My short story “The Inconstant Gallery” appears in Collected Works, an anthology featuring the Doctor Who companion character Bernice Summerfield.
“It might be your name on the deeds, but you don’t belong here any more. This is our home, our collection.”
The Braxiatel Collection. It’s a museum, art gallery, and academic institute. A home for renowned archaeologists, runaway art thieves, and galactic waifs and strays.
It’s been a private playground and the battlefield in the fight against tyranny. And now things are changing again.
With the Collection’s founder missing, it’s up to those left behind to make this place their own.
Amidst the chaos of visitors from the far future, dark secrets, old friends and new enemies, Bernice Summerfield must do whatever’s necessary to keep the doors open and her family safe.
Yet through it all, there’s one truth she cannot escape. Braxiatel is gone. And nature abhors a vacuum.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Originally created by writer Paul Cornell as a new companion for the Seventh Doctor in the Virgin New Adventures series of Doctor Who tie-in novels, Bernice Summerfield – or ‘Benny’, as she’s known – is an itnerant archeologist and general trouble-magnet. She proved so popular that after her jaunts across time and space with the Doctor came to an end, Benny began a new career in her own series of independant spin-off stories after Virgin lost the license to continue with Doctor Who fiction. Currently based on the Braxiatel Collection, an interstellar university/museum/reliquary, Professor Summerfield’s unusual life shows no sign of getting any simpler…
Since 1992, Benny and her erstwhile cohorts have starred in several full-length novels, an ongoing series of audio dramas, short story collections and novellas. Currently, Benny resides at Big Finish Productions, who regularly release her new adventures in CD and book form. Collected Works is the eighth volume of short fiction to follow her life story, and I was pleased to be invited to write for the collection by editor Nick Wallace; this is my second venture into Benny’s world, having previously written a story for the previous Bernice Summerfield: Something Changed anthology.
My contribution to this collection is a short story called “The Inconstant Gallery“, centering on one of Benny’s cohorts, Bev Tarrant, and her alien lover Adrian Wall.
My piece joins brand-new stories from Lance Parkin, Kate Orman, Simon Bucher-Jones, Mags L Halliday, Jonathan Blum, Mark Michalowski, Dale Smith, Simon A Forward and Philip Purser-Hallard.
