Virgin Missing Adventures #30:
--- "Burning Heart" by Dave Stone

I've been neglecting the Virgin Missing Adventures. For a range I'm two books off completing, I had read - up to this point - only a couple, and whilst one was a novel by my favourite prose author, Paul Cornell, the other was a logicless and dull prance around an overused Victorian setting. So, when PalindromeRose uploaded their glowing review of "Burning Heart", a book I had heard absolutely zero about in different corners of the fandom, I decided to finally revisit VMAs and see what it was about. Plus, it was written by Dave Stone, part of a trio of Doctor Who novelists who seem to be praised for their strange and outright weird story telling (the other two being Paul Magrs and Lawrence Miles). Since I had recently finished and loved Alien Bodies, written by another of these three writers, it seemed a no-brainer to pick up Burning Heart and see why nobody seemed to talk about it. The answer? It's pretty f**king mediocre.

In the colony world of Dramos, all hell is breaking loose. As the Doctor and Peri, still at odds with each other over the recent regeneration, arrive to investigate a gap in the TARDIS data banks, they find themselves thrown in with rebellion group, the Human First, and the tyrannical Church of Adjudication, who believe their god is coming back.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Burning Heart is another attempt at Doctor Who delving into the cyberpunk genre, a feat it hasn't really succeeded at yet. The Virgin New Adventures tried this with Transit, that one book everybody always overreacts about, and, whilst I found it to be utterly fine, it wasn't exactly a stand out novel. So, how does Dave Stone's attempt fair? Well, for one thing, the worldbuilding here is magnificent: the Habitat, the hundreds of alien life forms, the Church and its practices, the jungle of stacked housing that make up Dramos' infrastructure is all beautifully realised and excellently written by Stone, at least for the first quarter of the book or so but we'll get onto that. It feels like every other sentence has a new piece of information in it and half the time, this works brilliantly; the other half of the time, it really doesn't but again, we'll get onto that. The main thing I'll praise this book for is how it writes the Doctor and Peri; this is deep into the Season 22 JNT bitching era of the show, and the Doctor and Peri practically hate each other at this point. It's such an interesting dynamic that wasn't explored in the show because of the machinations of John Nathan-Turner but here it's really well written and the book even manages to pave over the jump in the character dynamic of Peri and Six from early Season 22 to late Season 22, by having this adventure be the thing that finally gets them off each other's throats.

One more thing I'll praise Stone for is his humour, this story will be black as night and then have the leader of a neo-Nazi organisation read his autobiography to the severed head of legally distinct Walt Disney. Stone's realisation of alien species and their individual quirks is magnificent, especially character like Queegvogel, a centipede-like alien who talks in sentences that sound like they were beaten to death with a thesaurus, simply because it doesn't fully grasp English. Not only is that great worldbuilding, that's great character development all rolled into one, and it's little details like this where Stone really excels.

Unfortunately, that's about where the positives end. This book is definitely nothing special, it's an incredibly forgettable read that's about as deep as paddling pool and it's no surprise it's been forsaken by the fandom at large. The story is weirdly narratively bare; by the halfway mark I felt like we were barely through the inciting incident of the story and the entire thing feels weirdly small in scale, especially for something so explosive. Everything feels insignificant, I never grow to care about any side character, the conflict between the Church and the Human First is explored minimally outside the events shown in the book. Within about ten pages of the Doctor and Peri landing, they're already knee deep in their respective plots and it feels like the story's missing a good few beats in its plotting. Not only that but, whilst Stone's worldbuilding can be wonderful to experience at times, at others its utterly incomprehensible. There will be sentences that don't make a lick of sense because half the words in it were made up by Stone and explained very, very poorly; this book struggles with context clues because all the context is also technobabble. Frankly, looking back on the story, if you asked me to recite exactly what happened, I'd struggle to. By the end, it felt like the lore had run out, the OBERON was confusingly explained, the final confrontation felt too sudden and the rest of the book just felt like it was going through the motions, there was no flow between scenes it just jumped between the Doctor and Peri haphazardly and forgot to put an actual story between these parts.

Burning Heart had the groundwork for a good novel but Dave Stone just writes in such confusing prose that it's impossible to understand what he's trying to say half the time. His world is dense but it's all in the background, we don't spend any time exploring Dramos, our story's mostly confined to a few buildings. It's got some great beats and some wonderful ideas bouncing around but the rest is too shallow and empty to sustain the concepts thrown in.

5/10

Pros:
+ Genuinely enthralling world with wonderful, detailed construction
+ Incredibly fun and playful notes between the dark and gritty Judge Dredd fanfiction
+ Six and Peri's dynamic is wonderful and incredibly compelling
+ Screaming with good ideas just wanting to be explored, the world really does feel real

Cons:
- The plot feels the skeleton of a story, there's no meat on it
- Incredibly shallow, practically no element beyond the world has any kind of depth
- The prose gets stupidly confusing at times to the point of being unreadable
- Outside of the Doctor and Peri, no character feels in anyway compelling
- All the compelling worldbuilding and details are the background to a comparatively dull narrative