Just shy of two weeks ago, on 29 Aug 2019, the Doctor Who community lost another vital member when Terrance “Uncle Terry” Dicks died. Dicks made an indelible mark on the show as both script editor (particularly alongside producer Barry Letts) and writer during the Second, Third, and Fourth Doctors’ tenures. Later he also wrote several audio adventures for Big Finish.

But many fans know him best as the author of of over sixty Target novelizations of Classic television adventures, spanning six Doctors. I’ve heard many such fans wax poetic over the importance of those books in their young lives. Yet I have never read any of them myself.

Given the fact that I am a text-based lifeform, my lack of experience with Target novelizations may seem odd. After all, for someone who grew up as a voracious reader (and is raising a pair now), a vast supply of related books seems like it ought to be a no-brainer to add to the ol’ To Be Read (TBR) pile. But there are two major factors at play that work against that course of action.

The first is what it says right on the tin: Neowhovian. Target novelizations were being published in the 1970s and ’80s. While I was of an age to consume them readily, Doctor Who was nowhere on my radar. For that matter, I’m not sure those books were even available in the US until much later. My lack of interest in the fandom combined with a lack of access to the materials means that I missed out on the novelizations during their prime.

Since then, though, many of those books have been reprinted and released in the US. In fact, back in 2011 and 2012 I purchased several of those reprints, five of which were penned by Dicks. However, I don’t think I ever cracked open a single one of them.

Why not? What prevented me from diving into those pages? If nothing else, it would’ve been cool to take them along to Gally and have them signed by the man himself when he was one of the guests I could see. But I never felt compelled to pick them up in lieu of whatever else was in that TBR pile.

I suspect part of it was the fact that my kids were still pretty small when I bought the reprints, and I didn’t have a lot of brain cells to spare for pleasure reading. More than that, though, I believe I didn’t feel the pull of the promise of prose because of the second major factor: I already knew the stories.

While on some level I know that I would get a richer experience of the various adventures—I’ve long been an advocate of the position that a book is almost always better than its movie—I’ve never really wanted to delve any deeper into Classic stories.

For me, much of the charm of Classic Who is the fact that half the time—more than half the time—the plot line just doesn’t make much sense. It’s fun and fluffy and something I don’t really need to take too seriously. But if I were to read those stories, I’d want them to hold together better. I’d start analyzing them with my Writer Brain and nitpick them in a way that I can usually avoid when just watching them unfold on-screen. So I guess it all boils down to my reluctance to risk ruining my enjoyment of those Classic adventures when next I watch them.

Of course, there are some stories that I don’t enjoy very much to begin with, so maybe it’s worth the risk to read one of those, and give Dicks the chance to redeem it for me. Then I could see for myself what makes the novelizations so popular. Perhaps there’s no better tribute I can pay him than that.