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Tyler's a colony world on the unattractive side of Earthspace, crawling with off-world bodysnatchers. Not really Benny's sort of place. She is as surprised as the authorities are when they pull her out of the ocean in a forbidden quake zone. Her explanations only confuse matters more. What could have stolen Benny's reason? .
311 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 21, 2023
A complex and colourful adventure for Bernice Summerfield as she investigates a hollow world. (Familiarity with the Doctor Who book The Also People will help, but is not essential.)
There’s much to admire about this, Miles’s second book after the colourful but vague Christmas On A Rational Planet. It plays narrative tricks and leaves you wondering if it played a few more, and seems to set up big things for future books. But there are a lot of characters in fairly similar (and easy to mistake for one another) combinations, and ultimately it doesn’t delve into how Bernice feels about it all. It’s easier to appreciate in concept than in execution.
There’s much to admire about this, Miles’s second book after the colourful but vague Christmas On A Rational Planet. It plays narrative tricks and leaves you wondering if it played a few more, and seems to set up big things for future books. But there are a lot of characters in fairly similar (and easy to mistake for one another) combinations, and ultimately it doesn’t delve into how Bernice feels about it all. It’s easier to appreciate in concept than in execution.
May 12, 2009
Submarines disguised as dirigibles. Hollow planets. Cartoonish futuristic neo-Nazis with names like "Katastrophen". A pulp action hero named Mr Misnomer. Insane supercomputers. Exploding shellfish. And an enemy whom Bernice Summerfield ultimately defeats by simply refusing to conform to its sense of aesthetics. Lawrence Miles at his mad, meta-fictional best.
If, like me, you were a fan of the Doctor Who New Adventures, but were never quite convinced that the range was worth following once it lost the right to use the Doctor, this book will convince you.
If, like me, you were a fan of the Doctor Who New Adventures, but were never quite convinced that the range was worth following once it lost the right to use the Doctor, this book will convince you.
October 7, 2024
"Neurologically speaking, you're not built for the truth. You're built for the constant reinvention. I told you, didn't I? Maybe every primitive has its story to offer. Maybe every paradise has its serpent to outsmart."
Fos!ca thought about the last sixteen words for a few moments. Finally, she got the joke. She didn't think it was very funny, though.
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Rereading the Dellah era novels is curing something inside me. There's a few aspects I have forgotten, so it's always good for me to go back and reread them and pick up on the things I have missed. But this particular book plays such an important part for the future of the Dellah novels, especially in terms of the People and the role God has to play and how they are not what they seem.
I loved this book. It was a good Journey to the Centre of the Earth - meets science fiction romp.
The plot of God and MEPHISTO and the comparison between Good versus Evil between the People versus the Time-Lords is such a good build-up as to what eventually happens later on in the series.
This book would be great debate in the future some point for the heaven versus hell analogy.
Also, Lucreatia background history was so sad to learn at how her colony sexualise everything, and her wearing that big duffle coat to shelter herself 3
Fos!ca thought about the last sixteen words for a few moments. Finally, she got the joke. She didn't think it was very funny, though.
-
Rereading the Dellah era novels is curing something inside me. There's a few aspects I have forgotten, so it's always good for me to go back and reread them and pick up on the things I have missed. But this particular book plays such an important part for the future of the Dellah novels, especially in terms of the People and the role God has to play and how they are not what they seem.
I loved this book. It was a good Journey to the Centre of the Earth - meets science fiction romp.
The plot of God and MEPHISTO and the comparison between Good versus Evil between the People versus the Time-Lords is such a good build-up as to what eventually happens later on in the series.
This book would be great debate in the future some point for the heaven versus hell analogy.
Also, Lucreatia background history was so sad to learn at how her colony sexualise everything, and her wearing that big duffle coat to shelter herself 3
August 26, 2024
This was real. This world of monsters and impossibilities. It felt hard, dangerous, solid. Everything else, the soft and safe things she'd grown up with in the worldsphere, suddenly seemed as vague as holograms or old memories. And !X…
!X was the realest thing of all.
This is one of the best novels featuring Bernice Summerfield, in league with even Love and War. Though on the surface, this seems to be a simple story of an expedition into an Inner World but Miles give a lot of postmodernist depth and breadth to the tale. It is by turns comedic, haunting, and fascinating. It has some of the best-written characters and a fascinating plot filled with thought-provoking twists. The worlds of Tyler's Folly is one of the most memorable within Benny's adventures if not within the DW canon. This novel also serves as a good introduction to the People to those who haven't read Aaronovitch's The Also People (which I have not yet).
In conclusion, a very good introduction to Benny's solo adventures and an extremely good novel in general.
!X was the realest thing of all.
This is one of the best novels featuring Bernice Summerfield, in league with even Love and War. Though on the surface, this seems to be a simple story of an expedition into an Inner World but Miles give a lot of postmodernist depth and breadth to the tale. It is by turns comedic, haunting, and fascinating. It has some of the best-written characters and a fascinating plot filled with thought-provoking twists. The worlds of Tyler's Folly is one of the most memorable within Benny's adventures if not within the DW canon. This novel also serves as a good introduction to the People to those who haven't read Aaronovitch's The Also People (which I have not yet).
In conclusion, a very good introduction to Benny's solo adventures and an extremely good novel in general.
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August 21, 2012Initially, this is a pretty straightforward book by Miles' standards - which is to say insanely high concept by most anyone else's. A self-aware pulp romp through an impossible hollow world (complete with dinosaurs, cavemen and suspiciously ineffectual Nazis), complicated by the presence of interlopers from the Whoniverse's resident Culture analogues, the People. And then the resolution turns everything on its head...
July 15, 2021
Lawrence Miles is a Doctor Who author with a reputation: he is the one author who BBC Books allowed to go above the 290 page limit that the Eighth Doctor Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures stopped at. Lawrence Miles writes long books. Interference is a 600 page book split into two volumes. So it is no surprise when his first of two Bernice Summerfield novels, Down, is a book which pushes the page-count to the longest Bernice Summerfield book yet, coming in at 311 pages, and one of the general longer ones (if not the longest). The forward by Miles actually sends readers to his website where there are things that he had to cut from the book and placed just on his website. This interesting little tidbit is perhaps some of the best description of what Down is, a book which is in desperate need of an editor who will cut things out. This review isn’t covering the cuts that Miles includes on his website, but just the text that is included in the paperback release. This is a book that does a lot of things, and with a book that does a lot of things you’d expect it to be a longer book, but the first third of the book is devoted down to setup of the setting and some of the characters without actually giving the reader much of the actual plot. This is partially due to Lawrence Miles’ tendency to write plots that are obfuscated in mystery and comedy. The setting here is Tyler’s Folly, which is initially set up as a Dyson sphere (an artificial planet that is hollow), but is revealed to be an actual planet full of people believing in some sort of hollow planet conspiracy theory. There are also space Nazis who capture Bernice and the reintroduction of the People from The Also People.
From that last descriptor of the book, you wouldn’t be wrong in feeling that Lawrence Miles wrote a comedy, because that’s kind of what it is, with Bernice commenting on the artificial supporting cast and being flummoxed by the reappearance of the People which is sort of a twist for her, but not for the reader. Miles takes cues from Ben Aaronovitch’s previous work and makes it something that Dave Stone would right, published immediately after a great Dave Stone book. It feels like Down wants to capture that feeling of The Also People, but that book worked so well because it was Ben Aaronovitch firmly in his own style and coming right off Head Games as a reflection of what the VNAs were doing at the time. With Down, there isn’t that much to actually reflect on as there had only been four books published and not enough of a story arc actually developing. Miles seems to try and develop a story arc with God returning and the villain being one of the People, !X, and the whole idea of Tyler’s Folly being the pseudo-Satanic version of the Worldsphere, with a program called MEPHISTO who is really behind things. The pastiche of action movies and few nods to Doctor Who also feel really out of place coming right off Ship of Fools and its murder mystery pastiche, but Miles makes it interesting by not making it an outright comedic parody, but trying to get Benny annoyed. The whole hollow Earth/Tyler’s Folly is secretly the Garden of Eden/there is a cult that worships Lillith is by design to be annoying, yet somehow a fun type of annoying. Miles is just making out how conspiracies are something that collapse immediately under any investigation and the interludes where Benny is essentially telling the tale which are a great use of metanarrative.
Overall, Down is definitely not the absolute best Benny book, as the previous two had been going on such a high streak, but it is still a very fun time. It has the big problem of being a grab bag of ideas wrapped up all in one very long package and that is to the book’s detriment, but it does end up reintroducing the People to the narrative and kind of gives us something to look forward to as they are going to play a part in the future, but it’s got a lot of problems that stop it from being one of Miles’ best. 7/10.
From that last descriptor of the book, you wouldn’t be wrong in feeling that Lawrence Miles wrote a comedy, because that’s kind of what it is, with Bernice commenting on the artificial supporting cast and being flummoxed by the reappearance of the People which is sort of a twist for her, but not for the reader. Miles takes cues from Ben Aaronovitch’s previous work and makes it something that Dave Stone would right, published immediately after a great Dave Stone book. It feels like Down wants to capture that feeling of The Also People, but that book worked so well because it was Ben Aaronovitch firmly in his own style and coming right off Head Games as a reflection of what the VNAs were doing at the time. With Down, there isn’t that much to actually reflect on as there had only been four books published and not enough of a story arc actually developing. Miles seems to try and develop a story arc with God returning and the villain being one of the People, !X, and the whole idea of Tyler’s Folly being the pseudo-Satanic version of the Worldsphere, with a program called MEPHISTO who is really behind things. The pastiche of action movies and few nods to Doctor Who also feel really out of place coming right off Ship of Fools and its murder mystery pastiche, but Miles makes it interesting by not making it an outright comedic parody, but trying to get Benny annoyed. The whole hollow Earth/Tyler’s Folly is secretly the Garden of Eden/there is a cult that worships Lillith is by design to be annoying, yet somehow a fun type of annoying. Miles is just making out how conspiracies are something that collapse immediately under any investigation and the interludes where Benny is essentially telling the tale which are a great use of metanarrative.
Overall, Down is definitely not the absolute best Benny book, as the previous two had been going on such a high streak, but it is still a very fun time. It has the big problem of being a grab bag of ideas wrapped up all in one very long package and that is to the book’s detriment, but it does end up reintroducing the People to the narrative and kind of gives us something to look forward to as they are going to play a part in the future, but it’s got a lot of problems that stop it from being one of Miles’ best. 7/10.
August 17, 2025
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/down-by-lawrence-miles/
I thought this was a rather good entry in the Bernice Summerfield spinoff series of books. Benny appears on a hollow world, encumbered with two junior archaeologists, and encounters various archetypes (dinosaurs, cavemen, useless Nazis (the best kind)) and threatening situations. Perhaps a little more going on than I had braincells to process at the time. But it all seemed to make sense
I thought this was a rather good entry in the Bernice Summerfield spinoff series of books. Benny appears on a hollow world, encumbered with two junior archaeologists, and encounters various archetypes (dinosaurs, cavemen, useless Nazis (the best kind)) and threatening situations. Perhaps a little more going on than I had braincells to process at the time. But it all seemed to make sense
July 16, 2025
This is about as bonkers as I would expect from Lawrence Miles. Is it too early to call out that Benny is the worst Mary Sue in the history of Mary Sue stuff?
Good gosh, I hate her more with every passing book. But I am determined to get through these, even if they keep being these weird philosophical rambles of complete insanity. Definitely not for me. But I bought these books, so here we go!
Good gosh, I hate her more with every passing book. But I am determined to get through these, even if they keep being these weird philosophical rambles of complete insanity. Definitely not for me. But I bought these books, so here we go!
July 11, 2008
I enjoyed this. While a lot of it was silly, it was enjoyable silly and there was a plot holding it all together. Just about. I liked the way it portrayed Bernice and Mr Misnomer, and the 'grave robber script'. I still don't like The People though, they just annoy me.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews