The Terrance Dicks World Cup is into its second day and we have the groupings for round two of voting. This will decide which ten novelizations of Doctor Who stories will go into a 2020 anthology celebrating the career of the late Terrance Dicks.
Keep up with all the action by checking out the #TerranceDicksWorldCup hashtag or following the @DWBBCBooks Twitter account. But for those who need it, here’s a roundup of day two.
After the replay matches for Groups A and B, The Auton Invasion maintained its lead while The Planet of the Spiders took the top spot. Former Group B leader The Planet of the Daleks took second place while The Abominable Snowmen took Group A’s runner-up position. These four stories are currently head to head to mandible to eyestalk in the next round of votes.
There were some raised eyebrows when the ref mispelled some of the story titles in the tweets. But, since the polls options were accurate, play continued.
At the end of the day the round one groups looked like this:
| Group | First Place | Second Place |
| A | The Auton Invasion | The Abominable Snowmen |
| B | The Planet of the Spiders | The Planet of the Daleks |
| C | Genesis of the Daleks | The Day of the Daleks |
| D | The Brain of Morbius | The Mind of Evil |
| E | The Loch Ness Monster | Carnival of Monsters |
| F | The Five Doctors | The Three Doctors |
| G | The Robots of Death | The Ambassadors of Death |
| H | The Talons of Weng-Chiang | The Claws of Axos |
| I | The Faceless Ones | The Image of the Fendahl |
| J | The Giant Robot | Kinda |
| K | The Wheel in Space | The Trial of a Time Lord* |
| L | The Pyramids of Mars | The Caves of Androzani |
| M | The Dalek Invasion of Earth | Revenge of the Cybermen |
| N † | The Horror of Fang Rock | The Web of Fear |
| O | The Time Warrior | Warriors of the Deep |
| P | The Deadly Assassin | Inferno |
*Terrance Dicks wrote the novelization of The Mysterious Planet which formed the opening four episodes of The Trial of a Time Lord story.
† The stories tied with 40% of the vote each.
There was also time for nostalgia as fan Simon Hart looked back fondly on his childhood with the Target novelizations as The Claws of Axos took second place in Group H.
For my analysis, each poll averaged 800 votes each which is a very good representation of Doctor Who fans on Twitter and far in excess of what the original one-hour polls were indicating. Even if the results were largely unchanged. It’s hard to say what Group I being the most popular poll – at 1,008 votes – says about the groupings but The Faceless Ones having a strong win probably has something to do with the animated reconstruction that was recently announced. It’s good to see that at least one story for every one of the first six Doctors has gone through to round two (Terrance Dicks never novelized a Seventh Doctor story) though it’s anyone’s guess if the lone chunk of season 23, which took second place in its group, will survive to the final 16.
We’ll bring you more analysis of the first round results tomorrow. But for now, let us know in the comments which stories you’re hoping to see in the anthology.