#30
Burning Heart
By Dave Stone
A Missing Adventure by Dave
Stone? This should be interesting. And it is, but mainly because Burning Heart is not so much a Missing
Adventure as a New Adventure cosplaying as one.
The Habitat is a messy, barely
civilised outpost in humanity’s distant future. Adjudicators rule with blunt
force, but tensions are palpable between the resident humans and aliens. Into
this sweeps a random, unearthly element of violence, and lurking beneath the
central fabric of the Habitat itself is a sinister intelligence.
This isn’t just set in the
aftermath of the well-known NA, Original Sin – it pretty much is the setting
for Original Sin. Then there’s the tone. The foulness of life in the Habitat is
a lot like Transit, cheerfully highlighting violent crime and body horror in a
very un-Classic Who way. If that wasn’t enough, the story ends up leaning into
the theme of emergent life, which is even more like Transit. As for the
language, the New Adventures’ favourite swearword (cruk) gets a resurgence,
plus we bandy around another one (Sheol) that may or may not be new to the
books. As well as Adjudicators there’s a supporting character called Kane who,
being in a book by Dave Stone, just might be related to someone from the New
Adventures.
Now there’s an argument to be
made that much of this (the violence, the futurism) makes sense in the Colin
Baker era, especially after the satirically violent Vengeance On Varos, so it
should work as a Missing Adventure. But you’re reading this years later and
potentially alongside the other books published around then, so it unavoidably
rings different bells. Even the front cover, which infamously gives us
Adjudicators ala Judge Dredd, sends NA signals: my housemate, who doesn’t read
these books but has heard me go on about them, took one look and said “That looks like one of the other lot.”
Getting back on track to what Burning Heart is rather than what it is
like, the Sixth Doctor and Peri arrive on relatively rough terms. I don’t
recall Varos ending on a sour note for these two, and I’d suggest that this
kind of characterisation might work better coming right after she meets an
unpredictable Sixie in The Twin Dilemma. She doesn’t mince words (or thoughts)
here: “One again – yet again – Peri felt
that edgy mix of disappointment and annoyance. Once again, on some deep
emotional level, she had expected to turn and see the friendly and engaging,
utterly decent and trustworthy man she had once known – only to find that it
was, well, him. The Doctor. It always slightly disorientated her, kept her on
the wrong foot. The fact that she had now known this version of the Time Lord
longer than the original seemed to make it all the worse. Now he looked at her
with that little supercilious sneer she had come to know and loathe.” / “The real Doctor must still be in there
somewhere. That was the only reason why anyone would stay with him and put up
with him. At least, any other reasons for staying with him were just too
horrible to contemplate.” Ouch.
In the long run, Burning Heart has an excuse for Peri’s
instant loathing of him, and Dave Stone comes up with another one up front:
seeing Peri’s reaction to the appalling conditions of the Habitat, and
acknowledging that they can't be changed, “the anger [the Doctor] had instilled
in her had countered and overridden the severe culture shock that might well
have threatened to tear her mind apart. Hopefully, it would protect her for a
while yet.” I’m not sure culture shock is that likely after the spate of
aggressive and weird aliens she’s encountered already – she’s met killer
androids, megalomaniac slugs, Cybermen, a smaller and more perverted slug, she’s been turned into a bird – but it’s a nice piece of character work for the
apparently thoughtless Sixth Doctor, who elsewhere is “someone who, [Peri] sometimes felt, could not honestly care less if she
lived or died.”
The overriding problem for me is
that Peri and the Doctor spend the next 200 pages apart. They’re in something
like three scenes together, so if Burning
Heart is intended to be the great “Peri accepts Sixie” book, it lacks the
material to qualify. Meanwhile, the Doctor runs afoul of the Adjudicators and
spends most of his time meeting other alien undesirables in their holding
cells, while he (all too slowly) begins to suspect that something is wrong
here. Peri falls in with a violent faction called Human First, which she
improbably believes is just this harmless bunch of guys, y’know? (Perhaps
2019’s depressing political atmosphere has made the red flag easier to spot.)
The aforementioned excuse for Peri’s bad mood also covers her sudden interest
in species-ist uprisings, but then Stone’s bets are hedged with the idea that
this dangerous anger was already a part of her. Burning Heart doesn’t really go into or justify that, although her
state of undress (taking a moment to examine her bruised, naked body) and her
luck with outfits might go some way to explaining a burning rage within: her
Human First uniform “mostly came from a
supplier for the underground fetish clubs”, and “had also been carefully tailored to enhance certain bits and pieces
into what a realtor would probably call a spectacular development of frontage
... She felt like a cross between a peroxide rock chick and the wet dream of a
gentleman of a certain age.” I see what you did there, but... can you really be said to be commenting on a thing, if you’re just
doing it anyway?
As well as separating them, the
book doesn’t seem all that interested in them. The mysterious Kane buzzes
around Peri, maybe-or-maybe-not working for Human First, and generally driving
the action more than she does. He has an attachment to an Adjudicator named
Chong, who works with the somewhat blinkered cop Craator, who seems to impact
the plot more (or at least more often) than the Doctor. His boss is the
religious zealot Garon (oh good, a religious zealot), while Peri and Kane have
to contend with the equally zealous Jelks. Both leaders are getting people
killed for their rather vague causes, but neither develops any depth. Same goes
for most of the in-between characters, many of whom don’t even get names –
it’s just group descriptors like Hand Of God, White Fire and so on. Things in
the Habitat get worse until they explode into violence, but unfortunately
Burning Heart hasn’t installed enough rounded characters for us to invest in
its decline. The Habitat is also such a hot mess to start with that it doesn’t
feel at all momentous when it gets worse. It just feels like Tuesday.
Maybe some of this is just the
nagging sense that Dave Stone is playing in the New Adventures sandbox, and
we’ve heard all this before. I’d also raise an eyebrow at the revelation that
(spoiler) people are behaving the way they are because of an outside influence
which is (in its own way) benevolent, meaning the violence is incidental. I
certainly suspected some mind control with Peri – and got increasingly worried
as the book went on and nothing was said about it, in case Stone had simply
decided that Peri Loves Terrorism this week – but as well as being yet another
accidental (?) yoink from Transit, this also allows Burning Heart to completely shrug off the two-dimensional
characterisation of Garon and Jelks. It’s just, well, of course they’re dull
fundamentalists. That’s the point! Urgh. Really?
Some arguably interesting things
are happening here, such as the pulsing alien Node that hangs monolith-like
over the Habitat and causes some of the random craziness below. (Such as deadly
hallucinations, psychic murders, angel-like visions that kill and just all
sorts of other random yuckness.) There is also OBERON, the computer /
intelligence that Garon and the Adjudicators are slave to. Both of these are
revealed as emergent lifeforms quite near the end, but it’s more of an
info-dump than a drip-fed mystery; the book has by this point shown so little
concrete interest in the Node that I was worried he’d forgotten about it. The
revelation is like the Sixth Doctor himself, dropping hints and waiting for you
to get it, then saying in his most irritating tone, “Well? Give up?” (He tells Peri “Telling is for people without the wit to see”,
which is a bit bloody rich.) On the way here, all you can do is wade through Burning Heart, bouncing from one group
of characters whom the narrative may or may not be writing with a deliberate
lack of detail to another. It felt like 250 pages going on a million.
Much of this sounds crazy, to me
anyway, coming from Dave Stone. Sky Pirates! is as jolly, fun and mad as its
title suggests. Death And Diplomacy is a jaunty, if somewhat patchier romantic comedy. Such sustained futurism and misery is a funny fit for
him, but there is the occasional concession to what, at this point, we can
probably call Dave Stone-ness. There are plenty of witty observations, like a
tangent on alien religions that includes The Rite Of Exterminating Everything
That Isn’t a Dalek. Stone has (inevitable) fun with the Sixth Doctor’s
verbosity, leaving other characters bored or irritated in exchanges such as: “Indeed, as the Doctor had said once, if it
wasn’t for all these thinking, walking lumps of organised meat, these automemes
in organic machines bucking local entropy all the time, the Universe would be
in a hell of a state. And Peri had said, ‘What?’” And just when you think Stone
has found the ultimate vessel for his obsession with long or obscure words in
Sixie, he introduces the Doctor to someone worse: an enormous
centipede called Queegvogel with a malfunctioning, psychotically verbose
translation box. (I’m not even typing it up, just trust me.) He peppers the
book with words like “bathetic” and “geodesic” that we both know aren’t part of
everyday conversations over the counter at Tesco, and I may have needed to
Google afterwards. He can turn a lovely phrase, like the Doctor’s summing up of
what it means to impact other people’s lives even a little, or the coda that
follows it.
But here we are. Burning Heart is still a dull,
derivative wander through the wrong book range. You’re right, the Habitat
sucks. Get me out of here.
4/10
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