Dave Stone (1) (1964–)

Ah Dave Stone. Now there's a mad writer. His style is densely intertextual and wordy, a tentacular morass of camp and ideas crammed into a book so tight the lid has to be nailed shut. It's a good bet that with none of his work – and his 1990s stuff in particular – are you going to get or understand everything on the first run through, but if you hold on you'll enjoy what you see.

His influences are admirably meretricious – the title story of this collection owes equal amounts to Dante show more Alighieri and Stanley Unwin – and despite the madness of it all there's no denying it works.

There's a perceptible jump in the middle of this collection, as we go from the original 1990s run of Armitage strips (all cyberpunk, leather jackets and Sonic the Hedgehog haircuts) to the 00s revival (suddenly the jokes are about I'm a Celebrity, Starbucks and the smoking ban).

Things are much more sedate this side of the Millennium; less mad, less ambitious perhaps, but also much more easily enjoyable. Armitage finds its place as the more domestic, grounded cousin of the Judge Dredd strips. It's a fair representation of how Britain (when it's not going full Empire 2.0) views its relationship with the States: we're not going to change the world, we're not as big, but we're also less likely to shoot you in the face.

Also, I really like Inspector Morse. show less

Ms Jones, the Braxiatel Collection's venerable administrator who made the mistake of falling in love, is gone. Bernice Summerfield is sent out to track her down in an anthology that, like A Life in Pieces, is made up of three closely-linked novellas.

Well, sort of. The collection is bound together by some typically strong writing from Simon Guerrier, who writes a four-part story that precedes and follows each of the novellas. This leads into the first, "The Serpent's Tooth" by Rebecca Levene, show more where Bernice finds herself on an out-of-the-way planet where Ms Jones has been sighted-- a planet where women are required to cover themselves up completely and hide from sight. So, she disguises herself as a man and soon finds herself involved in a quest to win the hands of the daughters of the king. As you do. Levene writes a story that does what the best Bernice stories do, moving between light humor and dark implications, sketching in a commentary on gender relations that almost seems worthy of Ursula K. Le Guin. Levene was the editor of the New Adventures for much of Bernice's run in the title, and she clearly gets what makes the character work.

As in A Life in Pieces, the middle novella features Adrian and Bev Tarrant on their own adventure. "Hiding Places" is the prose debut of Stewart Sheargold, who wrote two crazy Bernice audios (The Mirror Effect and The Masquerade of Death), and his experimental tendencies turn out to be fantastic in novella format. As Adrian and Bev try to find Ms Jones in a strange hotel, he gives us great prose, terrifying events, and some great characterization for these two oft-underused leads. Between this and Sutton's novella in A Life in Pieces, these characters are being handled very well, and I hope the line keeps this up-- and that we get to see some of this depth given to the actors playing the characters in the audio dramas.

Lastly we come to Dave Stone's "Jason and the Bandits; or, O, Jason, Where Art Thou?" I wanted to like this story, I really did. It features Jason trying to catch up with Benny when he's heard of what's going on, but a series of increasingly unlikely events keep him away. It's a good idea and a really fun story, but it conflicts completely with the tone of the other two novellas and the linking material-- much as happened with Dave Stone's contribution to A Life in Pieces. You can have one oddball story in an anthology of dozens of short stories, but I don't think it works in a collection of novellas, where it means that a whole third of the book is off on a weird tangent. Especially when it it's the last novella in the book, coming just before the incredible climax.

For incredible it is. Guerrier once again shows his depth of understanding of Bernice and her supporting cast, and that last line is oh-so-sad, to boot... show less

There probably wasn't anything really wrong with this piece of unabashed pulp scifi except for how we have to wait 176 pages to find out where the Mary-Sue comes in and then it turns out that the meaning of "Mary-Sue" in this world has changed via semantic drift to something rather different. Whether the book contains an *actual* Mary-Sue (in the traditional fanfic sense, which has more to do with omnicompetence than the romantic possibilities mentioned by the narrator) could probably be the show more subject of a thousand academic papers, if the book were substantial enough to warrant that level of attention. There's an argument to be made for Bernice, especially for the version of Bernice described in the excerpts of her fictionalised "true adventures". Or possibly it's a meta-joke that the main character is a Mary-Sue of the author.

This is all completely irrelevant to the actual plot (action-adventure mercenary investigates a weird interplanetary incident and discovers something even weirder is going on) but someone went and made it the title of the whole novel so here we are. show less

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