Above The Anti-Dalek Force run into their adversaries once again in Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate! – a story in Terry Nation’s Dalek Annual 1976. Art by Edgar Hodges.
In the 1970s, as the Daleks became a regular fixture of the television series once again, their renewed popularity ensured that, just as in the previous decade, their machinations and misdeeds were chronicled in prose.
If a Doctor Who-related story was commissioned for a mainstream publication, you could be sure the Daleks would be the featured monster. Indeed, if it came to a choice between a story with the Daleks and no Doctor, and a story with the Doctor and no Daleks, the story with the Daleks would win. For example, when commissioned to write a story for a special Radio Times publication celebrating Doctor Who’s tenth anniversary (published in December 1973), Terry Nation chose to focus almost entirely on the Daleks, including the Doctor only in a short prologue.
The story, We Are the Daleks!, is in three sections. The first establishes the situation, with Daleks conducting a “terror raid” on a future colony on Mars as a prelude to a full-scale invasion. The second, concerning a mission to set up a “mining claim beacon” on the jungle planet of Ollendorf 2, is a tale of a hard-bitten space crew with a traitor in their midst, facing improbable astronomical perils and hostile plant life in a scenario that recalls Nation’s 1965 TV story Mission to the Unknown. The final section has the narrator character, Joel Kendon, meeting the anthropologist Bryant Anderson, who’s learned of an experiment by the Halldon race to accelerate human evolution, which led to them evolving into Daleks. The story’s conclusion is marvellously gruesome – the discovery of the grislybut-never-described contents of a Dalek.
It’s interesting to note how the story not only recalls one of Nation’s old TV scripts but also pre-empts a couple of future ones. The quest for Exxtellium, the only metal capable of resisting Dalek weaponry, anticipates the quest for parrinium in Death to the Daleks (1974), and when our narrator considers the implications of being able to annihilate the Daleks, we get an early draft of the Doctor’s dilemma in Genesis of the Daleks (1975). The selfquestioning in We Are the Daleks! goes like this: “But did we have that right? If we destroyed them, what made us better than them? Did the very existence of the Daleks in the Universe have some greater meaning ?... The peoples of all planets had stopped warring against one another to unite and battle against a common enemy. With the Daleks gone would the fighting between ourselves start again?”