#4
Ship Of Fools
By Dave Stone
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming. I regret to inform you that there has been a murder. Okay, make that several murders. Actually now that I come to look at the list it appears that most of the people due to attend here tonight have already been murdered, in a variety of comedic ways. This list is… extensive, isn’t it? And it seems not entirely on topic? There’s a gentleman here apparently belonging to an alien species that’s obsessed with innuendo. Some jokes here about bad poetry. Drifting off into a sort of spy thriller now. And this bit’s just a recipe.
Dave Stone is a lot, isn’t he? His fondness for verbiage, broad comedy, intertextuality and fourth wall breaking have made him a somewhat divisive figure in Doctor Who fiction (or Doctor Who-related, thankyouverymuch), but I’ve generally been impressed by how well, compared to some other relatively green authors, he knows what he wants to do. Sky Pirates! was a spectacularly silly quest narrative. Death And Diplomacy was a light and silly pseudo-romcom in space. Burning Heart was apparently a 2000 AD pastiche (I wouldn’t know, haven’t read any), but it was less light and silly and, perhaps consequently, not great. We come now to his first book just for Bernice Summerfield and we’re back on the silly and onto a new genre. I’ll say this for Stone: you can always tell when a book is by him, yet within that bracket he’s remarkably keen to change tack.
Stone’s stated aim here (as per Bernice Summerfield — The Inside Story) was to show off a universe without Doctor Who in it. The most expedient way he could think to do that was a murder mystery set on a space liner, which partly makes sense. Said liner can contain lots of different species and go to lots of places, after all. But with a setup like that you’re mostly stuck indoors (even if it is technically in space) which makes the universe seem a bit pokey, and the more you adhere to murder mystery tropes (as a genre nutter like Stone is bound to do) the more Earth-bound the story and characters will seem, making it irrelevant that the murder victims are, for example, weird green blobs. (Which anyway, they’re not.) Heck, there literally already is a murder mystery set on a space liner in Doctor Who, but nobody’s going to argue that Terror Of The Vervoids broke new ground in world-building.
Still, this is Dave Stone, not Pip and/or Jane Baker, and he world-builds whenever he can. If anything, sometimes I wish he’d stop: see, the aforementioned aliens who love innuendoes, which is as hilarious as it sounds. There’s a lovingly detailed bit about the roughest pub on Dellah. There’s a species who feel honour-bound to add a long-winded insult to every statement. (I just started skimming over these, sorry Dave.) There’s one bit of shore leave for the passengers with attendant lovingly detailed spiel about the planet Shokesh and its crafty tourism industry. There are passages about largely irrelevant characters, such as the ship’s captain who pretty much is only there for appearances because the computer does everything. (I actually love this – and the fancy bridge just for appearances with blinky lights that turn off when there are no passengers in sight – as it recalls, but predates Avenue 5.) And there are between-chapter Interludes of deliberately hackneyed, casually racist old-timey spy action, followed by straight-faced fantasy fare which do all become plot relevant, but show up so late that they feel a bit left-field even for him.
There’s, in short, a lot here. But tying all that to a murder mystery, one of your plottier genres, can make going off like that seem rather indulgent. And this is the downside of Dave Stone’s writing style: no off switch. Stone is clearly a man who’s up on his Douglas Adams (quite right too, you’d be mad to write funny SF and not know Hitchhiker’s), but he seems less interested in his keenness to edit a joke. There are comedic lists in Ship Of Fools that dither on for paragraphs at a time. There’s a scene devoted to a character’s ancestry and how each ancestor died; later, a chapter spends three pages listing the deaths on the space liner only to follow up – incredibly! – with “in short…” There are sentences like the following: “Benny – whose room in the St Oscar’s halls of residence was packed with so many tottering heaps of data wafers, holoslugs, bound books, boxes of half-eaten kimu takeout, woofi-bird bones, toiletries, underwear, knick-knacks, gew-gaws, how’s your fathers, half-empty cups of cinnamon and caffeine beverage, completely empty bottles, tins and flasks of wine, beer and spirits, unmarked tutorial work, crumpled first pages of the supposedly next book, an antique typewriter, several antique felt-tipped pens, the cat-litter tray from hell and the various other odds and ends of a hectic life that resulted in a living space you couldn’t describe topographically in a year – found these new surroundings aliens and bland.” And I’m sorry, I don’t care how funny any of that is, wild horses wouldn't keep my brain from buggering off to the pub before the end of it. You get pretty good at spotting when a sentence is just going to amuse itself for a while, so we’ll see you in a bit when it’s done. There comes a point where it’s just not serving anyone but the author.
Okay: is it funny, though? Often, yes. On the inevitably doomed liner Titanian Queen, along with the aforementioned aliens-with-wacky-speech-patterns, there’s a cadre of thinly veiled pastiches of famous detectives, each loaded with amusing critiques of their methods of detection. (One of them becomes a running joke that doesn’t pay off until the last page.) There’s the solid satire with the computer that controls everything so the crew doesn’t have to – the computer, in itself, is admittedly more annoying than funny, and is another obvious yoink from Adams. Some of Stone’s diversions hit the target without going over the word-count, like an early vignette about an attempted robbery involving an invisible robber and hi-tech defences on a tropical island.
And there’s Bernice in the middle of it, who is such a naturally funny protagonist that laughs are guaranteed. Right? Well, yes and no. She’s as acerbic as ever, Stone’s prose moulding Wodehouse-like around her at times. But Ship Of Fools made me realise how much of Benny’s comedic appeal is her internal monologue and her dialogue; we don’t spend enough time in her head and she doesn’t often have someone to talk to. In more than one chapter she goes to sleep in her room, which sounds wonderful for her but doesn’t make for especially witty copy. She spends a good chunk of the book waiting for the plot to get going, and when it does, she does the smart thing and avoids it. At times like this I wish Bernice had a companion to get involved and report back.
The mystery, at least, is a solid one. (Those wacky Interludes feed into it a lot. I really wish they were seeded into the book sooner.) Stone’s predilection for funny details often means nothing seems to happen until the end of a chapter, but by and large it’s all amusing to read. As ever, he seems to know what he wants to do. I’m just not sure the chosen combination of writer and genre entirely pays off here. It feels oddly like Bernice sat this one out – a complaint I seem to keep making – rendering Ship Of Fools a peculiar, albeit jolly entry in the range.
Oh. You’re still here, are you? Sorry, got a bit distracted there. Anyway. Pretty sure the butler did it.
6/10
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