THE DALEKS
If you grew up in Australia in the 1960s, chances are this picture sums up your childhood television experience…
You will have to go to another part of this website for The Samurai .This part is devoted to Skaro’s finest.
I have been something of a Dalek tart ever since I first saw "The Dead Planet" aged eleven, when I was still living in London and cried when they were all killed at the end. Sad, but true and I’ve never done that since. It didn’t take me long to write them into my own universe in the form of stories which I wrote for my own amusement. (It was only much later that fanzines came along and even later before I published my own). I doodled them in notebooks at school and university. I made models and collected books and other items on them, though I was too poor (and in the wrong place) for much of the early Dalekmania of the 1960s. I have to say that I never considered this much of a loss as those early Dalek toys didn’t look right. Even in those days, long before I became a rabbit and cavy breeder, I "had my eye in" (as they say in the Fancy) for the Dalek shape and these (to put it in rabbit fancy terms) lacked head and/or conformation. The first decent Dalek I came across was the friction powered one from Denys Fisher in the mid-1970s though I have a soft spot for the Palitoy Talking Dalek of the same period, despite its flat head (a colleague at work once asked me to bring in my "exterminator" as he thought our boss needed a verbal seeing to). I really liked the small Dapol Daleks from the late 1980s and also the Sevans models, despite being a real challenge to assemble (my extremely artistic sister-in-law still cannot get over how I painted the hemispheres silver on my Black Dalek without any overflow. Sheer determination and a very thin paintbrush, dear.).
Unlike the Samurai section, I don’t intend to give a history of the Daleks or an episode guide to those stories they have appeared in. That has been done often enough elsewhere, both in print and online. Instead I have brought together some articles and stories I have written for print fanzines, my own and others’ over the years and also a bibliography of articles and books on Daleks and one on Dalek comics (mainly from my collection).
FACT
THE DALEKS: A PERSONAL VIEW (a revised version of an article which first appeared in Dodecahedron #2)
MITSUBISHI DALEKS (article on Japanese translations of Dr. Who and the Daleks and Dr. Who and the Day of the Daleks. Originally appeared in Junkyard #3)
PRACTICAL DALEK KEEPING Miscellaneous bits and pieces on Daleks
FICTION
THE SHOGGOTH INCURSION (Originally published in Zerinza #2-#4)
DALEK INVASION ???? (Originally published in South of Harad, East of Rhun #10)
THE HUMAN FACTOR (Originally published in a slightly different form in Multiverse #20)
FROZEN ASSETS (Originally published in Multiverse #23-#24)
LINKS
(Dalek images copyright BBC and Terry Nation)