#47
The Slow Empire
By Dave Stone
Once more unto the breach – the breach, here, being a novel by Dave Stone. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but upon finishing one there tends to be a feeling like that scene from Arrested Development where Jason Bateman looks inside a bag labelled DEAD DOVE, DO NOT EAT: “Well, I don’t know what I expected.”
That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy The Slow Empire. Let’s be clear: I think it’s one of his more consistent efforts, and it’s certainly less of a palaver than Heart Of TARDIS. It’s just that it’s another fairly typical example of the mystery that is Dave. Your mileage will probably vary. (I’ve seen five-star reviews for it. Also… less than five stars.)
The closest Stone comparison I can think of is Sky Pirates! – that’s a good thing – in that this is another fairly straight (here meaning “utterly fruit-loopy but at least it’s passingly certain what it’s about”) adventure story. The Doctor, Anji and Fitz are on the run from strange vortex creatures in a temporarily clapped-out TARDIS, only to find themselves entangled in a similarly hostile multi-planetary empire. The planet they arrive on is backward and bizarre, the local militia being armed with (at first inspection) musical instruments, and their only ally is a fellow prisoner, Ambassador Jamon de la Rocas. If this is your first Dave Stone novel then it might surprise you to learn that this man is rather ebullient.
The empire is not what it was, with the only constant being the technology used to send Ambassadors hither and thither: Transference, or a kind of teleportation where you are vaporised at one end and created anew at the other. The Doctor and co. soon determine to get to the heart of the matter, which will mean visiting various planets as the TARDIS slowly recovers, finding information as they go. Along the way they encounter story-obsessed circus folk, a very Dave Stone-ian alien that talks like a sitcom waiter with a dodgy Visa, a sinister virtual reality and finally a gestalt menace with a murderous plan.
If I seem a little light on details, well that’s because they’re starting to fade, and I only finished it an hour ago. The Slow Empire isn’t exactly hard to follow (take another bow, Heart Of TARDIS) but it does have that malaise typical of the author where it all seems faintly silly and amusing in the moment but with only a vague IOU that it will all mean something eventually. The planet of the awful musicians is memorable enough, until we leave it behind for good, as is the planet of the circus people whose entire economy is stories, until we’re done with them as well. We spend a good 30+ pages dealing with alternate lives in virtual reality – another popular Stone theme, see Oblivion – but as well as feeling rather been there, done that after Parallel 59 (what with Fitz being here and doing it again) it doesn’t feel all that consequential to the wider narrative. Once they’re out of it, that’s apparently that. I don’t know if being episodic is a bad thing since it tends to come with quest narratives, but it left the novel in a very wishy-washy place afterwards.
With Dave Stone the good stuff is very often the friends you made along the way, which is to say all of that verbiage surrounding the stuff that’s actually happening, which you may or may not follow and/or be able to commit to memory, is its own reward. The prose is full of Stone’s usual diversions and wafflings, except in The Slow Empire they become their higher selves at last and come with bonus features, aka endnotes. (I find footnotes mildly annoying and endnotes fatally so; I’m not going to flick back and forth like that, soz. But it was perhaps worth it to see Stone defend himself from calls of sounding too much like Douglas Adams by announcing that on one occasion anyway he was actually sounding like Lewis Carroll… who was being quoted by Douglas Adams.)
Stone’s sentences require concentration and to be frank they don’t always reward it. Anji (inadvertently?) lampshades this by way of the Doctor’s excessive verbiage: “‘No offence,’ said Anji acidly, ‘but what you’ve just said didn’t contain any actual new information at all. It’s like saying something’s taller because three feet have been added to its height.’” I find I sometimes have to go back, start again and pick through the words to find the bit where something actually, quantifiably occurred. On the plus side, this is very definitely a style and that is something to be appreciated in a range that – naming no names – can tend towards the stagnant, writing-wise. Stone’s text might wander off to the shops in the middle of a thought but at least it ends up going somewhere, even if it’s just somewhere funny. He’s not for everyone, but he (along with The Slow Empire) is generally good fun. (Anyway, some of his jokes are to-the-point: “‘You have the shard?’ the High Ambassador asked, in that curious way of those in authority, however unearned, who already know the answer to a query — or at least know what the answer damned well better had be.”)
Jamon de la Rocas is perhaps Stone’s best outlet. The florid, garrulous, pick-your-talky-adjective supporting character holds court in his very own first-person passages throughout the novel. As well as being generally amusing he also underscores one of the book’s more interesting ideas, the potentially soulless existence of those people in Transference. I wish there had been more to that, but at least it comes to a head when Anji (being typically forthright and thoughtless) chastises him for his probable lack of substance and gets instinctively slapped for it. (He is very sorry about this.) The Transference idea weighs significantly on the plot by the end, but by then it’s more in the line of technobabble than something I really felt or cared about as a reader. Even in that awkward Anji scene, and following his unhappy experience in VR, Jamon never seems to be soul-searching or wondering about all this particularly. And believe me, we spend enough time with him to find out.
At the other end of the Stone spectrum we have the Collector: denizen of a species that I had completely forgotten was introduced in Heart Of TARDIS. (Only in a passing aside, mind you, but I liked it enough to highlight it in my review at the time.) He/it speaks in the same sort of comedically broken cadence as Sgloomi Po in Sky Pirates!, because heck, if it ain’t broke. Strangely this highlights that in all his wanderings Stone is choosing his words carefully, even if only for maximum amusement: “‘I might not be entirely up on the specifics, but I’m certain the Collectors are known for ravening across entire planets and destroying everything in their path.’ ‘Is not destroy monkey-hominid worlds,’ the creature said virtuously. ‘Is just take things nobody want.’ ‘Oh, yes?’ said the Doctor. ‘What sort of things?’ ‘Nice things. Shiny things. Things what is not nailed down to floor. Is then wait for bit and come back for things nailed down to floor.’” It’s the sort of thing that might be very annoying for some readers but I found welcome and amusing – if nothing else because it’s a break from Jamon’s (and Stone’s) usual Douglas-Adams-if-he-was-born-150-years-earlier cadence.
The regular characters get a fair bit of that too, most noticeably (and out-of-character-ly) Anji’s thought processes in a few early scenes: “In the same way, so Anji gathered, that the commercial spacecraft of The Future supplied ‘viewing ports’ which displayed to their passengers false but aesthetically pleasing images — and which bore about as much relation to the actual conditions outside as Bugs Bunny does to the proliferation vectors of myxomatosis — the Stellarium factored external electromagnetic and gravmetic readings to produce an image with which the mind could more or less cope.” If you say so, Dave. He writes Anji rather well otherwise, walking the tightrope between her wanting to get home and yet also being invested in the safety of the Doctor and Fitz. She nearly goes a whole novel without tearing strips off the Doctor, Tegan-style, but the plot allows her to do so once near the end. This time without creating too many waves. (See Eater Of Wasps and The Year Of Intelligent Tigers for shoutier examples.)
The Doctor is an interesting figure in this, at least academically: Stone has this idea about people’s inner selves regressing to different points, including Anji’s and Fitz’s, which allows him to write the Doctor in different (actorly) ways. The trouble is, since I tend to take it as read that everyone in his novels is going to say twenty words when five might have done, and the Doctor does that from the outset, I didn’t really spot anything out of the ordinary. It just became a rather odd exercise of the Doctor, Anji and Fitz announcing that this was happening rather than me actually noticing it. (The only time I noticed a direct quote from someone else, I’m pretty sure it was Arthur Dent. In hindsight though, some of the Doctor’s technobabble and mood swings could be attributed to Tom Baker or Pertwee, and his eventual strategy is more or less likened to something McCoy might have thought up.) Stone gets some mileage out of the Doctor’s incomplete memories (with the usual obligatory reminder of what happened there, remember everyone that this is the less continuity version of the EDAs), landing on a pleasingly powerful yet still chaotic mix for the character.
Fitz is here too of course, Fitzing his little head off in the virtual reality section where he gets to be a rock star, but to be honest I’m starting to worry about him as a regular. You wouldn’t want to read an EDA with no Fitz in it – like Bernice Summerfield he’s a difficult character to get wrong – but it’s becoming apparent that he’s always the third wheel, good-naturedly bumbling along in the background. That’s largely all he does; even Jamon bumps him out of frame at points here. We’ll see how it goes in later books. It may be the case that, like a Dave Stone paragraph, the general atmosphere of Fitz is its own reward, and fair enough if so, but it would be nice if he actually drove stories too. (Perhaps Anji’s “get me home” angle is all we’re currently allowed.)
I wish I could think of more to say about it. The Slow Empire feels as dense as most of Stone’s books, throwing out sci-fi concepts left and right and couching most of them in jokes, but it nevertheless feels a bit lightweight in the end. I still appreciate having a voice like his in the roster, distinct if not always easy to digest, but Stone novels where the whole thing comes together and wallops you over the head are clearly the exception. With its quest narrative and relatively tight supporting cast though, The Slow Empire at least comes a bit closer than most.
7/10
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