Dave Stone (1) (1964–)

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/burning-heart-by-dave-stone/

To be honest, not one of the more memorable Sixth Doctor novels. The Doctor and Peri land in a crumbling authoritarian society, closely aligned with the setting of the Judge Dredd comics. Peri ends up with the rebels and the Doctor (after flirting with death) with the Adjudicators. Lots of running around and biffing.… (more)

There probably wasn't anything really wrong with this piece of unabashed pulp scifi except for how we have to wait 176 pages to find out where the Mary-Sue comes in and then it turns out that the meaning of "Mary-Sue" in this world has changed via semantic drift to something rather different. Whether the book contains an *actual* Mary-Sue (in the traditional fanfic sense, which has more to do with omnicompetence than the romantic possibilities mentioned by the narrator) could probably be the subject of a thousand academic papers, if the book were substantial enough to warrant that level of attention. There's an argument to be made for Bernice, especially for the version of Bernice described in the excerpts of her fictionalised "true adventures". Or possibly it's a meta-joke that the main character is a Mary-Sue of the author.

This is all completely irrelevant to the actual plot (action-adventure mercenary investigates a weird interplanetary incident and discovers something even weirder is going on) but someone went and made it the title of the whole novel so here we are.… (more)