The Infernal Nexus
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Big Finish The Infernal Nexus |
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| Author | Dave Stone |  |
| ISBN | 1 903654 16 5 | |
| Published | 2001 |
| Synopsis: Bernice Summerfield has found herself on a probe-ship heading deep into the Problematic Heart of the galaxy. What she finds is Station Control. A place that exists, simultaniously, in four hundred and seventeen dimensions, a brawling, souk-like Nexus between every world that can, or has or ever will be. And one of those dimensions is Hell. |
A Review by Finn Clark 28/11/01
Hurm. I enjoyed it, but... Well, none of it's actually new, is it? It's like a bunch of other Stone books put into a blender - gratuitous OTT weirdness, sexually hyperactive queens of all they survey, cybernetically adapted superkillers, the characters, flamboyant brutality that rubs shoulders with flamboyant whimsy... all overlaid as usual with the deafeningly loud Dave Stone authorial voice. To like the book, you've got to like that. Me, I'm lucky. I do.
If I'd never read a Stone book before, I'd have adored this. The plot doesn't wait too long before making an appearance and eventually proves to be quite good. It's good, solid and twisty with actual surprises and a decent resolution, though after that there's still a good twenty-plus pages of back-to-reality tidying-up. The patented Dave Stone Appendix is thankfully: (a) brief, and (b) relevant to the characters of the novel.
Good stuff: the funkiest, um, spaceship in the world. Laugh-out-loud moments. Stone doing what he does best.
Downside: before the plot gets underway it feels like Dave Stone rambling on and not getting to anything much of a point. Normally I enjoy this, but for some reason my tolerance level was lower this time around. But more importantly, I've read all this before. It's not bad at all, but I could have saved £6.99 by rereading a selection of Stone's greatest hits instead. And the book's biggest surprise feels almost inevitable thirteen picoseconds later, whereupon it's business as usual.
But I enjoyed it, honest! :-)
The Infernal Autopilot by Robert Smith? 7/3/02
If the author bio is to be believed, Dave wrote The Infernal
Nexus at the same time as I've been meaning to comment on this before, but Dave has recycled the
exact same ideas for about the fourth time now, so I can do it here. It's
great that Dave Stone has a reputation for having ideas come fast and
furious, and it's true that the idea about windows onto space being
completely impractical and thus having cameras substitute for them to show
a Star-Trekky view is a good one. But it was just as good an idea way back
in Ship of Fools. And The Mary-Sue
Extrusion. And The Slow Empire. And now The
Infernal Nexus. Furthermore, Anji and Benny have the exact same
thought processes about getting older and bodies becoming a bit slower as
they move into their mid-thirties (which I presume is Dave Stone's age as
well). It's one thing to have a reputation as a fast writer who can churn
out decent books, but it's quite another to copy and paste text between
books -- especially books that your target audience is highly likely to
read and remember. Not only does this give off the impression that the
author is desperately out of ideas, but it's unprofessional.
Anyway, to The Infernal Nexus itself, another TARGET length
noveloid from Big Finish. I quite liked it. It's easily the second best
Big Finish novel to date and might even surpass The
Doomsday Manuscript if I gave the matter serious thought. We're
nowhere near the Benny NAs, of course, but it's not without worth as well.
This is also the best Dave Stone novel in quite some time, IMO.
I'm not sure why that is, honestly. I think it might be Benny and
Jason, whom Dave seems born to write, unlike his recent struggles with the
second, fourth and eighth Doctors. I'm glad that Big Finish didn't bring
back Jason immediately, but I'm also glad that he's back now - it seems
just the right length of time, even more so since it looks like the line
won't be continuing. No one writes Jason better than Dave either. The
Benny-Jason dialogue simply sparkles and their reunion is genuinely
touching.
The 417 dimensions of nonsense are just there to give Dave a chance to
do his usual schtick, but it's done reasonably well here, unlike the
similar arbitrary weirdness of his last two novels. I think the novel's
length helps enormously here, because Dave has to keep things tighter than
he normally would and consequently there simply isn't time to get bored by
all the usual tangents and asides, 60% of which are new material for his
standup novel routine, now in its seventh year. We even get yet another
race of pseudo-Sloathes, in the form of the Imps, which as best I can tell
are simply an excuse for Dave to write yet more "Is good touchy feely
wacky dialogue, yes?" Sometime in the future, archaeologists are going to
piece together the quintessential Dave Stone novel, made up of pieces of
all his previous novels. It probably won't be that different from anything
we've had recently, but at least they'll go back to the Sloathes instead
of all this Collector-Imp ridiculousness.
It's a bit odd to see Dr Rupert Gilhooly not only mentioned, but
described in some detail, in the ridiculously wide text on the back cover,
only for him to be reduced to a cameo in the opening sections. It's a bit
of a pity he and Father Alsabalus didn't come along for the ride, but I
suppose that would only have led to an irrelevant subplot and probably
distracted us from the Benny and Jason stuff.
My biggest problem with The Slow Empire was that
the footnotes were funny for a change, whereas the main text was rather
dull. Here Dave's managed to balance both and add some restraint into the
mix. What footnotes there are are great (especially the Vermicious Knids
one), but they don't overpopulate the text either. I pity anyone with eye
problems, though -- I didn't know font size could be that tiny! Special
mention must go to Jason's "The Kiss of the Dragon Woman" at the end. You
can just tell Dave wishes he'd written those bits of Beige Planet Mars, so to compensate we have the book
we've just read resummarised in porno form. This is utterly, utterly
hilarious and worth the price of admission alone.
The epilogue is fantastic. I honestly thought the books were pretty
much ignoring each other, so to have actual consequences of The Squire's Crystal here is jarring (but welcome).
Not as jarring as the revelation, of course. I'd like to talk about that
in some detail, but I think I'll wait until The Glass Prison to see
how it plays out. I'm quite keen to read the next one though, for the
first time in Big Finish history, which is both great and a shame if
indeed they are cancelling the line.
The Infernal Nexus is a snappy little novel. Dave Stone's
autopilot drive is still engaged, but not nearly as much as his recent
novels. I've decided I really like the new cover design even though it
spoils a run of 87 straight books with white spines. My bank manager isn't
too happy with this month's loan I've had to take out to afford the latest
Big Finish novella, but the result is a tighter book than we've had from
this author in a long time, so I win this month's tug-of-war with my
financial institution. Recommended, unless your Doctor Who
overdraft exceeds one audio and three books a month, in which case I won't
be held responsible for the consequences.
A Review by John Seavey
10/3/03
This is another case of my own personal biases really helping me enjoy
this book. I'm a huge Stone fan and a classic NAstalgic (including the
Benny NAs, of which Stone was a major contributor and one of the three
defining writers for the character of Bernice [1]), so for me this Big
Finish Benny book was a little slice of heaven. In fact, if you love Dave
Stone, you will unquestionably adore this book, as this is probably the
most quintessentially "Dave Stone" book ever. I'm not sure whether he had
wonderful editorial guidance, or none at all, but this book really frees
him up to indulge in his own unique style of writing... and in a sense,
this book is the culmination of all his earlier works.
[1] The other two being Paul Cornell and Justin Richards; although, to
be honest, I'd actually rank Richards and Stone above Cornell in terms of
influence, given that he hasn't written a book featuring the character
since Oh No It Isn't!, and given that Stone and
Richards created Jason and Brax, her two most important and enduring
supporting cast members.
We get name-checks of the Sloathes, Planet X, the clockwork universe
from Sky Pirates! as a whole (which apparently Benny
either no longer remembers after all her brain-messings, or is being quite
sarcastic about), an ARVID unit, and the Maze from one of his Judge Dredd
novels... and, in fact, an explanation of sorts of the frequent
repetitions of person and place names in his novels. According to Stone,
"[Station Control, the setting of 'The Infernal Nexus'] 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 universes
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."
So there you go... The Infernal Nexus is the centerpiece of
Stone's work, its... well, nexus, not to put too fine a point on it. If
you love Stone, you simply must get this book.
There's also plenty to love for mere Stone-likers, too. Important stuff
happens in this book to the Benny continuity -- we finally get the return
of Jason, which if nothing else closes off the endless "This artifact
might lead me to Jason!" plotlines. We get the revelation of Benny's
pregnancy, which I knew about already because I'd read the back cover of
The Glass Prison, but which is nonetheless
well-and-sneakily-introduced here. We get threads tied up from The Dead Men Diaries, we get references to the
classic Benny NAs (including references to Jason Kane's pornography, and
the synopsis for the porno version of this very novel.) We get footnotes,
we get funny aliens, we get imps, we get the whole package... oh, and for
once, we don't get the sodding Fifth Axis, which I for one was heartily
glad to see. They were getting to be like the Shredder in the 'Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles' cartoon. :)
Oh, and we get a cover revamp, which is nice as that strange woman
impersonating Benny was getting on my nerves. (Aside: Yes, I know and have
always known that it was Lisa Bowerman... I was just getting sarky because
she shouldn't have been on the cover in the first place. Benny has been
shown several times on covers, and in point of fact is described in the
Big Finish books differently from Lisa Bowerman. She should never have
been used for the model for the covers.)
So, on the whole... if you're a fan of the old Benny books, and you
want to buy just one of the new set, buy this one, and relive the Golden
Age of Bernice Surprise Sumerfield. If you want to buy more than one, buy
this one too, as it's the best of the lot so far. If you don't want to buy
any, then don't. Nobody's forcing you to.