Afterlife (1984) Review

 

Afterlife is reasonably entertaining, diverse and includes some interesting themes, but its frenetic storytelling and overreliance on plot twists and double-crossings makes it impossible to fully appreciate. 

WRITTEN BY

Tony Attwood, who also wrote the Blake's 7 Programme Guide. Attwood wrote the book under contract with Terry Nation, who stipulated that it should lead to either a novel series or a full new season, which might explain the episodic storytelling.

PLOT

Five months after the catastrophic shoot-out on Gauda Prime, a surviving Vila rescues Avon from captivity. However, the latter is now more secretive and unpredictable than ever before, hunting for the mythical MIND - a condition that allows computers to manipulate the human mind at will - to absolve himself from responsibility of his illogical decisionmaking. Meanwhile, the Federation boils over into civil war, with several factions conspiring to force their own brand of absolute control over the galaxy...

ANALYSIS

As mentioned above, Afterlife follows an episodic format, but it's not the traditional "one adventure after another" kind. No, in this book, our heroes will go somewhere, then get massively deviated(possibly twice in a row) and then arrive at their destination, which may hold significantly less relevance than the deviation in the long run. It feels like a season of television that's been chopped to pieces by a machete and then stitched together like a Frankenstein's Monster, with bits all over the place. 

The sheer amount of scheming and unsubtle introspective monologues is staggering. It's as if he was more interested in defining Blake's 7 than telling a sincere story about it. Attwood tries to combine these 'episodes' into one by claiming that someone was the author of all of Avon's pain not once, not twice, but three times! And each masterplan is more convoluted than the last. 

It's a shame, because outside of the terrible storytelling and fannish retconning, the novel does achieve in nailing the overall atmosphere of Blake's 7 - there's witty wordplay galore, plenty of amusing hijinks, cynical attitudes and emotional wrestling. Some of the scenarios encountered echo the series well. I also can't say Attwood is lacking in imagination or scale. It just lacks any restraint, that's all. 

CHARACTERS

Being the only person without a secret agenda, I found myself seeing Vila as the protagonist of the story, even though the actual events center around Avon. But Vila is the audience's identification figure here - he's the one who asks the questions and plays catch-up with everyone else. He's also the only person around with anything resembling a moral center(with the possible exception of Tarrant), so as far as likability goes, Vila's what you got. 

Whilst he retains his classic zingers, I can say I've never been as irritated with Avon as I have been in this book. The guy just refuses to answer anything. If he wanted you to get coffee, he'd make sure you didn't know you're carrying coffee filters, that's how paranoid he is. I can appreciate there being some mystery around Avon's motivations, but I always thought it should be around strictly emotional matters, not acquiring basic materials. By making everything a secret, you undercut both the weight of the more emotional stuff and just turn him into an unrelatable dick. 

The other legacy characters - Servalan, Orac and Tarrant - aren't in the novel for very long, but all get at least one moment to shine. I actually thought that Tarrant's cameo was a really strong moment for his character, as it brings some closure to his poor relationship with Vila, and a maturity that the show never really depicted. I'm not a fan of his ignominious death(or Servalan's, for that matter), but I did feel a surprising amount of fondness towards him, given that he's never been a favourite of mine.

Besides Avon and Vila, the 'main crew' is completed by the newly introduced Korell, who is superficially likable for her sweet and reasonable personality, but seems to exist in the novel primarily to psychoanalyse Avon's behaviour and discuss his actions in previous Blake's 7 adventures. Her presence isn't really explained well until near the end of the book, so it's hard to really care. 

Computers! Take a drink every time Avon recruits a talking computer in this book. First, there's the eyerollingly named Caro, twin brother of Orac. It appears so briefly that it must've just been setup for future novels that never happened, and its singular useful ability of not being able to be detected by Orac is never even tested. 

Then there's KAT, Vila's Jeeves-esque wine tester machine that is kind of amusing, but feels too much like a retread of Slave to me if I'm honest. Its origins are pretty cool, though. We also have the computer onboard the Revenge, which Vila fittingly dubs Blake to piss off Avon. Obviously, this one's my favourite. I bet Attwood was hoping to hire Gareth Thomas as a voice actor if Series E took off. 

There's the boring old Terminal Computer(which would've had its own catchy name in time, no doubt). Avon hacks into some other computers on Earth too, but they don't talk. But yeah, so... so many computers. For a while, I genuinely thought Attwood might try to fill Blake's 7 up with AIs. 

NOTES

*Even though Tor recognises KAT as her brother's creation, I feel like Avon built it way after their childhood. Are we to assume that he just had it in his pocket throughout the series and nobody ever took it? The only thing that makes sense to me is that he made it sometime during Series D, and specifically with Vila in mind. Why else would it have all these complex functions, and the personality of a drunk?

*Speaking of Tor, I'm noticing a trend with Blake's 7 - all the stories with an Avon relative in them(also see Avon: A Terrible Aspect and Rock Star) are cursed.

*Just for the sake of clarity, here is a rundown of the major galactic conspiracies in the book: 

1) The Administration on Earth are deliberately fermenting rebellions throughout the galaxy(even though we saw them do the complete opposite in The Way Back, but never mind) in order to distract would-be military dictators from wresting control away. They send Korell in to potentially recruit Avon. At the same time, she keeps an eye on Servalan by pretending to be her spy. It's revealed that the Administration found an insane and nearly dead Blake at some point and brainwashed him to try and set up a new uprising on Gauda Prime. However, Blake remained too mentally damaged, forcing them to just cut the project and move in with troops(as seen in Blake)

2) As Commissioner Sleer, Servalan has set up a top secret operation on the planet Skat, accessing the portal there to obtain various equipment from parallel universes and giving them to the Administration in order to weaken their forces. Matter from other universes disintegrates eventually, catching the Federation offguard when she attempts to regain control of Earth with her own forces. 

3) Tor Avon, the new leader of the Freedom Party, uses a process known as MIND(machine-induced neural deviance) to psychically manipulate Avon into hunting Blake, believing that Blake had become an embarrassment to the Party. To focus MIND, Tor used Orac's tarriel cells. Her ultimate goal is to use MIND to overthrow the Federation and replace it with, well, communism. 

This may sound really cool to you, but remember that this book is only 150 pages long. And all of these revelations come in the final chapter. 

*Personally, what I take the most umbrage with is the complete reinvention of Blake into a homicidal patsy. It does a huge disservice to the character, and to Avon's relationship with him. I hate that initiative is taken away from them both by the daft MIND thing. For the longest time, I thought that it was actually a myth and that Avon was just in denial, which would've been far more appropriate in my opinion. 

*To give Tony some credit, I think the actual central theme of Afterlife - that people become larger than life when they die - is actually really interesting and worth exploring. 

*I loved seeing Terminal and Gauda Prime again in such detail. They're by far the coolest planets in the series and they're done justice here. 

*According to the Federation settlers on Skat, there are "thousands of universes", but Avon later makes a point of saying there's only 11 dimensions? And somehow, he's able to guide the Revenge through the black hole in the center of the galaxy so that it gets back to the main universe. How...?

*The Revenge is such a silly name for a spaceship. If you're going for that idea, at least call it the Vengeance or something! The planet names aren't much better. Skat, Rijks...

*After Blake is killed, Avon is arrested. Then MIND scares off the troopers and Vila(who was never shot) hides. Then Tarrant wakes up to find that *everyone* is gone. The obvious question is... what happened to Dayna and Soolin? Are they still on Gauda Prime? If they woke up before Tarrant, why'd they ditch him?

*I'm also curious as to why Vila sat in an old freighter for five months. Was he just building up the courage to return to the base?

*I know Avon's just nuts at this point, but his impulse to escape to an alternate universe with no obvious means of coming back purely to avoid the vague possibility that the Skat people might try to attack him is some of the hardest overkill I've ever seen. Unless we're meant to infer that this is again MIND's influence?

*Is... is MIND just Attwood's way of papering over every single plot hole surrounding Avon? Cause I was about to talk about how the Revenge just happens to pick Skat of all places to visit, but now that I think about it, I'm realising that MIND probably drove Avon to go there, as well as all the other places visited in the story. I think we can pretty much forget Avon as an independent character. 

*The whole alternate universe stuff is a serious missed oppurtunity to depict other versions of our heroes. They even bring the possibility up and then just drop it altogether. 

*Let's talk about the deaths of Tarrant and Servalan. I get that Attwood wanted the series to move on from the latter and I respect that, but given how long she was the main antagonist, you'd think she'd get some cool, unforgettable death. Nope. Just shot by a character introduced in this book. And Tarrant literally just seems to show up to get mauled by tigers out of nowhere as a kind of fannish execution. He dies in the same chapter he's reintroduced in. How petty is that? The irony is that Tarrant is genuinely one of the nicest people in Afterlife. 

*I wonder if Captain Telon(Servalan's Federation officer of the day) was supposed to replace Korell as the 'guest crew member' in the next book, given how he accompanies Avon and Vila onboard the Blake's 7 ship at the end(yes, there's a ship called Blake's 7).

*The updated references to 90s computer slang - debugging, software - are more than amusing.

*We should get Big Finish to hire Tony to write a sequel - I'm desperate to know how the heck he would've continued this arc. 

INFORMATION!

*Afterlife is set five months after the events of Blake, and partially takes place on Gauda Prime. The events in the episode are considerably retconned. 

*Avon, Vila and Tarrant all return to the planet Terminal. Their adventures in Terminal and Rescue are recapped, and slightly retconned.

*Avon uses the number of the apartment that he and Anna Grant shared in order to try to locate Orac(which he buried offscreen in Blake). 

*The famous 500 million credit computer fraud mentioned in Space Fall is finally pulled off successfully. 

*On Earth, Avon and Korell spend time in a dome city similar to that seen in The Way Back. 

*Each of the previous Blake's 7 members - Gan, Jenna, Cally, Dayna, Soolin - receive at least one mention.

*Computer geniuses Ensor and Muller(featured in Orac and Headhunter, respectively) are mentioned.

*It's revealed that Vila was caught and sent to Cygnus Alpha, because he didn't share the other thieves' professional habit of framing someone else for his crimes. 

*Avon's sister Tor Avon now controls Blake's Freedom Party(established in Voice From The Past). 

*The Revenge is named, among others, for Avon's revenge against the Federation President and Space Commander Travis. 

*The older alternative to Ensor's tarriel cells is named "Dorian Data", possibly after the same Dorian encountered by the crew in Rescue, who had studied with Ensor himself, or an ancestor of his.

*The Blake computer refers to Mutoids by their nickname from Duel: vampires.

BEST QUOTE AVON QUOTE

VILA: "Creatures! I’d forgotten about them. What happens if they mutate into something that can pick locks?"
AVON: "Don’t worry. I doubt if even this planet contains DNA stupid enough to produce a generation of Vilas."

CONCLUSION

If you just want a good, strong dose of Avon and Vila doing their thing, this book will give it to you. But don't expect to really follow what's going on, at least not on your first readthrough.