BBC Books to launch The World Cup of Terrance Dicks social media tournament on Monday 18 November 2019

BBC Books is to publish a hardback collection of Target novelisations by the late Terrance Dicks next year – and they want Doctor Who fans to help with the selection.

 BBC Books is excited to announce plans to publish a commemorative single-volume Collected Works of the late Terrance Dicks in 2020.The lavish hardback will include some of the Doctor Who legend’s most popular titles from the Target range, a list to which he contributed over 60 books. How do you choose the best, though? How does The Abominable Snowmen rate against Genesis of the Daleks? Do you leave out The Planet of the Spiders to make room for The Auton Invasion? What about The Three Doctors? With so many to choose from, we need some expert advice. We need the fans!

On Monday 18 November BBC Books will be offering Doctor Who fans the chance to vote on social media for their favourite works by Terrance Dicks, to be included in the collection. The World Cup of Terrance Dicks will take place over five days on the Doctor Who BBC Books Twitter account (@DWBBCBooks), where 64 of Terrance’s Doctor Who novelisations will be sorted into 16 groups of 4, and each day fan votes will get us closer to a final winner. The book will then be based around the 10 novels that make to the top of the tournament. Fans can keep track of the tournament through the hashtag #TerranceDicksWorldCup

Terrance Dicks became Script Editor of Doctor Who in 1968, co-writing Patrick Troughton’s classic final serial, The War Games, and editing the show throughout the entire Jon Pertwee era to 1974. He wrote many iconic episodes and serials for the show after, including Tom Baker\’s first episode as the Fourth Doctor, Robot; Horror of Fang Rock in 1977; State of Decay in 1980; and the 20th anniversary special, The Five Doctors in 1983.

Terrance novelised over sixty of the original Doctor Who stories for Target books, including classics like Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen and Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, inspiring a generation of children to become readers and writers. He died in August 2019, only weeks before the publication of his final Doctor Who short story, Save Yourself, in The Target Storybook.