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Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters book cover
Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters
1974
First Published
3.79
Average Rating
162
Number of Pages

Part of Series

While caving in Derbyshire, two pot-holers are attacked by a huge creature and one is killed. At the nearby Wenley Moor nuclear research centre, which is built into the same caves, there are strange power losses threatening the reactor. Not only is everyone at a loss to explain these incidents but there is also a high number of breakdowns involving staff members. Now exiled to Earth and working for UNIT, the Doctor and his assistant Liz are sent for. As the surviving pot-holer begins to make cave-paintings in his ward the Doctor discovers not only a Tyrannosaurus Rex but a colony of Silurians - intelligent, walking lizards who have been dormant for millions of years. Now they have awoken to find that mankind has replaced them as the rulers of Earth - and they want it back. Can the Doctor find a way of thwarting their plans or will humanity be wiped out to usher in a new Age of the Lizards?

Avg Rating
3.79
Number of Ratings
593
5 STARS
25%
4 STARS
36%
3 STARS
34%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
1%
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Author

Malcolm Hulke
Malcolm Hulke
Author · 8 books

Malcolm Hulke was a British science fiction writer best known for his tenure as a writer on the popular series Doctor Who. He is credited with writing eight stories for Doctor Who, mostly featuring the Third Doctor as played by Jon Pertwee. With Terrance Dicks, he wrote the final serial of Patrick Troughton's run as the Doctor, the epic ten-part story "The War Games." Hulke may be best known for writing "The Silurians," the story that created the titular race that is still featured in Doctor Who. Hulke's stories were well-known for writing characters that were not black and white in terms of morality: there was never a clear good guy vs. bad guy bent to his story. Hulke joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1945 and worked briefly as a typist in the party's headquarters. He left the party in 1951, objecting to the Soviet Union's hostility to Yugoslavia and its line on the Korean War, but soon rejoined, and appears to have remained a member of the party, on until the early 1960s. His politics remained firmly on the left, and this was reflected in his writings, which often explored anti-authoritarian, environmental, and humanist themes. In addition to his television writing, Hulke wrote the novelizations of seven television Doctor Who stories, each of which had written for the screen. He died at the age of fifty-four, shortly before his novelization of "The War Games" would be published.

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