The war is over. The Braxiatel Collection is back to normal. Better than that, people are all making more of an effort to rebuild, to get on, to re-establish the Collection at the forefront of academic excellence. Benny and Jason are back together. Life is good.
It’s not going to last, is it?
A Life Worth Living
Misplaced Spring
Paul Cornell takes a moment here just to reset the status quo. His extremely natural, intimate approach to Bernice gives us a very frank, very honest and very raw view of the collection rebuilding. As a prologue it gives you a very clear idea of what this collection is all about and what they’ll set out to do. Parasiel at least initially looks like an interesting character and Jason as always is fun when handled correctly.
7 / 10
Welcome To the Machine
Sin Deniz puts together an intriguing story with some delicious twists. Bernice only briefly appears but that doesn’t really matter because this story takes the cues laid down by Paul Cornell and explores the new arriving students on the collection further. Jess Carter is a fascinating creation with an intriguing secret. Short, sweet and thoughtful.
9 / 10
Final Draft
Cameron Mason’s short story returns to the world of academia that Bernice seems unable to quite pull away from. In just one short story Hass already appears more interesting than Mr Crofton ever did.
6 / 10
Against Gardens
Eddie Robson always writes interesting short stories, and after the previous story introduced us to Hass here we get a chance to see inside his head. As Mr Crofton only really shone just before he died this is probably as fitting a thing as ever to commemorate him.
9 / 10
A Summer Affair
Ms Jones went through something terrible in Life During Wartime so the character deserves some payoff. As initially interesting as Ronan McGinley is, there’s very little here besides a few more questions about Brax…. Who exactly are the ‘Important ones’? and what is he planning?
7 / 10
Denial
The comparisons to holocaust denial are obvious. Ian Mond apparently is a bit of an optimist though as he can’t help but push a noble cause beneath some dark propaganda. What’s more striking though, almost, is the way people are getting worked up about things they neither know or understand. Bernice learns something, a small fact she neither knew or card about until that moment, and suddenly flies into a rage until something is done immediately about the situation. As Ian Mond suggests this reaction, repeated a million times across a society, can have profound changes on the world around them. But are they all for the good? And more personally here, should we be proud we live in such a fickle society?
7 / 10
Sex Secrets of the Robot Replicants
Jason Kane is Dave Stone’s character through and through, and the highest honour I can give Philip Purser-Hallard for this story is that it more than measures up to the high standard Stone’s set recently. This is brilliant, insightful, honest and completely mad. The writing gets inside Bernice’s head and gives an account of all the characters involved so well that I almost wish it had continued for another 200 pages.
10 / 10
The Blame of the Nose
A slightly more traditional story than most, this seems an attempt to remind us that not everything is ‘lovely’ on the collection. There’s an unusual murder plot hiding beneath a lot of layers of sentimentality, with a twist that comes slightly left field involving telekinesis.
6 / 10
Reparation
Bev and Adrian have been almost ignored in this anthology so far. But this story uses their different perspectives to return to the theme shown in ‘Denial’ with extra element of crowd control. By in inadvertently, or perhaps Brax did it deliberately, causing offence to others history once again suddenly becomes a relevant issue that had previously been ignored.
7 / 10
Nothing Up My Sleeve
A very, very odd magician story. Lightly amusing but inconsequential.
5 / 10
Buried Alive
Kate Orman always excels at writing about mental and physical exertion. She mixes that in here with an interesting, albeit doomed society of insects. The incident at the end in particular is striking, and usually events on that scale just become somewhat meaningless, but she narrowly avoids that. To be honest the insects had it coming, and the jokes about whether they do or don’t eat their servants would send chills down anyone’s neck. It’s not just about whether you find insects repulsive or not, anyone would struggle not to be freaked out during that conversation.
10 / 10
There Never Need be Longing In Your Eyes
Ian Farrington pushes Bernice back into the world of motherhood and we get some promising signs of Peter’s presence again. That said I’m struggling to see how nursery attendants could get away with it, presumably they hadn’t been around long before Bernice found out… Quite a few stories so far have taken the opportunity to show Bernice alone, doing what she does, and to quietly reflect on what’s happening, and al though its well written it does slightly rob this story of a sense of purpose. Or perhaps that’s what motherhood is, worrying needlessly, only to be proved right.
6 / 10
Mentioning the War
And concluding my little imposed trilogy of stories about interpretations of history causing offending, Bernice herself becomes the ‘victim’ as a team of historians arrive on the collection to put context to the occupation. Ovmakh is quite a striking character and the subject matter… delicate at least.
9 / 10
Fragments
Although this anthology has told interesting stories and unusual twists it hasn’t advanced the series forwards in the way that ‘Life During Wartime’ did. Aside from the formal arrival of students (there were a few before, but now their ‘properly’ here) its pretty much ignored most of the ongoing events of the collection, preferring to take a deep breath after the events of the previous series. Here though Stewart Sheargold pushes forwards some tantalising hints about Brax’s dark side, reminding us that they haven’t forgotten about the dark glimpses we’ve seen up to now.
It’s a definite suggestion that something dark is coming.
8 / 10
——
After Life During Wartime redefined Bernice Summerfield short stories, reaching an incredible quality of interlinked stories all based around one common event, it was always going to be difficult to follow up. Doing something just as momentous would have felt like copying, so instead Simon Guerrier takes the learning from LDW and gives us a much more generic ‘life on the collection’ overview.
However, what differentiates this from the first two short story collections, which both had their highs and lows, there genuinely ‘is’ interlinking material here and a much more coherent, exploratory attempt to build a world up. The redefined Braxiatel Collection feels real, it feels alive and organic and functional and, most importantly, exciting.
8 / 10