Our exclusive Target edition of The Wheel in Space – with print editions of this issue – saw BBC Books’ consultant editor Steve Cole exploring Terrance Dicks’ 37-year-old manuscript in unexpected ways...

Cover art to the first edition by Ian Fraser Burgess, published in 1988.

I hope you are delighted with your new copy of The Wheel in Space (with print editions of this issue). I certainly got quite a surprise when the project appeared on my radar. I edit and help co-ordinate the Target range and was asked to typeset the book (basically to lay it out on the page as per established style) and to give it ‘a quick proofread’. Perhaps inevitably, it wasn’t so quick.

Steve Cole.

For older fans, myself included, the original Target novelisations of the 1970s and eighties were more than just books; they were the only way to connect to TV stories that had long-since vanished in the ether (or into skips). For many newer fans, those titles have become collectors’ curios while they line their shelves with the modern Targets that novelise more recent episodes of Doctor Who, coming bang up to date with the next batch of four Ncuti adventures publishing in July (you are in for some treats!). Appropriately, though, Targets still blow kisses to the past. DWM 609 presented an exclusive abridged Target edition of Frazer Hines’ The Evil of the Daleks, which novelises the in-world ‘repeat’ of the 1967 TV story as set up in the closing minutes of… that’s right, 1968’s The Wheel in Space. Another adventure for the Second Doctor and Jamie (played on TV by Patrick Troughton and Hines himself), The Wheel in Space also features the perennially popular Cybermen and introduces new companion Zoe Heriot (brought to life by Wendy Padbury). What better story to turn into a new Target edition for fans old and new?