Time Zero by: Justin Richards

 

The thesis of Time Zero comes in a chapter where the Doctor explains the concept of Schrodinger’s Cat, the thought experiment to explain uncertainty of matter existing in multiple states when unobserved.  It’s a thought experiment that is intentionally ridiculous in physics, something that Justin Richards is clearly understanding of because that chapter actually ends with a fairly good joke about it, but this is also a story where there are splinters of different universes making its way out through the multiverse because of the choices the characters make.  The title refers to the inciting incident of reality, a mythic zero point that even the chapter numbers of the book are counting backwards to.  This is before Event One, the start of the universe as established in Castrovalva.  Richards is proposing a book of massive proportions, fitting into Sabbath’s grand plan that dominates these latter Eighth Doctor Adventures novels.  Sabbath is here, when revealed it becomes incredibly obvious where he is hiding and yet there was enough to make me forget he could very easily be involved.  Richards brings the massive scale down to the personal level, this is an example of Doctor Who telling a story about having to fulfill history because the TARDIS team have been given information about their own futures.  This is a plot point that Steven Moffat would love, but Justin Richards isn’t using it for some grand plan, at least not on the surface, but for allowing for some particularly great character drama.  Fitz Kreiner is dead, he died in Siberia 1894 on an expedition with George Williamson, much of Fitz’s plot being the terribly sad plot of seeing the entire crew die while there is clear alien activity of some sort, interestingly connected to other books Richards has contributed here in a way that doesn’t seem overly continuity heavy.  Surprisingly it is the inciting incident of finding the diary in a bookshop is Richards most tense scene of the novel, because it is the precipice of choice.  The Doctor could choose not to open the book and seal Fitz’s fate, but he does so because he is just too curious.  He has to know, let the cat out of the box so to speak.

 

Anji Kapoor feels like it is time for her to leave the TARDIS at the beginning of Time Zero, another choice she is at the precipice of making.  She does leave for a time, it’s all part of the plan to try piecing together whatever happened in Siberia in 1894 and for her part she returns to her normal life.  It’s a life she cannot really return to, corporate office work is something that does not suit someone who has been time traveling.  The pace is far too slow and Anji no longer fits as just another face at the office, nobody really questioning a lot of what she has done.  It’s these early chapters that let Anji really shine as a character because Richards, continuing the idea of this book being a Schrodinger’s cat mystery, hints that Anji could still leave by the end of the novel.  There even is a potential replacement companion revealed in the final third of the novel who to me feels partially based on the potential replacement for Ace in Season 27, though she is introduced as working with Sabbath and as a twist.  Richards’ use of twists in Time Zero is actually odd, because it is all about ensuring that the proper universe, say the one where the cat is alive so to speak, comes to be, many of the twists are towards the logical explanations and not the science fiction possibilities.  It makes for a very different read but also creates a double edged sword because Richards does hand wave some of the events at the resolution in a way that feels like a reestablishment of the status quo.  This weakens quite a lot of what the novel was doing to further so many of the characters, but again that almost plays into the uncertainty that is at the heart of the book.  The ice TARDIS on the cover, for instance, and Fitz being dead and alive, are both things that get explanations but they are also intentionally vague explanations.  It’s a trick that for me shouldn’t work, and I’m not entirely sure if it actually does.

 

Overall, Time Zero is weird in being a type of Doctor Who story that would be very popular when the show was revived, especially during the 2010s.  Justin Richards makes it work by keeping a lot of the time breaking elements as simple as he can, even if it means the resolution finds itself just a little weaker than he can be.  The book is carried by centering the TARDIS team particularly more than previous books while pushing the overarching storyline of Sabbath forward.  It’s a very enjoyable time and there is a slight uniqueness in the format of the chapters that’s helping it standout and maintain the timey wimey tone.  7/10.