This is a brief review of Afterlife, a Blake's 7 continuation novel by Tony Attwood. This review will include spoilers.
Afterlife is best analogised using the trolley problem. One track leads to a good story. The other leads to incoherent rubbish. Attwood pulled the lever, so the train sped down the “rubbish” track before promptly crashing and exploding, causing the station to be set on fire and the integrity of the railway as a whole being put into question.
Yeah, the book's crap.
Highlights, or rather lowlights include a lack of plot; continuity ignored; things just happening for the sake of it; characters behaving out of character, including the one that Attwood himself created; Terminal being piloted like a spaceship; Orac leaving the plot almost as soon as it starts; Servalan being in the story for a grand total of five minutes and no actual conflict.
This isn't Blake's 7 as much as it is Avon, Vila and Korrell's Jolly Jaunt Across Space Doing Nothing. Say what you will about Darrow's contentious trilogy, but this is frankly unforgivable and a massive waste of both your time and the paper it was printed on. I feel bad for the trees that had to be felled just so this could be published.
You'll notice I said this review was brief; this is mainly due to the fact that thinking about Afterlife makes me irrationally angry and also gives me something of a headache - not only because of how utterly infuriating the trainwreck of a plot actually is, but also due to how stupidly complicated things get. Everyone has a secret agenda. Everyone hides information from everyone else. Everyone must purposefully remain silent (God forbid anybody actually has a conversation in this godforsaken book). Everyone argues. Etc. Etc.
And don't get me started on the overexposure of computers. Because Attwood had Orac bugger off in the opening chapter, and because Scorpio couldn't be repaired (why not?), he invents three computers, each of which is about as interesting as stale bread. The only one with anything interesting about it is KAT, but that's only because the computer has the ability to identify wines.
This book raises more questions than it answers. Namely:
- Black and white holes are treated as portals. How does that work? Never explained.
- Avon's sister has been mind-controlling him since at least Series A. Why? Don't think about it!
- After the events of Blake, Avon is apparently arrested and Vila escapes, only for Tarrant to wake up and discover everyone was gone. Are Dayna and Soolin still alive? Are they still on Gauda Prime? Did the Federation troops just leave him in the control room for a joke? Attwood never elaborates on that.
- MIND is barely elaborated upon, although it implies that everything we've seen Avon do has been controlled, to some degree by MIND. Have we ever seen the real Avon? Is he capable of free thought? Rushy posited that this is Attwood's way of addressing plot holes regarding Avon. But if that's the case, then surely this only creates more.
- Attwood was meant to write a sequel, State Of MIND, that was meant to “wrap up” Blake's 7, so I can only assume that everything that goes unexplained here was meant to be answered in that book. But did it ever cross his mind that the sequel would never be written? Surely that realisation would have dawned on him at some point, right? Why would he just be content with making us question the integrity of the whole show? Did he have an agenda?
