#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
No comments:
Post a Comment