Terry Nation’s Seeds of Destruction
It’s common for writers to include aspects of their own lives in their fiction. For obvious reasons this is somewhat rarer in science fiction, but it does happen. Kurt Vonnegut’s seminal Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is perhaps the best example. In his novel, Vonnegut gives his hero Billy Pilgrim some of his own traumatic wartime experiences but has him come unfixed in time and meet aliens. It’s well worth a read. But what’s all this got to do with Doctor Who?
Last year I revisited nearly all of Terry Nation’s work to inform my writing about his scripts for The Daleks. I found him taking inspirations from aspects of his own childhood experiences, in minor ways. Then I found something rather more intriguing in one of his Dalek spin-off stories which put me in mind of Billy Pilgrim.
In the 1970s, Nation wrote four Dalek Annuals. Or rather, four Terry Nation’s Dalek Annuals to give them their proper titles. It’s an important point, because this titling is the nearest thing they have to explicit identification of their author. The attribution of the copyright to Nation is the next nearest. But nowhere do the books explicitly state that Terry Nation wrote the text and comic strip stories they feature. The title may merely be an example of Nation’s canny instinct for branding and the copyright assignment could mask the use of a ghost writer. Indeed, some fans have assumed the content of these books was Nation’s in name only. But I disagree.
A 1977 Daily Express interview with Nation notes that he was working on the next year’s annual. That may not be conclusive evidence of authorship, but you only have to read the stories of the annuals to find them stuffed with Nation’s preoccupations, his favourite tropes, terminology and generic scenarios. If he didn’t write them, his ghost writer did a very good job of imitating him. And I don’t believe that. I suspect Nation wrote the annuals (or at least most of their content), probably as fill-in exercises between bigger, more lucrative writing jobs. The authorship of the annuals’ stories is important here as I feel one story in particular reflects a specific aspect of Nation’s life – and death.
The Seeds of Destruction from the 1978 annual is a slight story which was clearly inspired in part by HG Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), as the comic strip Island of Horror in the following year’s annual would be. The story concerns the fugitive biochemist Dr Lambray who, backed by the Daleks, sets himself up on a remote island to perfect a substance that accelerates plant and animal growth. Needless to say, his arrangement with the Daleks ends badly for him.
The full plot details are not relevant to us here, but note that the story uses a framing device of the tale being told to one of the annuals’ continuing characters, Joel Shaw, who is named after Nation’s son, and the story includes various stock settings and scenarios already familiar from Nation’s previous work. There’s a thick jungle (common in many of his stories) which is set alight (as in The Daleks’ Master Plan) and vegetation that has become menacing as a result of its accelerated growth (like in The Keys of Marinus). The story also features a character called Del, a name Nation would use for two characters in Blake’s 7 in the near future, and it uses the size of a dinner plate as a unit of comparison, as Nation would in his storyline and script for Destiny of the Daleks. It’s hard to imagine the story could have been authored by anyone other than Nation.
Del Kramer tells Joel Shaw that Lambray “suffered from a minor illness called Ethemnya.” Shaw recognises this as a respiratory disease and Kramer goes on to explain that: “sufferers from Ethemnya can’t travel in pressurised vehicles. Their lungs won’t stand the atmospheric changes.” This is a minor plot point as it signifies that, after becoming a wanted man, Lambray could not have left Earth, as had previously been assumed.
Ethemnya is not a real disease, but its name is very likely a partial corruption of Emphysema, which is indeed a respiratory condition. The words share many (but not all) of the same letters and have the same rhythm, both starting with an ‘e’, ending with an ‘a’ and using a ‘y’ to create an extra vowel sound. I think this was deliberate. Nation had previously used similar partial corruptions in his work. For example, ‘Exxilon’, from Death to the Daleks, was almost certainly derived from the word ‘elixir’, given the planet’s possession of a life-preserving mineral.
Unlike the fictional Ethemnya, Emphysema is not a minor illness, although some sufferers will experience it in milder forms than others. Without getting too technical, Emphysema reduces the ability of the lungs to absorb oxygen. This causes symptoms including breathlessness, coughing and wheezing. It is a progressive and irreversible condition, with many complications, often involving the heart, which can cause death. That was the course the disease took in my father – hence my particular interest.
When Terry Nation died in 1997, at the age of 66, obituaries reported that Emphysema was the cause. Smoking is strongly linked to the development of Emphysema and Nation was known to have been a regular smoker; many photos show him cigarette-in-hand, and shots of his office from the 1960s include a stockpile of packets of his favoured Embassy cigarettes. He probably smoked himself to death.
There’s a grim irony in Nation referring to his fictional Emphysema analogue Ethemnya as a “minor illness” when writing in 1977, given that Emphysema would kill him 20 years later. But this leaves us with interesting questions of cause-and-effect. Was it simply coincidence that Nation used an Emphysema substitute as a small plot point in one of his slighter works, only to develop the disease later? Or had he already contracted it at that point?
Clearly I’m not party to Nation’s medical history and consequently I have no information as to how long Nation had experienced Emphysema before his death. I did note that in the interview with his children published in last year’s DWM Legends special about Nation, his son Joel reported that “by 1990 his emphysema was starting to slow him down.” Nation had clearly had it since well before 1990, then. It’s a condition which typically has its onset after the age of 40 (which Nation reached in 1970) and in mild cases the sufferer may continue an essentially normal life for decades. So it’s certainly possible that Nation had developed and been diagnosed with the disease prior to 1977, when he wrote The Seeds of Destruction, with the condition only progressing somewhat later.
This is, of course, mere speculation on my part. Nevertheless, I’m tempted to wonder whether he invented Ethemnya when his own Emphysema diagnosis was fresh in his mind. If so, perhaps his suggestion that it was a ‘minor’ illness reflected his own early experience of minor symptoms. Or perhaps it was wishful thinking in acknowledgment of his potentially (and actually, as it transpired) poor long-term prognosis; his story depicting a future in which the worst effects of such respiratory ailments had been mitigated, rendering them minor. The title itself, The Seeds of Destruction, seems all the more appropriate in the latter case (noting also that no literal seeds feature in the story).
But if Nation hadn’t developed Emphysema by the time he wrote The Seeds of Destruction, or at least didn’t know that he had, then he was probably simply aware of the condition’s existence and it was a coincidence that he would later experience it himself. This scenario reminds me of Billy Pilgrim who comes unstuck in time, experiencing episodes of his life out of order. It’s as if Nation himself had had a premonition of what was to come later in his life.
We’ll probably never know which scenario was the correct one. But whichever it was, The Seeds of Destruction presents an unusual and subtle example of a writer’s art and life intertwining.
Image credits: Terry Nation photo © Radio Times; artwork © World Distributors (Manchester) Ltd, although the copyright may have reverted to the BBC.
No AI tools were used in the writing of the above text
Sources
David Wigg’s interview with Terry Nation from the Daily Express, 10 January 1977
Marcus Hearn’s interview with Joel and Rebecca Nation in DWM’s Legends: Terry Nation (2025)
Terry Nation’s Dalek Annuals 1978 and 1979