Molly! ┌| ∵ |┘♪

★★☆☆☆ – Bit of a drag!

A straightforward adventure with Adams-ian aspirations.

In her review of Sky Pirates! (1995, also by Dave Stone), Elizabeth Sandifer of the TARDIS Eruditorum opines that “Dave Stone is not Terry Pratchett”, that he’s “emulating […] The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Discworld”, and that he is “prone to trying a bit too hard to create a distinctive narrative voice, falling back on gratuitous verbosity and the deeper recesses of the thesaurus in place of actual wit or content”. Substitute that 50% Terry Pratchett with another 50% Adams (oops, all Douglas Adams!), and her observations hold true for The Infernal Nexus as well.

The inspiration Stone takes from Adams is crystal-clear: His prose often reaches for generalized observations on the nature of things (“the nature of a holdall is that over months and years of use it tends to accumulate any number of odd bits and pieces in the corners […]”, etc.) – a stylistic choice I quite enjoy in moderation – and constantly invents outlandish, palpably silly alien creatures and strange phenomena (a whistling ninja made up of tiny men; a space octopus strapped to a neutron star; a floor made of melting creatures…). I would find it superfluous to state that Dave Stone “isn’t Douglas Adams”: Of course he isn’t, though I believe that it is entirely possible to emulate what makes his books so enjoyable – so let’s instead examine why The Infernal Nexus, in comparison, falls flat.

For starters, the “musings on the order of things” gets a bit grating when used quite so frequently. Every break to explain some purported fact of the world – not quite worldbuilding, half the time – is a spanner in the pacing. Worse yet, however, is the tendency for Stone to use these as excuses:

The gaming house of Volan Sleed was the epitome of its kind – so much so, in fact, that versions of it spontaneously occurred in books written the universe over by a certain kind of brain-damaged writer who was responsive to the resonances of multiverses other than his own. And not as a desperate attempt to bump up the page-count by reusing old material from out-of-print books at all.

Or, in another example, which unabridged takes up 500 words:

Real life, such as it is, does not present itself in the dramatic way of fiction. [183 words describing an example of drama on TV…] Real life, such as it is, simply does not work like that. [143 words describing a dour real-life equivalent…]

We dramatise such things way after the fact, convert them into a language we can understand, for the simple reason that it’s the only way to cope with the sheer cold senselessness that is life – and indeed death. [40 words…]

All of which is mentioned because the events that occurred directly after […] should not and could not have happened under any truly reasonable circumstances. But sometimes such things do, if only by the law of average…

Dave Stone occasionally feels the need to, at length, make excuses for engaging in cliché. This is detrimental enough simply to the structural integrity of the story – I suspect I speak for more than myself when I say that readers generally don’t wish to be reminded that what they’re reading is no more than an arbitrarily spun yarn – but it pricks all the more when you need trudge through 500 words of those disclaimers for what’s just ahead.

When Adams invents something outlandish – a Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, or suicide-inducing Vogon poetry – you can rest assured that it will satisfy one of two conditions (or both). In the most well-remembered cases, the concept returns far later, its unique and seemingly inexplicable traits putting a tear in Chekhov’s eye with their newfound relevance. In the cases where something truly is a one-off, Adams usually strikes a chord either through clever societal satire or through delightfully tuned absurdism. Stone’s inventions, meanwhile, appear to be arbitrary: A tentacled brain controlling a decomposing body from inside its ribcage is cool, but not much more – and lacking any meaningful exploration of the concept, little more than an aesthetic flourish. And therein lies the crux of the book.

The Infernal Nexus is a strait-laced adventure. It’s a series of varyingly freaky obstacles for Bernice Summerfield to overcome. Opponents to defeat; traps to dodge; jams to get out of. I myself love a “dungeon” story: Take the Doctor Who audio drama “Tomb Ship”, for instance, which mostly comprises a series of traps for the Doctor and his retinue to outsmart. That’s exciting – clever solutions to well-defined (if arcane) problems! In The Infernal Nexus, there are no clever solutions. New facts reveal themselves the very moment they’re needed to resolve a problem. It’s almost jarring how straightforward a series of action scenes in fancy (read: offbeat) dress this novel is; how much lower it aims than, say, the New Adventures. It almost gives the impression of being written for a younger audience.

Somewhat famously, BBC Books’ Eighth Doctor Adventures were made with the mandate to be more family-friendly than Virgin Books’ notably dark and occasionally shocking New Adventures. In the end, they failed in a lovely way – just instead of sex, curse words, and betrayal, they veered into pleasantly disturbing weirdness. Is it possible that Big Finish’s Bernice Summerfield novels were written with a similar editorial mandate? A couple of times, Stone makes comments that suggest this, such as when a gratuitous description is eschewed because it “would not be commensurate with a published work suitable for all the family.” That would go some way toward explaining the fluffier substance of the Bernice Summerfield novels – but it doesn’t entirely make sense, either. Not with the end of chapter 9 consisting of a synopsis of the script to a pornographic film.

I’ve been spoiled. My most recent Doctor Who-related reads were Benny books by Jacqueline Rayner, a Faction Paradox anthology written entirely by women, and a few novels by Paul Cornell, whom Lawrence Miles (Faction Paradox, Dead Romance…) once derogatorily described as a “caring, sharing new man” (my kind of man!). I’ve been spoiled, because I haven’t been at risk of chauvinism. That comes crashing down with this book – not only with the aforementioned synopsis, but with Stone’s general depiction of women. Discounting Benny herself, three major characters in this book are women:

• Mora di Vasht, a spoiled teenage girl built to be annoying,
• Suzi II, her servant-bot who at one point is described as “almost completely naked now, adorned with mere strips of cloth which had somehow survived the most recent fighting”, and
• Mae An T’zhu, an “elven queen” who is described as being irresistibly and supernaturally “sexy” and who at several points attempts to snog Jason.

Not a great track record.

Right – Jason. It’s hard not to anticipate the appearance of this character just reading the back of the book, but it’s positioned as a twist, so I suppose I should spoiler-tag his name. This is a character Dave Stone created, way back when – and he’s almost given stereotypical fanfic treatment here. He’s not painted as particularly sympathetic – and certainly not a good partner to Benny (will-they-won’t-they though they may be) – when he’s going around snogging airheaded fairy models. What was the process there, Dave? With Benny’s characterization out of whack as well – is she truly one to hysterically slap a man? – I didn’t realize how good I had it (despite her Benny books being fluff-y as well!) with Jacqueline Rayner and her grip on the characters.

I will read more Dave Stone. With six New Adventures(!) and another upcoming Benny novel (The Two Jasons) under his belt, he’s hard to avoid, but more to the point, his prose is enjoyable. Decidedly more colorful than the average, even if it approaches the garish. Most importantly of all, he won me back, to a degree, with the epilogue. Though the novel generally aims to appeal to no other emotion than “swashbuckling” (it’s an emotion; don’t @ me), the epilogue – which sets up the next novel in the series, The Glass Prison – is written with a shockingly human touch, and a novel device I fell for hook, line, and sinker. Thanks, Dave Stone. I needed that.

⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻

As an addendum, the audiobook version holds the same general high standard as these audiobooks always do. Lisa Bowerman is a wonderful actress, and her humorous tone fits the book like a glove… mostly. The author is unusually diligent in describing the manner in which a line was said, or how somebody’s voice sounds – and Bowerman seems to ignore these instructions entirely, which jars a bit every time. Her voices do tend to lean toward the comedic and slightly whiny, I suppose – which might have been a bigger problem had it happened to scenes with a heavier, more serious tone. But we’re in luck: Such scenes are not the purview of this book!

★★★☆☆ – Respectable!

Freaky and Fun – Perhaps Occasionally Too Freaky?

Liberating Earth belongs to that more ambitious class of anthologies – one that unites it stories not only under a common theme, nor a common premise, but a common framing narrative. Two acolytes of Faction Paradox take turns instating new rulers on (a simulation of?) our Earth, and thus create a string of alternate realities where we, the humans, invariably have our collective day thoroughly ruined in a series of distressing science fiction ways. It’s not the sort of collection to use this premise to say anything in particular about the finer points of power structures or human nature, but rather uses it in service of three Fs: fun, fancies, and freakitude.

What sets Liberating Earth apart as a publication more than anything is that it’s an anthology written entirely by women! Stuart Douglas, the man behind Obverse Books, strikes me as a lovely bloke – reportedly, this was his admirably pragmatic solution to the issue that they hadn’t hired many female writers up to that point. As a woman who writes science fiction myself, of course I had to read it. As expected, the result is a refreshing lack of male gaze and chauvinism, not to mention the beneficial side effect that we have a higher proportion of new blood than usual. Somewhat funnily (stereotypes are what they are for a reason!), it also results in a markedly higher romance and sex content than in your typical Faction Paradox fare. A few of these romances hit hard; some missed me entirely. Some of the romantic and sexual elements, unfortunately, put me off quite profoundly – most notably, the framing narrative has a psychosexual throughline that I’d rather not have had in the background the whole book. See my individual story reviews below for details.

Though I tend not to mind when it comes to independent publications, I would in the case of Liberating Earth be remiss if I failed to mention its seeming complete lack of proofreading. Grammatical and typographical errors abound, punctuation is missing here and there, and no unification of typography appears to have been made: Some authors use curly quotes and some straight; some use en dashes and some use hyphen-minuses… Particularly tickling is an example from the final story of the bunch – a draft appears to have slipped through the editing and publication process, rather than the final version:

[…] [']You have to be able to prove heritage these days and even then...'

*something here.

There's a huge scarcity of resources in most of the European countries because of all the refugees. […]

The author apparently left a note to herself to fill out the scene, but never did. A decade after publication it’s a bit late to do anything about it, innit. For the most part, the proofing errors were only a mild amusement – but they did distract here and there, as well as impede some of the more emotional scenes. The publisher have gotten a bit better about it since.

I look forward to reading another Faction Paradox anthology! This sort of not-hard-but-certainly-not-soft sci-fi – high-concept, but not high-science (you could call it “science as magic”) – is surprisingly difficult to find, and I will forever remain thankful to Obverse Books for carrying that torch.

“Playing for Time” by Kate Orman

★★☆☆☆ – Couldn’t quite abide.

It’s a bold decision to frontload your anthology with psychosexual discomfort – for your framing narrative to heavily feature a group of young men being sexually exploited. That’s a plot device I, to be honest, am not particularly comfortable with. Had it been a short story positioned on the same level as the others, this would not have been quite such a problem – but being the framing narrative, it’s interwoven between the other stories, and thus makes its presence known again and again, meaning a part of me dreaded the interludes this story comprises. That and the fact that it’s a bit vague and fuzzy on the details – I certainly have a grasp on the emotional arc of the story, but the exact plot is a bit up in the air.

Still, “Playing for Time” contains some beautifully wondrous (and unsettling) imagery, and ties into one (only one, but nevertheless one) of the short stories to great effect (see “Red Rover Red Rover” below). The anthology would be poorer for a lack of it. It does elevate the book to “more” than a collection of short stories.

“Dreamer in the Dark” by E. H. Timms

★★★★☆ – Don’t mind if I do!

Economical and efficient; emotionally resonant and eminently personal. Possibly other “E” words. Effulgent. Effervescent. Ecclesiastical. No… I immediately veered into irrelevance there.

A lovely image of a smartly bounded mini-world, painted in a bit further with every paragraph. Timms gives the impression of having an eye on what every part is meant to accomplish.

I particularly enjoy the element of using mythology without naming it – the ruling class is plainly based on Medusa, but she is never named, which (along with the fact that it takes place somewhere in Egypt-ish) lends the story a moreish sense of cultural amalgamation; of living naturally in the greater collective consciousness of fiction.

“Annie’s Arms” by Xanna Chown

★★★☆☆ – I had a good time!

A pleasantly quotidian glimpse of a very strange alternate present. The sort of thing made for anthologies. It ultimately goes in a fun, non-obvious direction, which I appreciate – the sort of direction you might (stereotypically, perhaps, but in this case correctly) imagine is more expected to come about in an anthology written exclusively by women. Lovely to read something by Chown outside of Big Finish!

The story is let down by an all-too-abrupt ending and a lingering feeling that neither the “hook” nor the characters were quite compelling enough – it spends many of its precious words on worldbuilding the same few aspects somewhat redundantly, leaving the more personal elements underexplored.

Until the final couple of pages I was certain that Annie was going to boink her shade. Deeply thankfully, that did not turn out to be the case. I couldn’t have taken it after Kate Orman’s (probably intentionally) eminently unpleasant psychosexual onslaught.

“The Mountains Are Higher at Home” by Juliet Kemp

★★★★☆ – Alright, yeah!

‘Look, there are all those bits that have cracked off the tree,’ Bretet said, making out like he knows all about carbon lifeforms. ‘Something must have put them there.’

‘Leaves,’ I said, remembering our last Earth lesson. ‘They’re called leaves.’

I love a story that describes familiar concepts in unfamiliar terms. There was a series of sci-fi novels written from different species’ perspectives, weren’t there? Some squid creatures or some such? Can anyone tell me what that was? Either way, it’s as titillating here as always.

I can admire the focus and restraint that this story shows. Kemp exudes somewhat of the quality of a Zen master: Countless trifling questions that would niggle at any sci-fi writer abound – How do these boulder creatures locomote? How do they, concretely, restrict the humans? Why are they such staunch environmentalists? – but she either lacks the impulse to get into them, or rightly recognizes that answering them would be liable to at best yield an “oh, huh” and at worst wreck the pacing or eat up precious word count.

The decision to set the story not from the freedom fighter’s perspective but from that of a doubter is an intelligent one – it partly replaces the default tension of “will they succeed or fail?” with a feeling of watching a trainwreck in slow motion. Not that the underdog perspective doesn’t work – far from it; it’s the popular mode for a reason and worked just fine for “Dreamer in the Dark” – but this feels perhaps particularly fitting for the theme and setup of this anthology: that it’s about Earth being thoroughly messed up in a series of freaky-deaky ways.

Incidental spoilers for (this short story and) Earthshock (Classic Doctor Who, 1982): In a rare move, this short story breaks from a particularly famous part of Doctor Who continuity by replacing the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event – rather than Adric on a space freighter, the sapient boulder race from this story (the “Kyal”) decided they’d had enough of theropods. Truly immaterial in the grand scheme of things – especially given that Doctor Who is preeminently unconcerned with “canon” and “continuity” – and perhaps the author hadn’t even seen Earthshock… but it’s fun to see such a concrete manifestation of Faction Paradox’s growth into its own entity, a piddling manifestation though it may be.

“Judy’s War” by Rachael Redhead

★★★☆☆ – Sure!

A short short story woven of irreverence and spur-of-the-moment nonsense. It almost gives the impression of the author having sat down and written nonstop whatever popped into her head. There’s a certain Douglas Adams-ian tone, but there’s none of the prudence or internal logic that characterizes his work – very #NoFilter.

As a result, this story feels entirely unsubstantial, but it’s having fun, so it’s easy to have fun with it. Besides, it’s shorter than the skirt I’m planning to wear to next month’s sapphic club night.

Kate Orman’s framing narrative connective tissue after this begins with a character remarking “What the hell was that?” – a hilariously rude move on her part that I can’t help but read as her using her characters as a mouthpiece. BM, Kate Orman. BM.

…Not that it isn’t a reasonable comment to make!

“Red Rover Red Rover” by Q

★★★★★ – I’m smitten.

Dammit. My fear was realized: The most exciting story in the anthology was written by the author only known as “Q”, meaning that I’m now interested enough to have to wonder who in heaven’s name Q is.

I’m taken with Q’s worldbuilding technique – details about the world are invariably presented like the bonus temporary tattoo in a popsicle wrapper: always slipped in with something tasty and engaging; always delivered with something to make taking it in extrinsically worth it. Chew on this early example:

One of the trails goes through an abandoned neighbourhood, and I like to make up stories about the people who might've lived there. For example, that reed shack with the caved-in roof? It belonged to an old Korean couple. Married 53 years. They ran a roller skating rink and went to a different theme park each year for their anniversary. (Yes, I know. Theme parks and skating rinks are like unicorns over here: people will send you to the looney bin if you say you've ever seen one. But it's my story; I can tell it like I want to.) See that sad-looking tree-hut by the thorngrove? The woman who lived there won the lottery. No one knew it till she disappeared to travel the world and left a fortune to her favourite animal charity. That red bamboo longhouse with the rope-swing housed a lesbian couple who were trying to get pregnant before the floods came.

In a paragraph, we’ve learned 1) that we’re in a spin on our own world, 2) that this place floods, 3) that it wasn’t always that way, 4) what the local architecture looks like, and 5) that we’re in a dystopia dour enough to lack theme parks. Not one of these was stated as a plain fact or in a “box text”-style description. Instead, the author gives us a device to make it exciting, and simultaneously builds out the perspective character’s personality. Supremely efficient. The venerable short story is the author’s home field.

The texture of the story changes dramatically throughout, what with changes of perspective (and with it, voice) and scenery, and since the character writing is already strong from the word “go”, it has its claws in you from start to finish. I’d read a whole book about the all-too-prosaically-named Joe Brown (who, although he seems a bit of a doormat, didn’t manage to roll my eyes further than 45° or so) and his emphatically more protagonistically named moitié Ellie Green. Hoo boy. Their romance had me hot under the collar all the way up to the tear ducts.

For the first time in Liberating Earth, a story ties into the framing narrative, rather than the street being exclusively one-way. The shining result is that it both is greatly augmented by the framing narrative and greatly augments it – the whole book, really! – in return. Note to self: When I end up writing for an anthology (I can’t imagine it won’t happen), communicate proactively with the editor – this sort of coordination and synthesis is only possible by going out into the yard and playing a bit of the good old conversational catch.

Figures that the story that captures me is the decidedly YA-esque one. I haven’t read YA in a long time – but though I am an A, I am, I suppose, still a Y one, so I shan’t hang my head in too much shame.

“The Víkingr Mystique” by Dorothy Ail

★★☆☆☆ – Not my thing.

A trope I can’t stand in sapphic fiction – and the mirrored version exists in similar measure in MLM stories – is when the romance is inflected around disagreeable men. For one, it’s a shame to have your sapphic romance hinge on, in the end, the actions of men. On a level more fundamental yet, however, a romance – according to my sensibilities – shouldn’t be driven by how horrible your preexisting partner is, but how wonderful the other party is. In fact, I find it quite uncomfortable to have to deal with the messy, hurtful business of choosing somebody specifically over another – let alone relishing in that.

And that’s this story: A Thelma and Louise-style (very Thelma and Louise-style) love story between two women where the constant throughline is how detestable the main character’s caricature of a husband is, and the appeal of the other woman isn’t sold very convincingly. (I myself am not particularly drawn to the “gruff & buff” archetype in the first place – even less so when she’s violent and displays a disregard for the value of human life.)

I understand from where the impulse comes, in homoromantic fiction, to contrast the romance with a destructive heterosexual relationship. For one, if you’re to depict self-discovery – finding that your sexuality wasn’t what you thought it was – the easiest way to do so is to depict choosing the homoromantic relationship over a heteroromantic one. That poses a problem, however, in that you don’t want the reader to mourn the lost relationship; to feel sorry for the ex-to-be – so you naturally make the preexisting partner reprehensible enough to preclude any sympathy. (Of course, there are cases where there’s a simple case of heterophobia at work – the stereotypical “fujoshi” model – but you needn’t go nearly that far to arrive at this trope.)

When an author goes down this inadvisable road, however, they’ve inadvertently hurt their own work in two ways. One is simple: Now you have an odious character that needs to be present throughout, meaning you’ve introduced a recurring unpleasant streak. More insidiously, however – and I don’t think this is recognized enough – you’ve undermined the self-discovery journey. Your character finding themselves – their sexuality; their love – is no longer intrinsic, but spurred on by the disagreeability of the alternative. For lack of a better turn of phrase, you’ve painted the situation in a light in which the preexisting partner, in a sense, “turned them gay”. Which I don’t imagine is usually the goal. The ultimate romance is, in at least some aspect, slightly hollowed out.

The trope of choosing to let the whole world go to hell in favor of your romantic relationship is one that’s always pleasant, at least. My favorite scene of the story is how this decision is characterized – it’s spun as a reaction to the Cold War; a decidedly savvy, satisfyingly setting-anchored bit of character writing:

I wasn’t the only one who found the new situation […] something of a relief. After so many years of expecting the worst, finding that doomsday had finally come – and that it wasn’t quite as terrifying as we’d all be [sic] warned – was vastly preferable to the tension of waiting.

I’m usually not one to sweat the small stuff like whether something is “realistic”, but primed by the sour taste the romance left in my mouth, it perhaps stood out a bit more to me that it is ludicrous that the most infamously well-armed nation in the modern world would fall to an army of folks wielding axes and swords (though perhaps they were sci-fi axes and swords – it didn’t quite come across how technologically advanced the invasion portrayed in this story was). And that the world would jump to welcome and venerate the raiders. Hm.

This story will appeal to somebody – but that somebody isn’t me. (It’s, I’d imagine, somebody who has a thing for butch women who ~take charge~.)

“Life of Julia” by Tansy Rayner Roberts

★☆☆☆☆ – No thanks…

A story about horrible things happening to a young woman who exercises no agency until the epilogue. I’m not particularly drawn to melancholic descriptions of cold statue penis or attempted rape scenes.

Particularly frustrating was that Julia – the protagonist – does not seem to be afforded even the emotional agency of truly being against the horrible state of affairs (being married off at 15 to a space alien for whom she feels nothing). Instead, these scenes are written in a way that almost gives the impression that they’re intended to be titillating, which I don’t exactly see how they would be:

[Julia was] very much aware of his hand on her leg. It was an almost enjoyable sensation, and if he were human, she might have found herself catching her breath in anticipation of the wedding.

“Life of Julia” isn’t poorly written in a technical sense by any means, but I found the experience of reading it no more than depressing and frustrating.

“Project Thunderbird” by Kelly Hale

★★★☆☆ – I’m not complaining!

This one’s a bit slow for my tastes – not dense enough with happening (whether that’s plot-wise, character-wise, or thematically) for the pauce page count. Perhaps Kelly Hale does better in longer form? I’d imagine that could be the case – her prose is doubtlessly enjoyable. I look forward to seeing what her earlier Faction Paradox novel Erasing Sherlock is like (though I hear there’s a bit too much talk about Mr. Holmes’s “bulging member” or some such in that one).

This story is the one that suffers the most from the anthology’s seeming complete lack of proofreading, and it actually did impact my enjoyment when, say, punctuation was missing in an otherwise particularly emotional scene. It’s also the one that contains the “*something here” mentioned up top. Oopsie.

★★★☆☆ – Alright!

Oh, It’s a Comedy…!

And of course it is – it’s a Jacqueline Rayner book! Why did I expect any different?

If you, like me, have done your time skulking around the wiki; if you’ve read anything about this book, you probably know one thing about it. The one thing this book is famous for (to the degree that this book is famous, which it isn’t particularly). If you don’t, your proficiency in spoiler avoidance is of impressive caliber, but in case you think you do, let’s say it on three: One… Two… Three! It’s the book in which Bernice Summerfield gets nonconsensually pregnant with a wolfman baby while a villain is possessing her body.

Let’s dig into that a bit. Bernice Summerfield, of course, has had an active fiction line since 1992 – thirty-three years, at the time of writing. With the last Virgin New Adventures book being published in 1999, twenty-five of those years have been spent in the care of Big Finish. Despite this, I get the impression – and I cannot say how true it is, as I haven’t read enough of them to be sure – that Big Finish’s Bernice Summerfield novels are considerably fluffier fare than the New Adventures, in both senses: less dark, and perhaps of less substance.

Benny’s Virgin outings live in the collective cultural consciousness to this day – you hear extolment not only of heavy Doctor Who hitters such as Love and War and Just War (no love in that one), but even occasionally of her Doctor-less adventures like Down. Meanwhile, her Big Finish novels are not only not extolled, but… hardly ever mentioned, in my limited experience. With the Virgin novels both better remembered and known for their emphasis on continuity, then, it’s odd to think that most of Bernice Summerfield today – her personality; her continuity – is built on that Big Finish output that’s hardly ever discussed. Paul Cornell’s Bernice “I like a drink” Summerfield is who she was; Big Finish’s Bernice “I need a drink…” Summerfield is not altogether different – but certainly noticeably so.

A Comedy with Non-Comedy Consequences

With two decades of hindsight, this novel feels mind-boggingly odd. The reason? It’s a genre work where the genre trappings have consequences far removed from its genre.

In this book, the villain sleeps with a wolfman while in Bernice’s body and (as is only revealed in a later book) gets her pregnant with the baby of this man for whom she has absolutely no affinity. This is played for laughs, which in all fairness – despite being a writing choice that one could imagine would be avoided today – works just fine in the context of the novel… but then they ran with it. “She’s running sex-crazedly and decadently amok with your body!” works as an amusing circumstance – “You’re saddled with the baby of a man you do not love, conceived against your will while you were practically unconscious” does not. It’s an emotionally immaterial setup to a heavy story arc – a scene borne of comedy, its result deferred tragedy. The sort of genre-subversive whiplash that’s worthy of, say, The Boys, but it seems to have come about accidentally. Of course, when the fallout is eventually handled in The Glass Prison, it still doesn’t feel all that heavy – that is, after all, also a Jacqueline Rayner novel – but it’s the sort of thing that’s impossible to read a synopsis of (or even stop and think about in the shower) without it coming off as profoundly terrifying.

Coming from later releases, this serves to somewhat weaken the house of cards that is Bernice Summerfield’s continuity. When you hear about her past it sounds enticing and rich – so when it’s revealed to rest on a joke, that richness is made a tad poorer. It might serve the series better to experience it in order – going from “haha” to “oh” is decidedly a stronger experience than from “whoa” to “pfft” – but with the two decades of content released after this novel, that’s not necessarily the natural approach. Bernice Summerfield has, in a way, hurt its own structural integrity as a series by being as long-lived and successful as it is.

The Scent of Butter

On its own merits, The Squire’s Crystal is classic Rayner: It’s popcorn literature. It never makes any particularly daring story decisions, and all psychological exploration of the premise – the classic “gender swap” being famously ripe for a panoply of angles – is deftly dodged in service of being an effective, digestible vessel for comedy and a high pace. No palpable angst results from the body swap (Benny is portrayed as experiencing angst, but I can’t in good conscience say the book is written in an angsty tone), and gender roles are only explored from the perspective of genre tropes (“now that I’m a man I can’t use my feminine wiles!”). In a particularly funny moment, the book displays that it’s written by a cis woman a smidge too prominently: It’s apparently vexing that Benny’s new male body’s bits constantly “bounce around”. While wearing tight leather pants. In case you’re not familiar, I’ll tell you here and now: Such is not the penile experience.

This review undeniably sounds like damning with faint praise (mixed in with a helping of regular damning), but if I’m to be honest, as a trans woman currently battling a particularly lengthy bout of debilitating dysphoria, I was dearly hoping not to have to confront the intricacies of sex and gender today. There’s a time and place for popcorn literature, and mine – listening to an audiobook while moving – was certainly it. I suppose one could’ve wished for a few twists and turns to help the book skirt around being quite so “by the numbers”, but alas.

For once, we have a story that’s infinitely stranger in context than on its own.

★★★★⯪ – A would-be masterpiece with an unfortunate aftertaste.

This review contains spoilers for the ending of the book.

Read Human Nature. Do it! It’s a resounding success of a novel that, contrary to the associations of the phrase “tie-in media”, is in the same weight class as some of the best stand-alone sci-fi novels you’ve read. It’s riveting, it’s brave, its characters are written with incredible feeling, and it contains a stupefying example of how to write a satisfying romance in appallingly few scenes. The book is, in this case, a hundred times better than the movie. That said, what I’m interested in exploring in this review is something I haven’t seen discussed elsewhere: how the ending of Human Nature falls on its face.

A recurring theme in Doctor Who, and especially the New Adventures, and especially especially Paul Cornell’s work, is the tension between the epic and the everyday; between grand, unfathomable science fiction and the little things in life. When an effort is made to emphasize this contrast, the author du jour typically comes down on the side of the latter – sometimes unsuccessfully (the Fifth Doctor’s “well-prepared meal” speech in Earthshock [1982], an episode in which the evil robots with big guns arguably win, comes to mind), and sometimes, as is generally the case in Paul Cornell’s oeuvre, powerfully. Take his earlier novel for this line, Love and War, in which the winning hands include calling somebody by their chosen name and telling a story about a road trip passionately enough. Cornell seems to me an eminently media-literate man – he writes, I get the impression, with a watchful eye fixed on his message: Choosing to send your students to war as child soldiers conspicuously yields no positive results whatsoever, and despite the military making an appearance rather early, they’re never allowed to step in to provide any solutions. It is jarring, then, when the novel not only shoots itself in the foot, but does so shortly after explicitly proclaiming that “I shall not shoot myself in the foot”.

Hanging over the plot – in which the Doctor has turned into John Smith, a human, losing his memories and superhuman powers – is the possibility for the true Doctor to make a return in order to, as the deus he is, save the day ex machina. This would, of course, beyond being deeply unsatisfying (plenty of Doctor Who plots follow the structure “the Doctor is tied up somewhere, so everyone else’s agency is limited to waiting for him to show up and fix things”), run counter to the larger message of the book: If true triumph is to be found in the everyday, why should the solution be “we need the inscrutable Time Lord from faraway Gallifrey to work his sci-fi magic”? Indeed, the novel recognizes this, and – as if to reassure the reader – contains this line:

He sat down beside her. ‘John Smith is the real me. And it’s because of all this, not despite it. You don’t know what you really want in life until it’s taken from you.’

‘You mean Joan?’

‘Yes. […] I have to save her. And I have to do it as me.’

Unfortunately, in a move I can only describe as inexplicable, the novel then promptly turns around and has becoming the Doctor be the solution. Hey, is that the machina? Well, the deus has just come ex it, and he saves the day by way of technobabble. How Cornell managed to lay out a plan for the reader so concretely and yet summarily fail to execute on it, I do not know – but there is a possible explanation, though I described it as “inexplicable”. Quote the endnotes of the 2002 e-book version:

[N]obody had ever really done mythologist Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’ for the Doctor, the plot that’s most commonly recognised in popular culture as that of Superman II, where the hero gives everything up to discover what normal humanity is like. Fertile ground, I thought.

The particular stage of the Hero’s Journey Cornell refers to here is the apotheosis, in which the hero gains enlightenment. And, sure, the apotheosis can be applied to the novel as a whole; that enlightenment being found in humanity (that is to say, human nature). Apply the whole Hero’s Journey to the story, however, and the apotheotic moment within the book is… when John Smith sacrifices himself and becomes the Doctor. Here, “enlightenment” is becoming an inscrutable Time Lord from faraway Gallifrey. If Cornell did indeed choose this development as part of the Hero’s Journey, it’s a shame, and if not, it is inexplicable – either way, a tone-deaf moment in an otherwise pitch-perfect book. (As an aside – and this is hardly a critique, as it isn’t fair to ask that an author should’ve come up with the exact same idea – I can’t help but feel Cornell missed the opportunity to let John Smith live out the fifty or so remaining years of his life with Joan, something that would have been possible thanks to the unique setup of the Doctor as a character.)

In fact, at no point after returning to Doctorhood does the Doctor ever make a decision differently in light of his experiences as a human – he gets a chance, in the form of deciding whether to be empathetic enough to say goodbye to his paramour (as opposed to pulling an Irish goodbye for the ages)… but comes down on the side of “no”, and has to be convinced by his companion. (In the first draft of the book, he actually does disappear without a trace, a choice Cornell rightly recognized as a mistake.) Ultimately, there’s never any sign of the Doctor having learned anything from his ordeal, save for a scene at the very end, in which the Doctor cries – a lovely moment, given that it isn’t something the Doctor is given to doing, but underwhelming as the sole result of becoming human for a time.

Human Nature does succeed in its messaging in other areas – for one, it makes a stand for pacifism and conscientious objectors (something Cornell walks back in the TV adaptation, apparently having lost his pacifist streak along the way). As a work of character writing, it’s flawless – I didn’t even mention Bernice Summerfield’s role in the book, but it’s one of her most essential novels; her thoughtscape laid out beautifully before the reader. Take this review as one long – and, admittedly, significant – asterisk next to my central sentiment: “It’s amazing.*”

★★★☆☆ – “Hey, I had a good time tonight.”

A theme park ride of ideas.

Rose-Coloured Crosshairs is, in a sense, the Platonic idea of a Faction Paradox novel(la). When I say that, I don’t mean the Platonic ideal, mind – that being perfect, absolute, and eternal – but the Platonic idea: The most essential form; an embodiment that zeroes in on what “a Faction Paradox novel” is, free of extraneous features. And when I say “in a sense”, I do mean a specific sense: It manifests what I had heard Faction Paradox was like before I got into it. Quote Elizabeth Sandifer, in her essay on A Romance in Twelve Parts, Obverse Books’s first Faction Paradox publication:

[Faction Paradox] is a series and a mythology defined by setup and by the generation of ideas, as opposed to by their deep exploration and resolution.

Never has this been truer than in this book. Rose-Coloured Crosshairs is a guided tour of ideas; a safari of titillating notions; a theme park ride with concepts in place of animatronic characters. It never stops to explore these concepts in any depth, but they certainly get to strike their cool poses and put on their pyrotechnic displays as you ride past. Notably, the premise to which “rose-coloured crosshairs” refers –  a device placed on a planet in life’s infancy, which (over the course of the planet’s whole remaining multi-billion-year history!) brainwashes people into remembering a false past and “progress [thus] becomes impossible, as [nostalgia denies] any possibility of change” – smacks loudly of a message; of a point the author wants to make… but that point is never made, as the effects of the device never enter the story.

It’s difficult to be too disappointed by the lack of depth, however, because Rose-Coloured Crosshairs makes a good bid at compensating with quantity. I found myself lost and quite honestly bored for the first third of the book, which consists largely of meticulous, dry worldbuilding descriptions (as if out of a sourcebook for a tabletop role-playing game) and slightly too inscrutable exchanges between unfamiliar characters. Barring some hitches in the pacing, however – Bidmead likes frontloaded descriptions (though at least I always had a vivid image of the scene) – the rest of the book flew by: The Macy’s parade of ideas gets into the swing of it, and I’m sure I audibly let out an “ooh” and/or “ahh” on at least a few occasions.

Some of the concepts are a bit too fuzzily defined for my tastes (“vibes-based”, as they say, or sometimes “things just kind of happen”), but again, it’s not a great loss if a given idea doesn’t speak to you, since you’ll be on to the next but a few pages down the line. Unfortunately, the central plot of the book is characterized by this fuzziness as well; a general feeling of “what just happened and why?” In the end, I’m left feeling more as if I’ve read a single-author anthology than a novel(…la), but the inescapable fact of the matter is, I like an anthology. Do you?

★★★☆☆ – Good!

The Glass Prison is a Jacqueline Rayner novel, through and through. It has a light touch (despite its heavy subject matter), it’s eminently funny, and it’s decidedly more about its characters than its concepts. Make no mistake – despite an eponymous location that smacks of “high concept” as much as a “glass prison”, the ramifications of this odd setting aren’t explored so much as used as a source of emotional turmoil for the characters: Characters which, thanks to Rayner’s effortlessly human style,* are always immediately relatable; never impenetrable.

Exploring Bernice Summerfield’s pregnancy and labor, you would expect this novel to be a profoundly angst-inducing affair – and it does seem like something Rayner aims for! But she isn’t an author who writes spiraling psychological narratives: She writes fast-paced, (non-derogatorily) digestible, intuitive stories. When Bernice Summerfield worries whether her baby is truly hers or not (it’s some science fiction mumbo and/or jumbo), you never wonder on which side she’ll come down in the end – though that meshes with the tone of the rest of the book.

As nestled in my heart, Jacqueline Rayner is a comfort author. You get a good story, you’re never bored, and you aren’t too challenged. It’s the ultimate refinement of the “popcorn literature” that you expect a licensed novel to be. That’s not to say that she can’t write in a higher register – but I wouldn’t imagine that’s the mission statement here. Rayner writes quintessential Bernice Summerfield – she has a pitch-perfect grasp on her sarcastic, messy character, while assiduously maintaining the reader’s emotional connection to her. Of course, by virtue of her being one of the few female writers who consistently get work in the Doctor Who extended universe, you suffer no risk of running into chauvinism in her writing, and as a bonus, this particular novel centers on a cast of nigh-exclusively female characters – a breath of fresh air.

An odd feature of this novel is the passive nature of its plot – Summerfield and her gang are profoundly reactive. You would think a prison break would be an obvious feature of a novel named The Glass Prison, but… it barely is! They seem perfectly content doggin’ it in there.

If you, like me, are interested in immersing yourself in Bernice Summerfield as a franchise, this novel is a key inflection point. It chronicles the birth of her son, who goes on to be an important character in his own right, it’s another step in Bernice’s perennial will-they-again-won’t-they-again relationship with her (ex-!!!)husband Jason Kane, and it features a new angle on Rayner’s own pet alien species, the fact-obsessed, tentacle-faced, and deeply tickling (as in amusing, not with their tentacles, I— oh, forget it) Grel. It may also offer you some consolation as to why Bernice Surprise Summerfield’s son has a name as exasperatingly prosaic as “Peter”.

The audiobook version adds the value of Lisa Bowerman’s brilliant performance – who knew she commanded such a range of voices?

* Have you listened to Doctor Who and the Pirates?

★★★☆☆ – Good!

You know that feeling you sometimes get from academic literature – the feeling that the author, at some point, realized that the book is their soapbox? “This is my book – I can write anything I want in it!” This book gives off that feeling, for better and for worse (but also for better!).

If you, like me, are a 21ˢᵗ-century trans woman, the history contained in this book will, for the most part, not pertain to you directly. My gender identity is not an ethnoreligious phenomenon, I’ve never been a sex worker, and I was but a glint in my grandfather’s eye in the ’60s. Nevertheless, the history detailed in this book is eminently interesting, and offers a perspective on transfemininity (and its interaction with mainstream society) that may be illuminating and useful – it certainly made me question some of my basal assumptions.

It is my view that in order to create something truly special, one must be “radically different” for some value of that phrase. And if you are as “out there” as is required to create something special, I believe, you will necessarily not only make decisions that resonate with your audience as something special, but some decisions that will simply go down as “mad” as well. A necessity of making something great is to make something questionable. This book is a prime example: For every part that makes you question your place in society, there’s a part where the author recounts an entire music video, or goes on about nothing for six paragraphs. The final chapter of the book might make you – it certainly made me – feel like you’re being inducted into a sex-radical female-supremacist cult. The very final sentence – “Will you demand it all?” – struck me as particularly discombobulating. Because overall, it isn’t that kind of book.

When you read a book on gender theory – especially one written by a marginalized author – there’s always a risk that it’ll be angry, isn’t there? Righteously so, but nevertheless the sort of book you shouldn’t read if you aren’t at the top of your mental game; the sort of book that’s upsetting even if it’s right. The sort of book that induces angst in the vulnerable. A Short History is not that kind of book. It’s mixed in its digestibility, sure, and the coherence of its arguments isn’t always readily apparent (as in, I wasn’t always sure what arguments it tried to make) – but it’s level-headed and informative (if more than a bit florid and high-falutin’). You certainly don’t risk anything by giving it a try.