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!

---

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!

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

Bernice Summerfield: Adorable Illusion by Gary Russell

Bernice Summerfield: Adorable Illusion
by Gary Russell

I'm catching up on my Bernice Summerfield audio dramas, and I paused to read this novel. I listened to it between discs four and five of the Missing Persons box set based on what I read on-line; it's always tricky to place things before you experience them! Having read it, I would now advise listening to it during the Road Trip box set, between discs two and three. (See my Bernice Summerfield timeline for full details.)

Published: 2014
Acquired: November 2017
Read: April 2021

Bernice Summerfield may seem like an audio character now, but of course she was born in prose novels-- and, unfortunately, this is the last one. (All subsequent Bernice Summerfield books have been anthologies.) Doubly unfortunately because 1) this is a medium where she can thrive, and 2) this last appearance of Benny in her original medium is wretched. Like a lot of Gary Russell novels, it feels like he had 100 pages of ideas, and so this is padded out with long, unfunny diversions, and ostensibly humorous exposition. Nothing about the characters here will grab you, and much of the plot makes little sense. (Benny is given the identity of a murderer, on a ship with the parents of the murder victims, and apparently none of these people know what the murderer looks like!) Some subplots work to set up the climax of the New Frontiers box set... an episode that was actually quite bad. The character of Avril Fenman appears here, but shortly before reading this I listened to the audiobook of Fenman's original appearances in The Squire's Crystal and The Glass Prison and this isn't her, it's just a different character with the same name.

Its sole saving grace is that we do get our first (and, I think, only) check in on the Collection cast, the characters who made up the series's ensemble for ten years, but haven't appeared since Escaping the Future, released four years prior. I liked getting to see what happened to Adrian, Bev, and Joseph, though what we see here does make it pretty improbable that Benny never ran into them again.

Review: Bernice Summerfield: Filthy Lucre by James Parsons and Alexander Stirling-Brown

Hardcover, 231 pages
Published 2013

Acquired July 2018
Read December 2018

Bernice Summerfield: Filthy Lucre
by James Parsons and Alexander Stirling-Brown

The novels haven't exactly been a highlight of Bernice Summerfield's "Legion era," though this one isn't terrible. It's not as good as The Slender-Fingered Cats of Bubastis, though I did find more to interest me here than in The Weather on Versimmon. This is a mostly standalone adventure for Benny, Ruth, and Jack (with small parts for Peter and Irving), set during the New Frontiers box set (between episodes 1 and 2, specifically). In parallel plotlines, the trio meet a chip tycoon who's very interested in archaeology and rescue a disabled cargo ship.

The book is well written and interesting enough. The writers have a good grasp on the main characters' voices, and know how to write an interesting action sequence. Moving between the two parallel plotlines maintains the reader's interest; it actually takes a long time to figure out how the two plots actually fit together. Once you figure it out, though, it's a bit underwhelming, and one suspects the novel was structured this way because doing it chronologically would reveal how little it actually has going on. If the crashed ship story was inserted where it goes chronologically, it would be a long, irrelevant diversion from the book's main plot. The main plot isn't much: a wealthy person is sponsoring archaeology, but he turns out to have a hidden agenda. A man is sexually interested in Bernice, but he's just taking advantage of her. These are surely clichés of Benny's solo adventures at this point. It would be more of a twist if it turned out everything was aboveboard. And the bit where he comes back at the end to torture her once the main story is over feels like padding when the authors realized they were thirty pages short; it goes nowhere and does nothing.

For those keeping score, this book features the third popular resort planet within easy flight of Legion, the supposed most distant planet in the galaxy (after ones in Road Trip and The Slender-Fingered Cats). More than that, Benny is popping back and forth between Legion and worlds of significance all the time in this book, rather undermining the setting of the Legion era.

Review: Bernice Summerfield: The Slender-Fingered Cats of Bubastis by Xanna Eve Chown

Hardcover, 239 pages
Published 2012

Acquired July 2018
Read December 2018

Bernice Summerfield: The Slender-Fingered Cats of Bubastis
by Xanna Eve Chown

One feels a little churlish when one criticizes a book for not being something it never claimed it wanted to be, but The Slender-Fingered Cats of Bubastis is an enormous missed opportunity for Big Finish's Bernice Summerfield range. The third box set, Legion, sees the series bedding into a new status quo, with Benny and Ruth joining Irving Braxiatel, the mysterious Jack (from Epoch), and Benny's son Peter on the frontier planet of Legion. Only the new set-up is kind of sketchy, with the relationships between the characters only vaguely defined.

Given that, a novel seems like an ideal opportunity. During the later part of the range's Braxiatel Collection era, it was the prose works that really made that set-up work. Series five through eight really benefited from running in parallel with books like A Life Worth Living, A Life in Pieces, Parallel Lives, Collected Works, and Nobody's Children that could flesh out the people and places of the Braxiatel Collection. Obviously I liked the audios a lot, but I don't think Bev Tarrant would be half the character she was without the novellas; I don't think I'd have any sense of what the Collection was like as a place to live without the day-to-day stuff that's much better captured in print than on audio.

It's strange, then, that the tie-in novel for the Legion box set (all of which takes place in or near Legion) takes Benny off Legion, on Yet Another Generic Space Archaeology Adventure. Benny's travelling companions aside, this novel could take place during any era of the character. But at this point, I want to know what makes this era tick. It's especially noticeable in the novel's opening scenes: I get why Ruth goes with Benny on her "mission," but why is Jack even there? Benny first met Jack as a mysterious interloper in the Epoch scenarios in Epoch; then he popped up working in Braxiatel's bar when Benny got to Legion. But why is Jack on Legion? And what is he to Benny? Slender-Fingered Cats informs us that Benny "had become so used to being around Jack that she hardly noticed his eyes any more" (13), but from my perspective, they've spent barely any time together. This novel could have showed the beginnings of their relations with one another, but instead it starts with one already existing. Why does Braxiatel's bartender join Benny and Ruth on their archaeological exploits? No explanation is provided in this novel (nor in the Legion audios). He just does.

I feel that what this novel ought to have been is an adventure on Legion itself (like in its tie-in audio set), allowing the range to flesh out that milieu and its characters so that they can serve as the basis for the ongoing series. Then send Benny off-world to do whatever.

It's a shame, because this is actually a decent novel. Not a great book, but an enjoyable one. Chown crams it full of ideas and concepts (sometimes too many; not sure what the library of books from the future really added), and keeps things light without making them insubstantial. There are some good jokes I actually laughed aloud at. Chown's also great at capturing the voices of all three main characters: I could hear Lisa Bowerman, Ayesha Antoine, and David Ames saying these lines. In fact, this is the first Bernice Summerfield story to give Jack a meaningful role, and I found myself warming to him; he provides a new kind of dynamic for Benny to play off. The end of the book kind of wraps things up without much of an actual role for Benny, but otherwise it was enjoyable.

It's just not the book the range needed at this time.

(Also, between this story and "Paradise Frost" in Road Trip, supposed most distant planet in the galaxy is a short cruise from not one, but two popular space resorts.)

((Though, the dust jacket is a matte finish, instead of glossy, which had me inordinately excited. I love matte finish, but Big Finish have never used it before or since.))

Review: Bernice Summerfield: The Weather On Versimmon by Matthew Griffiths

Hardcover, 219 pages
Published 2012

Acquired August 2015
Read November 2018

Bernice Summerfield: The Weather On Versimmon
by Matthew Griffiths

The first Bernice Summerfield novel for five years, this takes place between episodes of the box set Road Trip; in fact, it's the first adventure Benny and new companion Ruth have on their "road trip" from Lyndiaz to Legion. Given that, it's a bit disappointing, but that would be true regardless. The book begins in medias res, with Benny and Ruth split up and on opposite sides, which is fine, I love me a bit of medias res, but the book maintains the sense of confusion for far too long, to the extent that I never really got what was at stake. Mostly it seemed like Benny was just kind of running around in circles, and meanwhile a minster was doing a thing, and also there was an archive. The explanations all seemed to arrive in the last fifteen pages, which was way too late! By that time I had completely checked out of whatever was going on. A disappointing return of Bernice to the medium that originally gave birth to her.

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: Bernice Summerfield: The Vampire Curse by Mags L. Halliday, Kelly Hale and Philip Purser-Hallard

Recently, I've been catching up on my Bernice Summerfield audio dramas over at Unreality SF; as aficionados will know, those are part of a multi-media narrative that also incorporates prose stories, and I'll be reviewing the prose installments here over the next few weeks.

Hardcover, 218 pages
Published 2008

Acquired June 2013
Read August 2018

Bernice Summerfield XII: The Vampire Curse
by Mags L. Halliday, Kelly Hale and Philip Purser-Hallard

The Vampire Curse covers three different encounters with vampires across Bernice Summerfield's lifetime. (She also battle vampires in the New Adventures in Blood Harvest, which would go between the first and second stories in this volume.) The first, Mags Halliday's "The Badblood Diaries," is set during her postgraduate years, before she met the Doctor. She goes on an archaeological expedition which is (of course) attacked by vampires. The whole story is told in the form of a column she's publishing about her adventures, which somewhat strained my credulity, as she's very open about some things I'm not entirely convinced one would reveal to a broad audience. However, Halliday is great at capturing Benny's voice; we've heard a lot of it thanks to the use of her diary throughout her history, and I could easily imagine Lisa Bowerman reading the lines. It's filled with little observations of people that sketch in character very quickly and very well, and also feel very Young Benny. The plot, on the other hand, was a bit too straightforward. I enjoyed the experience of reading it, but when it finished I was surprised that was all that had happened.

The second, "Possum Kingdom" by Kelly Hale, actually takes place during Benny's travels with the seventh Doctor, and he even puts in a brief (unnamed, of course) appearance on pp. 98-99. (I'd guess it goes somewhere between Set Piece and Original Sin.) Benny joins a group of time-traveling tourists in order to help track down an ancient, vampiric evil. I didn't entirely understand what was going on, as the story isn't told in order, but I enjoyed Hale's descriptions of Texas. The best part of the story, though, is the time tourism agency; the tour is about vampires, and so there are lots of good jokes about this, like the guy they meet outside Dracula's castle who matter-of-factly claims his uncle came back as a vampire to help with the kids, and the visit to the Edward and Bella Reenactment Society in Forks, Washington. I think it's the most complicated story in the volume, but also the shortest.

The last story, Philip Purser-Hallard's "Predating the Predators," is the best one. Set during series 9 of the audio dramas (probably between The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel and The Diet of Worms), the story is about an academic conference on vampires where the keynote speaker is a vampire. It's told as a collection of documents (shades of Dracula, there), mostly excerpts from the diary of a Jesuit priest and letters from a physics graduate student to his sister. It's funny and clever, as Purser-Hallard explores the sfnal implications of vampires on other planets to good effect. Benny's role isn't terribly huge, but it is significant, and also clever and funny. I really enjoyed reading it.

The whole collection is worth reading even if it is a little uneven. This doesn't reach the heights of some previous Bernice Summerfield three-in-one books like Nobody's Children or Old Friends, but it still shows off the strengths of the format. It's a shame that this would be its last use; from here on out, all the Benny books will be short-story anthologies or novels, nothing in between.

Review: Bernice Summerfield: Missing Adventures edited by Rebecca Levene

Two days in a row of USF reviews! Check out my account of The Avengers: Steed and Mrs Peel: The Comic Strip Adaptations, Volume One.

Hardcover, 246 pages
Published 2007

Acquired June 2013
Read November 2015

Bernice Summerfield XI: Missing Adventures
edited by Rebecca Levene

After Genius Loci and the general quality of Big Finish's Bernice Summerfield anthologies, I really wanted to like Missing Adventures. Unfortunately, I found most of the stories somewhere between frustrating and pedestrian. These stories range across Benny's early life, from her childhood in boarding school up to the day before she met the Doctor in Love and War. I wanted a sense of Benny's development as a person, but I didn't really get that-- in most of these stories, she's just kind of generic goofy action Benny, not the well-rounded character she is when at her best. Unfortunately, given Genius Loci, Ben Aaronovitch's "The Evacuation of Bernice Summerfield Considered as a Short Film by Terry Gillam" is one of the most inexplicable of the lot. Beyond that, I don't really have strong impressions of anything here, except for the last story, Eddie Robson's "Thirty Love," a cute story about Benny's 30th birthday that brings back a lot of characters and concepts from Benny's original introduction in Love and War.

Next Week: One last prequel book before I dive into The New Adventures proper-- the Doctor meets up with the Daleks for the final time in Remembrance of the Daleks!

Review: Bernice Summerfield: Genius Loci by Ben Aaronovitch

Last year I wrapped up reading The New Adventures, the Doctor Who spin-off novels starring the Doctor's companion Bernice Summerfield after she left the TARDIS. Now I'm looping back around to read all of The New Doctor Who Adventures, the ongoing range of seventh Doctor novels published by Virgin Publishing. Before I get to the actual NAs, though, I'm reading a couple lead-in books, starting with some of the Bernice Summerfield prequel novels:

Hardcover, 208 pages
Published 2006

Acquired and read August 2015

Bernice Summerfield #8: Genius Loci
by Ben Aaronovitch

I read a lot of tie-in fiction. And most of it is decent. Not great, but it scratches an itch to have more adventures of characters I like and love. But by and large it doesn't hold a candle to the majority of the original fiction I read. But it is possible to do so, and every now and again I read a work of tie-in fiction that's so good it I would recommend it without hesitation to people who don't normally read such things.

Genius Loci is such a novel. As a Bernice Summerfield novel, it's completely standalone, covering her first archaeological expedition as an eager postgrad with forged credentials. As a science fiction novel, it's completely excellent. I haven't read much of Ben Aaronovitch's prose fiction, but his work here is excellent: young Bernice is a real person trying to figure out how to grow up, while uncovering an ancient mystery on an alien planet. Aaronovitch handles character well: Benny and all her friends come to life here. It feels painful in the moments where they turn on each other because we've really gotten to know them prior to that. He handles worldbuilding well: there are some great ideas here, like the two sentient city-building robots who fall in love with each other, and the ecology and history of Jaiwan. He handles plot well: there are some tough surprises in this book that I didn't see coming, but made whole sense once revealed. He handles prose well: like, most tie-in writers are perfunctory at best. Some stuff here is lovely, like the tale of the two robots in love.

He even does archaeology well. Most Bernice novels have a pretty superficial grasp of archaeology, which I guess makes sense for the books' Indiana Jones-derived action-adventure roots. Benny needs to be in a new location with something exciting; that's all you need archaeology for. But here-- I don't know if archaeology field work is really like this, but based on my experience with ecology field work, it feels right. Archaeology is slow and painstaking and halting; you don't just zip in for a week, do a little digging, and zip back out. More than any other Bernice Summerfield book-- and probably more than any other science fiction book I've read-- this book captures the joys and frustrations of being a space archaeologist.

Seriously, this book is great. I read it in like two days at most, and when I finished it, I handed it to my wife, who couldn't care less about Bernice Summerfield, and she enjoyed it too. It's a complete shame that a story this good only exists as #8 in an out-of-print series of expensive tie-in hardbacks. It should be reprinted as a paperback standalone for all those folks who like Aaronovitch's Rivers of London books. Highly recommended.

Next Week: More of the early days of Bernice Summerfield, as we experience her Missing Adventures!

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: The Joy Device by Justin Richards

Mass market paperback, 254 pages
Published 1999

Acquired October 2014

Read November 2014

The New Adventures: The Joy Device
by Justin Richards

Never has a 254-page novel felt so long. Richards maybe has enough of an idea here to fill up a brisk novelette at best. The premise is that Bernice is in a bit of a funk (she lost some of her memories in Return to the Fractured Planet), and decides she needs a vacation to cheer herself up, and her friends don't want her to experience anything that's more fun than them, so they decide to manipulate events to make her think life is boring. Well, one or two times of having her attention diverted would be amusing; fifteen chapters of it is not. In between those bits, the book is pure tedium anywhere. A colossal misfire, not to mention a weird one, given how well Richards handled these characters in Tears of the Oracle, and how the events of the last few books ought to have provided fertile ground for something much more interesting!

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

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

Mass market paperback, 238 pages
Published 1999

Previously read February 2005
Reread September 2014

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

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

Review: The New Adventures: Tears of the Oracle by Justin Richards

Mass market paperback, 277 pages
Published 1999
Acquired and read July 2014

The New Adventures: Tears of the Oracle
by Justin Richards

Finally, we get a novel that really follows up on what the events of Where Angels Fear mean to Bernice herself. It's a little weird at first-- Bernice meets up with Braxiatel again, and they go on a mission to Dellah to rescue Commander Skutloid, a nonentity of a recurring character from Justin Richards's previous New Adventures. Given how much work Benny went through to sneak on and off Dellah two books prior to rescue Wolsey, it feels repetitive and easy and pointless. In fact, the whole beginning is surprisingly energy-less: instead of doing anything about the Gods, Benny, Braxiatel, and company decide to go off on a jolly archeological expedition to find the Oracle on asteroid KS-159 (which readers of Big Finish's Bernice stories will know later becomes home to the Braxiatel Collection and Bernice herself, though I don't remember the giant ringed planet ever being mentioned). Eventually this does turn out to intersect with the Gods arc, by way of the People, but that doesn't become clear to the reader for some time. In any case, it turns out to be a decent novel, definitely Richards's best Bernice New Adventure, with more character insight and narrative flair than I usually associate with him. Benny, Braxiatel, Jason, Chris, and Clarence are all here, and all put to good use in a clever plot. The framing device is excellent. Not the best New Adventure, but definitely the continuation of a pretty solid run since the big shakeup in Where Angels Fear.

Review: Dead Romance by Lawrence Miles

Trade paperback, 321 pages
Published 2004 (contents: 1999-2001)

Previously read May 2005

Reread May 2014

Dead Romance
by Lawrence Miles

For this Bernice Summerfield novel, I have the 2004 reprint, not the original 1999 publication. It's the third book in the "Gods" arc, and the first to offer real explanations (or at least hypotheses) as to who the Gods are and what they want. The scale of their threat is reinforced a lot here; back in Where Angels Fear, the Time Lords recalled Braxiatel's TARDIS, but here we see them sending Chris Cwej to negotiate treaties with the Daleks and the People, allowing them to possess the technology of time travel. Things are getting serious.

Bernice, of course, is not in this novel-- the main character is Christine Summerfield, a young woman from the 1970 London of a bottle universe. There are some who hail this as the greatest Doctor Who novel, but I don't see it. It's a decent novel, with amazing ideas and an intense apocalyptic mood but nothing much seems to actually happen, and what does happen is a distraction. It stands out from its surroundings, sure, but being better than The Medusa Effect or Dry Pilgrimage is not enough to trumpet, exactly. I remember enjoying it when I first read it, but the subsequent nine years of trumpeting by Miles fandom led me to expect more than I found on this reread. (The back cover proclaims it as "novelist Lawrence Miles' greatest work," as if that is somehow significant.)

The Gods arc really has given the New Adventures some energy and focus, but I look forward to seeing that actually imparted to Bernice, as this is the second novel she's been (largely) absent from. Hopefully she's more of a presence in Tears of the Oracle.

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

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

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

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

Review: The New Adventures: Where Angels Fear by Rebecca Levene and Simon Winstone

Mass market paperback, 241 pages
Published 1998
Previously read February 2005
Reread January 2014

The New Adventures: Where Angels Fear
by Rebecca Levene and Simon Winstone

This New Adventure injects some much-needed urgency and focus into Benny's dig-of-the-week stories, with a dangerous secret of the People becoming loose on Dellah. I like the way that this shakes up our status quo: Bernice, Emile (yay!), and Braxiatel are all put through the wringer, both emotionally and physically. It's neat to see the Grel in a more complicated role than goofy baddies (I particularly loved their creation myth). There's also some neat ideas about faith here: I loved Renée Thalia's Church of the Grey, for example.

I do wish the series had been a little more coherent up to this point, however: James Harker's heel turn would be more interesting if he hadn't been another longtime friend of Benny's we've just met, and Renée's relationship with Brax would be stronger if we'd ever seen her working for him before. Seeds about the faith explosion seem like they could have been better planted ahead of time, too. And it's not so much a problem with this book in and of itself, but Braxiatel is not quite the man he'll be depicted as later on.

Review: The Two Jasons by Dave Stone

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

Bernice Summerfield #9: The Two Jasons
by Dave Stone

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

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.