Bernice Summerfield: True Stories edited by Xanna Eve Chown

Bernice Summerfield: True Stories
edited by Xanna Eve Chown

This Bernice Summerfield anthology is set during the run of the Doctor Who: The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield audio box sets from Big Finish, specifically between volumes three and four, when Benny is stranded in the "unbound" universe introduced in 2003's Sympathy for the Devil, where David Warner is the Doctor, the Time Lords all perished in a devastating war, and the end of the universe is imminent. Though of course the Doctor and the Time Lords can't be mentioned directly, because this anthology lacks the "Doctor Who" branding.

Originally published: 2017
Acquired: April 2021
Read: June 2023

It's basically fine. It feels to me like this set-up ought to have been a rich one for Benny stories—what is the point of an archaeologist when history itself is coming to an end?—but what we get here is a pretty generic set of Benny stories, the fairly typical mad escapades. The set-up here is only loosely depicted, and there's not much done with Benny as a person, even by the usually dependable Kate Orman ("Hue and Cry," cowritten with Q(!)) and Jonathan Blum ("Never the Way," cowritten with Rupert Booth). Both of these stories felt like they could have used another draft to make them pop more, though I did like Benny's sense of resigned responsibility upon realizing that she's trapped in predestination paradox for the umpteenth time. But how does she feel about the situation in this universe? Why is she going on random adventures when reality is coming to an end? I feel like something more akin to the thematically linked anthologies of the Collection era (e.g., A Life Worth Living, Collected Works) could have worked a charm here, but alas, this is all pretty frothy stuff instead. I think Victoria C.W. Simpson's "Futureproof" is the one story trying to engage with the series premise meaningfully, but it didn't really go anywhere, unfortunately.

That said, my favorite of the mere six stories was one of the frothiest ones: Tim Gambrell's "Stockholm from Home," where Benny is inadvertently enrolled into an old-person's home... from which there is no escape! And at the same time, the aliens are invading and Benny is getting spam e-mail from a would-be insectoid lover. Bonkers but fairly entertaining.

I read a post–New Doctor Who Adventures novel every three months. Next up in sequence: Bernice Summerfield: In Time

Doctor Who: The Year of Intelligent Tigers by Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The Year of Intelligent Tigers
by Kate Orman
story by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

Following on a few books from EarthWorld, this is another adventure for the amnesiac eighth Doctor with Fitz and Anji. Like Jacqueline Rayner, Kate Orman is a deft hand when it comes to characterization, especially Anji; I also really liked Orman's eighth Doctor, who you can imagine as being played by Paul McGann, but who also does the kind of things that are unique to this prose version of the Doctor, a man obsessed but who also doesn't know his own past. I liked him on the music-obsessed space colony, trying to figure out a piece of music he could remember; the visual of the Doctor literally curling up with tigers and adopting cat body language is something one can't imagine the tv show actually being willing to do, but fits beautifully.

Published: 2001
Acquired: November 2009
Read: November 2021

The story is a good one, with a human space colony discovering that native "tiger" life-forms they'd thought benign and nonsentient are actually intelligent and possess their own agenda; the Doctor and his friends must work to minimize loss of life and bring two sides together. Some good jokes, some beautiful prose, well written throughout. In general, I've picked and chosen from the post-Burning Eighth Doctor Adventures, but every one I have read shows off Doctor Who prose fiction at its best.

I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: The City of the Dead

Review: Doctor Who: Vampire Science by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

Mass market paperback, 283 pages
Published 1997
Acquired March 2011
Read March 2020

Doctor Who: Vampire Science
by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

Having finished working my way through all the New Doctor Who Adventures I happen to own, I'm now going from the seventh Doctor to the eighth and tackling some of BBC Books's Eighth Doctor Adventures from the late 1990s and early 2000s. That begins with Vampire Science, the second EDA but (so people say) the first one worth reading. The Doctor and his new companion, Sam, fight vampires in 1990s San Francisco. I enjoyed it: it's a good mash-up of the sensibilities of the NAs with those of the 1996 television movie. It gets a little violent at times in ways I don't see as very eighth-Doctory, but outside of that it captures his character very well: there's a big emphasis on the sleights of hand he did in the TVM, and how his whole way of operating might itself be a sleight of hand. What's trickier: having a complicated plan like the seventh Doctor, or not having a complicated plan like the seventh Doctor... but everything still working out in the end? This isn't quite the eighth Doctor that Paul McGann would end up playing in the audio dramas (which didn't start for another four years), but this is a legitimate extrapolation of how he played it in the movie. It gets a little bogged down in vampire stuff at times, but it usually has a good sense of humor about it. (I was surprised to realize it was published four months after Buffy began, because it feels like Buffy must have been an influence, and yet it could not have been.) I remember liking Sam in the later Orman/Blum EDAs I've already read (Unnatural History and Seeing I), and that was true here as well; they give her that Rose-esque sense of someone who wants to do something in the world that the Doctor enables, but often feels overwhelmed by the realities of the universe.

I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: The Infinity Doctors

Review: Bernice Summerfield: Present Danger edited by Eddie Robson

Reviewing a book tied into some audio dramas reminds me that I actually haven't cross-linked my audio reviews here of late; there have been three. "Flight into Hull!", a Doctor Who: Short Trip read by Camille Corduri, features Jackie Tyler and the "metacrisis" Doctor. The Root of All Rage is the second Star Trek: Prometheus audiobook, presenting the German 50th-anniversay special. And Jeremiah Bourne in Time is a new, original concept from Big Finish about a teenager travelling between contemporary and Edwardian London. (Quoth my editor when I submitted the last review: "'famous magistrate and infamous nudist' is a hell of a character description, I need to listen to these." Indeed he does and so do you.)

Hardcover, 208 pages
Published 2010

Acquired August 2015
Read October 2018

Bernice Summerfield XIV: Present Danger
edited by Eddie Robson

Present Danger fills in the gap between the audio dramas Resurrecting the Past and Escaping the Future. Partially it serves to just move characters into position (in Resurrecting, Benny and Hass are on Earth, but when Escaping opens, Benny is travelling through time to fight the Deindum with a restored time ring, while Hass is a Deindum prisoner on Maximediras), and partially it serves to dramatize the Deindum War more completely, since it's mostly off-stage in Escaping, but of great importance.

So, it's kind of like Life During Wartime, but it doesn't work quite as well. Life During Wartime felt like a novel by many hands, showing the progression of the Bernice Summerfield range's cast of characters during the months (and months?) of Fifth Axis occupation. Present Danger is more spotty-- it often feels like things that ought to have been dramatized are skipped over in favor of things that are less important. Like, there's no story about how Bev manages to take control back of the Braxiatel Collection, which ought to be a key character point, and the refugees crowding the Collection is referenced in Escaping, but that's dramatized here in only a very cursory way. It would have been nice to see this in Present Danger; instead, the most we get for Bev is a story by Niall Boyce, "The Empire Variations," where she witnesses a time travel adventure Benny has by seeing how works of art in the Collection change as history does. It's a neat conceit, but if the book was going to tell just one Bev story, it doesn't seem like this is the one.

This goes for a number of stories. Like, I enjoyed a lot of them, but they often seemed like sidebars to the Deindum War. It's neat to have a sequel to Battlefield in Jim Smith's "Excalibur of Mars," but should working Brigadier Bambera in really have been a priority of this collection? There are a few too many Benny-on-strange-adventures stories that are tenuously incorporated on the basis of Benny scouring time for weapons to use against the Deindum. That said, Jonathan Blum's "The End Times" is a great Benny-and-Peter tale in the way that only Jon Blum can do, and I was unexpectedly delighted by the return of the tax assessor from Venus Mantrap in Mark Clapham's "In the Ledgers of Madness," where a group of reclusive monks keep their books in an ancient, dangerous language so that anyone who tries to audit them will go mad.

The book's best stories are those that deal with the Deindum War and the characters more concretely. "Winging It" by Lance Parkin focuses on Braxiatel figuring out how to fight the Deindum through time, and it's a clever time war story that I really enjoyed. Kate Orman's "Don't Do Something, Just Sit There" of course is a winner, with Benny trying to protect an indigenous population as Earth and the Deindum duke it out. Simon Guerrier gives us some Doggles and Adrian in "Six Impossible Things," a potent combination given their history; there wasn't just the space for this reckoning in the audio dramas, so I'm glad to read it here. (Is Doggles the worst? Yes.)

LM Myles's "The Better Part of Valour," Oli Smith's "Digital Dreams," and editor Eddie Robson's Hass-focused interludes were among the other highlights. But if this collection was meant to make us feel the immensity of Deindum threat in preparation for Escaping the Future, it didn't quite accomplish that as well as it ought to have.

Review: Nobody’s Children by Kate Orman, Jonathan Blum & Philip Purser-Hallard

Hardcover, 314 pages
Published 2007
Acquired June 2013
Read December 2013

Bernice Summerfield X: Nobody's Children
by Kate Orman, Jonathan Blum & Philip Purser-Hallard

Each Bernice Summerfield triple-novella seems to improve on the last: this one is three sequential tales that form one large story, but it would never work quite the same as one novel, as each has its own individual story and own point-of-view. The story here picks up right from the audio dramas The Judas Gift and Freedom of Information, with Bernice trying to sort through the aftermath of the Draconian-Mim War and the disposition of a number of Mim "war orphans" who more than one side claim jurisdiction over.

One novella gives us a first-person Mim perspective while Benny is on a Mim planet, another a third-person perspective while Benny visits Draconia, and the last gives us the first-person perspectives of every but Benny during negotiations on the Braxiatel Collection. I don't think the story told here could have worked any other way: each story adds layers of culture, of character, of plot brought by its new perspective and new writer. Finally, the Mim feel like a real civilization and not just an off-stage threat, and new complications are added to the Draconians as well. It's a great political thriller, but also a great personal story, too; this is about political motivations and people's motivations, winning wars and winning yourself.

It's Hard to Topple Governments When the Doctor's Not Around

Hardcover, 202 pages
Published 2003
Acquired December 2011
Read February 2012

Professor Bernice Summerfield III: Life During Wartime

edited by Paul Cornell

At the end of the previous Bernice Summerfield story, the audio drama The Poison Seas, Bernice received a message from Irving Braxiatel, telling her to come home to the Braxiatel Collection. Life During Wartime picks up almost immediately thereafter, with Bernice coming home to find the Collection occupied by the Fifth Axis, the Space Racists she'd thought defeated in The Glass Prison. Life During Wartime features little archaeology and little space adventure, instead telling the story of the months of the Fifth Axis occupation.

The first thing in Life During Wartime, as in most Bernice Summerfield books, is a little descriptive piece called "The Braxiatel Collection," explaining the series setup. This little piece explains succinctly everything that is wrong with the setup. There are potted backstories for Benny, Irving, Jason, and Adrian, which is fine, but it reads like it comes out of the series bible, and hence explains all of the jokes: we are told that Joseph the Porter is over-literal (but on purpose), what Collection administrator Ms Jones means when she puts on her glasses, how gardener Mister Crofton reacts to forgetting the "Mister," and that the public relations officer never actually turns up in stories (oh, the hilarity). Why do we need all these characters? Bernice Summerfield wants to be Indiana Jones in Space, but Indiana Jones just has Marcus Brody to report back to, not Brody and a lover and a rival and a department secretary and a janitor and a press officer. Why do you need such a large, uninteresting supporting cast? Even the one story largely set on the collection, The Squire's Crystal, didn't make a lot of use of them as I recall.

Life During Wartime doesn't mean that the unwieldy setup has been worthwhile all along, but it is used to maximum effect here. We just don't see what Bernice has to deal with (she feels compelled to play along with the Fifth Axis because she doesn't know where her son is), but how Irving Braxiatel deals with being surprised for the first time ever, how Jason Kane immediately gives in and defects to the Axis, how Adrian suffers as a worker, that Bev Tarrant can be something other than a thief, why Ms Jones fell in love with an Axis policeman, and what happened to Mister Crofton during the Dalek War. The range of characters has a range of reactions to the occupation, some trying to stop it at any cost, while the Axis itself tries to convince them that nothing has changed.

Suffice it to say that I liked this book a lot. It's technically an anthology, but it reads like a novel. Especially the early stories lead one right into the next. Paul Cornell keeps the book nearly seamless; with 22 stories in 200 pages, each story is around ten pages long, and thus no one voice is in play too long. The many-voice thing works, though; it feels like one author adopting a range of styles and approaches to convey one idea: the difficulty of maintaining your courage in a life during wartime. Some are just moments, with Bernice talking to Irving, or Mister Crofton remembering his past. Quite amazingly, not a single one is bad. Not a single one. The worst I could describe one as is "average," and even that is pushing it. If I just talked about the good ones, I'd be here far too long, but here are some favorites:

"The Birthday Party" by Simon Guerrier, where Bernice must help celebrate the life of a member of the resistance without offending Marshal Anson, otherwise many lives will be lost.

"Five Dimensional Thinking" by Nick Wallace, where Irving Braxiatel convinces himself that only a Time Lord could have beaten him, and that that Time Lord must be himself.

"Meanwhile, in a Small Room, a Small Boy..." by Robert Shearman, where Peter must try to occupy himself while his mother Bernice is gone... and he does so through self-destructive blame.

"Drinking with the Enemy" by Jonathan Blum, where Bernice, having sold out and resumed her relationship with Jason, now an Axis officer, has dinner with Ms Jones and her new boyfriend, an Axis stalwart. Curfew comes, no one can go home, they drink too much, and they all learn entirely too much about one another. The best story in the book, showing how someone can be a fundamentally good person and a fundamentally awful person at the same time.

"The Peter Principle" by Kate Orman, where Bernice finally figures out where she stands.

There's something intrinsically Bernice-ish about occupation stories; when I think of classic Benny stories, the usual suspects are Beyond the Sun and Just War, and there's also The Dying Days and "Kill the Mouse!" I think it's because for the most part, Bernice is a pretty Doctor-like character, swanning into sci-fi situations and solving problems through action/adventure and some good dialogue. But occupations play out differently for Bernice than the Doctor. I can't imagine the Doctor living for weeks or months under a dictatorship, unable to do anything but keep himself alive, but what else can Bernice do? It's an intrinsically (and exclusively) human problem, and hence what makes Bernice her own character, her own person, and very real. She's never cruel or cowardly, but when you can't swan into the occupation headquarters and destroy the government with five words, that's something it's very hard to keep up, making her a whole lot braver.