My short story “Siege Mentality” appears in Something Changed, an anthology featuring the Doctor Who companion character Bernice Summerfield.
Everybody dies.
There’s a fresh grave on planetoid KS-159, but only Bernice Summerfield seems to have noticed.
Her friends on the Braxiatel Collection are too busy with their own affairs to see how distraught she is, how keenly she feels this loss.
There’s no time to grieve. Life must carry on, different and strange as it may be.
Benny has a son and a bloke to look after, and a feud with Bev Tarrant to keep up.
And she’s also got dumped with a new assignment, babysitting some daft experiment.
Doggles claims his “history machine” will change everything.
And the worst thing is that he’s right.
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. Something Changed is the seventh volume of short fiction to follow her life story, and I was pleased to be invited to write for the collection by editor Simon Guerrier.
Unlike a conventional anthology, Something Changed comprises of three chapters; chapter one and chapter two frame the collection, while multiple chapter twos spin-off from the catastrophic events that open the book, as a “history machine” causes a massive fracture across space-time and multiple universes collide with each other.
My story, ‘Siege Mentality‘, opens the Chapters Two section, with Benny struggling to keep the Braxiatel Collection on an even keel in the aftermath.
