#30
Parallel 59
By Natalie Dallaire & Stephen Cole
If you’re wondering what a typical Eighth Doctor, Fitz and Compassion story looks like, Parallel 59 has some thoughts on that. We’re once again dropping hints about the ongoing development of Compassion, and the things troubling her; the Doctor still wants to nurture some camaraderie with his companions; Fitz continues to wonder if he’s the same person, or even a real person after what he went through in Interference; and Fitz also gets a life and settles down with a girlfriend.
That last one has happened a few times in general and now two books in a row, with the domesticity and the (occasional but not constant) first person narration and everything. Parallel 59 seems to have been a relatively late addition to fill a gap (via Pieces Of Eighth) and to his credit Steve Cole* makes all the appropriate allusions to Fitz’s similar experience in Frontier Worlds so that it sounds like it’s just one of those things that it all happened again. (*Natalie Dallaire is Cole’s sister. It sounds like Cole wrote most of the book. From POE again.) But the impact is inevitably lessened when it’s such a close repeat, like poor old Beltempest showing up with an inter-planetary snafu right after The Janus Conjunction had a creditable go at it.
That said, Fitz’s time in the strange world of Mechta is hands down the best thing in the book. A place used for recuperation before sending its convalescent citizens back to “Homeplanet” [sic], Mechta has an unusual, unearthly calm about it. No one needs to work very much, everything costs the same, there’s little excitement but the people are happy enough anyway. When it’s time to go you’re carted off to the wide world in a mysterious red taxi — and if that sets off your “something ain’t right” alarm, congratulations, you’ve encountered science fiction before.
Fitz doesn’t seem to have a job this time but he has plenty of larks. He quickly falls in with a group of friends and gets his end away (as if you had to ask) via a slightly creepy and very cheesy chat-up game on a tram. He has an affair with an older woman (Anya) and then gets true feelings for someone (Filippa); later he has another dalliance (Denna). No flies on Fitz this week. The Filippa portion of the story doesn’t really expand until it starts unravelling, by which time Anya is clinging more and more to his affections. Her husband, Nikol, runs a local conspiracy/freedom fighter group that aims to uncover the truth about Mechta. Fitz mostly just humours him for Anya’s sake, but being one of the TARDIS gang he soon begins putting in the hours to investigate. Towards the end of the story all he’s really interested in is making amends with Filippa, but it’s at this point that Mechta itself begins to twist and fall apart, dissolving into creepy hallucinations and unusual behaviours.
I think Parallel 59 just about overcomes the “we’ve been here before”-ness of a domestic Fitz by a) making it more prominent, b) making it not a work thing this time (he’s not here to achieve anything, he’s just waiting for rescue), c) not fridging his girlfriend again and d) letting him really sit with it all afterwards. Recovering in bed it occurs to Fitz that he needs to change, Scrooge-like; I’m not sure exactly what he means but playing fast and loose with people’s hearts might be it. He won’t be able to make a true go of it with Filippa, but we leave them in a surprisingly meaningful place, with the TARDIS butterfly room making a welcome reappearance. I’m fine with repeats like this in theory, just so long as they serve a purpose. Hopefully this one will.
As to the non-Fitz stuff, it gets off to a terrific start with the Doctor and Compassion hurtling through space in a claustrophobic escape capsule. Talk about starting your story late! I wondered if we were going to flash back to fill all of that in, but no, Cole/Dallaire commits to this and the story follows on from there. Kudos, as it creates a sense of momentum that comes in handy. (We later learn that the TARDIS landed on a space station/“Bastion”; Fitz and the TARDIS got separated and the other two had to get out of there fast.)
The capsule lands on Skale, a planet carved into different Parallels. “59” isn’t very friendly but from context we can assume that’s also true of the others. Skale exists in a general state of xenophobic paranoia, so you can guess how well the Doctor and Compassion are received. The Doctor is soon a prisoner (having charitably but incorrectly assumed that staying put during an escape attempt will denote innocence) and Compassion is soon hanging with the rebels.
It’s worth saying at this point that the whole authority vs rebels thing is not very clear. Parallel 59 is obviously a very strict and unhappy place, with things like enforced marriages and mandated birth rates, but it’s still not exactly fleshed out what it is they’re fighting against. There’s the Project, aka the reason for all those Bastions in orbit, but there’s a lot of secrecy around what all that’s in aid of. No one seems terribly bothered about the authoritarianism either, and when we meet someone working on the inside to aid the rebels, their methods are so casually murderous that it becomes difficult to see where they stand on any of it. The bulk of Parallel 59 just feels like tension and action by rote, people doing stuff loudly and with as much conviction as they can force.
Cole/Dallaire don’t seem all that invested in the world-building — we don’t even see the other Parallels — but they invest in the characters. A bugbear from Longest Day rears its head here, though: there’s too many of them. We’ve got multiple, mostly older upper-management types in the military (such as Dam, Narkompros and Terma), a few icy female officers with shifting loyalties (Yve, Jessen and Slatin), some lowly workers with notable quirks (Jedkah and Makkersvil), some general staff members (sorry, don’t remember); then there’s the whole rebellion side of things (including Rojin and Tod) and Fitz’s gang (the aforementioned ladies, plus Serjey and Low Rez). Cole/Dallaire do a good job of imbuing some or even most of these with nuances, but it’s a losing battle with so many of them, especially when Makkersvil just reads like Fitz 2.0, with the spotty romantic history and everything. Dam has quite an interesting neurosis about his arranged marriage, but for some reason he’s the only person on Skale that thinks about that custom at all. Narkompros is a hypochondriac (or is he?) and Terma is a jerk; both suffer horribly from “pointlessly intransigent authority figure” syndrome.
That’s most of the plot in a nutshell, people barking “alien saboteur!” at the Doctor, the bunch of boring morons. It’s here that Parallel 59 runs into another problem: the Doctor and Compassion don’t know what’s going on for most of it. (Fitz, isolated, stands even less chance of a handy info dump.) Neither the authority figures nor the rebels seem keen to fill in the Doctor or Compassion respectively, which helps keep up the suspense I suppose, but I think that comes at the expense of clear stakes. I’m guessing the reason for this is wanting the truth about Mechta to be a big surprise, but as the entire book hinges on what’s going on with that place and/or those Bastions I just ended up waiting to find out why any of this mattered. It’s a miscalculation that leaves most of the book marking time — admittedly at quite a lick, the pace being firmly set by that action-packed opening.
When we find out the truth it’s a mixed bag. Mechta is, as you may have guessed, an artificial construct: hundreds of people have their minds uploaded to it. This isn’t exactly a new concept but it’s one with legs. The Matrix came out not long before this (the book was written concurrently, okay!) and Doctor Who did something similar in Silence In The Library. It’s compellingly and creepily executed here.
Sadly though, we’re not done yet. While they’re in Mechta their bodies are also used in those “escape capsules” to form a sort of sensor net around the planet. They are also used remotely as bombs. Right. I found myself muttering “Whaaat” at some of that; it’s fairly cockamamie even for an SF novel to multi-purpose a high concept that way, and it’s a lot to take in so late in the book. (P192!) Impressively (or not, YMMV) Parallel 59 pulls yet another surprise out of its pockets by then having the much-scapegoated aliens show up after all and attack. This neatly galvanises all the Parallels, but again it’s so late in the game (P253!!!) that both the attack and the response feel like frenzied action housekeeping. Where were these definitive stakes during the rest of the book?
Your best bet while waiting for all of this to kick off is to follow the Doctor and Compassion, but Fitz is clearly king as far as the interesting stuff is concerned. The Doctor vamps well enough to keep from getting executed; I’m just sick of the old “we don’t believe you” routine. His attitude towards Compassion fluctuates at times. He can be desperately concerned about her, but also quick to shut her down, and happy to use her like a sonic screwdriver. Given his need for Compassion and Fitz to build a rapport in Frontier Worlds, he’s surprisingly poor at doing it himself here.
Compassion has been quietly building her part throughout these books and there’s more of that here — the Doctor openly worrying about what’s going on with her, her having strange dreams and feeling like the TARDIS is having an adverse effect on her — but there simply isn’t that much for her to do once she inadvertently destroys a medical scanner* and runs off with the rebels. (*She has one heart to the locally normal two, rendering her and not the Doctor the odd one out. This is one of the few very attempts to make this alien race at all distinct from humans.) Compassion is more of a grumpy plot device in Parallel 59, but to be fair that’s more feature than bug; like Seven Of Nine, she was written with tech enhancements that can move plots along, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. At least you can make something of the conflict between machine and humanity. We touch on that here.
Not having read anything else by Dallaire it’s perhaps inevitable that I mostly viewed this through the lens of Cole’s books. In that context it’s an improvement. While he continues to overpopulate the sidelines and doesn’t always get the most out of every idea, there are a few strong ones and there’s a firm eye on the ongoing, and even minor character stuff. It feels like we’re heading for an all-round excellent Steve Cole book at some point (maybe keep Natalie on speed dial?), and while Parallel 59 isn’t there yet it has enough going for it to rollick along nicely in the meantime.
6/10
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