Tears of the Oracle
The Doomsday Manuscript
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Tears of the Oracle |
Big Finish The Doomsday Manuscript |
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| Author | Justin Richards |  |
| ISBN | 1 903654 04 1 | |
| Published | 2000 |
| Synopsis: Bernice finds herself in possession of one half of a manuscript that foretells the end of the world. And with the Fifth Axis on the warpath, that just might happen. |
A fun little novel from the Justin Richards plotting machine by Robert Smith? 8/7/01
Fresh from the vanity presses of Big Finish comes the first novel in Bernice's fourth regeneration. This line is the spin-off of a series of audios that's a spin-offbof a series of books that's a spin-off of a series of books under a different licence that's a spin-off of a TV series. This has to be some sort of record.
As best I can tell, almost nothing on the cover is correct. The central figure looks nothing like Bernice or Lisa Bowerman (unless Lisa's been involved in a particularly nasty bar fight). The diving figure (the one with the backward hand) in the lower corner looks more like Sophie Aldred than anyone else. The spike on the false hand is supposed to be hidden within a fake index finger, not larger than the hand itself. The man with the slug balanced just under his nose in the torn picture is meant to have a huge bushy moustache. One of those figures in the background might be Jason, but I couldn't even begin to tell you which one. Then again, I can't even determine the gender of one of those figures. It's probably a good thing these books aren't being displayed in stores around the world for all to see.
The novel itself begins quite amusingly with the obligatory setup a new line requires. There's a couple of nods to The Dead Men Diaries and some of the mindnumbingly boring new regular characters from that collection pop up here, but otherwise a lot of the ground is fairly new. The seven page introduction is much funnier than the character introduction found in Dead Men Diaries, which bodes well.
The novel is divided into three major sections. The first takes place on the Braxiatel Collection itself and is by far the weakest. I've given up all hope of being able to tell which of Justin Richards' books are written in a hurry, because he's done some of his best work that way (eg Tears of the Oracle), but the first third is rather plodding, with some very forced jokes (although the "Bob's your uncle" joke on page 133 is even worse). It's as though the author is taking the first 50 pages to get settled into the business of writing. I find that a bit peculiar from Justin Richards, but we've seen this sort of thing before.
Oh, and the party is supposed to celebrate the new Millennium, but it's taking place in the year 2600. There's a short argument about exactly when certain individuals celebrate it, but it definitely shouldn't be before 3000!
That said, having Jason as the hook into the action is quite a good one. It draws us in as much as Benny, yet avoids the tedium that often came with having the character appear in person. And it's always a pleasure to see Braxiatel, even if he is in Picard mode here, staying behind while Benny goes off on the adventure. That's definitely a good thing though - it gives Benny plenty to do and keeps the focus on her. It's nice to see the new Joseph tagging along and he's just different enough to the old one to work.
The middle section is kind of fun, but a trifle strange. The search for the second half of the notebook is quite well done and things take a turn for the weird when Benny arrives at an aging filmstar's home. The edited chase through the corridors by cameras, complete with prop effects and CGI to be added in later is quite fun. Very little of it is explained, though - and none of it has any relevance to the rest of the story. That's not necessarily a criticism, though, since it's just loopy enough to work.
Things get moving when Benny gets to Kasagrad, which is definitely the tightest section of the three. Benny also gets a good amount of archaeology to do, which helps enormously. And the threat hovers nicely in the background, without losing the personal touch that Straklant gives. The Fifth Axis shouldn't really be as effective a threat as they are, but I really like the background of galactic politics we get. Hopefully they'll be back in future books.
The ending comes together in a way that we haven't seen from Justin Richards in a long time. Braxiatel's foiling of the invasion is just similar enough to Theatre of War without being derivative. Straklant's final deception is really well done and Brax's reasons for getting involved seem just right.
The only thing I'm not so happy with is Luci Yendipp. She seems to tag along and spend most of the book either dressed in black and walking around at the end of very long corridors, or sitting in a room discussing local politics until she can fulfill her plot function at the end. She even has to remind the reader that this isn't her sole function, which I think might have been a clue that more should have been done with her, or that the character could have been excised from the novel altogether. The space section is also a bit confusing, since it's not at all clear which ship is which. Benny finds her way back to one of them, but I'm still not sure if it was the one she started from or not. Some tighter editing could have clarified things here.
The second relaunch of the Benny Books is a mirror image to the first. Paul Cornell's Oh No It Isn't! offered a highly unusual, but hugely entertaining story that set up a lot of stuff that was never used again (eg Menlove Stokes), whereas Justin's Dragons' Wrath set some of the major events in motion (eg Braxiatel), but with a fairly drab story. This time around it's The Dead Men Diaries which is the drab story and Justin's Doomsday Manuscript which carries the fun tagline. Time will tell which of these will have more of an effect over the line, but I'm hoping for this one.
The Doomsday Manuscript is a fun little book. Not flawless by any means, but it works quite well as the first in a new series. There's a strong focus on Bernice and enough ties to keep the Benny fanbase happy. It could have used some tighter writing or editing in a few places, but otherwise it's quite enjoyable. Recommended.
A Review by Finn Clark 2/1/03
I knew it. If I bought one, I'd eventually buy 'em all. Blame my sad completist fanboy gene. Ironically I was happy to have unbought Big Finish Benny books while the series was still ongoing, but once 'twas dead and I knew it wasn't an open-ended commitment I just had to hunt down this and Steve Cole's Gods of the Underworld.
I did the same with Virgin's Benny novels, only starting to track 'em down systematically once I had a backlog of nearly two dozen to catch up with. But at least with those there was a decent chance of finding 'em reduced. With the early Big Finish Benny novels, there's precious little chance of finding them at all unless you do as I did, drop in on the Who Shop or Tenth Planet and possibly pay a premium. But at least I picked up Lawrence Miles's Book of the War at the same time.
This book divides neatly into three sections. I was impressed by the second and third, but unfortunately found the first boring. It's not appalling, just lacklustre and overshadowed by later events.
I'll start with that opening section. Admittedly this was the first Big Finish Benny novel (if one overlooks Cornell's Dead Men Diaries anthology) and thus Justin may have felt obliged to plough one by one through the entire Braxiatel Collection supporting cast. I dunno. It's vaguely interesting to meet Adrian Wall for the first time, given the importance he'll later assume, but some of the others either wildly contradicted the mental images I'd built up elsewhere (Ms. Jones) or were so forgettable that their brief cameos simply left me baffled. I guess Justin deserves plaudits for selflessly giving over so much time to scene-setting for the range, but if this weren't an establishing novel then we'd all be saying that the scenes on Brax's asteroid desperately need a good trim.
Apart from anything else, it's an innately dull environment. St Oscar's at Dellah got more than a little over-familiar, but at least there you had academic rivalry, back-biting and responsibilities. A university is its own little world in microcosm. Whereas the Braxiatel Collection is almost completely safe, with the only conflicts being inconsequential personality clashes between the various members of staff. (Which basically means Ms. Jones, who apparently even intimidates Braxiatel. Yeah, right. Firstly, this is Brax we're talking about, and secondly, if she's so awful then why'd he employ her?) But more fundamentally, Benny is holding down a sinecure at the top-security private planet of her billionaire best friend. Who happens to be an alien Doctor-a-like genius.
What's more, the Braxiatel Collection scenes aren't just dull but glitchy. 2600 ain't the turn of the "millennium", unless you're more passionate than most about the Japanese battle of Sekigahara (Sept 1600) or the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno getting burned at the stake in Rome for heresy, supporting the Copernican model of the solar system. There's also a bit where the obvious bad guy gets given the benefit of the doubt regarding a murder. Huh? Benny even lets him tag along once the action gets off-planet, a decision which is the direct cause of further death. I'm sorry, but that bit of idiot plotting didn't even begin to feel sufficiently justified for me.
There are indications that Justin thinks he's writing a comedy. It's bright and breezy, with various one-liners which are, without exception, not funny. This is kinda odd, since Justin's done funny books quite well in the past. But here the would-be comic lines die on the page. Weird. Maybe I just didn't buy the basic set-up (see my previous complaint) and so was never going to get behind its jokes.
For a while it's as if Justin's trying to channel Terrance Dicks. (There's even something that skates perilously close to being a Casablanca scene. Hurm. See what I'm holding? It's a big stick with nails in. This stick is gonna beat to death the next Who author who does a Casablanca scene. I trust we understand each other?) We have staple Indiana Jones ingredients, including sci-fi Nazis like Kolonel (no, not Colonel) Daglan Straklant of the Fifth Axis Security Elite. That's one cool name.
But then things start getting interesting.
The section that really made me sit up was Munroe Hennessy's. It comes out of left field and has almost no relevance for the remainder of the novel, but it's bloody good stuff! And then we land on Casablanca... sorry, Kasagrad, and the comedy Nazis get a little bite. It's not trying to be Just War, but it's not the usual Terrance Dicks cosiness either. You can take the situation seriously and the stakes get raised. Justin's trademark plot twists come into their own and I ended up really enjoying my reading experience. Kendrick's last words even foreshadow Jac Rayner's The Glass Prison... unintentionally, I presume, but I still found it a bit spooky.
(Mind you, I'm not wild about the space stuff. That action scene could have used a rewrite or some editing, methinks.)
Overall, I'd definitely recommend this. It doesn't start particularly well, but it's never less than readable and it's a prequel to the excellent The Glass Prison. I felt they enhanced each other, anyway. A good, solid piece of work.
P.S. if you regard the Big Finish Benny books as a continuation of the Virgin ones, then Justin Richards was the author of three out of five consecutive entries in the series! Tears of the Oracle, Return to the Fractured Planet, The Joy Device and Twilight of the Gods 2 concluded the Virgin NAs, whereupon Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Doomsday Manuscript was the first Benny novel.
A Review by John Seavey 26/2/03
Oh, dear. Oh, dear oh dear oh dear. This is the first full-length novel from Big Finish, and they even went and got Justin Richards -- creator of Irving Braxiatel and one of the major influences on the character of Bernice Summerfield. Richards is known for his tightly-plotted thrillers, and this should have been no exception... so what went wrong? What turned this into the weakest novel Justin Richards has ever written, and a very unimpressive debut for the new Benny line?
What went wrong was the "tightly-plotted" part was missing from the "tightly-plotted thriller" that Richards usually writes. Again, let me say that I hate giving bad reviews to authors I enjoy, especially when said authors are in charge of commissioning books for the BBC Doctor Who line. However, this one has holes in the plot that you can drive a Mack truck through. The first and most fundamental one is the question of how Straklant, the villain of the piece, used Josiah Vanderbilt's identi-disc to get into the Braxiatel Collection when we're told, several times over the course of the novel, that the identi-discs are keyed to a person's individual bio-patterns. (Apparently, he "alters" the identi-discs. Well, if they can be altered so easily and thoroughly that nobody notices the difference between a thirty-something man with a false arm and a two-armed eighty-seven year old, it's not a very good security measure, is it?) M<>Plot problems continue with Straklant, mainly because he's so laughably obvious a villain that it astonished me that Benny and Brax bought his line of patter for even thirty seconds, let alone four-fifths of the novel. He's an agent for a Nazi-esque government called the Fifth Axis, he's impersonating a scientist who can't be reached by any means, he's just killed a man right in front of your eyes, and yet nobody suspects for even a moment that he might be lying when he says it was all in self-defence because the other man was trying to steal an artifact... which wasn't recorded in the collection, and which the other man had no apparent motivation to steal. The story is so fishy that you could serve it with chips, and yet Benny and Brax buy it wholesale.
Add to that the fact that Straklant is so obviously, over the top, ludicrously evil. He kills people he has no reason to kill, and in fact every reason not to. He's traveling with Benny, he's trying to maintain cover, and so what does he do? He doubles back and/or lingers not once but twice to kill someone who's cooperated with them simply because he's that evil. Never once does it apparently occur to him that if Benny wonders what's taking him so long, he's just blown his cover six ways from Sunday. Oh, and when Benny asks about his delays, he gives those "bad guy puns" that always sound like announcements to the effect of "I JUST KILLED THAT MAN!!!!!!" Benny's failure to put two and two together about Straklant utterly sinks this novel.
Which is a shame, because apart from that huge, massive, gaping, grit-your-teeth-every-second-and-wonder-how-your-favorite-character-has-become-a-congenital-idiot plot hole, there's a lot to like in this book. Richards once again nails Benny and Brax perfectly, adding it to a string of great portrayals of the archaeologist. There's some funny bits, some touching bits, and a bizarre, yet cool chase/fight scene involving killer cameras. There are a few continuity holes from The Dead Men Diaries (Benny has Joseph Mark II throughout DMD, but receives him here for the first time), but on the whole, if not for the unbelievability of the villain and the horrible, horrible levels of stupidity required on the part of the heroes to advance the plot, this could have been a wonderful little romp. It's just that the one big plot hole is just too damned big to ignore.
Tacky title... by Joe Ford 1/7/04
Oh sweet Jesus just how awful are the first thirty pages of this book? If there was ever an introduction to a series that was going to turn you off FOREVER then this has to be the winner! It's so boring and laboured, rather than introducing you to the Braxiatel Collection through the story Justin Richards dares to give you a guided tour, describing the grounds and the features and taking you to meet each of the regulars as he does. It screams laziness and is the reason it has taken me nearly a year to complete the book, each time I tried to read it I got to page twenty or so and gave up. It's not even as if it was well written or anything, it feels as though Justin is ticking of a checklist, one he can't be particularly bothered with and so he mechanically gives you the tour so he can get on with his story. Honestly, this book gets off to a worse start than Heritage and it is painful to endure.
Fortunately once these editorial requirements are out of the way Justin starts to have some fun with his ideas. Soon Benny is shooting off into space in search of the other half of the dreaded Doomsday Manuscript. I have to admit though sending Benny off on some archaeological mission has also been done to death and it was going to take a pretty interesting plot to hold this dodgy premise up. Can this debut story manage this?
Well yes and no. For once I can see the cursed Justin Richards "thirds" in action, a common complaint about his works is that he splits books into three segments of varying quality (I heard it spoke of in The Medusa Effect, Time Zero) and not always saving his best third for last. This book had three locations, the Braxiatel Collection where the book was as bland and dull as an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, Munroe Hennessey's private asteroid where events pick up and the book enjoys a heavy dose of comic action and finally on Kasagrad where the story concludes in particularly dramatic fashion.
The middle section manages to capture the attention far better than the first third. As soon as Benny and Joseph discovered the storyboard showing Munroe's forged comeback to the screen with Benny and Straklant being manipulated into making the right moves I was finally interested enough to WANT to keep turning the pages. The chapter ACTION! is a hoot and half, basically a whole bunch of running around being chased by homicidal cameras but all the more fun because it doesn't try and suggest its anything but an insane interlude. It just goes to show the sort of nutcases Benny meets up with on regular occasions.
Tacked on to this section is the atmospheric escape from their shuttle after it is sabotaged from behind by a rival Doomsday Manuscript hunter. Justin drops the comedy routine here and concentrates on Benny's desperate survival in the burning wreck. Her eventual escape is quite ingenious and her survival on the shuttle, coming face to face with their attacker proves to be rather exciting. It is rather strange to go back and read this book after all the developments in the series; the later Bernice is quite a different character, surrounded by friends (Adrian and Jason), mother to a Killoran (little Peter) and close friend to her boss Braxiatel. It's bizarre to see the old Benny, minus the baggage throwing her into danger because she has nobody to come home to. She seems foolhardy, almost reckless and the writers (and Lisa Bowerman) deserve much credit for advancing her character so much.
The Benny of this story is pretty bland all told, Justin has written a handful of books for the character and knows her inside out in all probability but here we just get the usual rundown. Archaeology mission, check. Booze, check. Pining after Jason, check. Biting one-liners, check. Because she has no ties, no reason to fight other than the "fun" of it (which she admits on the last page) there seems little motivation for her to risk her life so wildly just to retrieve information on a planet she doesn't give a damn about. Yes I know there is the Jason motive but how many times does that one get dragged out of the closet? After all the times he has betrayed her are we really expected to think that she still cares? Having her run around after such a liability makes Benny seem foolish and to be honest their back-story is not given enough description to make it realistic. To be honest she comes across as being a little naive, especially when it is clear that all a villain has to do is suggest the involvement of Jason and she will come a-running.
However despite all these criticisms the final third of the book that deals with the political machinations on Kasagrad is by far the most involving section of the book, managing to tie up everything quite nicely and throwing in the odd Richards twist for good measure. At least on Kasagrad we have proper characters to care about and a situation that needs dealing with, the Piccolinis setting might seem a bit obvious but it does effectively introduce the handful of characters that will kick the start the climax into action.
Effectively the Doomsday Manuscript is finally given a powerful role in the story and deciding the fate of an entire planet Benny is working against the clock to decipher its treasures and to find out how to access the Lost Tomb of Rablev.
Added tension is generated by the presence of the Fifth Axis, the militaristic group whose debut outing brilliantly reveals how bloodthirsty and evil they are. You have to appreciate a series setting up its main bad guys in its first book and the Big Finish Benny series has already got a good reason for you to keep with it. They are bastards, especially Straklant, the Axis officer who accompanies Benny for much of the story. Admittedly it was his unclear motivations that kept me going through the first half (his horrific act of violence on page 72 suddenly gives the book the edge it so desperately needed) and he blossoms as the real nasty of the piece in the second half. It is worth sticking with the book just to see what happens to this sadistic wanker, trust me his fate is well earned and perfectly orchestrated by a smug and worn out Benny.
Another plus is how the book refuses to compromise on its tight ending, rather than spending thirty odd pages padding out the book (go read Richards' The Joy Device where he padded out the end with a utterly pointless yet screamingly funny attempted sex scene) he lets the page count drop significantly compared to what we Doctor Who book fans are used to (about 70 pages are lopped off) and finishes the book practically the instant the danger is over. Okay so there is a tiny scene between Braxiatel and Benny that again feels forced in (it's gonna be a fun ride kiddies!) but I was still surprised at how efficiently the book ended (in fact I was worried that the plot might not be wrapped up they left things so late!).
Argh... I cannot decide what the hell I think about this book. I found it tiresome, annoying, gripping, hilarious and exciting in equal measures. I'm certain had it not kicked off the series with that astonishingly bad prologue I would have though more of it. I can't actually think of a Justin Richards book I have enjoyed less but even Justin on autopilot is something to treasure as his climax pulls everything together powerfully.
A hit and miss.