Doctor Who and the Universe of the Daleks: Chapter 2: Ruins Of London

 I kinda forgot I was posting these. Well, after an unintentional delay, here's chapter two!

Sergei followed the Doctor down the abandoned streets of London, careful to stay close to the buildings. Weeds and sprouting trees grew out of cracks in the pavement. Vehicles clustered around intersections, like enormous burnt insect husks.

Mercifully, there were no human corpses… although there were hundreds of scorch marks of roughly human shape and size.

The street’s once bright commercial signage was now faded and tarnished. Store fronts still displayed the remnants of unimaginable wealth: rotting dresses and purses, rusting electronics, jewelry and more.

Only grocery stores had been thoroughly looted.

London’s pre-invasion prosperity was as alien as Daleks to Sergei. Post-war Russia had shaped his formative years, and much of his home city of Leningrad had been flattened by Hitlerite artillery. More than a million people had starved. His brother and older sister starved, and his father and uncle perished at the front.

Sergei shuddered, childhood memories flooding back unbidden. Flashes of gaunt figures huddled in frigid subway station, dust falling with every shuddering shell hit; mobs butchering horses in the street. The blood curdling shriek of German dive bombers. His father messing his hair before departing for the front, for the last time.

A flutter of wings and a burst of motion ahead shook him out of reverie: The Doctor had startled a cluster of pigeons.

Sergei chided himself: stay in the moment!

“Come on, Sergei! Keep up!” The Doctor urged, waving him forward before peering around the corner.

Sergei trotted up beside him and leaned past the Doctor to get a view. It was Trafalgar square! He’d seen pictures. The monument to Nelson still stood in the square centre, beside a fountain, now bone dry and stained black. A string of military vehicles wound its way along the road to the South: blackened hulks, their upside down turrets scattered about randomly.

What really caught his eye was the gleaming metal obelisk, lined with domes along its length, that stood before the National Gallery, crowned by a glowing white dodecahedron that thrummed with power. He could feel a low level vibration emanating from it in his bones.

“Tovarish,” he hissed, “What is that?”

The Doctor shrugged. “Not quite sure. Could be a BLEN. Lined with sensor domes. We’d best go around. Back that way.”

“It was not here last time?”

“No,” replied the Doctor. “That’s what worries me.”

“Tovarish, what’s a BLEN?”

“A Blinovitch Limitation Effect Negator. It’ll register any time eddies in the area… like our arrival. Among other things…”

Sergie’s brow furrowed as stepped over a fallen telephone pole. “What we felt earlier? The stuttering?”

“Yes,” nodded the Doctor. “It’d register across realities. Provide an event anchor, of sorts. Come on, let’s cut through this alley.” They clambered over a makeshift barricade of barrels, bikes and planks, passing into the comforting darkness beyond.

Shadows offered the illusion of safety.

One never felt so exposed as on the Russian steppes. Sergei remembered being the tallest thing in view, surrounded by an endless sea of wheat, with nowhere to hide.

Sergei gasped for breath. It was challenging to keep up with this nimble, genius time domovoy. Sergei had been in space for a week, and the sudden shift back to a terrestrial environment was taxing his leg muscles and stamina. “So… the Daleks know you are here.”

“Worse. You alright?”

Sergei nodded and slumped down on a crate. “Let me catch breath. How much farther?”

“Oh, another 45 minutes, I imagine. Little longer, if we stay off the main roads. Sooner we get to Wood Lane the better. We’ll need allies. Hopefully the resistance can provide clues. Ready?”

Sergei grunted, slapped his thighs and stood up. “Poyekhali!”

An hour later they finally reached Wood Lane and entered the dilapidated ruins of a tube station. Old newspapers, leaves, and twigs littered the concrete floor inside.

“How we reach these rebels?” asked Sergei, taking the opportunity to sit down again, this time on a worn wooden bench.

“I’m trying to remember,” replied the Doctor, examining the room carefully. “Never been myself. Susan said the entrance was revealed by pressing… ah!” The Doctor stopped before a sign.

Sergei noted that he could understand it, despite his poor grasp of written english. It advocated boiling rainwater. Curious! Before Sergei could ask, the Doctor pressed the letter ‘o’. A low grinding sound followed, whereupon a section of wall slid back, revealing a flight of stairs descending into inky black. The Doctor smiled, produced a flashlight from his seemingly bottomless coat pocket, and aimed it into the depths. He turned to Sergei and nodded towards the stairs. “Shall we?”

“No time like present,” replied Sergei.

They descended two full flights into the earth. At the bottom of the stairs was a platform. If it had once been an active station, it’d been mothballed long ago, and sections bricked up. At the far end was a reinforced metal door. The Doctor ran a hand over the smooth surface, then tapped it lightly with the flashlight. Shave and a haircut, twice.

They heard bolts being snapped back, and the door swung inward. The smell of grease, welding fumes and pungent charcoal flooded over them.

A disheveled fellow in a tattered suit stood beside the steel door. He motioned them forward with an automatic weapon he clutched tightly in gnarled fingers. His face was grim and unwashed.

The room beyond was lit by work lights strung from the ceiling. They hung low over workbenches littered with weapons, explosives, tools and a radio. Two dozen workers, clad in drab clothing, looked up at them expectantly. Sergei noted that one, an older fellow with unruly hair and feverish eyes, was in a wheelchair.

For a moment, no one moved.

“ATTENTION! ATTENTION SURVIVORS OF LONDON!” blared the radio. “THE DALEKS ARE THE MASTERS OF EARTH! SURRENDER NOW AND YOU WILL LIVE—”

The stocky man in the wheelchair switched it off, rolled back, and expertly manoeuvred towards them. “Well, don’t just stand there,” he snapped, waving a hand at the door. “Get inside!”

The Doctor stepped theatrically into the bunker. Sergei followed.

“Well, hello!” said the Doctor cheerily. “You must be Dortmun, yes? I’ve heard so much about you. How’s that bomb coming along? Won’t work, you know. Complete dud, but I can fix that. Is David about?”

Dortmun’s craggy face cycled through surprise, indignance, and bewilderment. Finally he managed to splutter, “Who are you?”

“Yes, exactly,” beamed the Doctor, more than a little smugly. “But you can just call me The Doctor. We have a lot to talk about. Swimming in the Thames, latest cricket scores, end of the world, what have the Daleks been about, all that.”

The seated man ignored The Doctor. “You,” said Dortmun, pointing at Sergei’s arm. “That’s Cyrillic on your flight suit. Are you Russian? How did you get here? Do you still have active air bases? Where?”

Sergei shrugged. “It long story.” He grinned broadly. “You have vodka? I tell you tale, you tell me tale.”

“We do,” grunted Dortmun. He hunched forward in his chair and fiddled his fingers. “But there won’t be time for it.” He nodded at the guard by the door.

The man grunted and flung the steel door shut with a reverberating clang. He then stepped before it, revealing the gleaming metal hull of a Dalek in an alcove that had been concealed behind.

The alien floated forward silently; as it did so, it emitted a sharp, acrid ozone smell that stung Sergei’s nostrils.

A half-dozen more Daleks flooded into the bunker from adjoining tunnels, accompanied by a swarm of gaunt humans. Sergei’s eyes widened: the poor souls were clad in rags, in stark contrast to gleaming metal helmets atop to their heads. The devices were elaborate affairs; each had a transmitter on the side. The men carried stubby automatic weapons and walked stiffly, like zombies. Their eyes were blank. Soulless.

Robot men!

It got even more eerie: the seated humans had frozen in place, unblinking, as if they’d been turned off.

“DOC-TOR! DOC-TOR!,” grated the Daleks in triumph, energy compensators flashing in unison.

Something about them struck Sergei as odd. These daleks looked… less sophisticated, somehow simpler, than the one Sergei had met in orbit. Most were gleaming silver with light blue domes running along their faceted skirts. Their base was larger, thicker.

One with a bright red and gold casing glided to a halt in front of the Doctor. “WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU!” It’s metallic voice seethed with hatred. “NOW WE CAN BEGIN!”

Doctor Who and the Universe of the Daleks: Chapter 1: The Impossible Visitor

Might as well post my Doctor Who novella here, serial style. There's so much stuff on AOO, it's difficult to get noticed without frequent posting, and I've pivoted to another graphic novel. Anyway. Here be...

Colonel Sergei Valentin Malevich checked the forward hatch of his Soyuz capsule as it swung around the earth at 27,600 kilometers an hour.

Satisfied everything was in order for docking with Salyut I, he spun about and propelled himself into the descent module.

As he passed through the ring, there was a tremendous impact against the hull that slammed Sergei’s stocky frame against the inner hatch rim, knocking the wind out of him.

A clatter of sharp metallic pings against the hull, then silence.

A micrometeoroid's impact could be catastrophic... and this was significantly larger than that!

Out the porthole, bright blue oceans flicked to the black void of space and back, again and again, like a strobe light.

There was no time to waste. The pilot-cosmonaut slotted down into his moulded Kazbek command seat and buckled himself in. He took a brief moment to smile at the crumpled, faded photo of his wife Sofia, and little Anya, affixed to the dash. “I will get back to you,” he said, and fired controlled bursts of the attitude control thrusters.

Slowly, gradually, the craft’s spin slowed, then stopped.

The blur of iridescent blue and jet black out the window resolved into a hazy line separating both. He squinted: dozens of bright metal shards, gently curved arcs of gleaming silver and iridescent nodules, spun through space outside the porthole, along with sections of… the Soyuz capsules’ heat shield.

He exhaled expletives.

He flicked the radio switch on, opening a channel to Roscosmos Control.

Silence.

He toggled the switch several times.

Nothing.

The Rassvet communications system was down.

A faint hiss alerted him to another issue: hull integrity had been compromised!

Sergei sighed and slumped back. Misfortune was the price of aiming high.

When it rains, it pours, as the farmers of his home town in Siberia were so fond of saying.

He cycled through options. Donning his spacesuit and depressurizing the hull seemed the best option. He just needed to reach the space station, contact ground control, and wait for a relief mission.

It would be fine.

No cause for panic.

He fumbled for his bulky helmet as a dark shadow passed over the window. Curious, he leaned over, pressing up against it, his breath fogging the glass, and peered out.

A large, conical object floated into view. It moved with deliberation, as if under power, yet he saw no evidence of thrusters, or propulsion of any kind. Magnetic perhaps?

It was a meter and a half tall; the lower-half was faceted, with rows of embedded nodules running the length, topped by a gleaming dome, out of which jutted what was unmistakably an eyestalk. Two short cylinders flanked the stalk, atop of the gleaming dome.

As he gaped at it, the cylinders flashed with a fierce blinding light, and a hysterical machine voice rang inside his head: “Infection detected. Exterminate!”

Alarmed, Sergei snatched the attitude controls and fired thrusters. “Do svidaniya!” The Soyuz spacecraft lurched forward, and the unwelcome guest vanished from view.

The periscope camera showed a debris field of fragments ahead. They pinged harmlessly against the hull.

Sergei’s eyes went wide as the unwanted visitor slid back into view out the porthole. He initiated erratic firing, jerking the capsule this way and that, to no avail. The guest easily maintained its relative position.

What was this thing? A capitalist ship killer? American sabotage? Did the corrupt West even have such technology? Or could it be even more fantastical? Aliens, lying in wait for humanity to slip the surly bonds of earth, only swat us back down like an upstart fly?
“Go away, you stupid machine!” he raged as his fear and frustration rose.

“EXTERMINATE!” roared the shrill voice again.

Sergei’s heart sank. Perhaps little Anya had been right. Perhaps he shouldn’t have volunteered for this mission after all.

With his free hand, he rummaged in his Sokol flight suit pocket, plucked out a flask of vodka, and took a long, final swig.

------

The Doctor stood, legs planted on softly humming deck plating, before the gleaming hexagonal console of the TARDIS, head downcast, while he contemplated eternity as only a Time Lord could. With drama aforethought, he tilted his head upward, one eye on the console mirror. He grimaced, dissatisfied. “Nah, doesn’t work. No audience, and even if there was, I’m just not as portentous!”

He stalked around the control pylon, hands thrust deep in coat pockets, muttering to himself. He stopped abruptly and snapped fully upright.

“I’m bored!” he exclaimed, grinning broadly. “That’s what it is! Must be why I keep all those humans around… Oh dear.” He slumped against the console and ran a hand through his spiky hair. Personal revelations flowed: “Without them, I… don’t know what to do with myself. What does that even mean?”

An alarm squawked and shook him out of reverie. Console lights flashed and data feeds chittered excitedly.

“Now, now, steady on, old girl” he soothed the TARDIS, patting the console. “I’ve plenty of—wot’s that?” Hazel eyes darted over readouts: the exquisitely sensitive TARDIS detectors had picked up an emergency time shift!

Who was left to mess with time, but him?

“Not too far off,” mused the Doctor, tightening the scanner scope. “Jackson was, what, 1851? We’re… ah! May 5th, 1971. Earth orbit… that’s odd.” He gave a blinking readout a sharp tap. Alien text flowed across the tiny scope. “Dalek. Unmistakable. Up to new tricks, eh? Well, I’ve come up with a few of my own!” He scampered around the console, flipping switches, spinning dials and pressing buttons. “Once more into the breach!” He flipped the materialization switch.

With a great wheeze, the central column flared white. It rose and fell like some kind of temporal butter churner. A groaning, shuddering sound filled the ship.

------

Outside Soyuz, the whisk-like appendage protruding from the alien’s casement dazzled Sergei’s eyes with a brilliant green light. Then, somehow, the light turned in upon itself, and the machine… rippled. Chunks of it collapsed at angles Sergei’s eyes couldn’t make sense of, as if it were happening in dimensions beyond his perception.

“SPATIAL ANOMALY!” grated the disembodied voice. “ALERT! VORTEX–AAIIEEEE!”

There was a blinding flash, a resigned wheeze, and all at once the alien was replaced with a British police call box.

Sergei gaped again.

He looked down accusingly at his flask, then back out the portal.

He blinked.

It was still there.

He’d seen these police boxes on his tour of London back in ‘61, with Yuri.

“Chto za huynya?” he blurted. There was no rational, sane reason for one to suddenly appear 450 kilometers above the surface of the earth!

Then the rough wooden doors of the blue box flung inward. Golden light flooded out.

He squinted and held up a hand to shield his eyes.

The silhouette of a man appeared, framed by a shimmering halo. Behind him was a vast control room, far too big to fit inside the box.

As Sergei’s eyes adjusted, he could make out more detail: the man wore a sharply fitted pinstripe blue suit and a taupe overcoat. His hair was spiky at the front, and he had a big, stupid grin on his face.

Alarmingly, the man wore no protection against the harsh, cold vacuum of space.

Impossible!

As if reading his thoughts, the stranger grinned even more broadly, reached out, and tapped the porthole. He stabbed a forefinger at the docking hatch, and spoke. Despite the vacuum, Sergei could hear him cheerily say, in fluent Russian no less, “Privyet, comrade! You’ve got some good sized gashes in your ablator plating. Fancy a lift back down?”

Sergei stared, dumbfounded. Then he drained the last of his flask, pocketed the picture of his family, and propelled himself towards the bow of his wounded ship.

One had to deal with reality, however unreal, after all.

------

After setting the TARDIS cortex onto the trail of the Dalek, the Doctor sat down for a quick, convivial tea with the bewildered cosmonaut. The poor fellow was clearly having difficulty processing, which was understandable.

Nothing like tea and crumpets to settle the mind!

Temporal disruption eddies faded quickly, The Doctor explained: it was vitally important they find out what the Daleks were up to, and why.

The prospect filled The Doctor with giddy excitement. A tantalizing new challenge! Something for his vast looping intellect to sink its proverbial teeth into. Puzzles and problems and more!

He did love them so.

It would be great to have a mission again. A purpose. Meaning.

As warm fuzzies washed over him, without warning, the TARDIS was struck by a jitter. Queen Victoria’s fine china spilled onto the floor, erupting into a cascade of porcelain shards.

“Well, t-that’s n-n-not g-gooood!” The Doctor exclaimed as he shot to his feet in a staccato of fractured temporal shards. He stumbled forward, grabbing at the hexagonal console to steady himself. Had he left the TARDIS’s brakes on again?

Sergei dodged his own oxygen tank as it careened erratically across the deck plating. “W-w-what is this? What is happening?” he spluttered, holding up a dainty china cup in one hand.

As the vessel lurched violently forward and back, the Doctor hauled himself along the console. He looked as if he were climbing Everest; reaching out with a trembling hand, stretching with every fibre of his being, he flicked one ruby red switch.

The TARDIS snapped back into the flow of time with a thunderous crack.

A blur of out of sync selves rippled around Sergei, who was now bug eyed. The poor fellow looked like he was about to toss his biscuits.

The Doctor’s haze of multi-timeline selves, however, were nonplused. He wobbled over to Sergei, an accordion of visages contracting and splaying out, and patted the cosmonaut on the shoulder reassuringly. “I’m going to see where we are-re-re-re...” his voice echoed. “It’ll settle down in a minute.”

------

The Doctor poked his head out of the TARDIS. Took a sniff. Satisfied, he slipped outside and took a few unsteady steps; a fading blur of iterations flowed after and through him, each bemusedly half-aware of the others. Small wonder the poor cosmonaut was overwhelmed, this sort of timey-wimey nonsense was challenging even for a Time Lord. Loops of consciousness from multiple realities interwove, cross-pollinating, implanting memories of other realities into the recesses of his already crowded mind.

He steadied himself on the still warm faux-wood TARDIS frame and took a deep breath.

The echoes finally faded, and he suddenly felt very alone.

“Well! That doesn’t happen every day.” He patted his striped blue suit down, snapped taut the taupe overcoat, and fully took in his surroundings.

The TARDIS had landed in a clearing between several ruined buildings. Dark grey clouds loomed menacingly overhead. The ground was littered with concrete chunks, half-melted steel beams and copious debris. There were stacks of bricks and rotten wooden planks dusted with ash resting against the ragged remains of a wall that cupped the TARDIS. A tattered poster declared, in faded red lettering:

EMERGENCY REGULATIONS: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO DUMP BODIES INTO THE RIVER.

“Charming,” sniffed the Doctor. “Not taking a dip then.”

To his left, a broad river, about 60 feet down a gravelly slope, cut through the ruins of what had once been a great city.

It all felt disturbingly familiar.

“Have I been here before?” he chortled to himself. “Or am I yet to come?” A noise behind him and whirled about. It was Sergei, the cosmonaut, stumbling out of the TARDIS.

“Tovarish!” called the man. “What was that? I could see myself, hear my thoughts, mine yet… not mine.”

“Temporal jitter,” said the Doctor, scanning the horizon. Far to the north, columns of smoke crumpled into the crisp grey sky. “It’ll pass.” Smokestacks jutted above the ruins to the south.

He felt a chill of recognition. It couldn’t be!

He had to get a better look. See what they were attached to.

He scampered up a concrete outcrop; from this vantage point he could see the stacks led down to… the Battersea Power Plant! The remains of it, anyway: two of its great brick smokestacks were missing, the outer walls pockmarked and scorched. A large metal sphere loomed beside it, streaked with rust and ringed by a narrow walkway. Low pressure gas storage, the Doctor mused.

“Incredible,” said Sergei. “Where… where are we? It looks like Leningrad, during the war.”

“Not quite. London, circa 2164,” said the Doctor softly. “Give or take a decade.”

This is where he’d bidden farewell to his granddaughter, Susan, all those lives ago.

Or would.

He wasn’t sure which timeline he was even in, thanks to that temporal jitter. Time travel was inherently multi-universal, flitting about infinite possibilities interwoven into a great big ball of timey-whimey stuff.

“Pizdets,” swore Sergei, as realization sunk in. “We finally did it. Nuclear war.”

The Doctor shook his head. “No… Not this time.”

A breeze from the river reached them. It carried the unmistakable stench of death. “Come on!” The Doctor clambered over the loose rubble to the water’s edge, with Sergei close behind.

At waters’ edge, jumbled flotsam and waves gently lapped at cracked remains of a pier. The mud brown river beyond was filled with corpses. Hundreds of them, bloated, purple, bobbing and spinning, carried along by a swift current.

The Doctor frowned.

Earlier, then.

Maybe 2140, when the plagues seeded by the Daleks were still doing their work.

“So much for the emergency regulations,” mused the Doctor quietly. “How very unlike Londoners.”

Sergei pulled out a handkerchief and placed it up against his face.

The Doctor clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and thought back to an earlier life. Lives. The journey of at least two selves had intersected here, both times with the Daleks. This place was temporal taffy, a knot in spacetime, pulling in the same players repeatedly, across realities. But the specifics… ah, the specifics! Jumbles of capricious whimsy, a million-billion dice rolls.

Every Dalek attack proceeded with the same pitiless logic: asteroid strikes against major population centres, military installations and the moon bases, closely followed by genetically engineered plagues to ravage the world’s human infrastructure. The beleaguered survivors were left isolated, confused, vulnerable.

Just the way Daleks liked humans.

Other than dead, that is.

He explained the invasion to Sergei. “The object that hit your ship? That was a Dalek. A Time Strategist, to be specific.”

“The alien salt shaker.” Sergei grunted, troubled by the memory. He had felt its cold, merciless hatred in his mind. “Machine creatures.”

“Actually, inside the shell is a living dumpling of hyper-intelligent hate. Terrible at cocktail parties. Even worse everywhere else. I hate cocktail parties.”

“What brought them here? What do they want?”

The Doctor shrugged. “Oh, some batty scheme involving gravity. Planets as ships. Depends on the timeline, but it’s always grandiose. I have to give them props, you know, for engineering evil.” He sniffed the air. “Smell that? The faint metallic tang? ”

Sergei shook his head.

“Residual ozone of cosmic ray bombardment. Degrades DNA. Nasty touch.” The Doctor sniffed again. “Ten years, tops.” He pondered. “This Dalek task force is pre-time travel. Yet I traced that Dalek Time Strategist’s emergency temporal shift here, to post-apocalypse London. Curious…”

Sergei’s brow wrinkled. “What is it doing here?”

“No good! But exactly what kind of no good? Why wasn’t it locked down in the Time War? Is it starting a new one? Is it a precursor?”

“Time war?”

“Aaaah,” groaned the Doctor. How could he explain the Time War in a single, comprehensible sentence, using cultural touch points Sergei would understand? “Imagine the universe… is a film, written by a thousand thousand writers who hate each other and spend eternity rewriting each other’s material.”

Sergei made a face.

“Exactly. More and more so, the longer it goes on. Infinite recursion. Ouroboros eating its tail. Well. I’m mixing metaphors. You get the idea. Doubt any English teachers are left to correct me. Let the double negatives fly…” He frowned and slumped as realization weighed down upon him: they couldn’t leave. Not until whatever kinks the Dalek added to the timeline were smoothed out. Sooner he got to it, the sooner they could get out of this mournful place.

He gave Sergei a quick tap on the back, and set off Westward. “Alons-y! Time to go.”

“Go?” blurted Sergei, perplexed. “Go where, tovarish? It’s ruins in every direction!”

“Wood Lane, tube station. Resistance has a bunker there. Or did. Reality’s a bit interwibbly.” He interwove his fingers and wiggled them. “Like so. Keep an eye out for Dalek patrols. Been a cosmonaut long? Chop chop.”

What's going on? Why are we revisiting a Who Classic? Has the writer lost his mind? Tune in next time to find out!

Villain stagnation and the Universe of the Daleks: Chapter 3

One thing I found frustrating as a kid was how stagnant the Daleks were. They were cool but limited villains, stuck in a repetitive loop of stories that rehashed all the same elements and added little. Good stories, mind you, but it felt like they could go further. Of course, one of the key traits about villains is that they are incapable of growth, instead doubling down on flaws. 

One of my absolute favourite Doctor Who Classic stories is Genesis of the Daleks. This one retcons their origins, but it also moves them forward the furthest since their introduction. It also introduces Davros, an absolutely fantastic character, played to perfection by the fantastic Michael Wisher. Davros has been described as Hitler crossed with Stephen Hawking (basically, a physically crippled yet frighteningly brilliant mad scientist-eugenicist), although that's not how I'd put it. 

Recently, Davies retconned Davros and made him physically abled. Why? Because he felt evil was being associated with disability. I don't agree, and find the retcon patronizing. Not to mention that, despite disability, Davros is one of the most dangerous and compelling villains to ever grace Doctor Who. That said, I get the sentiment. 

Beauty as good and ugly as evil is a trope in the same vein, which runs through fiction and particularly fairy tales. Goblins, trolls, witches, demons, devils, monsters, etcetera are all evil and ugly. Elves and angels are beatific, and therefore good. 

Underlying this logic are biological imperatives: beauty relates to youth and fertility, while the long noses, big ears, and wrinkles of witches and orcs code them as old. So favour the future generations, and discard the old and defunct. Old is dross, young is desire. 

So, should we redo orcs and goblins as beautiful, and elves as ugly, to fight this trope? 

Personally, I'd rather not mess with oodles of originals, and prefer just setting earlier work in context, rather than to 'fix' it. 

I do enjoy NEW work that plays with all manner of tropes. Something I wanted to do more of in future volumes of Dragon Garage. 

Anyway...

Mashing together WWI, space Nazis, eugenics, V2 rockets and body horror into a cracking good story, it also features Tom Baker at his dramatic best, supported by two of my favourite companions. 

True, the effects can't, and don't, live up to the narrative ambition, and the attack of the immobile giant clams is somewhat less than convincing, but the acting and the narrative sell it for me. I don't think kids these days can appreciate it anymore, they're too dependent on glitzy special effects to consume narrative with a less slick surface, but the story really fuelled my imagination as a child.

Heck, I accepted dinosaurs that were obviously hand puppets.

Story editors rejected several Terry Nation scripts because they were repetitive, which pushed Terry to come up with Davros. Stories after Genesis relied on Davros like a crutch, leaving the iconic villains in the background as glorified minions. 

And so, the Daleks remained one note villains: excellent at that one note, but little else. 

No flesh on the bones, so to speak. 

One of my goals with Universe of the Daleks was to flesh them out a bit, show the inner life of Daleks, while at the same time remaining true to their nature, and the thematic and moral purpose they serve in storytelling as villains.

One possible reason for their stagnation could be rights related: they're licensed from Terry Nation's estate, so what can be done with them may be very limited. On the other hand, the god-awful rainbow chiclet Daleks, Moffat's so-called 'new paradigm', would seem to refute that thought. 

You can catch chapter three of Universe of the Daleks over at an Archive of Our Own here. 

Give it a gander and let me know what you think.

I'm releasing a new chapter every Saturday afternoon, matinee time. 

Seems appropriate.

It's a proper old Hinchecliffian tale in style, with (some) banger cliffhangers, and an admittedly slower pace than the more frenetic reboot. 

Mind you, it does star the Tenth Doctor, who's fabulous fun to write for. 

Did I succeed? Did I fail? You decide!

Universe of the Daleks.

It's admittedly not kinky (AOO's real jam). I may post it here eventually instead.

NOTE: I found out there's a Dalek Universe line of stories, so changed the title to Purity of the Daleks, only to find someone has a Purity of the Daleks story out there already, so I changed it back.