Space 1999: Breakaway
by E.C. Tubb
1975 Pocket Books
Space 1999 was the spiritual successor to the far superior series UFO. I bought and watched the entire series, mainly on the strength of trying to find an episode I remembered from childhood which ended up being from Jason of Star Command. The only thing I remember from it is that it had Christopher Lee looking like this:
The shaky premise of the series is that nuclear waste is being stored on the moon. It explodes which sends the moon and its space station travelling at FTL speed across the universe, a speed fast enough to fly past various planets and stars, but slow enough to interact with them.
Breakaway crams four episodes into 141 pages, almost all of it exposition. We get electromagnetic sickness, alien possession, aliens turning up as dead spouses, and a black hole. Adds nothing to the series - it mentions a couple of suicides which I don't think were in the show, but I'm not going back to watch. The only characterizations we get is someone explaining that they were an old bachelor because "I was in love...once." This happens twice - couldn't tell you if it was the same person twice or two different characters.
Not a big fan of the series, but it's strength was definitely visual, and that is completely lost here.
Space 1999 novels continue to be put out to this day (more on that later), and Breakaway was reissued and possibly revised.
Paperback from AbeBooks.
