as each side struggled to gain the upper hand. Over time, however, their weapons became increasingly less sophisticated as resources became scarce, and the effects of the conflict began to have a noticeable impact on the physiologies of both species. This was compounded when the Kaleds began detonating nuclear warheads, which exposed combatants on both sides to the mutating effects of the ensuing radiation.
The Kaleds hunkered down and continued in their quest to devise even more devious weapons. They had evolved into a fascistic, intolerant race, supremely self-confident and convinced of their own superiority over the Thals. After all this time, they would not be satisfied with anything but the total annihilation of the Thal race.
However, the genetic mutations caused by the fallout from the nuclear war were becoming increasingly severe, and the Kaleds soon realised that they had doomed themselves as well as their enemy. As their numbers dwindled, the Kale ds turned their attention to finding a means to survive, to reverse the mutations, but all seemed lost – the effects were too wide ranging, their DNA too corrupted. Their greatest scientific minds were at a loss, and their civilisation was on the brink of collapse. All they could do was focus on devising ever more heinous weapons in their quest to eradicate their enemy.
The Dals
It is sometimes postulated that there might, at one time, have existed a third intelligent species on Skaro, the Dals, which were later obliterated in the terrible Thousand Year War between the Kaleds and Thals. Over time the surviving Thals, reduced to a mere shadow of what they had once been, appear to have conflated the Dals and the Kaleds into a common enemy. However, the surviving Thal history slates are difficult to reconcile, referring to established facts alongside strange myths regarding visitors from other worlds.
A lone Dalek patrols the Plains of Annihilation on Skaro, sifting through the remnants of a Thal settlement.
DAVROS
While Thal society essentially devolved during the Thousand Year War, the Kaleds continued to maintain a more authoritarian, scientific community, preserving their technological prowess despite the scarcity of resources. While many of their most capable scientists were deployed to research potential solutions for the genetic mutations that were now afflicting their people, their Chief Scientist, Davros, took an altogether different approach.
Davros was a man blighted by the War, horrifically scarred and disabled, forced to permanently exist in a life-support chair of his own devising. His list of afflictions was extensive, and might have proved the end of someone who lacked his fanaticism and innate desire to perpetuate the Kaled race.
His torso had been severed at the waist, meaning that he could not survive outside of his life-support chair for more than a few moments without his remaining organs going into fatal shock. He was missing his left arm, and the flesh of his face and upper body was terribly burned and scarred. This had resulted in his inability to open his eyes, effectively blinding him, and so a cybernetic eye had been installed in his forehead to afford some degree of compensation. His larynx had also been damaged in the attack, necessitating the electronic enhancement of his voice, and leaving him with a distinctive, sinister drawl.
Davros considered himself a futurist, outside of the morality of his, or any other, people. He was certain of his own superiority, and in the fascistic society that the surviving Kaleds had established, he thrived.
Over time he became convinced that the mutation of his people had become an unstoppable force and believed their DNA was now so corrupted that no matter the efforts of his colleagues, the Kaleds in their present form could not be saved. Following this line of thought to its logical conclusion, Davros began to experiment upon mutant Kaled embryos, instigating further alterations, attempting to follow the path of mutation through to its inevitable end. What he discovered was a creature so fragile, so helpless, that it changed his entire outlook on the war and the ongoing survival of his race.
Davros knew now that the future of his people lay not in the simple eradication of the Thals, but in orchestrating the survival of the future form of the Kaled race.
To do so, Davros devised a plan: he would accelerate the mutations en masse and build protective travelling machines to house the resulting life forms – the final form of the Kaled race. Then, without compunction, he would instigate the total annihilation of all other life on Skaro, including the remaining Kaleds – even if this entailed allying himself with the Thals to destroy the Kaled city.
The surviving mutants – Davros’s new ‘Daleks’, their name an anagram of ‘Kaleds’ – would be all that survived in the ashes.
As Davros set about the creation of his new race – as he had now come to see it – he designed a series of ‘improvements’, intent on equipping the Daleks with the many varied tools they would require to ensure their survival. He fitted their travel machines with powerful weaponry, but in a move that would prove even more contentious, he began to further manipulate the genetic structure of the mutants, isolating and removing any characteristics he deemed flawed or weak. Thus the first Daleks were forged from the remnants of the Kaled race, with no morality, no compassion, and no emotion save for hate. Imbued with Davros’s keen sense of self-belief and superiority, they saw themselves as the ultimate expression of the Kaled race.
The Eye of the Creator – portrait by unknown artist (thought to have been exterminated upon completion of the piece), depicting Davros, creator of the Daleks.
The inner workings of the early Dalek travel machines were complex and innovative – a triumph of design and engineering.
All was not well inside Davros’s bunker, however. A number of the other Science Officers were beginning to have grave misgivings about how far Davros was willing to go in his pursuit of the Dalek ideal. Trapped in the bunker, unable to get word out to the Kaled city, they found themselves powerless against Davros, who, now armed with a small force of Daleks, found it a simple matter to quash such rebellion. Davros had assumed complete command of the bunker – any and all who opposed him were marked for extermination.
It is during this period that the Doctor – a renegade Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey – visited Skaro on a clandestine mission. Thrown into the midst of the still-raging war, the Doctor had been tasked by his people with interfering with the evolution of the Dalek race.
The Time Lords were a race of time-travelling humanoids who, at some point during their history, had appointed themselves guardians of time and space. They had seen the terror which followed in the wake of Davros’s creations – the chaos and destruction they would wreak across the entire universe – and believed their only recourse was the complete destruction of the Dalek project during this, its fragile infancy. If they could be stopped now, billions of lives could be saved. Alternately, the Doctor’s presence might permit the Time Lords to learn of an intrinsic weakness within the Daleks that could be used against them later.
When Davros looked to the moons of Skaro, he imagined a universe ringing with the sound of extermination.
Deep inside the bunker on Skaro, Davros plotted the means by which his Daleks would become the supreme form of life in the galaxy.
The Doctor, however, saw the inherent irony in the genocide of an entire fledgling race to prevent future crimes at their hands. After stirring up further discord amongst Davros’s fellow scientists, he hesitated at the crucial moment, failing to destroy the mutant Kaled embryos in Davros’s ‘nursery’.
It soon transpired that, rather than avert the course of Dalek evolution, the Doctor’s presence had, in fact, served only to strengthen Davros’s resolve.
Now more certain than ever that his creations would survive the war on Skaro and go on to become a supreme force in the wider universe – a fact corroborated by the Doctor’s very presence and information he had extracted from the Time Lord that set out the Daleks’ future plans – Davros did the unthinkable: he set his creations free.
With no limitations or guiding hand, the Daleks did only what they had been created by Davros to do. Reasoning that they should be the only life forms permitted to survive on Skaro, they turned on Davros and the remaining Kaleds, destroying them all.
Free from the shackles of their creator, the Daleks emerged from the underground laboratories and began to build. They erected a vast city, Kalaann, amongst the ruins of the old Kaled stronghold. Kalaann was designed to accommodate their new forms, with powered gangways, ramped walkways and elevators – a city within which the Daleks could consolidate their control.
The Thal forces, however, were gathering for another attack. The war, as they saw it, was far from over, and the destruction of the Kaleds presented them with an opportunity. The Daleks were still a fledgling race, their numbers low. If Kalaann could be breached, then the Thals might yet gain the upper hand.
Minutes before Davros’s own creations turned upon him, a closed-circuit camera captured this haunted likeness.
