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: Blue Box by Kate Orman

Doctor Who: Blue Box
by Kate Orman

I've been reading BBC Books's Eighth Doctor Adventures and related books every three months since October 2019, starting with the novelisation of the TV movie: ones I owned but hadn't got to, supplemented by ones that had been rereleased. Trading Futures was the last of those, so now I'm on to some vaguely related books before I draw this project to a close. The first is Blue Box, a Past Doctor Adventure rereleased as an ebook; it has no link to the EDAs, but it's by Kate Orman, one of the very best Doctor Who novelists, so I made an exception.

 

Published: 2003
Acquired and read: December 2022

Blue Box features the sixth Doctor and Peri, seemingly some time in the run-up to The Trial of a Time Lord, in 1981 America. The novel is told in the form of a piece of long-form journalism by Chick Peters, who stumbles into a plot by a prominent D.C.-area hacker to acquire a piece of alien technology, and the attempts of the Doctor, Peri, and their friend Bob to stop her. It's got a lot going for it, and I really enjoyed it on the whole; surely one of the very best PDAs.

First, Orman as always has a good handle on characterization. Here we get some probing of Peri's tempestuous relationship with the sixth Doctor: why she likes him, why she wants to leave him, why she ultimately stays on. The sixth Doctor is in a bit of a different mode than normal (Orman perhaps channeling some of the seventh Doctor, with whom she cut her teeth as a Doctor Who novelist), but I could still imagine Colin Baker delivering his lines with gusto. (She does get him out of the coat, which was seemingly obligatory for PDA writers back in the day, though I did like the image of him wearing all black except for a rainbow cat tie.) The new characters, especially Chick, Bob, and the villain, Sarah Swan, all pop off the page. There's a pretty neat turn of events as regards Chick, one I wouldn't have excepted in a 2003 novel. Though it's not handled quite the way I would imagine for a 2023 novel, it was still pretty impressive.

Second, I really liked how the story was told. Peters writes in the first person from his perspective. Sometimes it's stuff he saw, sometimes it's stuff he reconstructed from his sources. It's a neat way to tell a Doctor Who story, and an effectively different way of getting into characters' heads. Orman does a good job of imitating the style of long-form journalism, like those occasional forays into people's backstories, the plucking out of their small idiosyncrasies, and beginning with a scene that occurs much later than most of the action. The book is able to give exposition in terms of both character and plot without it feeling belabored, and there is a nicely poetic recurring bit about someone riding a bull that wrong-foots the readers. As always, Orman reads smoothly and nicely. It feels like a novel, not a novelisation of a tv show, in the form of the story, too: the story here is about people, and the kind of action that is present, plays to the strengths of prose.

Third, I loved the topic. I watched War Games and Triumph of the Nerds a lot as a kid. I have a real fondness for the early computer era, an era where—as this book points out—individual people could still meaningfully comprehend and control computer programs and the emerging Internet. There are some good jokes about what was to come with computing, and lots of delving into the mechanics of hacking. I don't know if it was all plausible or not, but it felt plausible. (The "blue box" of the title is not the TARDIS but a real device that lets people manipulate phone lines.) I always get a kick out of this kind of thing, and Orman made it come alive.

Add to that a creepy concept and you have a winner. I don't know that I would give it "five stars" if I went around doing such things, but this seems to me to be the platonic ideal of a PDA.

(I read it a week before Christmas... and it actually takes place from December 23 to 26 or so. I guess I could have included in my readthrough of Doctor Who Christmas books. It's not very Christmassy, but no less so than, say, The Sleep of Reason.)

I read a post–New Doctor Who Adventures novel every three months. Next up in sequence: The Glamour Chronicles: Big Bang Generation

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.

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: Time, Unincorporated, Vol. 2 edited by Graeme Burk and Robert Smith?

Trade paperback, 365 pages
Published 2010 (contents: 1978-2010)
Acquired August 2012
Read August 2016

Time, Unincorporated: The Doctor Who Fanzine Archives, Vol. 2: Writings on the Classic Series
edited by Graeme Burk and Robert Smith?

First off, I want to discuss some weird editorial choices, not all of which are necessarily the fault of this book and its editors. The first is the awful subtitle, Writings on the Classic Series. The book was announced under the title Classic Series Cornucopia (which is perhaps worse), while the running head thinks it's called Writings About the Classic Series (which is miscapitalized) and the foreword calls it Backwards In Time. The second is that the foreword promises at least four more volumes of Time, Unincorporated: one on the new series, one on "the universe of Doctor Who (including non-televised versions of Doctor Who)," one culled exclusively from the fanzine Time-Space Visualizer, and one from Matrix. Only the first of these actually appeared, curtailing Time, Unincorporated at three volumes. The problem this causes is that no essays from TSV or Matrix appear in this volume-- but, for some reason, there are around a dozen essays original to this volume, which hardly feels like a "best of." It's a shame these were included instead of TSV/Matrix essays, given that volumes four and onwards are MIA.*

Now: the book itself. It was pretty good. It wasn't great, but I can't think of any essays that were outright bad (with one exception), and many were great. I think it's kind of borderline to call the website The Doctor Who Ratings Guide a "fanzine," but I appreciated that the book had many contributions from Mike Morris, probably my favorite contributor to the DWRG back in the days when I pored over it nonstop. My favorite was probably "10 Official Writer's Guidelines for the Pertwee Era," which gently mocks the Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks era of the show. (I was sad they didn't have Morris's essay on Season 21, though, or very many contributions from Rob Matthews, another DWRG regular. The season reviews both did were usually excellent.)

Other highlights include Dave Rolinson's "Is Who Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", a surprisingly literate and theory-informed feminist take on the show; Gian-Luca Di Rocco's "Is the Doctor a Pacifist?" (no, of course not); Matthew Kilburn's examination of authorship in television in "Was There a Hinchcliffe era?" (not to mention Dave Rolinson's in "Authorship in the John Nathan-Turner Era"); Graeme Burk's "Miss Wright," which explains of why Barbara Wright is the best companion and inspired me to rewatch The Edge of Destruction; Colin and Anthony Wilson's "Occam's Daleks," a surprisingly compelling take on Dalek history (we didn't need another one but I liked it anyway!); and the essay in four parts, "Ghost Light: Four Views" by Kate Orman, Steven Caldwell, Nathan Bottomley, and Dallas Jones, is an excellent dissection of an excellent story, especially its biological, literary, and historical allusions.

As someone for whom the 1980s are largely a peak period of Doctor Who (minus Seasons 22 and 24), I was glad to see that the essays throughout the volume were largely celebratory. I mean, I think Season 17 is largely bunk, but many folks think the same about Season 19, so why not celebrate everything instead of slagging it? But the early John Nathan-Turner stories, in particular, come in for some due appreciation, not to mention that there's an essay celebrating The Trial of a Time Lord, though I wish Emily Monagahn's "Greater Than the Sum of its Parts" could just come out and say Mindwarp is excellent because it is. On the other hand, it's hard for me to disagree with Mike Morris's slagging of Season 22 in "Untrue Grit"! It really is a nadir of the program.

I don't know if Scott Clarke's six-part "The Key to a Time Lord" is the worst essay in the book, but it's definitely weak, and because it stretches out across the whole book (it's arranged as interludes between the different sections), you have to keep reading it again and again. Did you know that characterization is a key element of Doctor Who? By gum. It comes from Enlightenment, a 'zine edited by one of this book's co-editors that is probably over-represented in its pages; the other co-editor edits the DWRG, explaining that site's high representation here. Indeed, one last editorial complaint would be that in addition to overrepresenting their pet projects, the editors overrepresent themselves. It seems to me to involve a little chutzpah to pick your own work for a "best of" volume, but both Burk and Smith? have multiple pieces in here.

That said, there's probably no better tribute that halfway through reading this book, like I said, I rewatched The Edge of Destruction, and that upon finishing it, I decided I needed to own more classic Who on DVD-- there are so many gaps in my collection, and this book shows just how good the show is. I want to own it all, but for now, I'm glad I've finally got The Ambassadors of Death on DVD.

* Not that any of the new essays are bad; some of them are among the better essays in the book! But with so much fanzine material I'll never be able to access, I'm sad to miss the opportunity to read more of it.

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.

Review: The New Adventures: Walking to Babylon by Kate Orman

Mass market paperback, 257 pages
Published 1998
Acquired November 2012
Read December 2012

The New Adventures: Walking to Babylon
by Kate Orman

This is a thoughtful, cute romance, where Bernice gets to hang out with an Edwardian archaeologist in the distant past, while meanwhile the People get up to no good. Not a lot happens, perhaps (seriously, how long does it take you to find people from the far future in ancient Mesopotamia?), but Orman's prose and interiority are such that you rarely notice, and when you do notice, you don't care. Bernice is at her best here, after a couple crummy outings, and John Lafayette is a good character too. The investigation of the People is great; my first real encounter with these guys.

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.