The Uncollected Internet Doctor Who Short Trips, 2004–21

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about all the short Doctor Who stories with Christmas themes that had never received some kind of hard-copy publication. In the process of researching it, I had to also figure out all the Internet-published short Doctor Who stories that were not Christmas-themed. Just as I read all the Christmas-themed ones as a sort of "book" in 2022, for Christmas 2025, I read all the other ones. Once again, here is a handy guide to all of them, along with my thoughts. (Note there were a bunch of short stories published on the official site during lockdown in 2020, but those were all subsequently collected.)

Adventure Calendar

As covered in my previous post, the official Doctor Who web site used to run an annual "adventure calendar" that often included short stories. Some were Christmas-themed, but some were not. Here are the ones that were not:

• "Number 1, Gallows Gate Road" by Rupert Laight (4 & 11 Dec. 2008). The tenth Doctor lands at a boarding house in 1940 where everyone—including himself—is curiously lacking in ambition. Published in two parts, I found the first pretty strong and atmospheric. Like a lot of Doctor Who stories, the second part, where you have to give explanations and solutions, is less engaging, but still I enjoyed it.
• "Houdini and the Space Cuckoos" Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four by Joseph Lidster (15-16, 19, & 25 Dec. 2012). In this story, the eleventh Doctor must team up with Harry Houdini to stop some aliens. I usually get on with Joseph Lidster's work very well, but this is more action-focused and less character-focused than plays to his strengths, I think. I did think he did a good job of capturing the voice of the eleventh Doctor.
• "Doctor Who and the Horror of Coal Hill" by Gavin Collinson (21 Dec. 2017). This is a bit longer than some of the other ones, and I found it surprisingly engaging. The main story is about the first Doctor visiting Coal Hill School during the time Susan is a student there, and helping a teacher fight off an alien menace; the story periodically jumps ahead and shows later Doctors coming back to the school later on to remember the events of the story. It's a neat story that parallels the Doctor's status as an outside with the perils of immigration. I thought Collinson's Christmas stories were a bit slight, but this one is strong.

Other Stories from the Official Site

• "The Feast of the Stone" by Cavan Scott & Mark Wright (3 Apr. 2004). This is the only story in this post to predate the 2005 revival, back when the official Doctor Who site was a subsection of "BBC Cult." (It is amazing to me that twenty years on, it's still there, though!) This is the only other story to ever feature the Doctor and his companions from the webcast Scream of the Shalka; it was part of a BBC Cult vampire-themed initiative. It's decent enough, but I very much enjoyed the glimpses of this unique Doctor with his unique companions, particularly the robotic shell of the Master. Scott & Wright to a good job capturing the voices of both Richard E. Grant's Doctor and Derek Jacobi's pseudo-Master.
• "'42' Prologue" by Joseph Lidster (12 May 2007). You may remember the 2007 episode "42," about the tenth Doctor and Martha, told in real time aboard a dying spaceship. This story chronicles the four minutes before they showed up, from the perspective of one of the characters on the ship. It doesn't particularly work on its own (it would be interesting to read it and then immediately start the episode, I think), but it's Joseph Lidster, so it has a strong sense of voice and character.
• "The Lonely Computer" by Rupert Laight (24 May 2008). The David Tennant years were really the peak of content on the official site; this story is based on a passing reference to the Doctor having met a lonely computer in Belgium in "The Unicorn and the Wasp." It's a little underdeveloped but Laight does well by both the tenth Doctor and Donna.
• "Blue Moon" by Oli Smith (July 2009). For the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo missions, the BBC site released this story about the Doctor discovering secret alien intervention in the moon landing—a premise the show would use itself just a couple years later. I thought this one was just okay, not much to say about it.
• "The War of Art" by Paul Cornell (Aug. 2010). I forget what the occasion for this one was, but I feel like it did have one, like it was a tie-in to a game or something. Paul Cornell is one of my favorite writers (not just Doctor Who writers, but writers full top) and he can do good, beautiful character work—but as this story shows, he can also be quite funny. Aliens invade a futuristic gallery, and Cornell uses this as the opportunity for a number of art jokes; I laughed out loud repeatedly.
• "The Night after Hallowe'en" by Mark B. Oliver (29 Oct.–5 Nov. 2010). This is the first of several stories by Mark B. Oliver about a family of kids the eleventh Doctor keeps meeting; they also appeared in a couple Christmas stories. I find the kids pretty generic, as is the plot here. I don't feel like they warranted repeat appearances.
• "What the TARDIS Thought of 'Time Lord Victorious'" by James Goss (15 Nov. 2020). This is one of two online prose tie-ins to the "Time Lord Victorious" event; it is told from the perspective of the TARDIS, picking up from the end of "The Waters of Mars," establishing how the tenth Doctor gets from there to the events of the crossover. It's fine. Goss always writes with a strong sense of voice, but the basic premise of the crossover was a bit silly.

Stories from Other Sources

• "My Dad, The Doctor" by Jamie Mathieson (First News, 29 Oct. 2015). Mathieson, writer of several Peter Capaldi tv stories, writes this prose story about him, one where the Doctor uses his sonic sunglasses to take over the mind of a kid's dad in the middle of a crisis. Well written but I found the final twist didn't make a ton of sense. It was written for a kids newspaper, but Mathieson republished it on his own blog.
• "The Dawn of the Kotturuh" by James Goss (official newsletter, 25 Sept. 2020). This is another tie-in to Time Lord Victorious, one explaining how the alien Kotturuh brought death to the universe during the Dark Times. It was originally published in the official Doctor Who e-mail newsletter. Frankly, even by the standards of Doctor Who, I don't think the idea of a universe with living things without death makes any sense, and this story didn't make it work any better.
• "The Voice of Many Angels" by Gavin Collinson (Maze Theory’s Into the Unknown web site, 18 Mar. 2021). My understanding is that the videogame Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins had a tie-in website called Into the Unknown, purporting to be a conspiracy theorist blog focused on the Weeping Angels. This was the final post on the site, a short story from the perspective of the guy who ran the site. The site and the story are gone now, but author Gavin Collinson was kind enough to share a copy of it with me via e-mail. I really enjoyed it; creepy and suggestive, and it expanded on Weeping Angels lore in interesting ways that I liked. Amazing to think there are new angles on them, but I loved the idea of a support group!

Since the time span covered in this post, there have been a least a couple more, tie-ins to another crossover event ("Doom's Day") but I haven't read those yet. These thirteen stories run over 250 pages if formatted like an official BBC Books anthology, so it makes for a nice set of readings. I wonder if any official publisher will ever be motivated to collect any of this work?

Doctor Who: Dalek Empire by Nicholas Briggs (ed.)

Doctor Who: Short Trips #19: Dalek Empire
edited by Nicholas Briggs with Simon Guerrier

Dalek Empire is a 2001-08 audio spin-off series from Big Finish (its first, actually, I believe), chronicling a Dalek invasion of the galaxy, focusing on the humans caught up in it when the Doctor's not around to save anyone. I picked it up in a sale a few years ago, but have never actually gotten around to listening to it; there is always too much new Big Finish to listen to first! The range engendered a tie-in of its own, the sixteenth volume of Big Finish's Short Trips series of anthologies, which was released between the third and fourth series.

Published: 2006
Acquired: July 2008
Read: December 2023

I haven't heard Dalek Empire, but I know the broad outlines of the plot; probably there's stuff here I'd get better having heard it, but I felt okay for the most part. Most of the stories here fall into two buckets. The first is made up of character studies of Dalek Empire's three human leads: "Kalendorf" by Nicholas Briggs and "Alby" and "Suz" by Sharon Gosling. "Kalendorf" takes place at the very beginning of the series, during the initial Dalek assault, while "Alby" and "Suz" take place later on, delving into the thoughts of those characters. They were all decent stories (I liked the horror of the Daleks in "Kalendorf") best, but also the ones that I suspect would most benefit from actually having heard the series.

Most of the rest of the stories are side stories to the Dalek invasion of the Milky Way, many of them including the Doctor in some capacity. But in these stories, he doesn't go around defeating dastardly plans; because the events of Dalek Empire already proceed without him, they're kind of what you might call "future historicals," featuring the Doctor on the fringes of future history, helping the little people, but not making any significant changes. My favorites among these included Ian Farrington's "Hide and Seek," where the third Doctor and Jo help a group of refugees evacuate; Farrington captures the Doctor and Jo particularly well.

The best of them as definitely Joseph Lidster's "Natalie's Diary," which is about a young woman named Natalie trying to stay alive during the Dalek assault on her planet, aided by the seventh Doctor, Ace, and Hex. As usual for Lidster, the strength of the story is in its characterization, as Natalie slowly discovers the hardness of the world she has come into. Ace and Hex aren't focal characters, but are deftly drawn, recalling one of Big Finish's best runs. The story is framed by a history student reading Natalie's diaries sometime later, which I think is set during the events of Dalek Empire III (when the Daleks return). The other ones are fine enough, though I found Ian Farrington's "Private Investigations" and Justin Richards's "Mutually Assured Survival" kind of pointless and dull.

There are two stories that break from this format. One is Simon Guerrier's "The Eighth Wonder of the World," which isn't a Dalek Empire tie-in at all, but a follow-up to the first Doctor serial The Daleks' Master Plan, featuring the sixth Doctor and Evelyn investigating what happened to a Dalek left behind in ancient Egypt during that adventure. Guerrier does his usual clever and interesting work, but it feels too fanciful in this context; Dalek Empire just isn't this kind of Dalek story.

The other is the volume's definitely standout, "Museum Peace" by James Swallow. Long after the events of Dalek Empire II: Dalek War, Kalendorf is retired and visiting a museum devoted to the Dalek War, contemplating how time has moved on. The Doctor is there, too (who he already knows; more on that in a minute), in his eighth incarnation, contemplating some terrible action against the Daleks. It's a deftly written, powerful story about grief and anger and moving on. Clearly when it was written, Swallow intended the eighth Doctor to be thinking about obliterating the Daleks, though subsequent revelations in "The Day of the Doctor" mean that can't be the case. But it holds up regardless—you can imagine the Doctor is at some terrible low during the Time War. (Or, in a very tenuous pet theory of mine, it takes place between To the Death and Dark Eyes, with the Doctor driven to despair.)

The book also includes the script for The Return of the Daleks, a 2006 audio drama that crossed the seventh Doctor into the events of Dalek Empire, as well as a sequel to the tv story Planet of the Daleks. (Hence, how Kalendorf knows the Doctor.) It wasn't a particularly great audio (I have actually heard it; it was a freebie for subscribers to Big Finish's main Doctor Who range), and reading a script is honestly never really that interesting. It feels like it's there to pad the book out—a whole forty pages! Given how many authors contribute two stories, one wonders if the volume was put together in a hurry.

(Despite the cover, the first, second, fourth, and fifth Doctors do not appear in this book.)

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Short Trips: The Quality of Leadership

The Uncollected Doctor Who Christmas Short Trips

Over the past decade, I've had a tradition of reading a Doctor Who Christmas book every Christmas. (Scroll down on this page to see the complete list.) Last year, I reached the endpoint of that tradition when I read the last one I hadn't read, Dave Rudden's The Wintertime Paradox.

Except that there are a number of Doctor Who Christmas short stories only available on the Internet or in various periodicals that have never been collected or reprinted. Once I finished The Wintertime Paradox, I spent some time tracking them all down, and this Christmas I read that "book." Here is a handy guide to all of them, along with my thoughts. (This is an expanded version of a GallifreyBase post; thanks to the commenters there for cluing me into an extra one.)

Doctor Who Magazine

Somewhat surprisingly, I think DWM have only ever done just one prose Christmas story.

• 
  Prelude to The Left-Handed Humminbird by Kate Orman (Doctor Who Magazine, no. 207, 22 Dec. 1993). Most of Virgin's The New Doctor Who Adventures had exclusive preludes published in DWM; this one happens to be set on Christmas. It's very much scene-setting for the novel, and the Christmas elements are incidental. But, you know, it's by Kate Orman, so it's well-written and horrific. Someday I'll read the book. Like all the preludes, it's been copied out on the unofficial Doctor Who Reference Guide, so it is easily accessed.

Newspaper Stories

Two times Paul Cornell published a Doctor Who short story around Christmas time. This sort of became a trilogy; see below under Unofficial but Interesting.

• "Deep and Dreamless Sleep" by Paul Cornell (Sunday Times, 24 Dec. 2006). The tenth Doctor encounters a five-year-old boy who hijacks the TARDIS in search of a perfect Christmas. It's by Paul Cornell, so it's pretty good. The ending in particular is great. It has some bits that made me think he had to condense it to fit the newspaper's space, but overall you can't go wrong with Paul Cornell doing Doctor Who at Christmas. (His anthology Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury is a thing of beauty.) [Link takes you to an archived copy of part 1 of 6. To get all six part, I think I signed up for a Times account and cancelled before the free trial ended.]
  

• "The Hopes and Fears of All the Years" by Paul Cornell (Daily Telegraph, 22 Dec. 2007). Another story of the tenth Doctor at Christmas; this one is about him popping in to see a single family at multiple Christmases across the course of a boy's life. I really liked this one: sentimental without being mawkish, and I'm always a sucker for a bildungsroman, even in miniature.
  

Adventure Calendar

From 2006 to 2017, the BBC's official Doctor Who web site always promoted the upcoming Christmas special with the "Adventure Calendar," where every day from December 1st to Christmas Day, you could go to the official site and receive some kind of treat: desktop wallpapers, Flash games, interviews, commentary tracks, artwork, and fiction. Not all of this fiction was seasonally themed, but I've included here a list of all the stories that have Christmas or winter links. (Someday I'll do another post looking at the others.)

• "The Frozen" by Rupert Laight (2 Dec. 2007). The tenth Doctor takes a graduate student from the future back to the February 1814 frost fair, the last time the River Thames froze over. (Luckily he doesn't bump into the first Doctor or the twelfth; see Frostfire and "Thin Ice.") A lot of these Adventure Calendar stories are, to be honest, pretty mediocre. No characterization to speak of, just dialogue and actions, like a television script, with often awkward prose.
  
• "The Advent of Fear" Part One and Part Two by Mark B. Oliver (6 & 10 Dec. 2009). The tenth Doctor encounters a girl with an advent calendar that keeps sending her through time. To be honest, I was into this one at first, but in the end I found it rather confusing and disjointed. This is the first one to have a juvenile companion stand-in, which is true of most of these.
  
• "The Doctor on My Shoulder" Part One and Part Two by Daniel Roth (17 & 23 Dec. 2009). The Doctor gets shrunk down and ends up wrapped in someone's present. To be honest, that's a lot more interesting sounding than the story actually is. Again, a pedestrian runaround without a prose style, and I didn't find the alien plan very believable even by Doctor Who standards.
• 
  "Snowfall" by Gavin Collinson and Mark B. Oliver (9-10, 17, 20, & 23-24 Dec. 2010). This is actually two short stories with a frame; they feature the eleventh Doctor with Amy and Rory in the frame. It was released across several days (each of the embedded stories was divided in half), but then collected as a complete novella. In the first, Mark B. Oliver's "Cold Snap" the Doctor bumps in a couple kids he met before in a previous web exclusive story (a Halloween one, so not relevant to this project) and also meets a guy named "Big Jack." They work together to stop a heat-draining alien on Christmas. The second, "Vampire Hurricane" by Gavin Collinson, is about the Doctor and a guy named David working together to stop a toy magnate from accidentally creating a vampire army on Christmas. The frame, also by Collinson, is about Big Jack and David—estranged brothers—reconciling... on Christmas. The embedded stories are fine, if a bit shallow like all the other Adventure Calendar tales. I didn't find the estranged brother thing worked at all.
• 
  "Attack of the Snowmen" by Mark B. Oliver (20-21 & 24 Dec. 2011). The kids, Louie and Millie, from "The Night after Hallowe'en" and "Cold Snap" are back, this time facing evil killer snowmen with the eleventh Doctor, a year before Moffat did evil killer snowmen on tv. Once again, it has the same issues as all the others of these.
• "Behind You" Parts One, Two, and Three by Mark Williams (19-21 Dec. 2014). Original fiction took a few years off, but returned with this twelfth Doctor story. Again, par for the course in terms of quality, but enlivened by a couple good jokes about how Peter Capaldi's Doctor hates panto.
• "Haunted" Parts One, Two, and Three by Joseph Lidster (21 & 23-24 Dec. 2015). The Adventure Calendar continued a couple years after this, but without original fiction, alas. But! The last of these stories was undoubtedly the best of them. Of course it was—it's by one of my favorite Doctor Who writers, Joseph Lidster, who gives us a child protagonist with meaningful struggles, a sparky twelfth Doctor, and some good twists.

That was it for Doctor Who advent calendars, I guess because that was also it for Doctor Who Christmas specials. And also that was it for the BBC web site doing anything interesting, and that was also it for the producers of Doctor Who being interested in promoting the show. (Actually, we got a lot of cool web content during 2020 in Lockdown, but I don't think any of it was Christmas-related.)

BBC Studios Web Site Stories

We did, however, get two Christmas stories from the BBC Studios Doctor Who web site, in 2016 and 2020.

• "Christmas Special" by Cavan Scott (23 Dec. 2016). This ninth Doctor and Rose short story ties into Titan's then-ongoing comic series, also featuring the original companion and a recurring character from that series. (It's set between the two stories collected in Official Secrets.) The story is pretty minimal, and it's a tie-in to a series I found pretty ho-hum. If this was meant to promote the comic series to a wider audience, maybe Tara should have been given any indication of being interesting at all.
• "Canaries" by Dave Rudden (15 Oct. 2020). Okay, not released seasonally at all, but it is set on Christmas. It was a tie-in to both Time Lord Victorious and the anthology The Wintertime Paradox—and indeed, doesn't quite count as "uncollected" because it was added to Wintertime Paradox for its ebook and paperback releases, and thus I have read it already. It's a prequel to Wintertime Paradox that sets up the book's villains.

Unofficial but Interesting

Lastly, this category is made up of things that are not officially licensed (so they are technically fan fiction) but have some kind of claim to quasi-official status, usually based on who wrote them.

• "The Last Doctor" by Paul Cornell (13 Dec. 2009). Cornell posted this story on his blog. It's about what seems to be the last incarnation of the Doctor, at the very end of the universe, as the last humans experience the last Christmas. It's by Paul Cornell, so it's good—really captures that Doctor Who at Christmas vibe of hope in the face of the coldness of the universe. I really liked it, and it nicely caps off an emotional trilogy continuing from Cornell's two stories above, about the Doctor's emotional engagement with people.
  
• "Mrs Wibbsey's Festive Diary" by Paul Magrs (21-27 Dec. 2013). Across seven blog entries in 2013, Paul Magrs serialized a Christmas story about Mrs Wibbsey, who was the fourth Doctor's companion in his Nest Cottage Chronicles series of audio dramas; in 2014, he rereleased it as a single post. It's told in the form of Mrs Wibbsey's diary as she waits for the Doctor to come back one Christmas in Hexford, but gets a very different Christmas visitor instead... It's by Magrs, so it has some good jokes, and is a bit meta about storytelling in a way that worked for me, especially at Christmas. (Some day I must actually listen to my Nest Cottage Chronicles box set!) Magrs collected this in an anthology of original fiction, but edited it to be about characters and situations not copyrighted to the BBC, so it became "Mrs Frimbly's Festive Diary."
• 
  "Who the Dickens...?" by Juliet E. McKenna (Paul Cornell's blog, 14 Dec. 2019). This third Doctor and Jo adventure was intended for Paul Cornell's Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury in 2004. However, it got cut because it conflicted with an episode of the upcoming screen revival: it features the Doctor going back in time and meeting Charles Dickens for the first time! So it was cut at the last minute, and posted to Cornell's blog fifteen years later. It's a cute story that I enjoyed reading; good handle on the Doctor and Dickens.

And that's it! It runs almost three hundred pages if formatted like the BBC's own anthologies. I have to say some of the stories are better than others—I tended to prefer ones that actually were Christmas stories rather than stories with Christmas trappings—but on the whole it makes for a nice Christmas treat to read them all.

Short SF&F Week: Voices from the Past edited by Scott Harrison and Lee Harris

Kindle eBook, n.pag.
Published 2011
Acquired May 2011
Read July 2012

Voices from the Past
edited by Scott Harrison and Lee Harris

Once again, I picked up this book because Paul Cornell has a story in it; I really am obsessed. Voices from the Past is the first (and apparently only) publication of H&H Books, collecting 1,500-word stories from almost thirty of British sf's best authors, released for charity. (Though "British sf's best authors" has a curiously high correspondence to "people who write Doctor Who tie-in fiction".) The linking theme seems to be the title itself; nearly all of the stories have literal or metaphorical "voices from the past." (Rob Shearman's, though, has a creepy man-dog creature. We love you, Rob!)

The main thing I learned is that the 1,500-word short story is immensely difficult to write; many of these stories are just an idea, but they're slightly too long to get away with only being an idea. Worse than a story that's just an idea is a story that's just a twist, and that's an all too prevalent mode here. Especially if that twist is just a cliche or a joke I've heard before. I could complain about a lot of those, but instead I'll focus on the good ones, such as Alastair Reynolds's "Ascension Day," which is about a spaceship that stays in a place for years upon years... but is about to take off. But of course, like all good twists, it's not twist, but simply a revelation about what's come before.

Other good ones: Cavan Scott's "Just Do It" was striking and creepy, Jasper Fforde's "Shuttle" had a great, vivid concept, Joseph Lidster's "Success" feels like the flipside of an aliens-invade-London episode of Russell Davies Doctor Who, Maura McHugh's "Mustn't Grumble" puts a poor father/son relationship into a disturbing light, Mur Lafferty's "750,000 of Your Friends Like This" was a great idea and funny even if it wasn't much of a story, Paul Magrs's "The Curious Package" was charming fun, and Robert Shearman's "The Runt" was darkly true in that way that Shearman always is.

So there's some good stuff, but the hit ratio is slightly lower than one might hope for. They're all over quickly, which means that most of the bad ones don't outstay their welcomes (though there are some capable of doing that anyway!). It's an okay book in the end, but you'd kinda hope for better from many of these authors.

All that said, for an eBook-only release, the formatting on this thing (at least in the Kindle edition) is terrible. I can (begrudgingly) understand bad formatting on print book also released as an eBook, but when a book is only an eBook, every line of text consistently being indented on the left side is inexcusably sloppy. Check your work, people!

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 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.

Professor Bernice Summerfield in an exciting adventure with some Academics

Hardcover, 183 pages
Published 2004
Acquired January 2012
Read April 2012

Professor Bernice Summerfield IV: A Life Worth Living

edited by Simon Guerrier

This is the fourth Bernice Summerfield anthology, but it's the first to be edited by Simon Guerrier instead of the usual mainstay, Paul Cornell.  But just like all of Cornell's anthologies (bar the first one), it's an intelligent, charming, literate, thoughtful collection of sf stories.

The premise of A Life Worth Living is that, in order to help obscure the memory of the Fifth Axis Occupation from the minds of the Collection, Braxiatel opens it up to students-- and then asks Bernice to not go offworld for a year so she can live up to her teaching and other academic duties.  Of course I would be sold on it right away: it has to be the only sf book I've ever read that revolves entirely around the doings of academia!  But there's more than that.  Though the book involves a lot of academia, it could involve a lot of anything. It's a book about picking up the pieces, figuring out what you're doing and who you are, and getting back to work. Because even if giant, awful things have happened to you, life really does go on.

This is set up right from the beginning with Paul Cornell's lovely "Misplaced Spring," which is a series of moments across the Collection as the new students arrive and Bernice tries to remember what it's like to be in love again.  There are a lot of stories about relationships, actually, and most of them are quite good: "Welcome to the Machine" by the improbably-named Sin Deniz is about a desperately lonely woman being stalked, and it feels all too real. "A Summer Affair" is a charming but dark tale by (of course) Joseph Lidster that gives another romance to Ms. Jones. Man, that "woman of a certain age" gets around!

Probably the most fun of all these was Philip Purser-Hallard's "Sex Secrets of the Robot Replicants," where Bernice discovers that not only has Jason taken up writing xenoporn again, but that it's attracting rather a lot of academic criticism!  Hilarity ensues, of course.  I also enjoyed "Against Gardens," an Eddie Robson story about Hass the new Martian (not an Ice Warrior, honest!) gardener on the Collection, who turns out to be rather a fascinating character.

My favorite story, though, has to be "Final Draft" by Cameron Mason.  Here, Bernice has to write a keynote address for a conference in three hours when Hass tells her she's made a basic mistake.  And the closer the conference comes, the worse the situation gets.  Funny and it includes nice character moments for every member of the cast, what else could you want?

There's only one flat-out bad story in the collection, Richard Salter's goofy and far-fetched "Nothing up my Sleeve," where Bernice squares off against the Brotherhood of Magicians.  Good joke if you've seen Tomb of the Cybermen (I have, unfortunately), but little else.  Also, I think the Collection plays host to three conferences in the course of the book, which seems rather a lot for an institution that small.

Honestly, though I'd miss Lisa Bowerman, I wouldn't be upset if Big Finish chucked the novels and the audio dramas and just did Bernice as a series of anthologies. These are where the characters and writers really get their chance to shine.

I read this after Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Bone of Contention, which was the release order, but it appears that it actually goes before that story. This means that the order of the past few Bernice stories is:

• Audio 4.3. The Poison Seas: Bernice is summoned back to the Collection.
• Anthology III. Life During Wartime: Bernice returns to find the Collection occupied.
• Audio 4.4. Death and the Daleks: The Collection is liberated.
• Novel #6. The Big Hunt. Bernice takes a vacation after the recent stress.
• Audio 5.1. The Grel Escape: Bernice comes home to find that while Jason has been watching Peter, he's been playing with the Time Rings.
• Anthology IV. A Life Worth Living: Bernice spends a year on the Collection without leaving.
• Audio 5.2. The Bone of Contention: Bernice takes her first offworld trip in a year, to the Clutch.
• Anthology V. A Life in Pieces: Jason persuades Benny that they should take a trip together, as they have each had one of their own recently.
• Audio 5.3. The Relics of Jegg-Sau: You tell me, I'm only halfway through it!

I enjoy the fact that this series crosses media, but it can be tricky to stay on top of without a central numbering system!

Archival Review: Doctor Who: Short Trips #15: The History of Christmas edited by Simon Guerrier

Hardcover, 192 pages
Published 2005
Acquired July 2006
Read December 2007

Doctor Who: Short Trips #15: The History of Christmas
edited by Simon Guerrier

Inappropriately enough, I got this book for my birthday in July of 2006.  Appropriately enough, I read it just after Christmas 2007.  The second of Big Finish's Christmas-themed Short Trips books, it was enjoyable enough, though towards the end I started to get tired of the Christmas theme coming again and again-- a problem that never afflicted me with Paul Cornell's A Christmas Treasury, despite the fact that that book had more stories!  I feel as though the earlier book had a wider variety of stories, but this book was by no means poor.  My favorite was probably Eddie Robson's "Not in My Back Yard", with Joseph Lidster's "She Won't Be Home" a close contender-- no surprise there, since they're both among my favorite Big Finish writers.