#13
Zeta Major
By Simon Messingham
I was a bit apprehensive about this one. There are a couple of reasons why.
First: it’s a sequel to Planet Of Evil, which despite featuring Tom Baker and Lis Sladen at the peak of their powers always manages to bore me to distraction. Second: it’s by Simon Messingham. Nothing personal there, it’s just that the only previous Who novel I’d read of his was Strange England, which was by some distance my least favourite book of the entire Virgin run. In hype terms I’d say Zeta Major was sitting somewhere around “oh no.”
Maybe that sense of dread helped, or maybe this is just a significantly better book. Either way, Zeta Major will not be taking the “least favourite book of the entire BBC run” trophy. Hooray!
For starters, despite what you might think from the word “sequel”* there is no low hanging fruit here. We’re not returning to a spooky space jungle to relive the scary (read: awake) bits of Planet Of Evil. Zeta Major takes place two thousand years after those events, and although the setting and substance of the previous story do figure significantly in the plot, they’re not the driving force of the book. Messingham is far more interested in the Morestran Empire and how they responded to the earlier crisis.
(*Let’s just take a moment to note that he’s done a sequel and set it in Season 20, a season deliberately filled with references to the past because of the then-anniversary. Neat!)
This includes their, shall we say, dramatic reaction to a throwaway comment from the Doctor, who casually suggested that they pivot away from the study of anti-matter and consider mining the kinetic energy of planets instead. This triggered two millennia of simultaneous scientific advancement and stagnation, plus a schism in their society that inevitably sewed seeds for war. Heck, I’ll just come right out and say it: oops. (But seriously, it’s quite an achievement to get a whole novel out of one line of dialogue, and a joke at that.)
The Doctor’s inherent fallibility is not quite the focus that it could have been here — perhaps surprising given it’s something that obviously interested Messingham in Strange England, and was generally running through the New Adventures at the time. (See also, Falls The Shadow.) Zeta Major nonetheless finds the Doctor in a weakened state, tormented by visions of a black wave and needing to visit this place in order to put them to rest. Nyssa and Tegan go off to find help since he’s unconscious — not a new experience for either of them and it won’t be their last — only to discover that they are on a colossal tower on an otherwise barren planet. The tower is largely deserted apart from the occasional shambling anti-matter-infested beast. (Or “anti-man”. Slightly silly sounding I know but I’m pretty sure it’s a carry-over from Planet.) The atmosphere is creepy, to put it mildly.
When help arrives, if it can be called that, the trio are not exactly welcomed. This sounds like some of that low hanging fruit at last — of course people are going to immediately suspect the Doctor and co. of causing trouble — but we don’t quite go there, with the TARDIS crew taken advantage of and then trusted to a surprising (and ever-fluctuating) degree. The story spans multiple planets and gives everyone plenty to do, in ways that explore aspects of Morestran society. Most of which is, to be honest, pretty grim, but you still get the sense that Messingham has thought about it.
Technology is no longer freely available, but it is still visible, with grand sights like hovering spaceship graveyards and small oddities like horse-drawn hover cars. Tech is the strict purview of the church: they pump it all into the construction of a tower two thousand years in the making, all due to an empire-wide power shortage that might have been a power grab exercise in the first place. Royalty and religion are meshed together like the two giant legs of the tower, and they are similarly likely to explode. Everyone involved is spoiling for a fight. Some, however, aren’t even that lucky: cruel experiments are being run in secret on a mysterious asteroid, and women are mistreated the entire empire over, a fact that becomes grimly apparent to Nyssa and Tegan. Things get quite unpleasant at points.
Nastiness is not new to Messingham’s writing. It was what mainly turned me off Strange England; the kind of go-for-broke violence on display was not unique to that book by any means, but it still seemed to exist just for the sake of it, coupled with a “how weird can you get” fixation with dream imagery that made the whole thing seem nastily obscure. It wasn’t for me, but Zeta Major has more of a handle on its impulses, while still indulging them. Dream logic is here in spades, especially for the Doctor; it sits behind his entire plot. Violence is plentiful too, but it is often only suggested. Deaths carry a meaningful impact, even when the people dying aren’t much more sympathetic than their enemies. There’s a degree of subtlety here, in other words.
Peaceful people are also driven to extremes, such as Tegan, who at one point is hypnotised into an assassination attempt, then at another tries to shoot an enemy yet finds herself unable to kill him. And then there’s Nyssa, who contemplates her lifelong interest in peace yet finds she can play a different part if it’s for a greater good — something she may not want to think too much about afterwards. There’s a duality inherent to stories about anti-matter, and Zeta Major scratches at it using its leads.
The guest characters also wobble back and forth. There’s Ferdinand, a somewhat good man whose quest for revenge leaves him disappointingly open to atrocity. And there’s his opposite, the suggestively-named Krystian Fall, a black ops monster with virtually no limits who can somehow make time to understand and believe the Doctor. Both form some connection to Tegan, which helps to enhance her comparatively small part in events. (She seems to spend longer talking about her peaceful time spent with Ferdinand than there was actual time with him.) Neither ever exactly covers themselves in glory, but this goes for the empire as a whole, a teeming mass of awful bastards who do sometimes run the risk of being confused for one another.
That’s perhaps the book’s biggest hang up. What we’ve got here is a sort of space opera, surprisingly grand in ambition with different kinds of society working together (or jarring against each other) and an eventual drawing together of threads and exploding of tensions that really feels like a pay-off. And yet, you’ve got so little reason to actually like or care about the Morestrans themselves that their inevitable ruin comes mostly as an academic tick-box. I mean, of course it all went to pot, they started off horrible and then got worse for two thousand years.
It’s perhaps for this reason that the book has some extra flourishes, such as suddenly dropping the narrative voice to give us a diary entry, or a mission log, or the minutes of a secret meeting, or an edition of paranoid student rag The Watchtower — the latter being a good source of winking amusement in a book that is often surprisingly funny, albeit in a wicked and satirical way. This stuff can make the book seem rather dense as you’re using multiple sources to stick it all together, but it also suggests a more colourful palette, and maybe insinuates some reason to find these disparate groups interesting. It could just as easily point to a book that has been somewhat over-engineered, and I would have a hard time entirely dismissing that notion. But I do think it’s more interesting for it.
Anti-matter’s weird, isn’t it? I always get confused when people start explaining it and, perhaps for that reason, I tend to find stories about it all rather dull. Zeta Major keeps it firmly in the background and, when employing it, does so as something either mythically overwhelming (such as a black ocean that becomes an enormous impossible-to-imagine creature) or viscerally upsetting (such as chunks of anti-matter sewn into people’s stomachs) — either way, not boring. People are by far the major problem in Zeta Major, with anti-matter (and Anti-Men, lol) more of an environmental hazard. I think that’s a good mix, and it keeps the book’s real interest — the awfulness of powerful figures when they find a really good excuse to control an empire — at the forefront.
Messingham’s writing has improved a lot, nailing little character insights (like the Fifth Doctor’s “little dodges”), big character insights (like Nyssa’s intensity and Tegan’s temper), and deploying prose that can be quite witty, or otherwise pretty without becoming purple. On psychic visions: “[The Doctor] had the comic notion of a telegraph operator somewhere at the other end of the line becoming increasingly exasperated with him and continually being forced to repeat the message, making it simpler and simpler with fewer and fewer words.” On a dreadful sight: “Skeletons ringed this lake like obscene jewellery.” It’s a good mix.
There’s a lot here, possibly too much at points, but I was impressed by the overall scale of it, both as a planet-hopping bit of sci-fi and as an occasionally unusual approach to a Doctor Who book. I’d check out more from the author, which isn’t something I thought I’d say.
7/10
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