The Janus Conjunction by: Trevor Baxendale

One issue new authors have when crafting a story is keeping the pace of the story going.  Now the pacing of a story does not always have to be fast paced or slowly paced, but with a novel there must be some consistency with its pace.  This isn’t as much of a problem if the pace starts slow and then speeds up, but whenever this happens in reverse, or worse starts fast, slows down, and speeds up again, the integrity of the story doesn’t hold up.  That is one of the main issues at the center of Trevor Baxendale’s debut Doctor Who novel, The Janus Conjunction.  The Janus Conjunction starts off with a brisk pace as the Doctor and Sam arrive on the planet Janus Prime where they are immediately attacked by giant cyborg spiders, inaccurately called spidroids, and a large portion of the book is just their fight for survival.  There are two rival military factions on Janus Prime, which will become a recurring theme in Baxendale’s work, and the one in control of the spidroids is obviously the ‘evil’ of the groups.  By the time Baxendale begins to devote time to these factions The Janus Conjunction then switches focus from quick paced action story, to a slower paced mystery to unravel some anomalies on the planet, and finally into a quickly paced conclusion in the last 20 pages or so of the novel.   While the conclusion itself is for the most part satisfying, it almost comes too quickly for the reader to process just how everything has been done.  The speedup does seem to be out of style with the rest of the novel, and it leads me to speculate if The Janus Conjunction wasn’t a victim of BBC Books’ harder limit on page count and the conclusion was left behind in editing.



The actual conspiracy and mystery driving the plot of The Janus Conjunction is a good example of fun Doctor Who, yet a style of Doctor Who story that isn’t often done.  The grand conspiracy plot brings to mind a story in the style of The Ambassadors of Death, though outside of atmosphere the plots are incredibly different.  The Doctor and Sam must keep asking questions about what the conspiracy behind Janus Prime is.  Janus Prime is a planet in a binary system with one moon leaving the planet in a permanent total lunar eclipse.  The planet is also soaked in a type of radiation which starts mild: at first it leaves only some minor rashes, but it eventually kills the skin and melts its victims.  Baxendale has a way with describing the poor victims of Janus’ radiation, and the bitterness it causes.  Baxendale employs it as a looming threat over the heroes throughout the novel as at any moment Sam and the Doctor could start succumbing to the sickness.  The ending has Sam dead, which is perhaps Baxendale’s biggest mistake in The Janus Conjunction: the novel has no consequences and most of it is undone by the end which feels cheapened.  This could have been a decent exit for Sam, but she is spared.



The Doctor and Sam are also split for a good portion of the novel’s length which Baxendale uses to muse on the Sam is Missing arc for a bit, while the Doctor is on Janus Prime’s twin planet and trying to get the action going and Sam is being defiant in the face of an authoritarian military.  Gustav Zemler is the over the top villain of The Janus Conjunction, and as a character Baxendale slowly lets him become unhinged while the plot goes on around him.  Moslei, one of his underlings, is much more interesting and a source for worldbuilding.  Moslei fought in the Cyber wars and there are several war style flashbacks which show the horrors war has on a psyche and the actual threat the Cybermen and Cybermats can be.  Neither actually appear, but there’s a goldmine for Baxendale to explore here and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was meant to have the Cybermen in it at one point.  The rest of the supporting cast, however isn’t nearly as interesting.  They all kind of fit into stereotypes for action movies, which isn’t too bad considering this is Baxendale’s first novel, but with another round of editing and maybe some cutting down of one or two the supporting characters could have been stronger.  Finally, the Doctor himself while great feels slightly out of development here, acting more like his TV Movie persona than the development the past fifteen books have given him.  Overall, The Janus Conjunction is a good entry in the Eighth Doctor Adventures and a great first effort from Trevor Baxendale which perhaps needed one more draft and an extended page count to find itself amongst the greats of Doctor Who books.  7/10.