Cybermania

It's a well-known fact that the Cybermen are the only baddies bar the Weeping Angels to come close to gripping the public as the Daleks did and it is a pity that when the silver-clad outer-space robot people began besieging bases containing Patrick Troughton on a quarterly basis that the folk in charge of merchandising made absolutely sod all attempts to cash in on this fact.

And they made Mechanoid action figures for crying out loud!

Would it have been too much to ask for those strange and insane individuals at World Distributors to have churned out an annual or two devoted to the children of Mondas? Looking at their generic output for Schoolboy/Schoolgirl Annuals in the same decade, there was plenty of sci-fi horror short stories waiting to be adapted to any given franchise. The Flame Flowers, for example, a bleak and apocalyptic tale of triffid-like weeds destroying humanity after a terrorist cell uses them as weapons against superpowers requires only a different setting to fit into the corresponding year's Doctor Who Annual. So, it wasn't like there was enough raw material going round at the time.

Nor was there a particular lack of awareness at what they were doing, with attempts made to link annual stories to each other (the TARDIS's scanner functions introduced in Only A Matter of Time are reused in the next year's Follow the Phantoms, Grip of Ice refers to the events of Peril in Mechanistra and there are numerous mentions of Galaxy G and its freaky inhabitants). A basic level of fan knowledge was already there to make a Cyberman anthology work, at least better than Gerry Davis and his "Mondas? No, Telos! No, Mondas!" attitude to his own continuity, believing The Tenth Planet featured the Second Doctor and Jamie.

The main problems would have been the people put in charge of writing/adapting the stories. The Troughton years are notable for there being three authors for the stories with three very distinctive styles - one has a very definite grasp on Doctor Who and its characters and can churn out stories very much in spirit of the show; another isn't so good and generally focuses on the sci-fi content with the TARDIS crew generally on the sidelines without need for characterization; and the third was crap at both characters and concepts as well as a strange obsession with aliens dissecting people.

And it wasn't like the Daleks had had a particularly good run of things themselves. The Dalek Book (the ur-text for Nick Briggs' Dalek Empire with a family trying to reconnect during a space war) was faithfully extrapolated by David Whittaker but the following installments went downhill fast. The Dalek World was a random collection of Dalek stuff while The Dalek Outer-Space Book was ultimately embarrassed by Daleks to the point half of it was devoted to reprints of totally irrelevant pulp sci-fi and the other half to the Dalek-free exploits of Sara Kingdom and the SSS.

So, would the Cybermen annuals even have been worth reading anyway? And if so, what would they have been like? Well, there probably would have been the usual blend of two or three comic strips and eight to ten short stories mixed with puzzles, science/history facts and things like "Anatomy of a Cyberman."

But as for the actual tales themselves? Well, they could very well have been awesome. The Big Finish spin-off Cybermen was regarded as a failure mainly because it was the same cast and plot as Dalek Empire, and the Cybermen ended up being sidelined for the politics of human and androids putting aside their differences for the common good. There'd be no need for such stuff here.

The Cybermen in short stories invite all sorts of potential. A story of silver saucer men invading Earth? A Frankenstein-tale of a lone Cyberman terrorizing a medieval village and being mistaken for witchcraft? Perhaps even more cerebral horror, like the Cybermen stalking a hospice offering immortality to dying patients? Stories told from the point of view of Cybermen, their human sides being constantly suppressed?

The Cybermen themselves don't always have to be central to the story. For every tale of them, say, hijacking a plane there can be one about their brainwashed slaves infiltrating somewhere important, or some mad genius deciding to bring them back.

It's almost certain sooner or later someone would have gone for the Who Goes There?/Thing From Another World as a template, with an Arctic Base under threat from a Cyberman dug up from the ice.

‘See if we can get up some sort of a barricade,’ said Johnson confidently. ‘It’s only got one working arm…’

‘Oh, what’s the point?’ moaned Rickard miserably. ‘Pandora’s box is open. It’ll get to us sooner or later. Either it kills us or transforms us into Cybermen. We’re all dead, one way or the other.’

McDonald closed and locked the main door behind her. ‘Not if we kill the Cyberman first,’ she said.

‘You still think it can be killed?’ Rickard scowled. ‘It’s immortal, don’t you understand? Indestructible?’

Johnson spoke firmly. ‘Not indestructible because all the others have been destroyed.’

Rickard laughed, but it was not the laugh of someone either truly calm or truly sane. ‘Oh yes! A whole battle fleet, two hundred and fifty ships, a thousand Cybermen… but we didn’t get them all. One of them survived, maybe more. And they only need one Cyberman to start it all again.’

‘He’s right,’ said Justine. She looked like she was going to be sick. ‘If you wiped out any other race, reduced it to a single survivor – the loneliness, the grief would drive it mad. But the Cybermen’s brains function with total emotionless logic. They don’t care if they’re wiped out by the thousands, they won’t be discouraged or frightened. That single Cyberman is just as confident and fanatical as it would be if it already had an entire invasion fleet at its back.’ 

‘But it doesn’t,’ McDonald said bluntly. ‘It’s on its own.’

‘For now,’ Rickard conceded. ‘But not forever. Humans wither and sicken and age and die. Cybermen never stop, never get ill, never get old, never get tired. How long can we last out here, eh? A few months at best before we run out of supplies? And even if we had more supplies, even if the cold wasn’t lethal, how long before we died anyway? A few decades? In a century’s time we’ll all be dead and forgotten and that Cyberman won’t have aged one day.’

‘You mean it could just wait for us all to die of old age?’ Johnson asked, his mouth dry.

‘It could wait even longer,’ Justine agreed. ‘Civilizations rise and fall. How long before the next dark age? Centuries? Millennia? Until the next world war? It can afford to wait. The Cybermen want to take over the world by assimilating the population of the world. They’ve stripped themselves and their civilization down to the essentials. Get rid of all the art and culture and science, all the window-dressing, and all that’s left is the need to survive. Survival, nothing else. They’re like a virus, dedicated to just growing and spreading.’

The crippler, of course, would the corresponding lack of Cyber-activity on TV. As Terry Nation took the Daleks off the air in attempts to give them their own spin off, Dalekmania starved and died out in weeks. As 1970

dawned and the Cybermen became a non-starter (since the UNIT-versus-Cybermen tale had been done definitively in The Invasion) would the audience have still paid the pounds for a tale of emotionless, ruthless inhuman killers? The sales on Doctor Who itself were so down that the second Pertwee annual was scrapped.

Still, perhaps as Terry Nation finally wrote his own stories for the Dalek and Blake's 7 Annuals of the late seventies, perhaps the eighties zeitgeist for Cybermen might have got proper input to their comeback...

Dega sighed. ‘Immortality is the dream of every living being, Sylvan. Every leader, every warlord, every peasant in the fields. You seek immortality through your writings and music and art, but I choose a more direct approach. This operation will mean I will become impervious, indestructible. Heat, cold, hunger, thirst, a hurricane gale or the vacuum of outer space will mean nothing to me.’

‘Congratulations, you finally achieve the disassociation you’ve yearned for your whole life!’

Dega’s hand shot out and clamped around Sylvan’s shoulder, wrenching him around. It was a testament to the cybernetic control of the King’s body that he didn’t so much as bruise his brother; his strength could easily have ripped the arm from its socket. ‘As ever, you’re ignoring reality. We cannot save Mondas from the catastrophe, we cannot keep the surface habitable. But if we cannot change our environment to suit us, we can change ourselves to suit the environment. To suit any environment.’

Sylvan swallowed his disgust. ‘Your logic is impeccable. But this new race of Mondans will be cold, unloving robots. They may survive, but they will not live! Not a natural life, not the ones we were born for! As human beings, they will no longer exist, just mechanized animates taking their place.’

‘You would prefer total extinction?’

‘I see no difference in the options.’

Dega smiled. ‘This is why, brother, you were not chosen King. Think logically! How can our civilization ever advance when we are constantly distracted by the need for food and warmth and comfort? We waste our years rearing children and educating them, only for them to wither and die. Centuries of life and only a handful of lasting inventions and creations. We reproduce because it is the only way our species can survive, the only chance we can have for immortality. Now there is an alternative.’

Sylvan shook his head. ‘Father would never countenance such a plan.’
‘Father, the Great King Paulus, never faced such a crisis. You can enjoy your nonsensical creative pursuits and your inefficient reproductive cycles, Sylvan – but you and your pure anarchist friends will perish in the coming World-Storm. The rest of us will survive.’

‘And you won’t mourn us, will you?’ said Sylvan angrily. ‘There’s no place for emotion in your world, is there, brother? There’s nothing worth feeling for you, no emotions, no sensations, nothing!’

‘You think a world without emotion would be a bad thing?’ Dega asked. ‘How do you know? You’ve never tried to experience it. You’ve closed yourself off from anything that could challenge your preconceived notions. Go back to your friends in the trees, Sylvian. When the world ends, I doubt you’ll notice...’

Oh, what might have been.