The Gods Storyline
A Bernice Story Arc
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Virgin Books The Gods Storyline A Bernice Story Arc |
| Published | 1998-2000 |
| Synopsis: Benny discovers that immensely powerful beings have become loose on the planet Dellah. Using religion to become godlike, they threaten a war between the higher powers of the universe and the destruction of everything she's ever known. |
A Review by Finn Clark 26/2/00
The NAs are dead, long live the NAs. After nearly a decade of books starring the Doctor and latterly Benny, Virgin have at last ended the line with a monumental story arc of gods and apocalypse. I hadn't been a regular Benny reader by any stretch of the imagination, but for these I returned.
Where Angels Fear (Rebecca Levene and Simon Winstone) kicks it all off in style. Here are lovely characters, clever ideas and a laudable willingness to think big. For once here's a book that can't be accused of underambition. The back cover blurb is terrific, promising a story of world-shaking conflict, of gods and men colliding in epic battles. "The most powerful races of the universe are running scared, withdrawing to their own strongholds, and leaving the lesser peoples to their fate." Benny's universe will never be the same again.
Unfortunately it's only 240 pages long, though it deserves 400. It doesn't feel squashed. What it does feel is fragmented, as if this is all they could piece together after dropping the original on the kitchen floor. Neat ideas are glimpsed but not developed, overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of the authors' vision. Plot threads are left unexplained, but not for long...
Dave Stone's The Mary-Sue Extrusion stomps on all our expectations. "Erratic and idiosyncratic grammar, lurching descents into circumlocutory chattiness, utterly unrelated infodumps coming in from far left field, the fact that the whole thing falls apart spectacularly at the end..."
That's not my verdict. It's Dave Stone's, or at least that of his narrator. (With a book called The Mary-Sue Extrusion, one might be uncertain about where the dividing line falls.) It's a harsh verdict, but not unfair. In fact, for quite a while the novel completely ignores the demands of storytelling and remains a series of extended essays. Gradually narrative rules take over (and do so extremely well) but we have been warned. This ain't the usual thing.
The Mary-Sue Extrusion is about novels and storytelling. Dave Stone often stops the action stone dead to throw rocks at SF cliche, deliberately using coincidences and contrivances that Just Aren't Allowed in ordinary narrative. Throughout we have Stone's deafening authorial worldview, so loud and distinctive that on this level he makes Douglas Adams look like Piers Anthony. Everything is refracted through Dave Stone's prism. It's obsessively offbeat and fantastically lavatorial to a degree that at times reaches genius.
I don't think Dave Stone is our best writer, but he has a good claim to being the most important. The work he's produced under the Who imprint is breathtakingly audacious, original to a degree that puts entire lines to shame. Even when he fails, you've got to admire the fireworks. For good or bad, long may he write.
Underneath, the story is straightforward. It's Dave's most reader-friendly book to date, but next up is undoubtedly the most important Doctor Who book never published. This is the must-read Benny book. If you haven't guessed, it's Lawrence Miles's Dead Romance.
Lawrence has always chafed at the adventure serial format of Who. Frankly, he's not very good at it. Christmas on a Rational Planet gets buried under all the things he's trying to do. Down isn't the psychological descent into hell he claims to have been aiming for. Alien Bodies (which he describes dismissively as a big, noisy SF epic) is wonderful almost until the end, but there it falls apart. I suspect Lawrence got bored and gave up on trying to sustain the action. It's just not what he's interested in.
What is Lawrence's philosophy of writing? To find out, read Dead Romance. It's almost a textbook on the subject.
Some would call it Interference done right. Readers expecting a happy runaround will find Dead Romance a shock. Lawrence isn't even slightly interested in corridors or black-clad villains, which is stated too explicitly to be even a subtext. When his heroine eventually does something heroic, Lawrence apologises! This is a proper novel, not action-adventure or a plagiarised TV episode. This book deals with appalling possibilities and makes it clear right from the beginning that tragedy is inevitable. Everything will go spectacularly arse over tit and our faces will be rubbed in the horror.
It's more than just world-shaking. Your view of the Whoniverse will be scrunched up like paper and tossed into the nearest bin. It's really, really bleak. It's not particularly easy to get into, but it's arguably the culmination of almost ten years' Doctor Who novels.
How do you follow that? Well, obviously with Justin Richards's Tears of the Oracle. Here the Gods storyline takes a break. Tears of the Oracle returns in large part to the cosiness of the early Benny books, starring all the regulars and even former academic colleagues. Awfully genial chaps, wouldn't hurt a fly. Another cucumber sandwich, vicar?
Of course this is all deceptive. It may start pleasantly, but before the end things get really quite nasty...
It has twists, as you all expected from Justin. One idea occurred to me about sixty pages before the characters thought of it (with gasps of surprise) but for the most part I hadn't the faintest clue what was going on. I'm still a little confused even now. Richards plays horrible games with his readers. Some of this is really quite emotional. There are headfucks and ambiguities, not to mention a healthy dose of paranoia.
Dave Stone's Return to the Fractured Planet is a sequel to Mary-Sue Extrusion, in every sense. It stars the same unnamed lead character, again filling out his background with lifts from Stone's Dredd work. It's hugely confident work, with stylistic experimentation alongside a story that's strong and direct. Incidentally it has the best ending I've seen from Dave Stone, who adores anticlimax and shaggy dog stories but here manages to reconcile this anti-dramatic desire with a genuine crescendo. Events come to a highly satisfying climax, which I liked a lot.
The biggest difference is the nastiness. The Mary-Sue Extrusion was pretty brutal at times, but events here are so incredibly vile that I don't think anyone else could have made it work. The horror would have overwhelmed the book. However instead of rubbing your face in it, Dave Stone's authorial voice leaves the worst to your imagination.
Justin Richards's The Joy Device is an out-and-out comedy. Plotted like a dream and funnier than his last similar attempt (Demontage), it's dependent upon the kind of misunderstanding and conspiracy that propels the best sitcoms. You half expect to see a vicar running around with a young lady in her underwear. I haven't read anything this bright and breezy since the last book by Terrance Dicks. Benny takes a holiday from the gritty Gods storyline, and how.
Last comes Twilight of the Gods 2 (Mark Clapham and Jon de Burgh Miller), the only disappointment of these seven books. As a stand-alone book it would be okay, but as the capstone to the earth-shaking Gods storyline it's a failure.
It feels like the Keystone Kops. Folks run around amiably and every so often suffer the indignity of a cliffhanger. Of course this is deliberate; the authors know this is the last NA and are teasing us with the knowledge that for once any or all of the regulars might die. However the book's tone undercuts this. For the most part it's inoffensive adventure in Flash Gordon style, which sends its own message.
But there's another reason why this should have been a weightier, more intense novel. Think of the subject matter. These are gods our heroes are up against! Lords of creation! Imagine yourself up against the God of the Old Testament; that's the sort of stakes our heroes should have been playing for. Something magnificently epic has been swept under the carpet. Religion is one of the most powerful forces in world history, something that toppled empires and swept continents, but here it's treated as a bit of a joke.
But what about the explanations? This is the last book in the series; surely it explains where the Gods came from, taking in every NA ever published and how this ties in with the meaning of life? Um... well, sort of. We learn who the Gods are, thus demonstrating again the truth of the Babylon 5 dictum: "it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive." It's a bit of an anticlimax, really. Dead Romance had some fascinating developments, but this book is actively hostile to them. There's nothing creative about how Lawrence's hints and intentions are simply ignored; to me it felt negative.
It isn't even much of an ending, as the number of plot threads left hanging could be woven into a rather nice rug.
At the end of the day, it's a damn impressive run of books. Virgin were never very good at story arcs and the opening and closing books here are probably the weakest, but the books en route go from solid to astounding. The themes (religion and storytelling) also appeared in the BBC books, but these things seem to go in waves. Go on, read a Benny. You could do a lot worse.
The Gods of Dellah rock by Robert Smith? 27/4/00
I've been an unashamed Doctor Who fanboy for as long as I can remember and I'll probably be one until the day I die, but the NAs were something special even among that very special series which is Doctor Who. They gave me books that seemed to define Doctor Who truly and completely for me, even beyond my natural fannish inclinations.
I was cautiously optimistic about the Benny NAs when they started, but from the start they proved to be fun, clever and thoughtful. And just as the line looked like it was in danger of beginning to stagnate, along came something mindblowingly huge, The Gods' storyline.
Where Angels Fear: An incredible achievement, worthy of a place in Season 3 of Babylon 5. A huge rollercoaster of lows and lowers, with depths most lines are too terrified to explore, sadly let down by the authors' inability to write decent prose. Amazingly, however, it survives this and sets up the sheer scale of the story with deceptive ease.
The Mary-Sue Extrusion: An astonishing book, especially once you ignore the lame ending. Dave Stone gets his second wind with this one and it really is fabulous, with little touches right throughout. That it's not the best book of 1999 says a lot more about the quality of the other books in this range than it does about this book. Oddly overlooked for some reason and just waiting to be rediscovered.
Dead Romance: Wow. Words fail me. There's no book like this, none as clever, sadistic, evocative, twisted or as funny. Written like a dream and edited so tightly it hurts. Somehow, Lawrence manages another surprise mega-hit (after Alien Bodies, although his third attempt failed with Interference). Just about the best thing ever written on the subject of Doctor Who, ever. Utterly, utterly brilliant from start to finish.
Tears of the Oracle: And just when you think things have got to start going downhill we get this -- and from Justin Richards! Another extraordinarily good book, surprisingly deep and very clever and non-stop entertaining. This could have ended the line with no problems.
Return to the Fractured Planet: Zippy and readable, but not as standout as it should be. The double plot is just a bit too grim and there aren't as many enjoyable touches as TM-SE. It's still pretty good, although the vicious see-sawing of the Richards and Stone double act can give you whiplash.
The Joy Device: Second rate comedy that feels flat and forced. It should have been highly amusing or a welcome breather or even funny, but it really sags. There's some okay stuff here if you persevere, but it's like extracting blood from an ogri.
Twilight of the Gods: An enjoyable action runaround... that's completely inappropriate as the last book in the Gods storyline. It nobly attempts to tie things up, but it makes a real hash of things by misconnecting with Tears of the Oracle. And the revelation of the Gods' identity is laughably arbitrary. It has some worthy stuff right at the end, but it's too little, too late.
The Benny line was one that was never afraid to take risks or swing things in a new direction. In a year when Doctor Who fiction continued to flounder for ideas and direction, the Benny books soared. The Gods storyline is the pinnacle in Virgin's crown. They proved that they knew how to write astonishing and wildly experimental books with consumate ease and professionalism, while the competition languished in a creative backwater.
The Gods arc ranged across different styles, different approaches and showed once and for all that the NAs were never about conformity or stagnation, even when they had a good thing going. We may never see their like again and it seems oddly poignant that the series which defined and redefined Doctor Who in the nineties should end with the twilight of that decade. Nevertheless, the legacy of the NAs has left its mark and we are richer and more complete for their existence. Thank you, Virgin.