#18
The Mary-Sue Extrusion
By Dave Stone
We’re in uncharted territory now, folks. All of a sudden and against all known laws of the Bennyverse, we’ve got continuity and we’re sticking to it.
That’s not to say there have been loads of continuity errors in this series. It’s more that these books have rarely seemed all that interested in what came before or in what’s coming next. With the advent of Where Angels Fear we have a fully fledged plot arc to be getting on with, and right from the prologue we’re reminded of those events – in a roundabout sort of way, it transpires. It immediately feels more like reading the New Adventures of old. (Granted, some of their arcs were a total mess, if not most of them, but it was great to feel like it mattered that you had read the one before and would stick around for more.)
All that said, it’s an interesting choice to take the next big step of this arc with Dave Stone. He’s mostly into surreal comedy and the idea of nailing him down for a bit of serious plot feels like a contradiction in terms. But I’ve got a pet theory about his writing that I think holds up here: if there is a clear enough assignment at the heart of it, be it a genre to take the piss out of or the next step of an arc, then he can focus his wackiness in a way that either helps or won’t hurt the story. If there isn’t, you’re left with wackiness that just sort of congeals. (I think his swings-and-misses are Burning Heart and Oblivion: a mean Judge Dredd imitator and a vague trip through the multiverse respectively.)
The Mary-Sue Extrusion takes a while getting to the point, but that’s par for the course with Stone. We follow (in first person) the adventures of an intergalactic mercenary/hit man/occasional time traveller who may or may not be named Flint McCrae. He has been tasked with finding Bernice Summerfield and he is being pursued by a couple of inept assassins, which doesn’t bother him much. He’s highly capable and less than pleasant, but there are numerous hints and cutaways throughout of a grim upbringing that may have toughened him into this. Anyway, he talks too much, or narrates too much, or however you want to put it. There are blobs of text which seem to underline the joke that if you hire Dave Stone, you might drown before the end of a sentence. “If I kept on going into the minor details of every little thing that flashes through my mind upon seeing a garbage canister and the possibly dangerous things it might contain, we’re going to be here all night and no further on by the end of it.” Quite. He throws in automatically ironic little qualifiers like “simple as that” and “what I’m trying to get across here is” after some exorbitant tangents, making me wonder how consciously he’s taking the piss. See his character’s reaction when faced with an acquaintance who has an aggressively long name: “Almost all of that’s mere extraneous bollocks, of course.” Really, Dave?!
I found myself skipping to the end of particularly self-serving chunks in Ship Of Fools and I was going that way in the first third or so of this. That’s not to say it’s never fun to read in and of itself. Stone is a very funny writer if you don’t mind settling in for the end of a thought. For instance this description of a grossly overweight crime lord: “A capable and effective man with eyes that missed nothing, secure enough in his own abilities to relax into them, to suffer fools to a precise and particular point and then no more, like a steel trap buried in lard.” It’s just that you start to notice how for every long and winding paragraph, there is maybe one concrete fact of the matter buried near the end of it. If you were so inclined you could probably speed run a Dave Stone book.
The action starts to get concise when he arrives on Thanaxos, the planet nearest to Dellah, and receives some scraps of information on what happened to Bernice after the exodus. He thinks she’s dead for a while because of a confused first hand account of her being carried away by an angel. (We know that was Clarence.) Then he gets genuinely trapped on the prison he has infiltrated, and only escapes when a reporter friend happens along and spots him in a crowd. At around the page 150 mark he ends up on a mission to Dellah – ostensibly to set up diplomatic relations between the two planets after Dellah’s mysterious transformation, really to look for clues re Bernice – and I wondered if you could just start the book there, or at least thereabouts. I’ve only just read the thing and I genuinely am not sure what Flint even got up to before Thanaxos.
That’s a situation made even more murky by Stone’s tendency to cut away, often to weird Elseworlds versions of his story or characters. Oblivion featured side characters slipping between entirely different lives; Ship Of Fools kept cutting to a strange pulp adventure. The Mary-Sue Extrusion falls somewhere in the middle, cutting in-universe to the fictionalised adventures of Bernice, called The New Frontier Adventures. Heightened and silly, Stone is here able to get in on some of that Beige Planet Mars ribbing of the series so far: “They couldn’t seem to make up their minds whether they were adventure stories, murder-mystery stories or some half-baked bastard hybrid of the two.” More pertinently we get occasional back-story on Flint (?) building to the reveal that he’s not an entirely organic life form, and these may be inherited memories. All of which is quite interesting – just as the New Frontier Adventures are quite funny – but when you start your book with a reminder of the ongoing arc and then veer off towards this instead, it’s tempting to ask what it’s in aid of and where the hell it’s going.
It’s all theme, I guess. (And hey, at least it’s not as meta as the title, provided by Kate Orman, makes it sound.) The trip to Dellah yields only secondary answers: he now knows that Bernice went back after her escape and left her diary behind which is a) unthinkable and b) confusing because the diary seems wrong, full of references to Benny’s apparent real life friend Rebecca. (Rebecca was her childhood doll, inexorably tied to parental trauma.) This is a clue that all is not as it appears – just as Flint is not – and Bernice is now in hiding, physically and mentally, on another world. She has used the titular Mary-Sue device to overwrite her mind and block the influence of the godlike Entities. All is pretty much well at this point (it was only a temporary override) except that Flint’s trip has inadvertently allowed the Entities to spread to Thanaxos. Benny, Flint, as well as Jason, his telepathic friend Mira (she was in Ship Of Fools apparently) and Emile (who we learn was possessed by an Entity in the previous book, and also went into hiding) rush back to Thanaxos to stem the tide.
And, well, that’s a hell of a lot of plot for a last act. It does an impressive job of putting the rest of it in perspective, a seemingly unrelated adventure subtly highlighting the gravity of the Gods situation: you don’t have to write a book directly set on Dellah or focusing on the Entities to show their influence, or the change happening in their wake. You can show the planet next door slowly and awkwardly adjusting to the new status quo. The very real possibility exists that Bernice has gone a bit potty with grief (although I didn’t buy that), and the lack of immediate closure on say, Braxiatel just makes you wonder even more how he’s getting on. (Getting an immediate answer to What Happened To Emile was a definite surprise, but it’s not as if his situation is resolved here.) Flint’s overall disinterest in Dellah and its upheaval somehow makes it feel more real, like a news story you’re sick of hearing about even though it’s still terrible. Even the victory won against the Entities feels temporary and entirely lucky, because he happened to be looking for Benny and that happened to lead him to a telepath. (Dave Stone-y sidestep: how’s this for an Elseworld? This entire “Gods” setup would have been a great pay-off for the Psi-Powers arc. You could keep all the morally grey stuff because it’s all done to stop a problem even the Time Lords and the People can’t solve. Ah well!)
The Mary-Sue Extrusion seems like a good use of Dave Stone’s talents, or bad habits if you’re so inclined. He can ramble and sidestep and not even write a book about Bernice per se, and still service the ongoing story in the end. (When we finally do get to Bernice she’s on reliably good form. “‘It’s a stupid grenade … It’s thrown into a room and, once primed, it hunts down the stupidest person in it and detonates…’ ‘Well, I personally think that certain tropes and themes to be found in Finnegan’s Wake were rather overdone,’ said Bernice, instantly and brightly.”) Flint is a decent enough protagonist, though I’m not sure he really evolves through the telling: he is neither as organic nor as artificial as he appears, but he already seemed comfortable with that knowledge. The main issue here is that the really satisfying stuff doesn’t occur until you’re a ways in already, and some of the really Dave Stone-y chaff is liable to fall away from memory entirely after that. It’s marginally more fun to think about than it is to read, then, but it’s at least a close race. I’m glad he’s got another assignment coming up. I hope it agrees with him.
7/10
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