Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #124 – The Joy Device by Justin Richards

The New Adventures
#22
The Joy Device
By Justin Richards

The New Adventures were at an awkward stage when this one rolled around. We’ve introduced a major arc, run with it more consistently than the range has done before, then appeared to resolve it, but introduced a new arc element anyway, then knocked that one off that in the next book. The main arc is over or merely paused, depending on who you ask, and we’re just… still here. It’s like waiting for a bus. They’ve brought Justin Richards back one book after his quasi-finale (did they even let him leave the building?), probably in the hope that at least he’ll know what to do.

By all accounts he didn’t, because The Joy Device is anything but a decisive next step. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Bernice needs a holiday. Before long she becomes entangled in a crime and a murder due to a Hitchcockian wrong-place-wrong-time contrivance. Various parties seek a mysterious artefact. No one seems remotely interested in what is or isn’t happening on Dellah. It’s as if they all collectively picked up a script that fell down the back of the sofa ten books ago.

None of that is by mistake. Per Richards: “[They] came to me … and said ‘We need another Benny book and we need it in a month.’ I said, ‘Well, to be honest I've written the last-ever Benny book. Doing some more is a shame from a narrative point of view.’” As a stopgap, he came up with something even he didn’t think would sustain a novel, and probably no one would think of as essential to read, but which might pass the time amiably enough. Think, average Benny novel, but as a farce. (“So, average Benny novel then?” you might say. No comment.)

Bernice’s need for a holiday does at least come via the arc plot. She is no longer dying, but chunks of her memory have gone for good. She doesn’t know how to cope with that – having copious journals isn’t the quick win you might think, partly because she rewrites them all the time. So she wants to make new memories. The best way to do that, she reckons, is to live dangerously, which horrifies all her closest friends. (It’s worth mentioning here that she isn’t 100% committed to this and expects them to talk her round, but Jason makes such a balls up of it that off she goes. (It is also worth mentioning that all her closest friends are men. Isn’t that weird?)) So Braxiatel, Chris, Jason and Clarence decide to keep a close eye on her activities and swoop in – literally viz Clarence – to remove any dangerous obstacles. Bernice is going to Mr Magoo it, in other words, whether she likes it or not.

I’d be lying if I said this approach reaps a lot of rewards (as would Richards: “I don't think that's a book. It might be a short story but it won't sustain a novel”), but I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. The entire conceit is based on how much the characters care for Bernice, and that appeals to me enormously. One of the major issues I’ve had with Jason as a character is that he butts heads with Bernice, usually as a tired prelude to the old “they fancy each other really” routine, but often with a real unpleasantness that makes you think, well why bother adding him in then? Since Beige Planet Mars though, he’s kept the twattishness to a gentle sarcasm and by all accounts he actually wants to be here. Suddenly the bullish uselessness is endearing, and the concern - though not enough to sustain a marriage between two unstoppable forces - is genuine. (As I said about another Dave Stone protagonist in Return To The Fractured Planet, I wish they’d reached this point sooner. I’d read more books about this guy.) To a lesser extent, concern for Bernice makes Clarence a better character too: he has identity crises for days, but one thing he’s sure of is his platonic love for our scrappy archaeologist. It anchors him, which is no mean feat for an artificial life form with giant angel wings. In short, these two running around to make sure Bernice is okay made me smile a lot.

It’s also quite funny, although your mileage may vary. I’ve watched enough Frasier to rub my hands with glee at the thought of a comical misunderstanding, and there’s tons of that here, with Bernice being assured of danger at every corner by her well-travelled guide Dent Harper only to see nothing of the sort. “I appreciate your tales of danger and mystery and intrigue, really I do. But everyone here is just as nice as pie.” This slowly drives Harper to distraction, which is quite fun in itself. Later, when the two of them are tasked with finding Dorpfeld’s Prism – our mysterious object du jour – they narrowly escape execution only because, unknown to them, Jason is jabbing a knife against the mob boss in question, so she suddenly becomes courteous.

Some of the writing is just downright good, like this bit of unseen slapstick: “‘The genuine ones are incredibly strong and emit a perfect C-flat when you tap the lip of the opening on something.’ She carefully lifted it up again. ‘Here, like this.’ The embarrassed silence was broken by the sound of the lift arriving. Dent followed Benny in without a word. Benny coughed. ‘Sorry about that,’ she muttered. ‘Do you have someone who clears up?’” And I’d direct anyone in need of perking up to Chapter 2 – the comedy of errors as Bernice makes her mind up and her friends panic is a thing of bliss.

How far any of the above will take you probably depends on your tolerance for frothy comedy and gentle character beats. I was clearly in the mood for it, and even then I found the story almost aggressively lightweight. The whole debacle around Dorpfeld’s Prism feels like it should be interesting, but it isn’t. The artefact causes whoever holds it to be happy, but only because they are oblivious to danger. That’s a thematic link to what Jason and Clarence are doing for Bernice, but even then it’s just the same thing again, except more literal and more obviously a bad idea. So bad you sort of wonder what the local crime boss thinks she’ll get out of stealing it. But even then, Bernice eventually gets hold of the thing and is fine actually, so I don’t really know what Richards is saying. It doesn’t do much to enhance the action; narratively all it does is defuse situations or get people killed by proxy. As for the idea that real happiness can’t be as easy as holding a magic gem, I’m struggling to even take the piss out of such a basic concept, but Bernice does pretty much have a nice time with or without it, so…

Most of the non-regular characters are similar non-starters. The crime boss, Mrs Winther, shows promise as a weary and potentially reasonable fixture of the underworld, but firstly it’s hard to root for someone with such a patently daft retirement plan, and secondly Richards won’t stop making references to her weight, as if that has any bearing on her characterisation. (Technically it could do, but it doesn’t, so it just seems cruel.) Her number 2, Nikole, thinks her boss is old and weak and is itching to bump her off and take over the business - but first of all, how bog standard is that, and second of all, that was Mrs Winther’s plan for her anyway. Chill, love, the promotion’s in the post.

Perhaps wonkiest of all is Dent Harper, Bernice’s famous guide, who just doesn’t quite add up. He’s an adventurer who keeps journals and rewrites them – okay, there’s a parallel with Bernice. (Again, it ain’t subtle.) But he’s a little different in that his rewrites exist to sensationalise his life and make him sound better. (Bernice’s rewrites also come from a place of insecurity but there’s no pomposity there, and she keeps the original versions.) After we’re introduced to Dent and the concept that he embellishes things, he then appears to believe his own hype, which makes for good comic fodder. But then, with Jason and Clarence taking care of business all around him, it’s not really possible to show that his (overhyped) worldview is wrong – because it isn’t, if external forces need to get in the way to make it safer than it really is. You could show him being surprised at more real life danger happening than is normal, and then bafflement when it’s taken away before Bernice can spot it, but that’s a layer of complication that just isn’t happening. As with Dorpfeld’s Prism then, I ended up wondering what Richards was trying to achieve here. A comic buffoon who can’t tell reality from aggrandisement? Probably, but he’d have had exactly the same journey if he really was the danger-loving guy he purports to be, and that doesn’t seem right.

Probably the only material gain from The Joy Device is Bernice’s perspective on memory loss: she eventually decides that not knowing how she got out of this scrape or that disaster is no bad thing really, so long as she knows that she did. This is not as much of a boon as getting her memories back - and I still think that was a weird, mean thing to do to your protagonist in her surely soon-to-end series - but it gives her something of a restorative to be getting on with. (And it probably would have felt a bit pat anyway if she got them back right after she cured her terminal illness. Here’s an idea, just don’t fire these random life-altering horrors at her if you don’t want to keep them around.) Apart from all that, The Joy Device is knowingly just a runaround, destined to be enjoyable in the moment or irritating as part of a series. I got through it very quickly, which ought to count for something, and like Benny I really did have a nice time, whilst sort of wishing more would happen.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #123 – Return To The Fractured Planet by Dave Stone

The New Adventures
#21
Return To The Fractured Planet
By Dave Stone

Well, that’s this range of books over with. Cheers, Tears Of The Oracle. On the whole then, I thought it went – wait, what? We’re still going? Argh! Does anyone have a book ready to go, like right now?

Lucky for us, Dave Stone did. Return To The Fractured Planet was written mostly as an original novel, or at least “not entirely disconnected from the world of Benny … with the intention of going back over it and detaching it entirely.” (Bernice Summerfield — The Inside Story.) I don’t know whether Stone intended to spin off the adventures of his unnamed hero from The Mary-Sue Extrusion, but what we end up with here is enough of its own thing, even with that sequel element, to imagine that might have worked. The Stratum Seven operative (a fictional version of him was once called Flint, so I’ll use that here) learns in the course of Mary-Sue that his memories are not his own, just as he is not really human. He’s not entirely artificial either, leaving us with a fairly complicated and generally pissed off intergalactic wetwork guy. I’m not saying he’s endlessly fascinating or anything, but it’s perhaps a shame Stone didn’t hit upon this idea sooner. You could have had him work alongside Benny and Chris a few times, and you could probably spin him off too if that was an option.

All of which is to say, Return To The Fractured Planet being intended as its own unrelated thing? Knock me down with a feather… I don’t think. Regardless of its merits as a novel, you might reasonably feel a bit narked reading a book like that at this point in the series. Quite simply: are we arc-ing or aren’t we?

“Ah,” you might say. “But it’s all been tied up now, hasn’t it? That Justin Richards doesn’t muck about.” Well, yes and no. The Gods arc has – nominally, if you want – been given a resolution. We didn’t go and watch it play out, but it’s there. And Stone… just doesn’t appear to know about that, with Bernice and Brax investigating what they think is another escaped Godlike entity from Dellah. Even though they’re all stuffed. (It turns out it isn’t one. But then, it is? Sorry if I’m spoiling the twist here, but then again the “twist” is that yes, this book is part of this series. Even if the author didn’t get a very important memo from one book ago.)

So we have continuity, even if it’s of the “I wasn’t really listening but I think I got the gist of it” kind. More importantly, we carry on with Bernice’s condition: she found out she was dying in the previous book, likely thanks to a botched temporary memory wipe in The Mary-Sue Extrusion (thanks a lot, Dave!) and that is picked up again here. Again though, he misses some specifics: Tears Of The Oracle ends with a hopeful lead on the Fountain Of Forever, which might save Bernice. No mention of that here, although a still-game Benny appears to have longer left to live than when we last saw her. (Months, instead of weeks. Is that progress… or another memo gone astray?) In the last 20 pages or so, when it is hurriedly revealed that something-something-Dellah-I-guess after all, the plot contrives to get Bernice out of her illness too.

I’ve got to give Stone plaudits here for fitting that so neatly into his plot, but good heavens, it would be nice if that sort of thing happened to her in a book where she could aspire to be even second billed. “Flint” grows to like Bernice (whom you may remember he barely met last time), and he becomes concerned about her both subtly and visibly deteriorating state. That’s nice, but it would be nicer (since it is part of an actual y’know ongoing series type thing) if I knew what the actual sufferer of said condition was going through. She does at least get to strike the critical blow against the baddie at the end, which – as well as being handy for her salvation – might be a sweetener to any Benny fans wondering just who they’ve got to knock off to get a solid heroine in this town.

Hey ho, Flint’s our man whether you like it or not, so what kind of jaunt is he on this time? Well, picking up on threads (and literally some of the text) from Mary-Sue, we dive back into his past to his awakening as an Artificial Personality Embodiment – a sort of cyborg with another person’s memories – and his first mission. Alongside Kara, another APE that he instantly likes more than the rest, he is sent to investigate Sharabeth, the fractured planet of the title. The fractures refer to time, but there’s little in the text to round that out. Sharabeth is just an unpleasant and out of control hellscape, with crazed surgeons and roaming metallic creatures. It’s suitably ’orrible but not very interesting; the interesting bit is Flint’s time spent with Kara. Or at least as far as it informs the other half of the book – because, surprise, it’s two books running alongside each other! (This isn’t as confusing as you might expect, with handy different fonts to keep your head right.) The second, main chunk is Flint now, assigned by Braxiatel to investigate the possibly-sorta-arc-relevant murder of Kara.

The interesting-but-also-frustrating thing about The Mary-Sue Extrusion was that a seemingly unrelated adventure (that happened to involve Bernice) took up most of the book, only to turn out to be right in the thick of the series arc by the end. Return To The Fractured Planet is, for reasons that should be obvious if you’ve read this far, even more of the former and less of the latter. As we cut between Flint’s would-be suicide mission on Sharabeth and his investigative vengeance back home on the Proximan Chain (another bit of world building that just doesn’t come off, and he’s had two books for this one), there’s at least more of a grip on the main character this time around. That’s what I meant about how it would have been good to discover this guy sooner: he is emotionally invested in the story this time, cut up about the death of someone he more or less cared about and not now caught by surprise regarding his origins. (I can’t remember – ho, ho – whether the reason for his amnesia was in Mary-Sue. There’s no sign of it here, just a past and a present where he’s aware of what he is.) He can cut a bloody swathe about the place, in other words, for what feels like an actual character-driven reason.

Does that help if you’re here to read another New Adventure featuring Bernice Summerfield? (And would you even be here if you weren’t?) Probably not. To briefly draw an unfair comparison, Dead Romance didn’t feature our fave archaeologist at all, but it did matter to the arc and the established New Adventures world. The only established bits here (apart from Chris Cwej appearing fairly late in the game – Stone got that memo) are care of Mary-Sue. When you take out the last-gasp arc bits, and do the same with Mary-Sue, I think this story is the stronger. The dual narratives idea is quite effective, although all Operation: Sharabeth really does is give us more time with Kara and (eventually) set up our villain, who we finally discover does stereotypical things that don’t always make sense because *checks notes* he can’t help himself. Huh. I don’t know whether the sudden parachuting in of Dellah mythology weakened the villainy Stone already had planned, but what’s left seems awfully like a lot of mean-minded, vaguely satirical busywork. It’s not much of a pay off. Still, Flint’s investigations in the present have a pulpy, enjoyable quality to them, like a less eyeroll-deserving Mean Streets. The prose never dawdles off down an alleyway like a lot of Stone’s novels. You might actually miss that, of course.

Crucially, Fractured Planet doesn’t change our perspective at the end like Stone’s previous, perhaps less emotionally invested book did. So if you’re going to compare them – as I can’t help doing – you have a weaker novel with an ending that means something more to the series, followed by a more rounded book that tosses in a critical plot point as if it’s working on a computer battery that’s about to go. I think, on balance, Mary-Sue has more reason to be a New Adventure, whereas it’s downright strange for a series now in its twilight volumes to provide literally random manuscripts to be getting on with. You can probably put that one on the management more than on Stone himself, who just wanted to write about his cyborg guy, I guess. It’s best looked at in that light.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #122 – Tears Of The Oracle by Justin Richards

The New Adventures
#20
Tears Of The Oracle
By Justin Richards

Oof.

Look, I know every book can’t be Dead Romance, and that a sideways nightmare not even featuring Bernice Summerfield won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But for the very next instalment to not only jump back into the structurally sound embrace of Justin Richards, but also make things far more traditional overall, feels like an over-correction to me.

Still, there might be reasons for that besides “that’s just how he do.” During my customary post-book visit to Simon Guerrier’s Bernice Summerfield — The Inside Story I learned that Richards believed he was writing the final Benny book. (There was a lot of that about at the time: Where Angels Fear was assumed by some to be the end.) That certainly might explain why a series that has just spent the last few books pushing further and further away from its conventions should suddenly find Bernice – oh, lord – on an archaeological dig that turns into a murder mystery. It’s probably supposed to be a victory lap. You don’t do those in completely uncharted territory.

It also explains why Richards delves into recent continuity more than you’d expect for just another one-off trope jolly. For a while I thought he was just being thorough, but the significance piles up: the treaty between the People and Time Lords, established in Dead Romance, is front and centre, and we pick up Chris’s story from there; the events and characters of Walking To Babylon get a mention; Clarence’s mysterious origins are given some more fuel; The Mary-Sue Extrusion is potentially still important to Bernice; a character arc I didn’t know was a character arc is resolved from Dragons’ Wrath; characters from The Medusa Effect are seen again as Bernice and Braxiatel revisit Dellah, which then shoves us right back into Where Angels Fear; hell, one of the book’s sub-sub plots is setting up the Braxiatel Collection from Richards’ (and Braxiatel’s) debut, Theatre Of War. (Said back-when-they-had-the-license book also forms a critical plot point near the end.) There’s even a flashback to Happy Endings! Plus Richards canonises, as much as you can without the license, Brax being the Doctor’s brother. This stuff isn’t continuity box-ticking, it’s “don’t forget to turn out the lights when you go.” You can even read one of the book’s final flourishes as a neat resolution to the Gods arc. I know hindsight is wonderful, but Richards has just made it rather awkward for that idea to keep going for three more books, one of them his. (And to think, I was only just marvelling at how well the editors and authors had been keeping it together.)

You’ve got to admire – and I do – the effort it takes to tie this all together. But a lot of that stuff comes quite near the end, or becomes clear at that point, with Tears Of The Oracle feeling in the main like a decent meat and potatoes dig of the week. The main concern of the plot, as well as being a riff on The Thing (and perhaps a riff on riffs on The Thing), even feels like suspiciously similar territory to The Medusa Effect (also by Richards), as a series of historic deaths threaten to happen again to Bernice and friends. In this case a trip to The Oracle, a fortune-telling statue long thought lost, goes better than expected until an unexplained shape-shifter starts offing the expedition. Is this what happened to the previous expedition? Paranoia increases, naturally, and Bernice hurtles ever closer to the book’s framing device, which sees her preparing to complete a murder-suicide bid.

It’s good, solid stuff, as you would rightly expect from Richards, though if anything I thought the team would be more paranoid. (It doesn’t seem to occur to them that the killer must be one of them. Goodness knows who they thought dunnit.) The paranoia angle is very specifically tied to having contact with the killer, and it mainly manifests in Bernice going on a panicked rampage at the end, which is rather frustrating to read as we’ve got very little reason to believe she’s right and everyone else is wrong.

What with all the continuity affecting Braxiatel, the People and even – significantly but also just as a means to have him show up – Chris, who regenerates in this one, Bernice comes close to being a silent partner in the book, especially when she starts drifting along with the antagonistic folie a deux. (Bernice not being entirely herself is also one of the range’s tropes, while we’re at it.) It’s an odd one to end on, in theory at least, since it also lobs a terminal illness into the mix. Yes, we end on a note of hope and a spirit of adventure. You know in your gut that she’s going to zoom off and beat this thing, with or without further adventures. But if you know the range is wrapping up now or even soon, “she’s dying” could seem like a tasteless footnote.

As ever, you’re in safe hands with Richards, and this is definitely a tighter effort than The Medusa Effect. I think I’m just not the most receptive audience for his puzzle-solving narratives; the tendency throughout Tears Of The Oracle to present information in journal entries, confessions or other forms of data seems oddly antiquated, like Victorian novels that are all diaries. That form of storytelling also ironically minimises Bernice, unless she’s writing all the journals, which might seem a rather choosy criticism after flying through Dead Romance without her, but if you’re going to send her specifically on a last hoorah with trowels and crime scenes then she really ought to run away with it.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #121 – Dead Romance by Lawrence Miles

The New Adventures
#19
Dead Romance
By Lawrence Miles

Things have been looking bleak for the universe since Where Angels Fear unleashed its godlike entities on Dellah. Now along comes Lawrence Miles to ask the important question: what about other universes? Can they be screwed, too?

I’m getting ahead of myself, but that’s in keeping with Dead Romance, a novel told in first person by a distinctly unreliable narrator named Christine. Her notebooks full of memories are not always in the right order.

First person is just better, in my experience. Obviously it needs to be done well – it is done very well here – and third person can be better written, but first person just gets a story into your brain faster, or gets you into the story faster. Christine’s direct and unpretentious reactions to the weirdness and horror that stalks London, and later space at large, grounds Dead Romance in a way that would have helped plenty of other New Adventures to get their ideas across. (That includes ones by Lawrence Miles. Early parts of Dead Romance recall gnarly NAs like Christmas On A Rational Planet or The Death Of Art – all spooky WTF imagery and gross body horror. But this time there’s a clear purpose from start to finish, and nothing feels like it’s happening just to sprinkle on a bit of atmosphere.) The occasional bit of information arriving too early, like a wound in Christine’s leg or an as-yet-unmentioned character named Khiste, really only serves to make you rethink what you’ve already read and want to know more. I was never confused by Dead Romance, but the gulf between what had been revealed and what was very quietly still a mystery often fluctuated.

Here’s the gist: Christine, who tells us from the start that the world ended in October 1970, is having a terrible time thanks to rather too much cocaine and some kind of cannibalistic creature attacking her. She also has a run in with Chris Cwej, who later rescues her and recruits her to the cause. He is here on a mission from his employers (hold that thought) and as Christine knows too much, she’ll go along with him. She travels to other worlds and between universes as Chris tries to do something about the Entities.

As with The Mary-Sue Extrusion, we’re seeing this conflict from an unusual perspective, once again with Bernice Summerfield more as a concept than a character. An interesting editorial decision there. (I sympathise with anyone wondering when the hell we’re going to get on with it, Bernice-vs-the-Gods wise, or even where-is-Brax wise. But I’m not having a bad time waiting for it.) Christine, not a native of the twenty-sixth century, has even less idea what all this means that Dave Stone’s protagonist du jour. But I think both authors approach their outsider perspectives differently. Christine’s lack of preconceptions about the Time Lords are especially helpful when framing the good and the bad in this conflict.

Because ah yes, Chris’s employers – referred to here as “the time travellers” – stand no chance of anonymity behind Miles’s barely-trying air quotes. And they do not come out of this well. Some of their questionable practices are likely just the worst-case-scenario inventions of Christine, such as a murder-regeneration cycle that gradually causes more agony in the recipient. But at least one is on full display in front of her, as Chris foggily remembers his time with an “Evil Renegade” who went around ruining everything, which handily makes him more compliant around said renegade’s big collared betters. When they’re not brainwashing the friendliest character in this series, they’re experimenting on him and others in the front lines, causing mutations into things that will fight better, perhaps survive a little longer. Perhaps this isn’t really “our” Chris – we’ll see what he has to say for himself if he crops up again – but maybe that’s just me hoping, because good grief, the damage to Chris in this, both physical and mental.

And what’s it all for? The time travellers (why not) aren’t actively fighting the Entities in this: they’re retreating, possibly to think of a better idea later on in relative safety. Either way it’s not going to get rid of the problem. This fits, in a rather twisted way, with their policy of non-intervention. They retreated quite openly in Where Angels Fear, so it’s really just an escalation of that. Even the creatures they are most keen to negotiate with – the sphinxes, dimension-expanding monsters that originally worked with the Entities – aren’t directly interested in the conflict. Even the Entities aren’t uniform on the matter. (The Mary-Sue Extrusion highlighted that different “gods” have their own interests, and we are reminded of that here.) After a while it begins to feel like this is more about them being challenged than a genuine assessment of the threat they are facing. Later, when things kick off in this much-maligned 1970, they arguably have even less to do with the arc plot and more to do with the time travellers themselves and their warped monopoly on the worlds they observe.

(I have heard it said that Dead Romance feels like a novel apart from the series, and this bit of plot supports that. But the central question of what will be done in the name of defeating monsters slots perfectly into what the books are doing right now. And besides, no writer could create Dead Romance without being fundamentally interested in Doctor Who and the New Adventures. This one is too broad and too deep for BBC Books by a long shot, but it still finds time to casually throw in a sequel to Shada.)

Underneath all this is Christine, gazing in wonder at the weird worlds where Chris must make treaties with monsters, before – or during – finding herself back in her flat. Again with that out-of-sequence storytelling: she can never entirely hold on to a sense of where she is in the story, or even in her relationship with Chris, which seems to happen mostly when we’re not looking. All of this creates a tantalising sense of the story being both enormous and room-sized, as much itself in a cavernous realm of space as it is in a ruined magic shop. This fits entirely with the story itself, where monsters bigger than human imagination can be reasoned with and huge decisions can be made as simply as tossing a coin. It’s a novel that shrinks and expands throughout, as if sphinxes had settled in between the words.

It’s tempting to dive more into the plot and what it all means for Christine and Chris, but perhaps it’s better to tear those pages out of the notebook. Dead Romance holds together more confidently than I’m used to, and despite its earnest Doctor Who nerdiness – because this is the guy who wrote Alien Bodies, which barely seems bleak at all now – it feels like it ought to appear on sci-fi bookshelves on its own merits, a nightmare you want to share with others. You should go and read it, in other words, despite how gloomy I’ve made it sound. If Christine can stare all this stuff right in the face, so can you.

9/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #120 – The Mary-Sue Extrusion by Dave Stone

The New Adventures
#18
The Mary-Sue Extrusion
By Dave Stone

We’re in uncharted territory now, folks. All of a sudden and against all known laws of the Bennyverse, we’ve got continuity and we’re sticking to it.

That’s not to say there have been loads of continuity errors in this series. It’s more that these books have rarely seemed all that interested in what came before or in what’s coming next. With the advent of Where Angels Fear we have a fully fledged plot arc to be getting on with, and right from the prologue we’re reminded of those events – in a roundabout sort of way, it transpires. It immediately feels more like reading the New Adventures of old. (Granted, some of their arcs were a total mess, if not most of them, but it was great to feel like it mattered that you had read the one before and would stick around for more.)

All that said, it’s an interesting choice to take the next big step of this arc with Dave Stone. He’s mostly into surreal comedy and the idea of nailing him down for a bit of serious plot feels like a contradiction in terms. But I’ve got a pet theory about his writing that I think holds up here: if there is a clear enough assignment at the heart of it, be it a genre to take the piss out of or the next step of an arc, then he can focus his wackiness in a way that either helps or won’t hurt the story. If there isn’t, you’re left with wackiness that just sort of congeals. (I think his swings-and-misses are Burning Heart and Oblivion: a mean Judge Dredd imitator and a vague trip through the multiverse respectively.)

The Mary-Sue Extrusion takes a while getting to the point, but that’s par for the course with Stone. We follow (in first person) the adventures of an intergalactic mercenary/hit man/occasional time traveller who may or may not be named Flint McCrae. He has been tasked with finding Bernice Summerfield and he is being pursued by a couple of inept assassins, which doesn’t bother him much. He’s highly capable and less than pleasant, but there are numerous hints and cutaways throughout of a grim upbringing that may have toughened him into this. Anyway, he talks too much, or narrates too much, or however you want to put it. There are blobs of text which seem to underline the joke that if you hire Dave Stone, you might drown before the end of a sentence. “If I kept on going into the minor details of every little thing that flashes through my mind upon seeing a garbage canister and the possibly dangerous things it might contain, we’re going to be here all night and no further on by the end of it.” Quite. He throws in automatically ironic little qualifiers like “simple as that” and “what I’m trying to get across here is” after some exorbitant tangents, making me wonder how consciously he’s taking the piss. See his character’s reaction when faced with an acquaintance who has an aggressively long name: “Almost all of that’s mere extraneous bollocks, of course.” Really, Dave?!

I found myself skipping to the end of particularly self-serving chunks in Ship Of Fools and I was going that way in the first third or so of this. That’s not to say it’s never fun to read in and of itself. Stone is a very funny writer if you don’t mind settling in for the end of a thought. For instance this description of a grossly overweight crime lord: “A capable and effective man with eyes that missed nothing, secure enough in his own abilities to relax into them, to suffer fools to a precise and particular point and then no more, like a steel trap buried in lard.” It’s just that you start to notice how for every long and winding paragraph, there is maybe one concrete fact of the matter buried near the end of it. If you were so inclined you could probably speed run a Dave Stone book.

The action starts to get concise when he arrives on Thanaxos, the planet nearest to Dellah, and receives some scraps of information on what happened to Bernice after the exodus. He thinks she’s dead for a while because of a confused first hand account of her being carried away by an angel. (We know that was Clarence.) Then he gets genuinely trapped on the prison he has infiltrated, and only escapes when a reporter friend happens along and spots him in a crowd. At around the page 150 mark he ends up on a mission to Dellah – ostensibly to set up diplomatic relations between the two planets after Dellah’s mysterious transformation, really to look for clues re Bernice – and I wondered if you could just start the book there, or at least thereabouts. I’ve only just read the thing and I genuinely am not sure what Flint even got up to before Thanaxos.

That’s a situation made even more murky by Stone’s tendency to cut away, often to weird Elseworlds versions of his story or characters. Oblivion featured side characters slipping between entirely different lives; Ship Of Fools kept cutting to a strange pulp adventure. The Mary-Sue Extrusion falls somewhere in the middle, cutting in-universe to the fictionalised adventures of Bernice, called The New Frontier Adventures. Heightened and silly, Stone is here able to get in on some of that Beige Planet Mars ribbing of the series so far: “They couldn’t seem to make up their minds whether they were adventure stories, murder-mystery stories or some half-baked bastard hybrid of the two.” More pertinently we get occasional back-story on Flint (?) building to the reveal that he’s not an entirely organic life form, and these may be inherited memories. All of which is quite interesting – just as the New Frontier Adventures are quite funny – but when you start your book with a reminder of the ongoing arc and then veer off towards this instead, it’s tempting to ask what it’s in aid of and where the hell it’s going.

It’s all theme, I guess. (And hey, at least it’s not as meta as the title, provided by Kate Orman, makes it sound.) The trip to Dellah yields only secondary answers: he now knows that Bernice went back after her escape and left her diary behind which is a) unthinkable and b) confusing because the diary seems wrong, full of references to Benny’s apparent real life friend Rebecca. (Rebecca was her childhood doll, inexorably tied to parental trauma.) This is a clue that all is not as it appears – just as Flint is not – and Bernice is now in hiding, physically and mentally, on another world. She has used the titular Mary-Sue device to overwrite her mind and block the influence of the godlike Entities. All is pretty much well at this point (it was only a temporary override) except that Flint’s trip has inadvertently allowed the Entities to spread to Thanaxos. Benny, Flint, as well as Jason, his telepathic friend Mira (she was in Ship Of Fools apparently) and Emile (who we learn was possessed by an Entity in the previous book, and also went into hiding) rush back to Thanaxos to stem the tide.

And, well, that’s a hell of a lot of plot for a last act. It does an impressive job of putting the rest of it in perspective, a seemingly unrelated adventure subtly highlighting the gravity of the Gods situation: you don’t have to write a book directly set on Dellah or focusing on the Entities to show their influence, or the change happening in their wake. You can show the planet next door slowly and awkwardly adjusting to the new status quo. The very real possibility exists that Bernice has gone a bit potty with grief (although I didn’t buy that), and the lack of immediate closure on say, Braxiatel just makes you wonder even more how he’s getting on. (Getting an immediate answer to What Happened To Emile was a definite surprise, but it’s not as if his situation is resolved here.) Flint’s overall disinterest in Dellah and its upheaval somehow makes it feel more real, like a news story you’re sick of hearing about even though it’s still terrible. Even the victory won against the Entities feels temporary and entirely lucky, because he happened to be looking for Benny and that happened to lead him to a telepath. (Dave Stone-y sidestep: how’s this for an Elseworld? This entire “Gods” setup would have been a great pay-off for the Psi-Powers arc. You could keep all the morally grey stuff because it’s all done to stop a problem even the Time Lords and the People can’t solve. Ah well!)

The Mary-Sue Extrusion seems like a good use of Dave Stone’s talents, or bad habits if you’re so inclined. He can ramble and sidestep and not even write a book about Bernice per se, and still service the ongoing story in the end. (When we finally do get to Bernice she’s on reliably good form. “‘It’s a stupid grenade … It’s thrown into a room and, once primed, it hunts down the stupidest person in it and detonates…’ ‘Well, I personally think that certain tropes and themes to be found in Finnegan’s Wake were rather overdone,’ said Bernice, instantly and brightly.”) Flint is a decent enough protagonist, though I’m not sure he really evolves through the telling: he is neither as organic nor as artificial as he appears, but he already seemed comfortable with that knowledge. The main issue here is that the really satisfying stuff doesn’t occur until you’re a ways in already, and some of the really Dave Stone-y chaff is liable to fall away from memory entirely after that. It’s marginally more fun to think about than it is to read, then, but it’s at least a close race. I’m glad he’s got another assignment coming up. I hope it agrees with him.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #119 – Where Angels Fear by Rebecca Levene and Simon Winstone

The New Adventures
#17
Where Angels Fear
By Rebecca Levene and Simon Winstone

I’ve only myself to blame, really. I’ve complained a few times that the New Adventures aren’t going anywhere, preferring to play their meagre hits (mainly murder mysteries) instead – a problem cheerfully underlined and to be honest, exacerbated in Beige Planet Mars. And though I am 20+ years late, I feel like someone out there has heard me. A monkey’s paw has clenched a finger.

Where Angels Fear starts with a flash-forward: St. Oscar’s University is in ruins. Implicitly Dellah as a whole is in the same situation, but it is the Uni – Benny’s sanctum sanctorum, the heart of the series – that best symbolises the planet’s ruin. This is before we even get to the prologue. They might as well have put “certain doom” in the Acknowledgements.

The prologue is heartily grizzled as well, with an as-yet-undetermined number of random slayings committed on a spaceship. Chapter One then includes a random death by traffic accident. Things, once-editor Rebecca Levene and now-editor Simon Winstone (co-writers) seem overjoyed to tell us, are not okay. And from the first page alone, we know things will not improve.

That flash-forward fascinates me because apart from that, and despite those other early deaths, Where Angels Fear is not a gloomy book – or at least it’s one that takes its time getting there. Clearly a situation is happening on Dellah with all the planet’s religions, specifically the gods, suddenly coming to life. An influential Sultan is creating rules to enforce religion – of any sort – and discourage “immoral” behaviour, which at one point involves scaring a couple of stoners straight. It all seems faintly silly, with Bernice jetting off to investigate a local god with the aid of some Grel – readers will automatically know them as Funny Aliens, obsessed with facts. Irving Braxiatel, of all people, seems to be living through a comedy of errors as he dodges the affections of a voluptuous fellow professor. And that’s after he tells Bernice that his people (the you-know-what Lords) have run away and raised the draw-bridges, evidently terrified of an imminent threat. The book seems slightly crazed in tone, being upfront about a catastrophe and then insisting on playing as the Titanic goes down, entirely unaware.

That dissonance made it a bit hard for me to invest in the story. Well, is it a big deal or not? But I appreciated the idea behind it: religious fanaticism, which is surely the only way things can go when gods legit walk among us, probably would start small. Dangerous beliefs can take hold in little ways that may be easy to laugh off at first, and the gentle absurdity of Where Angels Fear, with New Moral Army soldiers wagging their fingers at non-believers who then end up at faith boot camp, makes it all the more horrifying when you realise there is no way to stop it escalating and – for this book at least – no coming back. Take the god Bernice goes to investigate, Maa’lon, who seems quite charming at first, until a local historical conflict flares up and then he leads a holy war. It is made very clear that Bernice isn’t going to snark her way out of this one, particularly in a creepy scene where she sees Maa’lon smiling on the battlefield and, despite being observed through binoculars, he turns to look at her.

Probably a bigger issue for me was the writing style – or to be more specific, that old favourite of mine, short sections. To be fair, it would be difficult to imagine Where Angels Fear without them as there is so much ground to cover. We’ve got Bernice and the Grel investigating Maa’lon, and then following (and hopefully surviving) his crusade. Emile, tasked by Bernice with investigating those prologue murders by inveigling his way into a local cult, at great personal risk. Renée, a music tutor at St. Oscar’s and a believer in a rather low-key religion, being drafted into the New Moral Army while orbiting the machinations of Braxiatel and a shadowy figure known only as John. A couple of medics/stoners, Fec and Kalten, also getting drafted. James, a Maa’lon preacher, going along with Bernice while terrified that his lapsed faith will be found out. And Clarence, angelic figure from the Worldsphere and friend of Bernice, whose people – like Braxiatel’s – have retreated from all this for reasons that can’t be good. He agonises throughout the book about what to do (still haunted by his significant inaction re Bernice in Walking To Babylon), not to mention his own mysterious past which God, aka the Worldsphere computer, keeps from him.

It’d be a very long novel if you didn’t chop and change between that lot, but all the same, changing the channel up to twice per page is hell for my attention span. And in amongst all of that, inevitably, Where Angels Fear doesn’t really have a protagonist. All of it just happens to everybody. It’s arguable whether this is A Bad Thing, but it’s puzzling for a series that revolves around a familiar character. One of the authors (Levene) purposefully didn’t write any of the Benny bits, as she didn’t feel she could capture her voice. This gives you some idea how regularly Bernice “The Reason We Are All Here” Summerfield is in it.

In some ways this is a nice problem to have, as it means any character can be granted depth as if they were the main focus. Braxiatel has never seemed more down to Earth, being almost frenziedly interested in Renée and passionately committed to staying on Dellah, his adopted home. He almost dies for it. (He refuses the call to we-legally-can’t-name-his-planet and his spaceship-you-might-know-the-name-of is taken away.) Emile – still a wearyingly self-deprecating teen riddled with familial psychological abuse – jumps through his usual gay panics, but also knowingly engages with fundamentalism while knowing the risks only too well. (And he dies! Or he doesn’t. I’m hoping further books will explain the ending.) James, the preacher, gives perhaps the best boots-on-the-ground view of the bubbling zealotry on Dellah, as his sense of guilt allows Maa’lon to flip his mind entirely to his cause, with murderous results. Renée, conversely, goes from a figure of fun caught in an absurd military role to someone who can seriously look Braxiatel in the eye. Even the silly old Grel come out of this richer and more real, from an amusing vignette about the birth of their fact-based society to what happens when they are confronted with proof of divinity – which isn’t even the same for every Grel.

It is perhaps Clarence, though, that comes closest to protagonist if-not-Bernice. He quests for knowledge, goes against his programming, confronts his feelings for Bernice and then rescues her, ending up in exile. (Though that may have been what God intended all along.) Bernice, it must be said, needs rescuing in this fashion twice, which I’m not too thrilled about. But then it’s a book determined to tell us the rules have changed, and there’s hardly a clearer way to do that than to have Benny out of her depth. (Blowing up the main hub of the New Adventures will admittedly also suffice.)

Where does this leave the New Adventures? Well, somewhere else, at the very least. (Which is a pity as I thought more books should have been set on Dellah.) There’s some significant arc stuff in Where Angels Fear, giving Clarence plenty to chew on about his past, and spelling out for us the working relationship between Bernice and God – which puts all those adventures with the Worldsphere in a new light. It’s what I wanted, at least on a moving-the-series-along level, and it’s undeniably very interesting when you dig into all the moving parts. (Some of which are still not entirely clear. See, what happened to Emile. And the strange murderer from Tyler’s Folly. And to be frank, what’s going on in general. Bernice only really vocalises the problem around Page 193.)

Where Angels Fear was still not the most readable book for me, for a couple of fairly semantic reasons, and it’s definitely a bummer overall. But perhaps that’s why they put the flash-forward in there: rip off the plaster right away so you can focus on the rest of it. I have no idea what the series will look like after this point, which is automatically an improvement. Hopefully it can answer my next question: is there a middle ground between bubbly mysteries of the week and Armageddon?

7/10