FEATURE BY MARCUS HEARN
A map of the Moon from the Doctor Who Annual published in 1967.
Flicking through the Doctor Who annuals published in the 1960s and 70s, it’s impossible to ignore the books’ disproportionate coverage of space travel. Year after year, filler material was dominated by samey pieces on star constellations, the planets of the Solar System, communication satellites and so on. It’s almost as if someone at the annuals’ publisher, World Distributors, decided that after all the television series’ fanciful journeys through the fourth dimension, what children needed was a solid grounding in the real science behind the Space Race.