Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Infernal Nexus

★★☆☆☆ – 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.

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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!