Beltempest (novel)



Beltempest was the seventeenth BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures novel. It featured the Eighth Doctor and Samantha Jones. It is author Jim Mortimore's only contribution to the EDA range.

Publisher’s Summary
The people of Bellania II see their sun, Bel, shrouded in night for a month following an impossible triple eclipse. When Bel is returned to them a younger, brighter, hotter star, it is the beginning of the end for the entire solar system...

100,000 years later, the Doctor and Sam arrive on Bellania IV, where the population is under threat as disaster looms -- immense gravitational and dimensional disturbances are surging through this area of space.

While the time travellers attempt to help the survivors and ease the devastation, a religious suicide-cult leader is determined to spread a new religion through Bel’s system -- and his word may prove even more dangerous than the terrible forces brought into being by the catastrophic changes in the sun...

Plot
to be added

Characters

 * The Doctor
 * Samantha Jones
 * Surgeon Major Alesis Conaway
 * Father Alexis Denadi
 * Eldred Saketh
 * Captain Bellis
 * Aellini
 * Smoot

Culture

 * Surgeon Major Alesis Conaway likes opera.

The Doctor

 * The Doctor mentions, "I was in my early nineties before I could bring myself to admit that I still liked to play with my perigosto stick.".
 * The Doctor has degrees in psychology and the social dynamics of machine intelligence.

Drugs and medicines

 * Sam takes speed.

Foods and beverages

 * The Doctor likes chocolates with soft centres.
 * Sam doesn't like ham because her mum packed her lunches with it until she was eight (which may be when she became a vegetarian).
 * The Doctor (in the lead up to trying to save everyone) requests some Broken Orange Pekoe tea.

Individuals

 * Samantha Jones says she'd like to have children.

Planets

 * Belannia XXI is too dangerous for colonisation or mining due to the radiation.

Religion

 * Father Alexis Denadi is a priest.
 * While considering religion, Sam recalls Kyle Dale and Micawber's World (and the Church of the Way Forward's role in all that occurred).
 * God is something of a taboo on the Bellannia system of planets.

Species

 * The Seekers are planet-like beings that live for billions of years and dwell in the depths of Deep Time.
 * The Hanakoi built many of the cities on Belannia VIII which are now inhabited by humans.

Technology

 * Sam gets infected with nanotech and (she believes in some ways) "dies".
 * Eldred Saketh has nanotech in his body, making it seem he can't die.
 * The Doctor uses an emergency button from a sandminer to control a generator for his gramophone.

Continuity

 * The Doctor wonders if the TARDIS is taking them to planets with odd suns. The previous book PROSE: The Janus Conjunction also featured an odd sun.
 * Sam wonders to herself what decompression would be like, despite having gone through it three times in PROSE: Dreamstone Moon.
 * Sam recalls the events of PROSE: Placebo Effect.
 * Similar nanotechnology also appears in TV: The Doctor Dances.