Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #111 – Tempest by Christopher Bulis

The New Adventures
#9
Tempest
By Christopher Bulis

Few writers are quite as ubiquitous in Doctor Who fiction as Christopher Bulis, who by this point had written for all but two of the Doctors for Virgin Publishing. (One of the “not”s was Paul McGann and that was probably just because Virgin lost the license. Bulis later rectified this at BBC Books.) It is fitting, then, or at least unsurprising that he should have a crack at the Bernice Summerfield range as well.

Tempest is a murder mystery on a train. So far, blah: it’s fair to say we’ve been there and done that in pop culture. Hell, this range of books has already plundered Agatha Christie for Ship Of Fools. Sometimes though, it’s how you do it, and Tempest… is also not the great brain-teaser of the century as far as murder mysteries go. Bugger. (Let’s just say it employs the old gambit of leaving an obvious suspect completely unremarked upon for some reason. I cheered smugly when I was right.)

There are other marks against it. Bulis has somewhat of a tin ear for names in this, with the action centring around a priceless statue called the Drell Imnulate (just reading it on the page makes my tongue twist), characters such as Lankril, Tralbet the Narg and briefly two completely unrelated people called Lin and Lyn.

Worse though, on a general level, is Bernice. She just doesn’t seem as witty as usual. I can’t help rating these books on how well they’ve captured her voice — it’s one of the only constants of the range — and with inner monologues as, ah, pithy as “The more I learn the more I realise I don’t have to look outside my own species to find behavioural quirks quite as strange as those of any alien society,” I’m unlikely to exceed 3 Paul Cornells out of a possible 5, am I?

And yet: after a while I realised I was haring through this at a good speed. Though I held a pretty firm suspicion throughout over whodunit, I was enjoying the process of uncovering it and how it was dun. Last — and best — of all? It’s bloody Bernice, who is good in this, actually, Mr Judgy Where-Are-My-Quips.

First off, we see Bernice in her element delivering a lecture to laughter and applause. Showing, not telling! Hooray! She’s a guest speaker in need of funds. (“It will be a novel sensation to be solvent for a while.” Wouldn’t you know it, the cushy status quo from Mean Streets hasn’t held up.) As far as she knows she hasn’t been tasked with finding an ancient artefact or even solving a mystery for once, she’s just here to do her job and the plot happens to her while she’s on the way home. I’ve moaned before about the level of contrivance needed to get her into plots sans TARDIS, and it’s nice to make it feel natural once in a while. (Of course it turns out her involvement is not a coincidence, but that reveal didn’t bother me. She manages to avoid being further ensnared, and hence keep her agency, just by getting drunk at the right time. So that’s a character foible becoming critical to the plot. Nice!)

Her (arguable) lack of spark could be attributed to the fact that she’s knackered, and quite simply not interested in cleaning up a mess she didn’t cause. Whatever the reason in-continuity (and outside continuity apparently Bulis wanted to write a very all-ages-accessible Bernice, which in practical terms meant fewer rude jokes, so that’s that mystery solved), the result is a more weathered but I think, not unbelievable Bernice Summerfield. She’s done this sort of thing before, literally: “If you’re volunteering to take charge, be my guest. I’ve played detective before and believe me it’s harder than it looks.” (I think that’s above being called lampshading: if you’re stuck with repetition in a series, say so, as long as you can build on it.) Whether she likes it or not, she fits the role of investigator and hero, and the other characters seem to insist on it.

And why shouldn’t they? I’m probably projecting here – from the book’s general reputation it’s clear I’m quite generous about it too – but I like to think that’s just something characters pick up when they spend enough time with the Doctor. Bernice just seems like the one who’ll sort it out. She fits the mould of responsibility, particularly in a Doctor-ish moment where she consoles the survivors of a fight that, unlike the raiders who just attacked, their own lost lives were given for something that actually mattered. But she’s still not, and can’t be, the Doctor, hence joining in when a gun battle ensues and helping to engineer a fatal crash for some attackers. When we finally get to the accusing parlour scene, it doesn’t feel like a re-run of Ship Of Fools — firstly because this book isn’t so thoroughly arch about it, but mainly because she’s invested in this one, as mucked in as anyone else on this very unfortunate train.

Which is, by the way, another good thing about Tempest. The setting is both claustrophobic, rarely straying beyond the high speed train (which lets us focus on the plot and the characters), and interestingly sci-fi-ish, with the thoroughly inhospitable and weird planet frequently visible (and a frequent hindrance) just beyond the windows. The planet was the original impetus for the book, but I think it’s a smart move to keep it as an incredible thing we only get glimpses of. (You could come back to it and do more with it if you were so inclined, but I’m guessing they didn’t as Bulis didn’t return.) It’s a good way to keep the ho-hum setup from seeming too ho-hum while maintaining the essential “yeah but then what happens” of a murder mystery. That said, don’t panic, there’s plenty of action as well.

The mystery, which I’ve banged on about as being too simple, is at least more complicated in execution, with various red herrings and deliberate nefarious fake-outs. That process is fun, and the character relationships are fleshed out quite interestingly through the investigation. It all serves to get Bernice good and stuck into things, and make it feel as though these things can just happen to her, just as she can sort them out, quite naturally. Tempest isn’t especially bold or showy, but after multiple books where she felt like an afterthought in her own series, I can’t not appreciate that.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #110 – Mean Streets by Terrance Dicks

The New Adventures
#8
Mean Streets
By Terrance Dicks

Well, I wanted Bernice to get up to something different for a change, and here we are. There is no archeological dig in Mean Streets. After wittily griping about it in Ghost Devices, Bernice is now actually committing to her work on Dellah: she’s reasonably important and living on book royalties, in no mood for adventures, thank you very much. It takes a visit from Chris Cwej – which unwittingly triggers a Hitchocockian murder plot – to coax her into visiting an old haunt to solve a mystery. No trowel required.

Honestly, I’m not sure if this is a legit character choice for her eight books in or if Terrance just didn’t look at what she had already been doing (pretty consistently) up to now, vis-à-vis quite happily going on adventures, thank you very much. Like how Chris turns up entirely motivated by the death of Roz and determined to honour his friend. Okay, but why now? Has he been trapped in amber since So Vile A Sin? (We know he hasn’t: he’s been in five New Adventures since then.)

The reason for the (arguable) reset is probably the subject matter. You’ll have noticed a theme in some of Terry’s NAs, with the Al Capone era being visited in Blood Harvest and the futuristic crime haven of Megacity appearing in Shakedown. He loves noir and he’s not afraid to sprinkle some cheese on it. Well, it makes sense to dust off Megacity if he wants another go. The prologue is set during Shakedown and Mean Streets is a sequel to that book’s B-plot (which we’re only hearing about now). It’s a tenuous setup, and a fair amount of contrivance is needed so that Chris only has to mention a “Project” and “Megacity” in earshot to get Bernice involved, but it brings us back to prose like “The place was so corrupt that everyone had something to hide.” Ahhh: you can hear that boozy jazz already.

All of which is fair enough if you love that sort of thing. Unfortunately I have a pretty low tolerance for it. (Half of two novels was plenty, thanks.) More significantly, it’s not as if Mean Streets adds anything to the realm of cheesy noir that Terrance Dicks – not to mention the stuff he’s riffing on – hasn’t already done. (Literally, when it comes to sending our heroes undercover as criminals. See Blood Harvest.) He even makes efforts to rein in the futuristic elements that would otherwise make this different from yer average Raymond Chandler pisstake. Sure, there are aliens everywhere and there’s a sci-fi plot, but then Bernice goes shopping (in Megacity, on another planet, in the future) at a still thriving branch of Nieman-Marcus. One of the many crime syndicates in Megacity is noted for having “clung to the old Mafia terminology.” (Of course it has.) A resident of Megacity still refers to drugging people as a “Mickey Finn.” It’s all just a bit too comfortably Earth-like. We get it, Megacity is like old Earth Chicago. It doesn’t have to be old Earth Chicago, albeit with hovercars.

Take Garshak. He was an interesting character in Shakedown: an Ogron who thanks to genetic modification is not only not a brute but a genius. That’s basically Rocket Raccoon! Loads you could do with that! Last time he was an amusingly high cultured police captain in a lawless town; this time, long since out of the job, he’s a private eye. Okay, fair enough. But he’s only a private eye because he came across some old Earth pop culture and thought, why not. Really? He can’t arrive at that idea without some nudge-wink connection to the materials Terry based this on? It makes him consciously part of the pastiche; worse, now he’s like an idea in search of a personality. Still, it gets us to chapters written in first person as Garshak investigates, but they’re not really elevated by the fact that he’s an Ogron with a high IQ and not Humphrey Bogart. The only really notable thing about him is that he tends to win all his fights. I’m not sure that’s more interesting, especially after a while.

It’s not as if I spent the book rolling my eyes and soldiering on. After all, it’s Terrance Dicks, so the prose clicks along like a metronome. But this is not his sparkling best. Terry’s famously concise powers of description are a little lacking here: Chris is “big”; Bernice is “medium-sized” (!); Roz, who only appears in the prologue but is mentioned a lot, is “dark” – several times on a page at one point. I know he’s just being expedient but after a while that last one starts to feel a bit, really? That’s her defining feature, if you had to pick one out of a hat, on an alien planet full of random animal-shaped whatevers? (And about them: there is a crime boss called Lucifer who happens to be a tall, horned chap with wings and a tail. His species is “Demoniac”; apparently the name came from lazy Earth people and it stuck. Lampshading the obviousness of an idea doesn’t elevate it above obviousness.)

Bernice doesn’t come out of this brilliantly. I’ve got my issues with the setup – I think you could have her snap back to academia after those earlier books but this feels more like introducing a fake norm – but through the rest of the book, she doesn’t quite click like she usually does. She’s often a step behind Chris, such as not being able to guess how criminals at large could get to you in prison; worse, when they’re both posing as crime lords and a guy arrives who previously met Chris as an Adjudicator, Bernice says “Why does it matter if he knows who you are?” Gee, maybe because it would blow his cover? She normally has more imagination than that.

She at least enjoys herself posing as the “Dragon Lady,” complete with killer laser-lipstick, but plot-wise the whole “blend in” schtick is a bit of a dead end, and only serves to delay the meaning of the “Project” until the last fifth of the book – which does little to keep up the stakes earlier on. In terms of usefulness, she does get to storm into the proverbial accusing parlour at the end, but not because she has a particular stake in this: it’s because “as an academic, she was used to lecturing people.” Oh. (You would think Chris would want that job since it’s his quest, but I should probably just shut up and be grateful when Bernice has something to do.)

Her dialogue seems a little muted as well, which is a pity as it’s often the best thing about her, but that’s a common malaise in Mean Streets. Funny lines are all too often punctuated with exclamation marks, making characters sound like they’re in the Famous Five. It seems rather gauche for Bernice my-middle-name-might-as-well-be-Sarcasm Summerfield. It’s positively bizarre when Garshak does it.

I’ve done almost nothing but complain about Mean Streets, but I didn’t hate it. It’s as cheerily readable as anything by Terry, and the whole pastiche bit will be some folks’ bread and butter. I just found the story itself so thunderingly uninteresting and irrelevant to Benny that all I’m left with for a review is the ways in which it didn’t take advantage of this range of books so much as force them into a comfortable shape that the author likes.

5/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #109 – Ghost Devices by Simon Bucher-Jones

The New Adventures
#7
Ghost Devices
By Simon Bucher-Jones

When I review books one of the main things I turn to for help (apart from the pool of Doctor Who trivia taking up brain space which perhaps should have gone towards useful everyday skills, but hey ho) is what the author did last time. Ghost Devices sees the return of Simon Bucher-Jones. His debut The Death Of Art didn’t quite work for me. I didn’t hate it; in fact I enjoyed many of its facets and ideas. The whole thing though could be described as a bit of a mood that I couldn’t get into. Therefore – no offence to any passing Bucher-Joneses – I’d be lying if I said I cracked open Ghost Devices with a giddy sense of optimism.

Well, that was then. Fast forward to now and it turns out Ghost Devices is much more my kind of thing. Hooray!

The prologue features a sentient factory questioning its lot. Neurotic robots are a bit of a cheat code to get me to enjoy things, so that made a good first impression. And then once again we’re dabbling in The Also People: a logical extension of “neurotic robots”, as well as a perennial fan favourite and increasingly the Rosetta Stone for Bernice-novel world-building. Who could object? (Although, sidebar: let’s see some non-Aaronovitch reference points as well, shall we?)

The plot concerns ancient machines of death with varying levels of sentience that try to commit their usual murders, genocides etc but end up squirting condiments or performing magic shows instead. This makes for a delightfully offbeat intergalactic crisis, but it has made certain warlords understandably upset. The head of a crime family is keen to start the heads rolling by visiting the homeworld of the Vo’lach – the ancient death-machine builders – while Vo’lach agents are keen to monitor the situation and keep any visitors at bay. Both parties hide in plain sight once an archaeological expedition crosses their path.

And speaking of Bernice: she is hired by an agent of God (as in the big computer one) to go on an expedition with the promise that a duplicate will write her next book for her. The perpetually late post-grad agrees, despite somewhat meta misgivings: “I know my life seems to be falling into a Bernice-has-a-university-problem-goes-on-a-field-trip-almost-gets-killed-but-triumphs-brilliantly-and-solves-her-domestic-crisis-into-the-bargain style of thing, but just occasionally I do need to do some real work.” (Put a pin in that for later.)

The expedition is to Canopusi IV, more specifically The Spire: a gargantuan tower of mysterious origin that is worshipped by the somewhat primitive, if seemingly agreeable natives. The Spire is made of “futurite,” a crystal with temporal properties, and the structure sends back information from the future. (Bits of futurite also litter the nearby desert, which is a mystery for later.) Bernice can’t believe her luck in getting onto this expedition. Professor Fellows, who is leading it, cannot believe his bad luck for exactly the same reason: “Bernice ‘Jonah’ Summerfield. The woman had been a jinx on so many offworld field trips, that it had got to be something of a joke.”

And, well, this is entirely fair, isn’t it? We’ve all heard the clever-clever argument that the Doctor turning up somewhere in the TARDIS is a trigger for certain doom, but that’s just wrong, like blaming firemen for fires. Canonically he goes where he’s needed – often not the place he intended. The doom was already happening! Bernice Summerfield doesn’t (or doesn’t always) have that in-built excuse, so the fact that she keeps turning up at dig sites that become bomb sites is worthy of comment. This week God has asked nicely for her help, which might as well be the TARDIS picking a location out of a hat, but unless she’s going to start working for The People on the regular that’s a narrative sticking plaster. And anyway, Fellows and his colleagues don’t know about that.

All of this hints at a narrative question that I’m happy to see articulated, even if there’s no answer yet: can you really get away with dropping Benny into an archaeological dig-of-doom in every book? Does she do anything else? Isn’t her academic life ticking along as well? (Now unpin that thought from earlier: even Bernice has noticed the level of contrivance in her life.) What else, in other words, can these books do? At least Doctor Who can swap out its star wars for historicals, or just give the interstellar megalomaniacs a time out. Bernice finds herself increasingly in a rut, which is undoubtedly bags of fun to be in but is a bit tricky for sustaining a series.

Lots to ponder then. Ghost Devices doesn’t, of course, push us to the next stage (in my ignorance I still hope there is one), but it does some interesting things with Bernice. She is again (!) not quite the protagonist, more of a team player, with Fellows leading a strand of story at the Spire once Benny and others head off to find the Vo’lach (who, multitaskers they, also built the Spire). With the added context of Fellows (see “Jonah”) it seems less of a wrench not revolving it all around her. She is only one component of these expeditions, and it would threaten suspension of disbelief to always position her so. Bernice, in this one, consequently feels like a scruffy little variable you’re delighted to cut back to. Like the larger meta questions, this lack of focus feels like it’s either going to be solved or I’ll just have to get used to it, but this time the mix works.

Bucher-Jones writes Bernice very well generally, which isn’t always a given. There’s the essential wit: “‘It’s the wider implications I’m worried about. I just don’t see why anyone would use poison.’ Bernice hesitated. ‘If I said to kill him, would I be hot or cold?’” There’s the way she jumps at anything resembling pop culture: “‘It’s me, I am the Air Vent itself, not some hunky rescuer in a torn vest trapped with his wife, who needs a vital operation, in the bowels of a nuclear reactor captured by terrorists in the path of a runaway Continental Siege Engine.’ ‘You saw Die Hardest?’” There are the little meta series-of-adventures nods, as already mentioned: “Well, it’s just that you seem a liberal, educated, benevolent sort of Priest-King, not at all a raging fanatic.” He also nails that aspect of moulding the prose around her, sometimes giving Dave Stone a run for his funny-long-sentence money: “Staggering back from a pub in the students’ quarter, at twelve bells past closing time, the bells being measures of spirits, not of chronology, Professor Bernice Summerfield hadn’t expected to find an angel waiting on the stairs.”

But apart from all the funny stuff there’s grit too. God’s offer of a pseudo-you doing her homework has its appeal of course, but it also sends her into a mild existential crisis. (Do you really need her if you can outsource like that? Ah, the joys of AI!) The Spire gives her a vision of the future that seemingly includes murder, about which she anguishes – until a moment of crisis when she fulfils it because circumstances demand it, and she accepts the cost. (There is an out for this shortly afterwards, but you can’t unring that bell, can you?) At times she wonders how Chris or Roz would handle the situation. And when she saves the day in the end, which incidentally she can only do by wilfully endangering a friend, she may have fundamentally damaged the universe. Existential crises are here again! Things weigh on Bernice in a way that they do not seem to – within earshot of the reader anyway – for the Doctor. Highlighting those differences, like funny robots and air vents with opinions, is my jam.

There’s so much to like. Any hang-ups? Well, yes: there’s a little stylistic quirk carried over from The Death Of Art, although that was far from the first New Adventure to use it, but for me it’s a biggie. You guessed it: short sections. Cut, cut, cut goes the action across the page. And I’ll give it this: we are often cutting around the same scene. But the effect on me is the same. My attention span just can’t take it. Ask me to restart, as a paragraph break does, and I might take the opportunity to go and do something else. It’s an interruption. And it’s generally not the same scene. This is a stylistic choice and not everyone will be bothered by it. (You might even find it improves a book. Quick cutting is after all pretty standard when the action mounts towards the end.) But it made Ghost Devices a somewhat long, stuttery experience for me, despite its merits.

Apart from that it’s very funny and gently puzzling, most of the time in a good way. (At one point a time paradox unravels in far greater detail than I’m used to, which was cool and broadly easy to follow. But then, for example, a lingering plot point is answered by Bernice on Page 206 as if it was entirely obvious, which it wasn’t – perhaps a bit of editorial lampshading there? Still, it made me laugh.)

It’s refreshing to revisit an author and find myself on their wavelength this time around. I hope for more pleasant surprises in the range.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #108 – Deadfall by Gary Russell

The New Adventures
#6
Deadfall
By Gary Russell

I might as well rip off the plaster: I’m not a fan of Gary Russell’s books.

The writing that came out of the Virgin stable was admirably varied, with a few obvious major talents and a lot of very enjoyable, if not particularly ground-breaking reads. Some of the “bad” novels were still interesting, even promising. Some weren’t.

Gary Russell sat somewhere in the middle of all that, turning out sometimes decent adventures that you mainly remember for being massively, massively fannish. And look, he wasn’t the first or last Who writer to cram in too many references to things. That’s not even a bar to creativity: look at Conundrum, or Return Of The Living Dad! Better yet, listen to all the things he oversaw at Big Finish. Some classic stuff there, and it matters that he thought it passed muster.

His actual books, though. You really can have fun with all the – let’s be nice – intertextuality, keeping a running tally of the crazy connections. But when the Who trivia falls away, what’s the rest of it? How does he handle character and plot? The clearest answer is probably Deadfall.

It’s a novel assignment, literally: before it was a book, Deadfall was an Audio Visuals drama, also by Russell. AV was the world of audio Doctor Who before there was a Big Finish. (There is unsurprisingly a lot of crossover between the two companies, some of it still going.) I have heard all the AVs including Deadfall, but I don’t remember much about them besides their ambition being generally quite high. For whatever reason, Russell repurposed this one as a book, transposing the AV characters for Virgin ones.

Due to those wonderful license issues he has to keep his Doctor Who brain on a leash this time. There are still nods, but mainly sideways ones like a reference to the star-liner Hyperion II. (Somewhere, a Pip and Jane Baker fan just clapped.) On the plus side he can pig out on Virgin-created canon all he likes, so we’re returning to an ongoing plot about the Knights of Jeneve (set up in Dragons’ Wrath), as well as teens Emile and (briefly) Tameka (from Beyond The Sun). I was only just complaining that these books haven’t settled on a regular cast, so – although I hope they can come up with better than Emile and Tameka, who aren’t exactly scintillating so far – that’s something to celebrate. Jason Kane is here also, and though I stand by my previous description of him (What If Chris Cwej Was More Of A Prick) I’m willing to accept that he holds an appeal for some people. Bernice, for starters.

So then: an archaeological dig on an infamous planet goes horribly wrong. (The quintessential setup for a Benny book, let’s face it.) Rushing off to investigate is… Jason Kane, with a recently returned Emile in tow. Also heading for the strangely blue world of Ardethe – or is it? – is a scavenger ship staffed with female convicts and a dreadful, equally incriminated governor. They are after metal salvage, or so most of them think. Jason is after something else. A third and much more dangerous something is after something else altogether.

If I’m sounding vague, it’s because the plot is awfully coy for most of the book, spilling its beans only in the final 50-odd pages and about as inelegantly as it can, with an amnesiac character suddenly remembering that he knows it all and helpfully blurting it out. I still didn’t entirely follow it, but suffice to say we haven’t heard the last of those pesky Knights, whose long game continues to get people killed in the hopes of setting up a bright new future. They have also ensnared (holy heck there’s a guest star in this?!) one Chris Cwej! About which I was very happy at first, except that he’s the amnesiac I mentioned. And if you like that, he spends the first half unconscious. Anyone hoping to revel in Chris’s somewhat innocent yet colourful charms is out of luck. (Of course the role was somebody else’s in the original audio, and according to Bernice Summerfield – The Inside Story and TERMINUS Reviews Gary Russell didn’t much like Chris to begin with. Which, y’know, great. At least we got to spend a whole novel with Jason, and he’s fascinating.)

So most of the book is, frankly, low on plot. This isn't entirely surprising since this is a less than 90 minute play suddenly becoming a 200+ page book. (Look how much material Terrance Dicks had to invent for Shakedown to work a second time.) It’s about going to a planet (did they ever confirm what the deal was with the mysterious planet and its underground city? Did I doze off and miss it?) and then leaving it again. We fill the time – no doubt making up those useful extra pages – getting to know many, many, many characters, and not very well. Although to be fair, most of them are destined to die anyway.

Does knowing that help? Hmm. The book’s insistence on killing bit parts (or just parts) as casually as possible is… maybe?… intended to show some kind of authorial confidence, and amid the usual Gary Russell-ian flippant tone you could argue it’s all done for black comedy, but it has the result of seeing no reason why I should be upset that characters are dead or invest in them in the first place. What, apart from a daft laugh, is the correct response to this character’s exit? “[She] just sat there and sighed quietly. Then her head exploded, showering everyone in blood and tissue.” RIPLOL, I guess?

The character writing is just not very good. Too many people is one issue – and when clusters of them have names like Hurwitz, Harries and Harper, you immediately know it’s going to get confusing. Everyone in this has a bad habit of addressing whoever they’re talking to by name, which may be intended to fix the over-population issue, or it might be a leftover from when this was an audio script. (It would sure help with crowd scenes.) Either way, it stinks of artificiality written down. People just don’t say “Hi Character Name, what’s shaking?” “Well Character Name I’m fine thanks.” It’s even more ridiculous when they’re the only two people in the room. Why does one guy need to remind the only other guy what his name is?

The writing makes occasional random, slightly inexplicable recces to make things more interesting, like “Blummer exclaimed esoterically” (?!) or “Emile had asked what the problem was, only to have his head metaphorically bitten off by Jason, who had pointed at the seat belt, ordered Emile to strap his body down and his mouth with it.” (“Bit my head off” is a well-known saying. Pausing to explain it's a metaphor takes me out of it, sort of defeating the point of using the metaphor as shorthand.) There are other more consistent affectations thrown in to make people stand out, such as a ship’s navigator (who is getting on in years) calling everybody “lad.” Which is fine, except he does it in virtually every line he gets, often multiple times in the same conversation. We get it! You’re old! You say “lad”!

The worst, though, is a downright Gary Russell staple: everyone in this finds everyone else utterly irritating. Every single conversation bubbles along at a low level of lame sarcasm, and it’s just wearying after a while. Responding to every prompt with “Gee, that’ll help” or “Wow, why didn’t I think of that” just isn’t automatically funny. It’s like once upon a time he watched a Robert Holmes double act bitch at each other and thought the sheer fact of their annoyance was the reason they went on to be popular characters.

The sad thing is, sarcasm seems to be the defining feature of Jason in this, but it’s utterly drowned out by everyone else doing it as well – particularly the (what seemed like) dozens of totally interchangeable convicts we spend so many long chapters with. At one point Jason muses: “What would Benny do if she were here, apart from annoy the hell out of everyone?” And, well, how could she, when it’s already the most popular pastime in the book?

Ah yes. There is an elephant in the room, isn’t there? I’ll just say it: who writes a Bernice Summerfield book and doesn’t go out of their way to put her in it? (Emile is the closest thing we have to a protagonist, more's the pity: all he does is mope.) Aside from a few cursory “sorry, there was nowhere in the audio version we could put her, here’s an interlude” bits, Bernice is AWOL. Worse than that, she knows there’s a weird shitstorm happening on a strange planet somewhere and decides not to go. I mean, as well as cutting out a walking generator for what are always the best lines in any book she’s in, which is just demented, this absolutely stinks as a character choice for Bernice. Come off it: Bernice, as established, would absolutely go and get involved even if it was a bad idea. It’s Benny! And well, that’s what adventures are. (Wider point: six novels into this range of Bernice Summerfield books, it's feeling uncannily like nobody wants to write about Bernice Summerfield. Honestly, what gives?)

I can feel my past self reaching through time to hate me for saying this, but: I wish this was Gary on full Doctor Who reference crack. It’s more fun, and perhaps it’s essential, to be distracted from his rather odd handle on character interplay by things like “how all of this connects to Mavic Chen in a few easy steps”. Deadfall isn’t dreadful, but it’s certainly a long time spent in the company of a lot of bitchy bores who are just waiting around to get killed off. What a pity there wasn’t a more fun protagonist we could have gone with instead.

4/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #107 – Down by Lawrence Miles

The New Adventures

#5

Down

By Lawrence Miles

I wasn’t much looking forward to this for some reason. At a guess this was because Lawrence Miles has at least two modes and I don’t know which one I’m getting. Perhaps the clever, plot-driven, fannish-until-he’s-just-the-right-side-of-fanwank Miles? Or the one that has some (probably) very interesting ideas, spends ages filling a big bath tub with them and then asks you to get in and splish splosh about for what feels like an eternity.

I’d call Down a bit of both.

From the outset it’s playing with ideas from The Also People, which I’m all for. With the appropriate understanding that everybody loved The Also People and invoking it may invite comparisons that find you wanting, Ben Aaronovitch’s book threw around some enormous ideas (aka the People, not to mention their creations) that, quite frankly, should have become a bigger thing by this point. (We at least got shades of them in So Vile A Sin, and even some influence on Oh No It Isn't!)

What follows is, consciously, something of a parody of Aaronovitch’s “world sphere”, if not a bit of a parody in general. Bernice, along with a couple of students (Ash and Lucretia, the latter having been kidnapped as bait) heads for the mostly unremarkable world of Tyson’s Folly. They soon find the core of the planet, itself a Dyson Sphere, filled with impossible life forms, such as yeti of varying intelligence and oh yes, Nazis. (These are futuristic pretend Nazis – hobbyists playing at fascism, amusingly named the SSSSSSS – and they are here for a reason, promise.) Also in attendance is Mr Misnomer, a fictional character from old (by Bernice’s time) comics. (Think Abslom Daak in a fedora.) Not to be missed off, we have a terrifying alien related to the People, named !X, and his terrified companion/medical support Fos!ca. Before long Ash ends up with !X, Lucretia ends up with Katastrophen (an SSSSSSS bigwig) and Bernice with Mr Misnomer. The entire bonkers expedition is related to us retrospectively by Bernice, now a prisoner, and it includes all the different POVs. (This is not a mistake, but I wondered why so much of the book went by happily letting it look like one.)

So we’ve got shades of Parasite (look at my big bonkers planet!), All-Consuming Fire (it’s old-timey SF time!), Conundrum (Mr Misnomer is real?) and on a more boring textual level, The Also People. (Just War also has some significant impact for Bernice.) Down is doing a lot, mostly ticking off the crazy sights in its hollow world and then later playing narrative tricks with us, but for the most part it’s a romp – which is all good fun (ahem) but arguably doesn’t always make any great shakes as a story. Because Down, in the end, is one of those books/episodes/movies that has one big idea and then proceeds to unpack it. This it does, extraordinarily slowly, with pages seemingly multiplying before my eyes as I neared the 300 mark. Definitely felt like we ran out of romp at some point.

It’s not as if nothing interesting is happening with the characters, but some of it only becomes clear retrospectively. Bernice sits quite a bit of it out (Christ I'm sick of saying that – guys, stop it!), while Mr Misnomer has plenty to do – what’s that about? Turns out she added him wholesale to the narrative to help cope with some more violent moments, but while that is very interesting as a concept (and there’s more to it that she learns later), there wasn’t time for me to feel or her to significantly reflect on it. I did, though, get to spend time with Mr Misnomer. (“Abslom Daak in a fedora” was not a compliment.)

Lucretia has some intriguing neuroses: she comes from a planet obsessed with breeding (and therefore attractiveness) so she needs to wear a duffle coat to hide her body. She is also petrified of transmats as she believes they kill the original and build a copy – a popular SF bogeyman which is presented here and, unless I missed it, never satisfactorily disputed. Sleep tight. (She also develops an oddly progressive friendship with Katastrophen, but given the Misnomer fake-out which on some level seemed inevitable, I was surprised that he was real.) Ash has some stuff going on, mostly in relation to !X (which makes Fos!ca a touch redundant), and !X is at least hard to look away from: a sort of homicidal tenth generation echo of the Doctor, being an unknowable alien exile who travels around in a quirky geometric shape and has a name you can’t pronounce.

There’s oodles of stuff here all right, but the switching between Bernice/Misnomer, Lucretia/Katastrophen and Ash/!X, all variants of interesting female protag/awful and slightly ridiculous male, leads to some confusion over who the heck is who. (This might be deliberate, and certainly it becomes so nearer the end: a psychic melding has taken place which explains Bernice’s multi-narrator narrative, so perhaps she’s just repeating herself. But again: clever concept, still got to read through it before it become clever thing.)

Call me old fashioned, but this is a Bernice book, so I’d like the focus to be on her. (It’s not as if Down is the first book to give her “companions,” but the range isn’t yet consistent with them.) What Bernice we do get is as champagne-bubbly as ever, at one time described thus: “The prisoner is unarmed, but has a finely honed sense of irony.” (I also loved the bit where she’s strapped to a table facing a mirrored ceiling and tells her reflection: “Don’t just sit there – do something!”) This Bernice, however, feels like all funny stuff and no gristle. Is Miles doing a thing there? We know she might be massaging the narrative to exclude (and/or ridicule) the SSSSSSS because of her wartime experiences, and we know how she feels about “Mr Misnomer”’s actions; we also repeat and underline her famed habit of papering over the bits of her diary that she doesn’t like (controversial opinion: I never liked that. How would that book even work? Post-its aren’t that strong!) but this book isn’t the time for her to reflect on any of that. Shame.

It’s got plenty of time though to discuss the hollow world’s mysterious MEPHISTO (the world sphere is run by a computer named “God,” draw your own conclusions), along with alien processes and lizard dirigibles with built-in yeti. And don’t get me wrong, some of that’s very diverting and much of it is funny. I love that Lucretia’s planet is called Sarah-361 because it turns out when you name a celestial body after yourself it’s legally binding; there’s a bit where the characters watch a sort of information recap (of course they do) and the intro looks like the 80s Doctor Who titles; and there are nerdy little nods like: “According to the Roddenberry-Harrison model of Zeno sociology, ‘God’ was the name given by primitive people to the insane alien supercomputer that secretly ruled their planet from its concealed bunker while keeping them in fear and ignorance.” But there came a point where I wanted everyone to just spit out what it is they want to tell us about MEPHISTO, or shut up.

Plenty of ideas. Multiple laughs. Colours, craziness and fun. But I dunno. This feels like the bath tub full of ideas again, more than it does a solid story.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #106 – Decalog 5: Wonders edited by Paul Leonard and Jim Mortimore

Decalog 5: Wonders
Edited by Paul Leonard and Jim Mortimore

Bless the Decalogs. They were Short Trips before there were Short Trips, and despite some youthful awkwardness with the format (how do we string together ten stories? Do we need a linking narrative? Will a theme do?) we got many excellent stories out of them. They have necessarily moved away from Doctor Who now, with the fourth book focusing on the lineage of Roz Forrester and book five (Wonders) completely unmoored from continuity. This is, as far as I can tell, ten stories of honest to god sci-fi. We know going in that this was the last Decalog, so it’s fair to say that one way or another there was no progression from here. Was it a step too far? With these stories, will I be tempted above whether it’s good or bad simply to wonder, is this anything? I’m a fan of the editors so I’m cautiously optimistic.

*

The Place of All Places

By ???

Based on an idea by Nakula Somana

It’s sort of ironic, in a book totally divorced from Doctor Who, that this feels like the sort of moody no-idea-what-that-was-about prologue you’d get in a Who book. It’s very short and mythical: there’s a boy in a strange desert whose uncle builds a washing machine for the local workers and ponders the worth of stories. The boy walks away, pondering. I got nothin’.

*

Poyekhali 3201

By Stephen Baxter

Yuri Gagarin completes his historic flight and orbit around the Earth. Or does he? A shade of the Sam Rockwell movie Moon defines a peculiar monument to Gagarin, as versions of him (machines? Holograms? The same being, but on a loop?) complete the flight over and over, and one of them accidentally catches on. Interesting, but too quick to really grasp hold of anything. Such is the character’s lot, to be fair.

*

King’s Chamber

By Dominic Green

…and suddenly things get really weird. Set in (probably) a future Earth, long after some cataclysm and the splintering of intelligent life into three forms, two of them – man as we know him, and a kind of wibbly amphibian that communicates partly by colour – occupy the planet in an uneasy arrangement. The amphibians live their lives around a shared dream, and the humans (?) begin making inroads about that, which blossom into a psychic attack. This, in turn, leads to a reckoning, and then a better understanding of who the inhabitants are in relation to one another.

Honestly, it’s a lot, but it gets a more generous page-count to flesh out its barking mad imagery. The verbiage is all pleasingly strange – I bet Jim Mortimore loved it – and by the end, I was invested.

*

City Of Hammers

By Neil Williamson

A visit to a mysterious city is shared by a man and his old flame, the latter suffering from a degenerative disorder. You can sense the writer’s excitement at describing this weird closed system of a city, but it’s somewhat over-written here and indeed elsewhere, with character interactions tediously micro-managing their movements and inflections. The real problem though is the characters: Cal is a bitter, dull man who only thinks about himself, while Yanni – essentially dying, wanting to see a remarkable place with an old friend, clearly the character with the most interesting stuff going on here – has almost no input except as an object Cal can mope over or be mad at. I was glad to leave them.

*

Painting In The Age With The Beauty Of Our Days

By Mike O’Driscoll

This wastes no time in announcing that it will be edgy as all heck, muddy funsters! Profanity, sex and drugs are fired at the reader in a manner certain infamous New Adventures could have only dreamed of, as a totally way cool and not at all insufferable protagonist plumbs the depths of depravity to discover whether anything can be art, including terrorism. It has some ideas about artistic expression and how modern day ennui makes it harder to feel anything. The latter is perhaps intended to paper over the lack of any character you could empathise with, but the sheer revolting glee of its excesses (including, but not limited to, necrophilia), the giddy sprinkler system of edge-lord swearwords and the dash of misogyny around its one female character make it difficult to respect what it’s doing so much as want to chuck the book in the bin with embarrassment.

*

The Judgement Of Solomon

By Lawrence Miles

Oh thank god, Bernice is here. Actually wait a tick – Bernice can be in these? Why the blithering heck isn’t it a collection of Bernice stories, then? Sure, variety is the spice of life, I've nothing against a collection of straight sci-fi, but it seems fairly self evident by her appearance here that if you have Bernice, it will improve book. (Gazing at my frequent resource, Bernice Summerfield – The Inside Story, it appears Miles genuinely believe this was intended as Bernice collection. Ah well, certainly no harm done!)

Mind you, some of the credit is due to Lawrence Miles. We can perhaps thank the shorter word-count for a stronger sense of purpose than there was in his last Virgin work (the colourful, swampy Christmas On A Rational Planet), but it’s also just a bloody good application of Bernice Summerfield: archaeologist. Visiting ancient Baghdad (I don’t think they say how but ehh) to settle the question of impossible technology turning up in history, we are soon privy to the story of the old King Solomon and how that relates to the fascinating wonders (natch) of this city. There is beautiful, melancholy writing here, all buoyed by Bernice being fabulous.

*

The Milk Of Human Kindness

By Elizabeth Sourbut

Definitely a unique idea, and very well written, but this one might cause some discomfort. What if everybody started breast feeding? Just a pandemic of that? What would cause it, and then what would happen? There are some disturbing moments, from a man pretty much getting off on it to a war zone. It’s a fascinating story, and a very good example of how SF threats don’t have to be aliens or zombies. Also it seems like a uniquely female idea. But still, your eyebrows will raise reading it.

*

Bibliophage

By Stephen Marley

Ahhh. I’ve missed Stephen Marley. His Managra was one of the most memorable Missing Adventures, and Bibliophage shares its chaotic interest in literature. A likeable duo of adventurers visit a paradoxical library that contains and affects the entire universe, seeking to find out why one of them is disappearing from history. It’s a deliciously clever and funny story, even if the character writing is a little mannered. I’m glad he’s written two in this collection.

*

Negative Space

By Jeanne Cavelos

This is compelling stuff, if a bit more at the traditional end of sci-fi than a lot of this collection: it’s a good old fashioned space expedition gone wrong. Where it gets interesting is the lack of a fully realised alien threat; instead the crew are investigating, and soon endangered by a series of alien “sculptures” and the unusual life-forms that constructed them. Jeanne Cavelos – another female writer, what are the odds! – imbues this with reflections on art and the response to art that raise more questions than they answer, but that’s often the way with gently mind-expanding SF.

*

Dome Of Whispers

By Ian Watson

A short, interesting encounter within an ancient dome that records and repeats every utterance forever. It doesn’t go quite how the tour guide would have liked. Not a lot to say about this one – it’s neat and it works. I wonder if they commissioned an itty-bitty story to work around the longer ones. (The previous story was about 50 pages.)

*

Waters-Of-Starlight

By Stephen Marley

If you’re concerned about the same author showing up twice (and to be fair, it’s sort of unfair) at least these are very different stories. This Stephen Marley is not the frothy, funny one from Bibliophage: Waters-Of-Starlight is not frivolous, as much myth as sci-fi.

In the distant future a woman is parted from her husband, and must honour their pact: the one who doesn’t die must go up the great river. She is pursued by her husband’s vengeful brother. It all gets a bit metaphysical, but I enjoyed its grand ideas even if I only glimpsed them through unearthly waterfalls.

*

The Place Of All Places

By ???

Based on an idea by Nakula Somana

Just a little capper really, touching on what we’ve learned. Like Jim Mortimore in the About The Authors segment, it is.

*

I don’t have much love for short story collections. This is, to be clear, my problem and not theirs: when reading a book I find the story’s momentum is essential to stave off distraction, and I don’t get that when the story has to start again and again. A sci-fi collection with no linking theme or character and (almost) no commonality in its writers is sort of a worst case scenario for me, with each fresh start meaning I might have to construct a world out of mental whole cloth every time. So, I found Decalog 5 hard going more because of what it is than how good it was. (Yeah I know – boo hoo.)

The important question is, how good are the stories? On balance: pretty good! King’s Chamber and Negative Space are strong pieces of sci-fi. The Judgement of Solomon and Bibliophage are great, fun stories. The Milk of Human Kindness probably can’t be called fun but it’s a devious piece of work. Really the only bits that didn’t work for me are City of Hammers (needed character work and the style perhaps wasn’t my thing) and Painting In The Age With The Beauty Of Our Days (thought it was dreadful, other opinions available), so not a bad average.

Do I think they should have done more weird, unmoored Decalogs? Well, they didn’t, but I think they’d have got a stronger handle on this broader (deeper?) remit if they had. What we got though was still mostly worth your time, and the hits can comfortably compete with the more recognisable Decalogs.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #105 – Ship Of Fools by Dave Stone

The New Adventures
#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

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #104 – Beyond The Sun by Matthew Jones

The New Adventures
#3
Beyond The Sun
By Matthew Jones

Anyone up for a change of pace? After the efficient (if slightly empty) genre box-ticking of Dragons’ Wrath we come to Beyond The Sun, which is much more interested in laying out ideas and exploring characters than just getting to the explosive finale on time.

This approach has its ups and downs. I love a bit of characterisation, and I wouldn’t be reading sci-fi if I wasn’t in the market for thoughtful concepts. But take your time too much and you risk the reader wondering if there’s anything more important they could be doing right now. In other words I enjoyed Beyond The Sun, but it seemed to take forever.

We open with a spot of world-building that would make Paul Leonard sit up straight. On the cordoned-off world of Ursu people are not born like mammals or laid as eggs: they are grown in enormous crystalline Blooms, eight at a time. The Ursulans have no parents, are not always the same species, and are ushered into existence by caretakers like Kitzinger. (No one knows who built the Blooms.) One day she is confronted by mysterious, shaven-headed beings called the Sunless, who promptly murder one of her infants and whisk her and the Blooms off to a different world. Ursu is now under their control – and the Sunless carry on in the same vein, brutalising anyone who disobeys.

Meanwhile, Bernice is on an archaeological dig (fancy that) with a couple of slightly annoying students, Emile and Tameka. Matthew Jones goes to some pains to introduce these two, Emile glaring at his spotty complexion in a mirror, the Hispanic Tameka revelling in her “Vampire Chic” appearance and “yeah but no but yeah” speech patterns. (She’s… a lot.) Then into an otherwise unremarkable dig comes Jason, and after a night of I’ll-give-you-three-guesses-what with Bernice, he goes missing. Concerned for his welfare, and despite herself, Bernice goes in search of Jason. Her only clue is a figurine he left behind which points to Ursu. Emile and Tameka tag along.

An unhappy landing on Ursu leaves Errol, their pilot, fighting for his life; a surprising chunk of the novel is then spent trying to find help in the uncooperative Ursu cities. I didn’t mind this at all, as it allows you to get to know Emile and Tameka better, plus it allows for observations of Ursu, its strange multi-species people, the occupying Sunless and the collaborating Ursurians. There’s something charmingly offbeat about placing so much stock in the welfare of a minor character through the simple plot mechanism of the characters arriving where they need to be – badly. However, I think there is a tacit understanding here that such a lengthy digression will be worth it. If you spend all that time traipsing across a planet not achieving much in plot terms, and then (as a totally hypothetical example, you understand) the bugger dies anyway, I think you’ve got grounds to say that your time has been wasted. Just sayin’, don’t do that.

Ursu is at least interesting. I love that, wherever possible, Jones fills this story with aliens; it feels diverse and colourful. This also goes for the Ursurians and their relationships, which due to the unique birthing process are more equal and less focussed on one person (e.g. a parent or a partner). This makes them markedly different from Bernice and co., although it arguably makes them a bit dull as well, always being above everything and yet confounded by humanisms like asking what a person does for a living. (This feels like a very Star Trek gag; what is this thing you call, “the 9-to-5?”) Their sexual politics are a mixed bag: they’re open to pretty much anything, again because of how their society works, but the likes of Chris Cwej already act like that so it doesn’t feel like too much of a departure from the norm. Scenes of sexual awkwardness between Emile, who is gay but hasn’t come out, and the handsome Ursurian Scott are certainly reminiscent of Chris out gallivanting in Damaged Goods.

That said, I like the inclusion of a gay character and his internal struggles. This is obviously important to Jones, who did much the same thing with Jack in Bad Therapy. He has acknowledged (over on TERMINUS Reviews) that Jack and Emile are essentially author stand-ins, but that he didn’t realise that at the time of writing. Knowing this explains a few things, such as the ultimately small impact Emile has on the story, and it lends an almost Mary Sue-ish air to the bit where Emile and Scott finally broach the awkwardness and give it a go. (It’s hard not to think of very earnest stories about whirlwind holidays with handsome strangers.) At the end of the day though it’s still something you don’t see much in genre fiction, so even if it’s a little heavy-handed it added to the novel for me.

Bernice gets a little left out of all this, which is odd since it was her relationship with Jason that jump-started the plot. Ah yes, that guy. I know I’m on a hiding to nothing here, but can we just… not? Their marriage was a deliberate (if highly enjoyable) rush job that the reader just had to go along with in order for it to work. Not long after that, Eternity Weeps pistol-whipped the reader for being so silly as to think such a thing could work, and then said marriage imploded on the spot. It’s hard not to feel a little messed around. Now we’re back to the two of them being so attracted to each other they can’t not jump into bed, with Jason (somewhat improbably) making moon-eyes at Bernice in the end. Jason is almost completely absent from the book, which maybe explains why he’s so unconvincingly written here – to the extent that we know the guy, he is What If Chris Cwej Was More Of A Prick – but I’m a bit disappointed to see Bernice going weak at the knees so easily. Guys, I know human beings are flawed and contradictory and you can absolutely love and hate someone; of course you can still be in love with your ex. But this thing is a hot mess, it always has been, and I really wish they’d just pick a lane.

For the rest of it, Bernice mostly safeguards the two teens – whose dialogue, particularly Tameka’s, often tries too hard. (“Hey, I’m, like, sorry.” / “’S OK. Don’t worry ‘bout it.”) But despite sharing some of the climactic cleverness with Kitzinger, who we cut to occasionally throughout the novel, it’s Bernice’s smarts that ultimately round it all off. Earlier, a plan to locate Jason’s last known contact (and obviously, paramour) Iranda by crashing a collaborators’ party as a drag act is loads of fun, particularly the bit where Bernice tries to convince the locals that she is pro-Sunless: “‘Wear more grey!’ Bernice screamed. ‘Support your local coup!’” There’s plenty of good Bernice writing here, with hits including: “‘I’m afraid being shot at has become a bit of an occupational hazard.’ ‘I thought you said you were an archaeologist?’ ‘Yeah... well, academics can be the harshest critics.’” / “‘We are going to die,’ [Bernice] whispered to herself. But at least we are going to do it in sequins.”

She also makes some keen observations that get to the heart of the novel’s themes: “It was so much harder to keep a hold of who you were without the accessories of your identity. But that was what uniforms were for, after all: to whittle away your uniqueness and individuality. To mortify your personal self.” As in Bad Therapy, Jones seems interested in ersatz people. The Sunless don’t seem human, their collaborators trade in their identities when they suit up in grey overalls, and the Ursurians seem disconnected from any biological reality we recognise. But again, these things don’t necessarily make them monsters; the collaborators and even the Sunless may not be black-and-white villains. “‘I wonder what happened to them to make them like this. Sometimes colonies get cut off...’ ‘Does there have to be a single reason?’”

Admittedly the “villains might not be all bad” angle is a hard sell this time. The Sunless make a point of beating people to death without registering any emotion at all, so they can quite frankly eff off, and their collaborators – particularly Iranda and Nikolas – are the worst kind of one-note, moustache-twirling gits. On more than one occasion they threaten to harm Character A unless Character B co-operates, at which point they kill Character A anyway. Two of these occasions happen so close together I really wish Jones hadn’t repeated it. (We get it. These guys are horrible. Ho, ho.) The biggest effort in the “not evil” direction is the Sunless’s actual plan, which involves finding a power “beyond the sun”. There are dark hints about a weapon of incalculable power, but so little is actually said to back this up that you can’t help wondering what else could be going on here. I’ll simply say that we are dealing with baddies called the Sunless, and their planet’s sun is dying. Sooo, what might it be…? Really, if no one involved, including the power-mad collaborators, has connected these dots by now then god help them. (Even more incredible is the idea that, suddenly in possession of a constructive “power beyond the sun”, these guys won’t just continue battering people to death. What, are they really nice now? As if.)

In many ways, I liked Beyond The Sun. It takes its time, it’s thoughtful, it has good ideas. I still consider myself a fan of Jones and I wish he’d written more of these books. But ultimately this one doesn’t justify its lackadaisical pace (which again I’m fine with in theory) and the surprises in the plot don’t take too much guessing. The urge to revel in new characters often leaves Bernice looking like a chaperone in her own book, which suggests some more work is needed to get the balance right in this Doctor-less world.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #103 – Dragons' Wrath by Justin Richards

The New Adventures
#2
Dragons' Wrath
By Justin Richards

The dust has settled. The situation has been... sat. It’s time for our first “proper” Bernice novel where she just gets on with the business of having adventures. What’s it like?

Well it’s Justin Richards, so you’re in safe hands. I think he shares a certain reliability with Terrance Dicks: at worst, his books tick along without frightening the horses. Often he manages to work his interests in there as well, like the stage in Theatre Of War or programming in System Shock. It seems like you can tell when he’s engaged.

I say this because I never quite felt that in Dragons’ Wrath, which does enough to qualify as an archaeologist adventure novel (in space) but still somehow lands on the wrong side of dull.

The title refers to the Gamalian Dragon, an artefact once captured by the legendary warrior Gamaliel. A shady deal is underway to copy the artefact; in an opening straight out of Hitchcock, the forger is on his way to a rendez-vous when he is killed – but not before mixing his bags with Bernice Summerfield and inadvertently giving her the Dragon. (Or is it a copy?) She coincidentally is tasked with investigating the planet Stanturus Three for signs that Gamaliel woz there; the warlord Nusek has a vested interest in this, as he has ties to Gamaliel and finding evidence of his ancestor will give him a claim to the planet. (And parts beyond.)

Bernice and a team including Nicholas Clyde, a historian with a curious lack of interest in field work, set out for Stanturus but not before stopping at Nusek’s palace atop a glacier and a volcano. (!) Here Bernice finds the real Dragon (or so it is assumed) and swaps it for hers. Before long another Dragon is found on Stanturus, along with sinister evidence of Gamaliel’s history. An enquiry is to be held, chaired by one Irving Braxiatel, to once and for all confirm if Nusek has a claim to this world. Nusek is undoubtedly up to no good, aided by whoever committed the murder at the start, and he will want his claim confirmed either way.

There’s plenty of plot here and it captures quite a few flavours along the way. There’s your Man Who Knew Too Much inciting incident, a suspiciously Bond villain-esque lair with that fire-and-ice palace, some Indiana Jones hijinks on Stanturus Three with artefacts and attacking animals (why’d it have to be rats?), then a televised courtroom finale as the case for Gamaliel is made, and finally more Bond stuff as a literal countdown threatens to erupt a volcano. Despite the histrionics it’s hard to disagree that all of this pivots on archaeology, which is what you want in a Bernice Summerfield novel. And yet, despite heaps of incident and a bread-and-butter problem for Bernice to sort out, Dragons’ Wrath simply never engaged with me as a reader.

Bernice herself is unaware of all things Gamaliel, which right away chucks some cold water on all that. She’s intrigued by the murder (although we depart from Hitchcock in that there are scarcely any further attempts on her life), and the Dragon she now possesses, but it’s mostly out of academic interest. Discoveries on Stanturus are disproportionately shared with Clyde, who gets a little too much of the action (and that off-screen). What with his vested interest in Gamaliel, and later Braxiatel pushing for the truth in the enquiry, it rarely feels like a story that could only work if Bernice is taking part in it. Even the device that starts the countdown, which will sort out Nusek one way or another, is Clyde’s. Bernice seems to be along for the ride. As a reader I felt the same thing, only at a greater distance.

On a prose note, Dragons’ Wrath never quite meshes with Bernice in the way that the best books about her have done before, including Doctor Who ones that also had other main characters to cater for, but more notably Oh No It Isn’t! which came directly before this. Benny and prose just go together, it’s a given that we get in her head and it’s a colourful space, but Dragons’ Wrath seems to maintain a polite, almost dull distance. She has enough wit in the dialogue, but she often sounds a bit dispassionate in third person. (“Intellectually, she did not believe the supposition for a moment.” Zing?) All this is quite disappointing when Richards’ own Theatre Of War wrote Bernice so well, including not only an archaeological dig gone wrong and some ancient history everyone remembers incorrectly, but Bernice’s first meeting with Braxiatel.

One of the best things here is that Brax joins the character roster, and thanks to time travel we get to see his first meeting with her. Through sheer force of personality Bernice convinces him that they’re going to be friends, so that’s the footing they are on from the start. It’s a delightful way to get on with it without cheating. Brax is delightful, it probably goes without saying, although a) he isn’t in the book as much as I’d like and b) it’s difficult to shake the idea that his mentor-like role was by necessity inherited from the Doctor.

The other characters pale in comparison. Nusek is a thoroughly bland villain, even with his ridiculous palace, and it never quite comes across why his victory would be so terrible. Even his fellow warlords seem apathetic: “They were pretty much resigned to following Nusek, whom they each privately considered to be less objectionable than at least two of the other candidates.” (Feel the tension.) Attempts to stir some sort of rivalry between his two lieutenants – Webbe, methodical and fair, vs. Mastrov the no-nonsense heavy – never quite convince as Nusek’s such an obvious bastard that I never believed he’d side with the “nice” one. Their conversations are desperately lacking in spark: “‘So close now, Webbe. So close.’ Nusek slapped his commander on the back, and continued down the corridor. ‘I know you have reservations about the methods we have used, but the goal is almost achieved now. An honourable goal.’” Plenty of the dialogue is as dry as an archaeological find, including this one I had to take a few runs at: “We’re expecting soon to receive the video images from the shuttle that the cruiser dispatched to investigate.” Woof.

There’s certainly imagination on display, some of it executed very well. There are several natty moments where a pivotal action or sound is omitted and we focus on the aftermath. “Mastrov took the two halves of the mould from Rappare, lifting them with care from his slightly trembling hands … Rappare actually jumped. Not so much at the sound, but in sheer disbelief and horror.” Omission is almost a theme, with some of Bernice’s fellow (alien) tutors described in the lightest strokes, one who “wheezed and slushed along the corridor,” another who “shrugged with what passed for his shoulders” and held a small box “surprisingly delicately between talons.” Lack of detail, or allowing for the reader to fill in the blanks? I don’t entirely mind the ambiguity there. I’m not sure how I feel about a character being deliberately non-gendered for most of it in order to protect a subsequent switcheroo, their gender being present and correct from then on, but maybe I’m just annoyed with myself for not spotting it until afterwards. It’s funny what you just assume, given a sinister character acting sinisterly; hats off to Richards, this was subtle.

Some of his ideas don’t entirely work, like the race of primitive aliens who are (somewhat comically) a mix of Neanderthal and anteater, and named steggodons. (Good luck not imagining dinosaurs every single time they are mentioned. Call them something else!) They have an odd habit of dismembering the nearly dead, which they are said to all look forward to, but then that doesn’t quite square with the apparent pain and horror of the ones having it done to them. A random archaeologist is named Bjork for some reason – oh come on, we all know loads of Bjorks, you could be imagining anyone! – and in other news, have I mentioned Nusek’s lair is a bit silly?

It’s entirely possible that for someone other than me, Dragons’ Wrath will whizz along. It has all the hallmarks of an exciting narrative: it cribs from different genres, the action moves from one locale to another, we open with a murder and there’s a literal countdown to an explosion at the end. For me though, it felt like a bunch of bits that Bernice wanders through out of mild curiosity. Her level of involvement is a key ingredient for me. It’s harmless reading, anyway, but I’d just as soon dig up Theatre Of War again.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #102 – Decalog 4: Re: Generations edited by Andy Lane and Justin Richards

Decalog 4: Re: Generations
Edited by Andy Lane and Justin Richards

One of the less celebrated parts of Virgin canon is the Decalog series, and now it continues (along with the New Adventures) without Doctor Who. You’d be forgiven for thinking the linking theme here is “The Doctor doesn’t turn up,” but it’s the Forrester family throughout history. (I love the title.) Honestly, that’s one of their better ideas. I’ve no idea how it’ll go.

*

Second Chances
By Alex Stewart

Sort of a murder mystery on a space station featuring Jack Forrester, an affable guy who mentally pilots a maintenance drone outside the station, and may or may not be dead. The main drive is not hunting the killer but settling on a future for Jack. This has some great sci-fi ideas like bouncing your consciousness into random technology (possibly inspired by the baddie in Original Sin?), and some good writing as a character does not initially realise they’ve died. It’s not exactly spectacular and there’s a bit too much description of people’s speaking tone, but it works very well as a short story.

*

No One Goes to Halfway There
By Kate Orman

Oh snap, Kate Orman’s in this? Here we find another Forrester working a somewhat menial space job, only Theresa Forrester feels a lot more like Roz, being abrasive to co-workers and rejecting her family’s influence and wishes. (If you really wanted to you could draw a parallel between the Forrester dynasty, Roz’s/Theresa’s friction with them, and the Doctor’s rejection of the Cousins in Lungbarrow.) Theresa has few close relationships but she is fond of another space-garbage hauler who goes missing. When she finds out what happened to him it’s bad news for the outpost named Halfway There, and possibly for Earth as well.

Pretty much any Orman is good Orman. This features her characteristic flair for playing with convention: the story flips between diary entries, scripted (and wonderfully interrupted) comms dialogue and normal narrative, with memories weaved in there too. Theresa really is a lot like Roz, and I’m not sure how deliberate that is. The story has a genuine threat and a sombre ending; the problem is an unknown force and there’s no magical Doctor to sort it out, so the characters must make do. Dashes of the writer’s endearingly cheesy humour (such as the garbage scow names, like Cash Scow) lighten a story that is sometimes unexpectedly visceral. It’s a cracking one-and-done.

NB: I’m pretty sure this is the first use of the f-word in any of these books (Decalog, NA or MA), swiftly followed by a second and a third use. I guess they don’t give an f-word any more.

*

Shopping For Eternity
By Gus Smith

This one doesn’t quite come off. Jon Forrester is a huckster. The (naturally sinister) Pabulum Corporation want to use his dubious skills to persuade ne'er-do-well colonists to find religion. (And also, the Corporation.) Despite an apparent spaceship crash and later an escape using just his wits, Pabulum are never far away and Jon ends up on the run for his life. Probably. (Do these Forresters ever make it to old age or, y’know, actually breed?)

The jaunty first person prose lets us into Jon’s head, but the other characters don’t work as well (particularly a silly space captain who throws Jon overboard for silliness reasons) and there’s too much then-this-happened-then-that-happened in the narrative. A few moments could have used a red pen, such as “I had other ideas. Seeing those exhibits on stage had given me an idea.” And “I thought of all the millions of light years I had travelled in space during my lifetime, and here I was, defeated by a few hundred metres of water. Ironic.” (Is it?)

It ends with a satirical swipe about shopping (see title) but with few actual consumers in the story this feels a bit random. Still, it’s all somewhat fun to read.

*

Heritage
By Ben Jeapes

Another one bites the dust. Did the Forresters desecrate an ancient burial site or something?

This is a tense, well written stand off on a “sleeper ship” arriving at a new world after centuries in space. Two generations of Forresters meet, one with less than savoury intentions for the ship and its cargo. There’s a hint of moustache-twirling here which is disappointing, and some moments of villainy seem to jump the gun due to the low page count. Billy Forrester is the star, the weight of responsibility for all the lives on board carving an immediate personality in her, and it ramps up to an impressive, if yet again bleak climax. It’s promising stuff, but jeez would you give a Forrester a break.

*

Burning Bright
By Liz Holliday

This one’s straight out of the New Adventures. Anjak Forrester is in law enforcement on a turbulent future world – so another Forrester that feels quite a bit like Roz, albeit younger. After the apparent death of her partner (okay, you’re taking the mickey now) she works with a disgraced cameraman to uncover a conspiracy that links frequent riots to drug abuse – and possibly the Psi-Powers arc? I’m nostalgic as hell right now.

Besides the latent NA-ness this is a tightly written story that whizzes by, despite being one of the book’s longer entries. Anjak’s family conflicts (now who does that remind me of) help define her and she has a nice rapport with Kenzie the cameraman, although it escalates a bit quickly once again because there’s only so many pages. I’ll let you guess whether Anjak has many Christmases to look forward to after this, but at least Liz Holliday orchestrates a fittingly heroic finale for her.

*

C₉H₁₃NO₃
By Peter Anghelides

Yuck. Kids, this is why you don’t write in second person. Peter Anghelides finds a reason for the device towards the end of this story – the title is as annoying as the prose, anyway it’s the formula for adrenaline – but that in no way makes up for constantly disorienting you and putting you at a distance from the main character. Second person seems designed to stay out of their head; it’s rarely done and, in a remarkable coincidence, is also a bloody stupid way to tell a story.

As for what this actually is, talky and unpleasant, mostly. Samuels and Bocx are on the run from synth humans. They find evidence of dangerous experimentation and for most of what follows, Samuels (you / the lifeless video game protagonist) just listens to expository dialogue about it. Bocx is our best shot at a character and the best thing you can say about him is that he seems to enjoy Virgin’s sudden lack of a swear filter. It ends with a revelation that explains the godawful narrative voice, then gives us more exposition, because in second person there’s sod all you can do but sit there and be told things.

It’s a strange mix of the fairly average and the totally unreadable. Thanks, I hate it.

NB: There is a Forrester in it, but don’t panic, he’s dying.

*

Approximate Time Of Death
By Richard Salter

Phew, another good one. Our Forrester du jour is Mark, who runs a family business that makes food easier to transport across space. A hostile takeover looms and, in possibly the most on-the-nose plot development in Decalog 4, he has received death threats. An Adjudicator (Rachel not-a-Forrester) investigates.

This is a confidently written, craftily plotted was-it-a-murder mystery that warrants a second reading. Rachel comes across as very smart, particularly when wheedling cooperation from a news anchor by threatening to keep him in holding just long enough that his replacement might make a good impression on the public. The Forresters once again have some bad news for the family quilt, but a quick reference at the end reminds us that one of them may actually breed at some point. Anyway, this story’s a winner.

*

Secrets Of The Black Planet
By Lance Parkin

This one’s quite interesting. A sleekly futuristic story featuring taxis that cry over movies and Special Editions of films with higher “emotional definition,” it follows Kent Forrester, brother of the more influential Troy, whose film about Nelson Mandela has (among other things) led to possibly getting the highest office available. He wants to remake his Mandela movie with greater accuracy and he tasks Kent with the research. The consequences are serious, and they come around a bit too quickly. Guess that’s short stories for you.

Parkin gets an immediate feel for the complex racial politics at play here, including the ballsy conceit of Mandela being retrofitted into the man who introduced apartheid in order to strengthen the (at this time) black-led society. Equally eyebrow-raising is the idea that the Forresters are descended from Mandela, but the fact that this seems to be the first I’m hearing about it is surely a clue...

With plentiful ideas and challenging themes, this is rewarding. A pity it’s only 20-odd pages.

*

Rescue Mission
By Paul Leonard

Well that was, er, lovely, wasn’t it?

Abe Forrester lives with his little sister, ailing mother and daydreaming father on a run down colony world. They would all like to escape to a better place, but Abe passes the time merrily enough in flights of fancy and the prose goes along with him, wallowing pleasantly in details as Paul Leonard often does. Then Abe’s sister Callie goes missing. Abe eventually figures out a conspiracy that led to this.

Leonard’s story escalates into a full blown horror movie about (I think?) snuff films, and it’s brutally nasty stuff. This hurts even more after the quite wistful writing about life on the colony, crap as the place is; there’s nothing as sad as betrayed children. I wonder if there was a less extreme avenue this story could have gone down. It’s a bit much, in terms of believability and taste, but it’s certainly not poorly written. Inevitably this is one of the more memorable stories. It’s probably very good, but still, good grief.

*

Dependence Day
By Andy Lane and Justin Richards

Finally we check in with Leabie Forrester, Divine Empress of Earth, in the aftermath of So Vile A Sin. How are things? Unsurprisingly, not great.

A historian, Tranlis, has nearly finished documenting the lives of the Forresters and Leabie is his last port of call. He finds a dead empire, a ruined palace, an old and weakening empress in name only. Oh, and cannibal gangs. Some mysterious aliens have arrived seemingly to hand out food parcels, but something is amiss.

This is funereal stuff, but beautiful in its way. We almost end on a note of hope, though naturally this is qualified with cynicism, and by the time we get to it there’s already been another family tragedy for the Forresters. (It’s as gruesome as the climax of the previous story.)

There’s a hint of mechanism in having the last story feature a guy documenting the Forrester history, but it makes enough sense. His final act is a bit implausible – let’s just say he really wants an ending for his book – but the story’s not really about him. Roz’s spirit makes a literal and figurative appearance and she makes an important difference once more, which is quite fitting.

I’m not sure I wanted this post-script, but it’s a well written piece.

*

Taking Doctor Who out of the equation has been good for the storytelling here, removing the usual constraints of needing to arrive, introduce self, find problem, solve it in under 40 pages. These tales are more grounded in people’s lives and by and large, they’re excellent. That said, they are generally very downbeat to the point where it seems surprising that the Forresters made it this far. Perhaps that’s the point – triumph over adversity – but each generation is so separate, with little to no immediate link between ancestors and their actions in these stories, that it feels more like random people who cannot catch a damn break. Certainly the concept of the Forresters as an elite family with great influence is kept to the sidelines, as much as it was by Roz herself.

Is it a good collection? Yes. The quality is perhaps more consistent than any earlier Decalog, and it’s certainly the best use of a linking theme so far. I would recommend it. But all the same, once in a while it would be nice if the sun came out.

8/10