SHORT STEPS AND SIDE STRIPS: City of the Daleks
Presented in: The Dalek Book
Script: Unaccredited *
Art: Unaccredited **
Page Count: 8
Main Characters: Daleks, Jeff Stone
* The Dalek Book was written by David Whitaker and Terry Nation
** Illustrations for the book were by R Jennings, J Woods and A B Cornwell
Synopsis:
Jeff Stone lands his scouting ship on Skaro and infiltrates the Dalek City there. Inside he witnesses all kinds of wonders and obtains a copy of a leaflet called “Anatomy of a Dalek”. He’s spotted by a group of daleks but manages to get back to his ship and to the Earth before they can exterminate him.
Episode Endings:
One – Jeff gets away in his ship and heads back to Earth to give his report on the Dalek City.
Continuity
The lifts in the dalek city are powered by pressurized gas. Nuclear generators supply the power for the city as a whole.
Dalek “food” consists of plants that are pulverized into dust, which is then turned into nutritious gases and circulated around the city for the daleks to breath in.
The floors of the city are the traditional metal, charged with electricity.
The position of each individual dalek in the city is monitored and the information passed onto the Emperor’s private screen.
The daleks monitor their progress on other planets in the Radio Telescope Visualiser room.
The party of daleks in the northern hemisphere of Pluto has gone missing.
The A.E. (Albert Einstein) Flight is a group of “super daleks” who learned the secret of breaking the light barrier.
There are two “suicide daleks” on watch over the city. Should there be any danger of invasion in the city then they pull the big red* handle that would destroy the city and its secrets in a giant atomic flash.
The daleks have a training school where they’re taught to kill by a Sgt Major.
Craft seen in the Dalek War Museum: A Mercurian Sun-Hopper, a Methane Gas Ship (from Jupiter), the first scoutship to land earth men on the moon (captured in the earth year of 1971), the remains of the first ship to fly faster than light, the nosecone of an abandoned spaceship found drifting in space and an early Venusian flying saucer of the pre-dalek era.
The creatures inside the daleks are described as “jelly-like living cells” are given regular doses of radioactivity to revitalize them.
There’s a bust of Albert Einstein in the dalek hall of fame that has a plaque that reads “Einstein – his theories were taken from dalek cosmology”.
The daleks are capable of turning any human into a humanoid thought use of a Schizoid Accelerator and a Skaro Mesmeristor.
In the Museum Stores there is the fossil of an ancient Uranean birdman and a superman of Mercury.
Given that this story comes after the dalek invasion of Venus, there’s the rather strange comment by one of the daleks that humans think that they invented the daleks…
*Given later books reveal that the daleks can’t see red, perhaps they painted the suicide handle red because they thought it would then be invisible to everyone else.
Comments:
Low on plot but high on Dalek culture, it’s basically an excuse to treat us to glimpses of the way daleks live and think. The artwork is terrific and, although the ideas contained within are more than just a little off the wall, it’s an absolute scream to read. The Anatomy of a Dalek in the middle is one of the highlights of the dalek book and something pretty much completely overlooked by all future dalek stories. It’s worth hunting down “The Dalek Book” for this strip alone.
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