Survival (novelisation)

Novelisation

 * This novelisation is based on the final original television serial TV: Survival, written by Rona Munro and shown from 22 November 1989.
 * The cover and information on the right are for the original Target edition. It featured the artwork of Alister Pearson. (See below for information on editions with different covers).

Publisher's summary
`So what’s so terrible about Perivale?’ the Doctor asked as he caught up with her. Ace sighed again. `Nothing ever happens here.’

Ace had wanted her homecoming to be spectacular. She had imagined the amazed greetings of her old friends, the gasps of surprise as she recounted her time-travelling adventures. But Perivale on a summer Sunday seems the least lively place in the universe. The members of Ace’s old gang have gone away – disappeared.

The Doctor has other things on his mind. What is killing the domestic pets of Perivale? Who are the horsemen whose hoofprints scar the recreation ground? Where have the missing persons been taken? Is the Doctor stepping into a well-prepared trap? And if so, can it be the work of the Doctor’s old adversary the Master?

As Harvey the grocer said to his partner Len: `I’m telling you, you put a catflap in and you get just anything coming into your house.’

SURVIVAL was the last of the four adventures broadcast in the 1989 Doctor Who season on BBC television.

Deviations from televised story

 * The Doctor's concluding monologue from the final episode is not included.
 * Paterson is a police sergeant as opposed to being a Territorial Army sergeant.
 * Derek is killed by Midge under Cheetah Person control after he gets off the Cheetah World.
 * Harvey and Len are taken to the Cheetah World by.

Writing and publishing notes

 * Alister Pearson’s original cover design featured the face of the Master in the Kitling design. It was simplified in the final cover.
 * The claw-marks on the cover design are not painted elements: Alister Pearson actually slashed the canvas to achieve the effect.
 * Included at the back is a full page advert for subscription to Doctor Who Magazine.
 * A postscript by Peter Darvill-Evans, Editor of W H Allen’s Doctor Who books, states that for the first time the BBC have not announced the production plans for further seasons of Doctor Who. From the second half of 1991, however, new, completely original Doctor Who novels will be published with the adventures continuing from the end of Survival. He also writes that, at that time, three additional Target novelisations were in preparation (presumably referring to the remaining Season 26 stories that had yet to be adapted).
 * This is only the second (and last) Doctor Who novelisation to be written by a solo female writer, after Barbara Clegg's Enlightenment (other women, particularly Jane Baker, had been involved in other books, but always in a co-writing capacity).

British publication history
One single paperback edition, priced £2.50 (UK), estimated print run: 25,000 copies.