Return to the Fractured Planet

Bernice Summerfield: Virgin New Adventures #21

by Dave Stone

Things aren't going well for Bernice. Her home world, Dellah, has been taken over by sadistically evil beings with god-like powers. Her university is a burnt-out ruin. And the infection in her head could kill her at any time. But when she hears of the horrors that befell the planet Sharabeth, she suspects that something from Dellah has escaped through time. She embarks on what she knows may be last quest.

Genres: Doctor Who, Science Fiction

248 pages, Paperback

First published August 19, 1999

About the author

Stone has written many spin off novels based on the BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who and Judge Dredd.

Stone also contributed a number of comic series to 2000AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, focusing on the Dreddverse (Judge Dredd universe). In collaboration with David Bishop and artist Shaky Kane he produced the much disliked Soul Sisters, which he has described as "a joke-trip, which through various degrees of miscommunication ended up as a joke-strip without any jokes." Working independently, he created the better received Armitage, a Dreddworld take on Inspector Morse set in a future London, and also contributed to the ongoing Judge Hershey series.

Stone’s most lasting contribution to the world of Judge Dredd might well have been his vision of Brit-Cit, which until Stone’s various novels had been a remarkably underexplored area.

Reviews

[Clare · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dave Stone focuses on his new character again to the detriment of the other characters. I really didn't follow the denouement - just how did they fix what was going on in Benny's head? I did like the concept of a god changed to cliched villain, but rapidly got tired of all the horrors he perpetrated.

[Gareth · Rating 3 out of 5]

A surprisingly quick turnaround gets us another Dave Stone book in the soon-to-finish series, this one following up with the main character from The Mary-Sue Extrusion. That nameless operative feels like a more rounded character this time, helped by a narrative that runs along two lines, finding him at his beginnings (as a mostly artificial life form sent on dangerous missions) and in the present (investigating the death of a friend from said missions). It holds together well, and does eventually remember to belong to the ongoing plot of the series, but rather less satisfyingly so than in Mary-Sue. It’s an important one for Bernice, but only in the plotty sense; otherwise she sits enough of this out to make you wonder, quite frankly, what the range editors were playing at. It might have been better if Stone had been able to push the thing out to sea to be its own novel.

[Mole Mann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written at the tail end of the Benny NAs, Return to the Fractured Planet ties up lose ends from The Mary-Sue Extrusion - which I haven't read. However, you don't have to read TM-SE as the plot threads are only really briefly brought up.
The main meat of RttFP is a pastiche of the crime genre given by a very mysterious and probably unreliable narrator. This plot involves the killing of the narrator's girlfriend and steps that he goes to solve the murder. There's also the interlinking "prelude" plot set ten years earlier about the narrator and his girlfriend - Kara - investigating the planet of Sharabeth, where something awful has happened.
That something awful turns out to be the machinations of the main villain of this book - Absolom Sleed, who warped the population of Sharabeth into hideous monsters using malicious advertising. Sleed is defeated by the narrator and seemingly killed, however, Sleed can transfer his mind into other bodies and does so - hatching a plot to do what he did on Sharabeth to the narrator's homeworld - the Proximan Chain.
Dave Stone's writing is beautiful as always and the narrator's point of view is fascinating. The only problem with this book is that it doesn't end!

[Julia]

L’agente segreto di The Mary-Sue Extrusion ritorna ad essere il protagonista, e questa volta è stato assunto da Bernice e Braxiatel per indagare sulla morte di una sua collega che stava lavorando per loro. Pare che qualcosa sia scappato dalla quarantena di Dellah e le ricerche sembrano far emergere un collegamento con il primo incarico che l’agente aveva affrontato: un pianeta in cui il tempo sembra essersi fratturato e in cui si è svolta una terrificante carneficina.

Questo libro è una via di mezzo tra una spy-story e un horror splatter, con descrizioni dettagliate di torture cruente e raccapriccianti di cui avrei volentieri fatto a meno. Al di là della trama riguardante le indagini in sé c’è poco altro che bolle in pentola, più che altro solo la risoluzione del problema che Benny ha scoperto di avere in Tears of the Oracle.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2727588.html

Getting towards the end of the first run of Bernice Summerfield novels; this one is told from the point of view of an agent who doesn't realise his own nature, investigating a murder which in fact he may have committed himself, and becoming entangled with the attempts of the seriously ill Bernice Summerfield to protect the planet Dellah from encountering yet more calamity. I see fan opinion is divided on whether this is a work of genius or utterly awful; I liked the interesting situation of the protagonist, but got a bit lost with some of the rest of the plot.

[Benedict Reid · Rating 3 out of 5]

I needed something full of plot and action after reading some literary fiction and this did the trick. Slightly too violent for my liking, but some interesting sci-fi concepts... and a heavy influence from Neal Stephenson's writing (which was a surprise in a Dr Who, spin-off novel).