the dalek wars

War of the Daleks is an original novel written by John Peel, published in 1997, based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It features the Eighth Doctor and Sam. This novel was the first appearance of the Daleks in an original Doctor Who novel; they had not appeared at all in either the Virgin New Adventures or the Virgin Missing Adventures. War of the Daleks was originally announced by the Doctor Who Appreciation Society as being published as a New Adventure around the time of The Left-Handed Hummingbird.

This story chronicles the demise of Davros once and for all and the rising of the supreme Dalek force. This also conflicts the destruction of Skaro which has survived thanks to a larger plot played by the Dalek Prime.

As with all Doctor Who spin-off media, its relationship to the televised serials is open to interpretation. But the Doctor is still worried. For there is a signal beacon inside the pod, and even now a Dalek ship is closing in..

The story opens up with the Doctor and Sam in the TARDIS doing some maintenance when they are collected by a ship which holds an escape pod containing Davros. A group of Thals arrive; they want Davros to alter their species so they will be better able to fight the Daleks. A force of Daleks then arrive and take the Doctor and Davros, along with other characters, to Skaro. Before landing on Skaro, the Doctor discovers that the coordinates he believed were Skaro's were actually those of the planet Antalin.

Since Davros's return the Dalek Prime has met considerable resistance with a number of Davros loyalists forming. Initiating a final civil war on Skaro, the Dalek Prime has all the Davros loyalists revealed and exterminated. In the mean time he releases the Doctor to leave Skaro. The Doctor discovers a planted device on board the TARDIS which would allow the Daleks to survive in case the Dalek Prime failed. He jettisons it into the vortex.

With his faction defeated, Davros is sentenced to death by matter dispersal. Prior to his downfall he had implanted a Spider Dalek as a spy amongst the Dalek Prime's forces. Davros is placed in a disintegration chamber and his atoms dispersed. His fate is left open when his data is either erased from the disintegrator or transmatted across space to a safe location.

The novel Unnatural History suggests that the Doctor, perhaps under the influence of Faction Paradox, tricked the Daleks into tying their own history into such knots that it collapsed in upon itself.

The Dalek Prime claims that the planet the Doctor destroyed (in Remembrance of the Daleks) was not Skaro, but Antalin. According to the Dalek Prime, the Daleks had found out about the destruction of Skaro when they found records during their invasion of Earth in the 22nd century (The Dalek Invasion of Earth). To simultaneously save their homeworld and maintain the flow of history, the Daleks reasoned that they needed to make it appear as if Skaro had been destroyed, so they allegedly terraformed Antalin to resemble Skaro and placed Davros there after altering his memories so, when revived (Destiny of the Daleks), he would believe he was on Skaro. It is also suggested that the Daleks' war with the Movellans was faked to give the Daleks a plausible reason for reviving Davros. The truth of the Dalek Prime's claims is debatable.

It is implied that the Dalek factory ship jettisoned from the TARDIS near the end of the book ends up as the capsule seen in The Power of the Daleks