Bernice Summerfield: In Time edited by Xanna Eve Chown

Bernice Summerfield: In Time
edited by Xanna Eve Chown

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

Published: 2018
Acquired: July 2023
Read: August 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: 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: Bernice Summerfield: Secret Histories edited by Mark Clapham

Another review up at Unreality SF: the Fifth First Doctor (I think that's right) returns in The First Doctor Adventures, Volume Two!

Hardcover, 175 pages
Published 2009

Acquired July 2015
Read September 2018

Bernice Summerfield XIII: Secret Histories
edited by Mark Clapham

2009's Bernice Summerfield book is another anthology, with a frame story that fleshes out what Benny was doing between deciding to confront Braxiatel at the end of Secret Origins and being captured by a giant robot in Dead and Buried.  On a dig, Benny discovers a collection of sentient skulls at the site of a war crime, and ends up telling them stories to pass the time. The stories cover a wide range of her life, but there are essentially three or four clusters: a few from her youth, before she had her graduate degree; a couple from the heyday of the Braxiatel Collection, when it was her and Adrian and Jason; a couple from her freelance on-the-run-from-Brax years; and then a number following on from the end of Secret Origins, as Benny and company plan their next move against Braxiatel and in the meantime have some wacky adventures.

I like the diversity on offer here. It's nice to see a young, inexperienced Benny alongside an older, but more carefree Collection-era Benny alongside her present-day status quo. And Mark Clapham's frame story is suitably atmospheric, additionally raising the kind of issues that work well with Benny as a character: dealing with the consequences of history and memory. But though Bernice Summerfield usually thrives in the anthology format (during the Big Finish era, the weaker books have almost always been the novels), Secret Histories isn't among the best of them. It's hard for me to put my finger on it, but I just felt like a lot of the stories here were weirdly plotted, not really coming to climaxes even when they had a solid foundation.

For example, there's a set of stories built around a common incident, where a mysterious machine shunts Benny, Adrian, and Peter back in time: Benny ends up in 1914 England, where she once again encounters Mycroft Holmes and John Watson; Adrian lands in World War I-era France; and Peter ends up in a vaguely Victorian freakshow. Each of the stories is evocatively written, with a great concept. But each one just kind of stops: in Jim Smith's "A Gallery of Pigeons," Mycroft deduces a time-travel mystery but it's more of intellectual interest than dramatic; in Eddie Robson's "The Firing Squad," a pair of alien time travelers (who I think are meant to be pre-existing characters?) tell Adrian what was going on; and in Mark Michalowksi's "The Illuminated Man"... I don't really know what happened at the end. Each story seems quite good until the disappointing endings, though, which is all the more frustrating. Smith is good at the retro-Sherlockiana, Robson does a great job with Adrian's character in an unusual situation, and Michalowski likewise has a good handle on the adolescent Peter.

So it's not like it's a bad book or a waste of time. Benny is a great character, and it's nice to hear from Collection characters like Adrian who have had their roles diminished with season 9's format change, such as in Cody Schell's "You Shouldn't Have," where Adrian and Benny crash-land on a planet where it's the height of masculinity to wear flowers. I also really enjoyed Lance Parkin's "Young Benny" tale, "A Game of Soldiers," a brutal and effective story of Benny reluctantly having to play a role in the Dalek Wars when she's accidentally drafted. And Nick Wallace's "Turn the Light On" is creepy and disorienting.

I did find that the resolution to the frame story followed the same pattern as many of the individual stories, in that it ended disappointingly as well: Benny makes a sort of nonsense technobabble deduction to wrap it all up, which undercuts the emotional potential that had been built up in the until-then effective scenes of her interactions with the skulls. It's not the worst Bernice Summerfield anthology (that's either The Dead Man Diaries or Missing Adventures), but it is underwhelming given the quality this range often provides.

Review: The New Adventures: Twilight of the Gods by Mark Clapham and Jon de Burgh Miller

Mass market paperback, 242 pages
Published 1999

Acquired March 2015

Read April 2015

The New Adventures: Twilight of the Gods
by Mark Clapham and Jon de Burgh Miller

What a way to go out! And what I mean by that, is that the New Adventures have gone out with a total whimper: the last three novels have just been boring and dull, the narrative potential of the Gods arc totally squandered. Here, basically Benny just got to do some technobabble and the allegedly universe-shattering problem that she's been up against is solved so easily. Add in yet another previously-unseen-but-supposedly-very-well-known-colleague-of-Benny's-from-St.-Oscar's, and you have a banal action-adventure plot that delivers on none of the neat stuff about faith set up by Rebecca Levene and Simon Winstone in Where Angels Fear.

(As a side note, it was amusing to note that I don't think Dave Stone ever read this book, as nothing he says about the hell dimension Jason was in in The Dead Man Diaries and The Infernal Nexus really relates to the one he ends up in here; probably someone just told him, "Jason's in a hell dimension," and he just went and did his own thing, as he so often does.)

I've been reading the Bernice Summerfield New Adventures on-and-off for ten years now, and since April 2012, I've read one of them every three months (more or less) in an effort to finally finish the series off-- which now I've done at last. To be honest, I don't think it ever really delivered on its potential. The narrative arcs were either halting or uninteresting, the early insistence on providing frothy sci-fi standalones meant Bernice never really grew or developed as a character, and the writers/editors obviously never really committed to a recurring cast of characters-- the only characters who were carried from book to book were the ones already introduced in Doctor Who (Jason, Braxiatel, and Chris). There's a lot of potential in Benny as a character, as Big Finish's later work would show, but these twenty-three books have a surprisingly few number of highlights.

Review: The New Adventures: Beige Planet Mars by Lance Parkin & Mark Clapham

Mass market paperback, 242 pages
Published 1998
Acquired October 2013
Read November 2013

The New Adventures: Beige Planet Mars
by Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham

This Bernice Summerfield New Adventure is fun and light, and in that it achieves more than most of its brethren, but beyond some good jokes, Jason's job writing xenoporn, and villains Parkin would essentially recycle in Doctor Who: Davros, you can't point at a whole lot of note. There are rather a lot of good jokes, especially at the expense of academics, though, so there's that. As I near the end of the New Adventures, I am coming to feel like Virgin never really figured out how to use Bernice in Doctor-less adventures the way that Big Finish did a decade later.