The novel “Mutually Assured Domination” by Nick Walters was published for the first time in 2015. It was republished in a revised special edition in 2020.

Harold Chorley is looking for a job as a journalist when he runs into a group of young people in the middle of a protest and gets caught up in a clash with the police. The only good thing is that he may have found an interesting story because Dominex Industries seems to be the center of strange rumors and some people in the area surrounding the complex where the industry operates have disappeared.

There’s no evidence that Dominex Industries is involved in the disappearances and the secrecy is understandable for an industry that can obtain very cheap energy from nuclear waste. Instinct tells Harold Chorley that something strange is going on and the only important person to whom he can confide his suspicions is Colonel Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart.

The Lethbridge-Stewart series tells the adventures of the character who became famous in the “Doctor Who” TV show when he works without the Doctor. The stories start from the period immediately following the debut of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart in the TV show and then extend the period covered. These stories include some characters that appeared in the TV show, some invented for other productions connected to it, and others that were created specifically for these novels.

This series of novels began with strong roots in the television serial “The Web of Fear” and then developed into other adventures of the then Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart that go well beyond his first meeting with the Doctor. In “Mutually Assured Domination” another character from that serial appears, the journalist Harold Chorley, but the plot is linked to another Second Doctor serial, “The Dominators“, as the Dominators discovered the Earth and their plans for the planet are certainly not good for human beings.

On television, the Dominators weren’t very successful, and the fault could be above all the infamous Quarks, their robots that are supposed to be threatening but ended up being above all ridiculous. Nick Walters tried to play on that fame by explaining that their appearance can be an advantage because the enemies who encounter them for the first time may underestimate them.

In general, Nick Walters manages to exploit the portrayal of the Dominators as brutal and ruthless and at the same time use the Quarks in the way conceived on paper and not in the way shown on television due to the low budget of the classic “Doctor Who” series. Despite their violent tendencies, the Dominators can also be good strategists, and over the course of the novel, their plans for Earth are slowly revealed. In particular, their choice to collaborate with what is officially an Earth’s nuclear industry is explored.

However, in the end, this series of novels centers around Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, who is the protagonist of “Mutually Assured Domination” as well. This is the period of his life before the formation of UNIT. In this case, his hands are tied because Dominex Industries has important political support. This forces him to collaborations that are definitely out of the ordinary, as he ends up getting allied with the journalist Harold Chorley and with a group of young people protesting against the activities of Dominex Industries. The novel is set in 1969 and the author took into account the historical events of that period, including generational tensions.

Even without UNIT, in “Mutually Assured Domination” there’s a lot of action with surprises and twists that keep the pace fast. Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart shows that he can be resourceful when he doesn’t have official support from the authorities. For these reasons, in my opinion, this is a must-read novel for this character’s fans.