Bernice Summerfield: In Time edited by Xanna Eve Chown

Bernice Summerfield: In Time
edited by Xanna Eve Chown

In Time was the last Bernice Summerfield book published by Big Finish in hard copy: evidently sales had diminished too much after this point to justify keeping the range going. By the time I went to buy my copy, you couldn't get one in hard copy even if you wanted to! There is not a hard copy to be had even on the secondary market, it was so rare. I had to settle for buying an ebook version, but I am keeping an eye out for a hardcover to complete my Benny books collection.

Published: 2018
Acquired: July 2023
Read: August 2023

The book was published in 2018, for Benny's twentieth anniversary at Big Finish, and it celebrates the complete run of the character, with stories set across the span of her life, from her young days at Space Academy to her time in the "Unbound Universe," and possibly even beyond that.

As a longtime fan of the character, I definitely appreciate the excuse for some nostalgia. Along those lines, my favorite story was certainly Simon Guerrier's "Benny and the Grieving Man," set during my favorite "era" of Benny, when she's based at the Braxiatel Collection, and indeed, set during one of my favorite Benny books, A Life Worth Living. The story is a human one, about Benny trying to help a man whose daughter died on the Collection... but is he all he seems? Like some of the best Benny stories, it engages in what it's like to live in a place that has undergone great tragedy and deal with the consequences, with the weight of histories, both public and personal.

Some of the stories are explicitly about Benny's history, instead of just set during it; this is particularly true of the two set in the Unbound Universe, traveling with David Warner's alternative Doctor (though of course he can't actually appear in this not-BBC-licensed anthology). "Legacy Presence" by Victoria CW Simpson has Benny meeting the ghost of someone from her time at Space Academy—in a universe where that person can't possibly have existed—and "The Death of Hope" by James Goss has Benny and the Mother Superior from the Unbound audios trying to see if there's any possibility of hope in a doomed universe. The former is so-so, much like the stories collected in True Stories (it could almost be a cut story from that book), but the latter is a strong piece of character writing, which gives us both nostalgia and its dangers.

Three stories I wanted to like more, but were just okay. Mark Clapham's "The Seventh Fanfic" (set during the Dellah years, shortly before Beige Planet Mars) has some neat ideas, but Benny feels mostly like an observer to them. I wish there'd been more recurring characters and such from the era; c'mon, where's Emile and Tameka? "The Bunny's Curse" by Doris V Sutherland (set during the Space Academy years) seems to give us the beginning of Benny's interest in archaeology, but that moment could have clicked more. "Old Ruins" by Peter Anghelides gives us an older Benny... but it's a dull story that goes on too long to too little effect, alas.

Two more were not very good at all. "Wurm Noir" by Antonio Rastelli fails to make much of anything interesting of Benny's time on Legion... but that's fair, neither could the writers of that actual era. Worst of all is Dave Stone's "Oh No, Not Again," which like much of his work (though not all!), is an unfunny joke stretched out far too much.

On the whole, it's not terrible, but it is one of the weaker Benny anthologies from Big Finish. This will remind you why you love the character (if like me, you do), but it won't make you love her. I'd have liked to have seen more stories like "The Grieving Man" and "The Death of Hope" that worked with the themes that really make Benny work, instead of adventures that just happen to be set during her past.

I read a post–New Doctor Who Adventures novel every three months. Next up in sequence: none!

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Since August 2015, I've been working my way through a collection of Virgin New Adventures, BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures, and various adjacent books, mostly featuring Bernice Summerfield. That began with Bernice Summerfield: Genius Loci, and eight years and twenty-seven books later, it has finally come to an end! It's been an interesting journey through some excellent (and some non-so-excellent) books. I've loved getting a better understanding of the VNAs, and getting to see more of my favorite Doctor in action in prose.

I had thought that I would circle back around and plug in some more VNAs and EDAs that interest me, but I decided that instead of buying more Doctor Who books I should focus on reading ones I already own, so—for a while at least—I'm going to start working my way through them in purchase order. First up will be Short Trips: Dalek Empire, which I got way back in July 2008!

Review: The New Adventures: Return to the Fractured Planet by Dave Stone

I'm going to try to be better about noting what I've been up to elsewhere-- before you read this review, note that I have a review of a novel in a different book series about a Doctor Who companion who originated in the spin-offs over at Unreality SF. (I think, weirdly enough, that this is the first time I've ever reviewed prose fiction for USF, despite having written for them for over six years now!)

Mass market paperback, 238 pages
Published 1999

Previously read February 2005
Reread September 2014

The New Adventures: Return to the Fractured Planet
by Dave Stone

This sequel to Stone's previous New Adventure, The Mary-Sue Extrusion, feels like a bit of an also-ran-- a rehash of that book's approach, and, like I said of it, a dry run for what Stone would do better in The Two Jasons. Though nothing is really wrong with the book per se, there's a strong feeling of filler here, that the urgency that Where Angels Fear initially imparted to the series has largely been wasted, aside from Tears of the Oracle. Putting a God at the root of the book's plot does not automatically make it more exciting.

Review: The New Adventures: The Mary-Sue Extrusion by Dave Stone

Mass market paperback, 243 pages
Published 1999
Acquired and read March 2014

The New Adventures: The Mary-Sue Extrusion
by Dave Stone

This is a decently enjoyable book on its own merits-- probably one of the better and more interesting of the Bernice Summerfield New Adventures-- but it didn't entirely work for me because it feels like a dry run for themes and ideas that Dave Stone would return to in his later work, more successfully. The twist about the "Mary-Sue" and Bernice's friend Rebecca was good, but 1) it's not built up to enough and 2) it's just a twist, it doesn't really have any meaning in the story. Whereas the similar twist in The Two Jasons is fundamental to that entire novel. There are a lot of things still to like in this book, though-- I'm a sucker for Dave Stone's metafiction-- and it takes itself seriously enough to make the jokes work really well. Fun, but smart fun.

Review: The Two Jasons by Dave Stone

Hardcover, 216 pages
Published 2007
Acquired July 2013
Read December 2013

Bernice Summerfield #9: The Two Jasons
by Dave Stone

This is the first Bernice Summerfield novel in a couple years, and it's the first in a long while to really have anything to do with the ongoing story. While something has happened to Jason Kane in The End of the World (I don't know what, having not listened to it yet), two of his duplicates from A Life Worth Living are in troubles of their own. The story alternates between the plight of these duplicates and a recounting of various memories, especially Jason's first meeting with one Bernice Summerfield. It's probably the best Dave Stone prose work I've read thus far-- it's focused, serious, meaningful. This sounds like damning with faint praise, but this really is heads-and-shoulders the best work from Stone that I've read. Stone created Jason, and he's among the best for writing him. Whatever happens to Jason in The End of the World, this sets it up nicely by showing Jason at his very best.

Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Alternate Timelines

Hardcover, 202 pages
Published 2006
Acquired February 2012
Read May 2012

Professor Bernice Summerfield VII: Something Changed

edited by Simon Guerrier

This Bernice Summerfield anthology has a somewhat odd premise: a man named Doggles brings a "history machine" to the Braxiatel Collection just after the emotionally devastating events of Parallel Lives.  At the end of the first chapter (Simon Guerrier's "Inappropriate Laughter"), the history machine malfunctions, and the devastating consequences are explored in the second chapter (James Swallow's "Siege Mentality"). But at the end of that chapter, everyone dies, and there's another second chapter (Joseph Lidster's "Dead Mice") where we pick up again in a reality where the machine malfunctioned in a different way.  And so the book goes again and again, sometimes picking up immediately after the malfunction, sometimes months or decades later, but always showing a different possibility.

What stops the book from feeling like a collection of pointless alternate-timeline stories is that they all use the premise as a way to create genuine insights into Bernice herself and her supporting cast. I didn't fully understand what was happening in "Dead Mice," but it was a great look into Braxiatel and his levels of manipulation, as is "Family Man" by Ian Mond.  Pete Kemphshall's "Acts of Senseless Devotion," where Bernice is blinded and her son is dying, showed the all-too-plausible depths to which Bernice might sink to save her son.  Jason Kane gets a good showing in Dave Hoskin's "Writing in Green," where he attempts to show Benny the depth of his love with the help of Hass, the Collection's Ice Warrior gardener.  Another dark story was Ian Farrington's "A Murderous Desire," where someone kills Doggles.  Very dark actions from all of our main characters, but seemingly all too plausible.

Of the stories that picked up much later, I most liked Eddie Robson's "Match of the Deity," where Benny and Doggles are reunited eight years later to try to return a religious artifact to an alien planet, with hilarious consequences.  But even though it's set eight years in an alternate future, it still tells us something of both Bernice and Doggles.

Some take odder approaches, but that's okay.  In Ben Aaronovitch's "Walking Backwards for Christmas," the history machine makes Bernice relive her own past, and thus we get a great story of the little-explored period where Bernice was at a military academy and subsequently went AWOL. It's neat to see a very different, but very recognizable Benny. I also liked Dave Stone's "There and Back Again," where Jason uses the constantly shifting timelines to try to help his other selves break free from Braxiatel's conditioning.  Poor guy.

A couple, though, I couldn't see how the worlds they showed were related to the premise at all.  Why is Bernice fighting with a fanatical resistance army in "The God Gene" by Ben Woodhams? No one really ever says. Or why is Bernice fighting for the Fifth Axis in "The Ice Garden" by Jonathan Clements? I have no idea (though it yields the excellent cover image).

Those are just two stories, though, out of an excellent bunch. Once again, Simon Guerrier has knocked it out of the park with a Bernice Summerfield anthology: we have here a collection of deeply character-driven, unique sf stories, which only an open-ended, multi-author series like this could do. A variety of voices and styles, all giving their perspectives on a small group of people, but able to do almost anything like them. Excellent stuff, which once again has me excited for the continuation of the Bernice line.

Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Novellas' Curse

Hardcover, 218 pages
Published 2006
Acquired February 2012
Read May 2012

Professor Bernice Summerfield VI: Parallel Lives

by Rebecca Levene, Stewart Sheargold & Dave Stone

Ms Jones, the Braxiatel Collection's venerable administrator who made the mistake of falling in love, is gone. Bernice Summerfield is sent out to track her down in an anthology that, like A Life in Pieces, is made up of three closely-linked novellas.

Well, sort of. The collection is bound together by some typically strong writing from Simon Guerrier, who writes a four-part story that precedes and follows each of the novellas. This leads into the first, "The Serpent's Tooth" by Rebecca Levene, where Bernice finds herself on an out-of-the-way planet where Ms Jones has been sighted-- a planet where women are required to cover themselves up completely and hide from sight. So, she disguises herself as a man and soon finds herself involved in a quest to win the hands of the daughters of the king. As you do. Levene writes a story that does what the best Bernice stories do, moving between light humor and dark implications, sketching in a commentary on gender relations that almost seems worthy of Ursula K. Le Guin. Levene was the editor of the New Adventures for much of Bernice's run in the title, and she clearly gets what makes the character work.

As in A Life in Pieces, the middle novella features Adrian and Bev Tarrant on their own adventure. "Hiding Places" is the prose debut of Stewart Sheargold, who wrote two crazy Bernice audios (The Mirror Effect and The Masquerade of Death), and his experimental tendencies turn out to be fantastic in novella format. As Adrian and Bev try to find Ms Jones in a strange hotel, he gives us great prose, terrifying events, and some great characterization for these two oft-underused leads. Between this and Sutton's novella in A Life in Pieces, these characters are being handled very well, and I hope the line keeps this up-- and that we get to see some of this depth given to the actors playing the characters in the audio dramas.

Lastly we come to Dave Stone's "Jason and the Bandits; or, O, Jason, Where Art Thou?" I wanted to like this story, I really did. It features Jason trying to catch up with Benny when he's heard of what's going on, but a series of increasingly unlikely events keep him away. It's a good idea and a really fun story, but it conflicts completely with the tone of the other two novellas and the linking material-- much as happened with Dave Stone's contribution to A Life in Pieces. You can have one oddball story in an anthology of dozens of short stories, but I don't think it works in a collection of novellas, where it means that a whole third of the book is off on a weird tangent. Especially when it it's the last novella in the book, coming just before the incredible climax.

For incredible it is. Guerrier once again shows his depth of understanding of Bernice and her supporting cast, and that last line is oh-so-sad, to boot...

Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Trilogy of Novellas

Hardcover, 212 pages
Published 2004
Acquired January 2012

Read April 2012

Professor Bernice Summerfield V: A Life in Pieces

by Dave Stone, Paul Sutton & Joseph Lidster

Not yet satisfied by her domination of audio dramas, novels, and collections of short stories, Bernice Summerfield now moves into a new format: the trilogy of novellas. A Life in Pieces is made up of three novellas that interlink to make a complete story.  Given the series's success with the interlinked short story format in Life During Wartime and A Life Worth Living, I was looking forward to this, but I actually ended up being somewhat disappointed.  Nothing is bad, but the book never forms a cohesive whole, either.  It doesn't have to, of course... but I think it might want to.

The first story is by Dave Stone, who I always remember as writing the weird stuff.  That's as true as ever here: Bernice and Jason go on vacation... only it turns out they're secretly on reality television?  There's not so much a plot here as a series of jokes, some of which are funny.  Not all of them, unfortunately, and maybe not even most of them, but there were a couple good ones, and one belter. (When Bernice figures out how to circumvent the reality TV cameras, if you're interested.) As a story, it's kinda there: it wants you to laugh, but you don't want to, so everyone is just standing around awkwardly most of the time.

The next is by Paul Sutton, one of my favorite Big Finish writers, as he's penned Arrangements for War, Thicker Than Water, and No More Lies.  His contribution here is very different from those big, emotional stories, but it's still very character-driven.  It follows Adrian Wall, Bev Tarrant, Irving Braxiatel, a couple cops, and a host of criminals on Earth as everyone tries to get their hands on the Purpura Pawn, a valuable artifact from an alien planet that's recently been stolen... by Jason Kane?  It's a dark, tangled story, but Sutton's knack for character strikes; it's perhaps the most insightful story about Adrian and Bev we've ever had, and there's other good stuff, too, especially with the cop character.  Dark and ominous; I'd call it noir if I knew enough about the genre to feel confident enough to make such an assessment.

Finally, there comes a story by Joseph Lidster about Jason's trial for stealing the Purpura Pawn.  It's the flipside of the events in Sutton's tale, told as a series of reconstructed documents a couple generations later. It's an interesting idea, and I like the narrator of the piece, a very likable and driven fellow who is completely and utterly wrong. The thing is, I think I'd prefer to get into Bernice and especially Jason's heads more than the format allows.  Intellectually admirable, and with some good stuff to say about how we try to uncover truth, but it left me kinda cold in the end.

The three stories are all decent at least, but the book feels lopsided. Stone's story is so goofy compared to the other two dark ones, and its tale is completely irrelevant to the later ones, making it feel like it doesn't even belong in the same book.  I like the idea of the book, and I liked the book itself more than I didn't, but I feel like it could have been done better.

Ten Years of Bernice Summerfield

Since the beginning of 2010 or so, I've decided to finally get back into Professor Bernice Summerfield, many years after I listened to the first two seasons of the audio dramas and read the early novels. I've been listening to an audio every now and then, but it occurred to me that I should be intermixing the books that go with them. (Bernice has a complicated storyline that constantly switches between prose and audio.) A Life of Surprises actually came out during Season 3, and now I'm on Season 4, so I've jumped back to fill in this gap:

Professor Bernice Summerfield II: A Life of Surprises
edited by Paul Cornell

Hardcover, 166 pages. Published 2002.  Acquired and read December 2011.

A Life of Surprises was published ten years after Benny debuted in Paul Cornell's Love and War, and the book claims to celebrate the full extent of her life, though for obvious reasons none of the stories feature her traveling with the Doctor, and most are set during her time working for the Braxiatel Collection.  It's a very nice anthology, with a lot of stories that tend to the more "literary" end of things, in terms of prose style and experimentation, which isn't a thing there's usually a lot of room for in tie-in fiction.  The looser nature of Bernice Summerfield works to its advantage here, I think-- there's no "franchise" or anything for it to be bound to, and so the authors are free to take the quite-varied tone of Bernice stories and spread their wings.

Most notable along these lines was "Kill the Mouse!" by the not-published-enough Daniel O'Mahony.  I mean, I don't fully get what happened or why, but it's an excellent look at Bernice under pressure, and it's dark without feeling overly so.  Paul Ebbs's "Something Broken" is similar, but less effective, maybe because Bernice is rarely so directly political as she is here. (I mean, I know she hates cruelty, but I feel that Beyond the Sun handled this more aptly.)  "Cuckoo" by Stephen Fewell was also a favorite; unlike many stories, it's set at a defintive point in the chronology (soon after Benny gives birth in The Glass Prison) and deals with the issue of Bernice's motherhood in a deeper way that we've seen in the audio series up until this point.

There are also weird or funny stories, such as "Alien Planets and You" by Dave Stone, which is written like an article about travel, with endnotes that explain what specifically happened to Benny. (For some reason, though, the endnotes are in a dark gray box, making them nearly illegible.) "The Collection" by Peter Anghelides is a strange time-travel adventure, but it works more than it doesn't, mostly thanks to the humor (though there's one bit that seems somewhat forced).  Steve Lyons's "Taken by the Muses" has a race of alien robots who must rhyme, and is worth it entirely for that joke.  "Time's Team" by David McIntee is also a fun romp, but surely the most humorous story in the book is Nev Fountain's "Beedlemania," features the Knyy'ds, a race compelled to use any pointed object once unsheathed before it is sheathed again.  Initially referring to swords, their honor code cause them to extend it to pens (they must write their mothers a letter) and more.

And then there's some continuity-pleasing ones (at least in theory), like Terrance Dicks's "A Mutual Friend," which takes a great premise (Bernice meets Sarah Jane) and manages to turn it into a complete non-event.  Mark Stevens's "Setting Stone" sees Bernice encountering the aftereffects of an adventure she had with the Doctor, but it didn't really come together to me-- perhaps because it's forced to be vague by its very nature.  "The Spartacus Syndrome" by Jonathan Morris is set during the old Virgin adventures, when Benny was based on Dellah, and is also disorienting but fun.  Lance Parkin's "Paydirt" is a nice tribute to Bernice (and her contradictory nature), but the best of these stories was "Dear Friend" by Jim Sangster, a simple letter from Bernice to the Doctor thanking him for what he's done for her.

There are a few stories I didn't mention, but most of those are dull at worst, not bad.  I have very mixed memories of Big Finish's previous Bernice Summerfield anthology, The Dead Men Diaries, but thankfully by this point, Big Finish had stopped pushing Bernice Summerfield as a series of sub-Indiana Jones adventures set in outer space, and let Benny return to the more literary and emotional tone of the Virgin stories.  A good celebration for a worthy character.