Doctor Who: Psi-ence Fiction

Past Doctor Adventures #46

by Chris Boucher

It's Reading Week at the University of East Wessex, but not everything comes to a stop.

The wood is still haunted. Experiments in telepathy, remote viewing, precognition and other paranormal phenomena continue in the Parapsychology Department. The department heads still think the Kellerfield Research Fellow is out for publicity rather than psychic results. A grizzly murder remains unsolved by local police. The students are still holding seances in the graveyard.

When the TARDIS arrives in Norswood, the Doctor and Leela are caught up in events that are spiralling out of control. Leela is chased by a phantom, and the Doctor takes the waters. But soon it isn't just the Parapsychology Department's funding that's in question — it's the whole of existence.

Genres: Doctor Who, Science Fiction, Fiction, Time Travel, Media Tie In

288 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published September 3, 2001

About the author

Christopher Franklin Boucher was a British television writer, best known for his frequent contributions to two genres, science fiction and crime dramas. Prior to becoming a television writer, Boucher had worked at Calor Gas as a management trainee and he also gained a Bachelor of Arts in Economics at the University of Essex.

In science fiction, he wrote three Doctor Who serials in the late 1970s: The Face of Evil, The Robots of Death and Image of the Fendahl. Perhaps his most durable contribution to Doctor Who mythology was the creation of Leela, the savage companion played by Louise Jameson. Boucher was commissioned for the programme by Robert Holmes, who would suggest that Boucher be appointed as script editor of new science fiction series Blake's 7. He served in this role for the entirety of its four season run from 1978 to 1981, also writing several episodes himself, including the well-remembered final episode. In 1987 he created his own series Star Cops, which combined the science fiction and crime genres, and lasted only nine episodes.

In the genre of police dramas, between working on Doctor Who and Blake's 7, Boucher was the script editor on the second season of the drama Shoestring, which followed the investigations of private detective and radio show host Eddie Shoestring. In 1982, following the end of Blake's 7, Boucher script edited and wrote for the third season police drama Juliet Bravo. He later moved on to script edit the detective show Bergerac, working on the programme throughout the 1980s.

Reviews

[Danny Welch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chris Boucher has done it again! Another brilliant classic! I really finds his work to be underrated, he’s a really good science fiction writer who brought us the fantastic Leela!

Psi-ence Fiction is a brilliant but underrated story with parapsychology, very likeable characters and plenty of horror! It has some very interesting ideas and an ending that ties everything up really well! 9.5/10

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A novel of thirds. One third covers the 4th Doctor & Leela; in the hands of her creator, Leela shines from start to finish. Meanwhile, the Doctor comes off just as magnificently in prose as he would on-screen. The next third covers the cast of students and professors: a set of characters that have their charms, but their mutual bitchiness simply goes on for far too long...to the point where it seems to actually inflate the page count. The final third concerns the machinations of the police & the university rent-a-cops: a plot strand so uninteresting that it could be excised from the novel without damaging the rest of the story. The end result is a three star rating for a book that splits into three variable sections.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

At a “plate-glass” university in Wessex, a group of students are dabbling in the paranormal. Brought together through a research project by the parapsychology department, the six undergrads experiment with seances and Ouija boards in an effort to establish contact with the spirit world. Only something sinister seems to be haunting them, filling them with unease. When the TARDIS lands in the nearby woods the Doctor and Leela quickly pick up on this sense of disturbance, which causes the Doctor to behave erratically and leaves Leela continually on edge. Is she being stalked by a malevolent force as she believes? Or is it all entirely in their heads?

Chris Boucher’s third novel for the Past Doctor Adventures series gives him the chance to display his skills as writer of both science fiction and crime dramas. At the heart of it is the mystery of the source of the unusual activity, one that is powerful enough to affect even a Time Lord. Boucher is very effective at fostering the sense of dread it causes thanks to scenes which capture the growing sense of horror felt by the characters. His portrayal of Leela’s thought process is particularly effective, as the reader gets to see how the trained Sevateem warrior copes with her fears about an intangible, undefinable threat that she can sense but not attack. It’s a depiction that is both faithful to the character while underscoring effectively the menace that she and the others face.

Even more impressive is how effectively Boucher keeps the mystery going until the very end, with readers given enough clues to puzzle out elements of the plot while still making the final reveal enough of a surprise. At that point, however, Boucher’s talents exhaust themselves, as the story is resolved with the sort of grandiose, quasi-magical deus ex machina that is more often characteristic of NuWho rather than the original series. Even after some amusing finishing touches, it can leave a sense of disappointment given how effective Boucher’s novel is until then. While it can definitely be recommended for Doctor Who fans who particularly enjoy horror-tinged tales within the franchise, that Boucher fails to stick the landing disappoints nonetheless.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Doctor and Leela land near a university where someone is doing psychic research. Oh, and a demon is chasing students.

This is a really good read that focuses on the character of Leela. It feels like its quite early in her travels with the Doctor, as she still has doubts. The way the ghosts are represented that it does look psychic and not science. The twist near the end is very clever.

A very good read.

[Clare · Rating 2 out of 5]

This started off well but then descended into nastiness. I think he was aiming for horror but ended up with a spiteful boy and a profoundly arrogant and unpleasant man. The spooky goings on played out well, and the setting in a modern university was believable. The female characters read much better and were more believable than the male ones. But yet again we have people on the edge of insanity. Why can't we just have wicked or selfish people, why do they always have to have serious mental health issues?

[Jacob Licklider · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chris Boucher’s previous two Doctor Who novels for BBC Books, Last Man Running and Corpse Marker, left me wanting more from the author. In terms of his television work, all three of his serials are enjoyable, The Robots of Death perhaps being the best while Image of the Fendahl is an underrated gem but his prose to this point had been lacking. The previous books were both quite short in terms of word count, with my review for Corpse Marker even noting how big the typeface was. Psi-ence Fiction is the third of four novels Boucher would write and of the three I’ve read, it is by far the most cohesive and interesting. While like Corpse Marker before it, there are cues taken from his previous work, here the homages to Image of the Fendahl are limited to the general atmosphere surrounding the plot. As the title suggests, psi powers have made their way back into the Doctor Who books range, though here Boucher isn’t taking inspiration from previous novels but reflecting more the film Ghostbusters for its basic premise. At the University of East Wessex, Dr. Barry Hitchens has brought together students to explore parapsychology and their latent psychic powers with classic tests such as reading figures on a pile of cards. Outside of the department there has been a murder that remains unsolved and the woods near the university are clearly haunted. These are essentially presented as three aspects that trisect the novel with the presence of the Doctor and Leela flitting between the three thoroughly.

Interestingly there are quite a few stretches of the novel where the Doctor and Leela do not appear, however, this isn’t really a detriment to the plot. Boucher has essentially mastered his previous lackluster character work to populate Psi-ence Fiction with a cast that jumps right off the page. Many of the students especially while not entirely fleshed out in terms of backstory, are given their own personalities and are written like young adults, stubborn, standoffish, and especially stupid. Those in the parapsychology department perform their own experiments including playing with a Ouija board meaning that because this novel slowly shapes up to being a horror story, something is released. Joan Cox and Chloe Pennick become the obvious victims of this entity throughout the novel, interestingly much of Boucher’s prose going back and forth on if this entity is real or just in the stressed mind of the students. This creates this uncertainty and unreliability in the narrator as while in third person because of the format of the novel the reader is focusing on the students’ perspectives.

The evocative cover is also something that happens in the novel, though not until the final third where the chaos and psychic manifestations have become all too real. Unlike some other covers, this image is a perfect scene to illustrate a lot of the confusion and almost blending of structure Boucher is doing with Psi-ence Fiction. That uncertainty is added to with several scenes seemingly being written to be incomprehensible to the human mind, put down in a way that the reader can understand and rationalized. Most obviously the entity being perceived as a demon and religious imagery being used while the eventual explanation is completely ‘scientific.’ While the Doctor and Leela weave in and out of the narrative, this does not mean they have no role to play. The Doctor of Psi-ence Fiction is a much more enigmatic figure overall, perfectly matching the character as seen in The Face of Evil and Image of the Fendahl. There is this sense of darkness over the Doctor here, although he has less of a focus than Leela. He hates having to deal with authority and bureaucracy but becomes intrigued when the danger is present. There is also the mask of eccentricity placed in academia which is almost perfect for the Doctor. Leela on the other hand has quite a bit from her direct perspective which allows a genuinely interesting look at her skepticism. This skepticism is of course through the lens of a warrior, but at this point in her travels she has come to realize that while there is more to the universe than she dreamt of there is still the impossibilities becoming possible in the oddest of places like present day England. There are interesting reflections on her tribalism as well, as she perceives the entity and psychic goings on as mainly the Tesh while still keeping herself as Sevateem.

Overall, Psi-ence Fiction was genuinely a nice surprise from an author who I had not been working well with. Some of it boarders on the simple and it is certainly not perfect but Boucher has finally mastered pacing and given readers a nice little horror story that shifts into a classic science fiction plot by the very end. 8/10.

[William Norrington · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is entertaining but it has a few flaws. The group of students, who are the main focus of the story, are introduced rather quickly in the first chapter. There was little to establish their characters and it was easy to confuse one for another. Also, their back and forth bickering dialog was distracting. The Doctor takes second stage which on its own is not bad but I feel the author, who wrote for the series, did not do a great job capturing Tom Baker’s likeness. Leela, on the other hand, has a prominent role. Although the book never specifies it seems that this story takes place shortly after Leela joins the Doctor in the Tardis. She is very much her savage self and the author is keen to remind the reader of that. An appearance from Leela rarely goes without her thinking about her time as a warrior of the Sevateem. The plot is intriguing and entertaining up until the end where (spoiler) the Doctor wraps everything up neatly. The main plot was resolved but I was still left with some questions.

I recommend this book to any Leela fan and anyone who might be out of Doctor Who books to read.

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

After more than five years of reading Doctor Who novels, it's hard to believe that this is my first completed Fourth Doctor novel. It's obviously a very early Leela story, as she's still coming to terms with the Tardis, the Doctor, and how to navigate new surroundings as a former member of the Sevateem.
This novel is a typical installment in the DW lore: landing in a place where weird things are happening, investigation of said happenings, meeting new characters, some red herrings, splitting up of the Doctor and companion, and eventual rejoining at the climax with an explanation and an occasional monologue from the villain of the piece. Boucher is a new Who author to me, and I rather enjoyed his storytelling style and pacing. It wasn't overly complicated to understand, the characters acted like normal people, and the climax, while a little more than slightly unbelievable, was consistent enough with the story that it made sense. He gets high marks for that alone!
While a little slow in parts, this was a well-rounded, well-placed story with Four and Leela that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend. Actual score 3.5.

[Derelict Space Sheep · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boucher knows how to build a story, if not how to end one; how to flesh out minor characters, if not how to distinguish them; and above all how to write for Leela... even if portraying the Doctor as a high-functioning psychotic!

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Good plot but I couldn't take the constant insulting sexism from the male characters.

[Brett · Rating 2 out of 5]

This 4th Doctor and Leela story kept grabbing me then losing me. It mainly lost me when the supporting characters were doing “banter.” It mainly grabbed me when it was more focused on the ESP stuff.

[Dan Hodges · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable though uneven read. The Doctor and Leela are captured wonderfully, the plot has some compelling ideas, and there are a handful of memorable scenes. The world and its characters are well-realized, apart from the student characters, who feel awkward and unnatural. A decent 4th Doctor story.

[Angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

Watching Fourth Doctor episodes with Leela for the first time since I started paying active attention to Doctor Who put me quite in the mood to pick up my housemate's copy of Psi-ence Fiction, by Chris Boucher, a Fourth Doctor and Leela adventure. I am not, however, entirely sure of what I got for my reading effort.

The dialogue and interaction between most of the characters, I have to admit--threw me. This includes the interactions between the Doctor and Leela, too. There is an overall sense of disconnectedness to it, for reasons which are actually pertinent to the plot; yet, something about Mr. Boucher's writing style didn't quite make it work for me. At least, during the first half of the book. I'll grant that towards the end, it started coming together better and feeling more like a Doctor Who story.

I was further hampered by not liking most of the cast members du jour very much. Most of the characters are students who clearly don't like each other very much, and who, as a consequence, are always sniping at one another. As a reader, then, I had very little opportunity to find anything to like about any of them. Hands down, the strongest character in the plot is Leela--and then mostly in the contrast between her primitive view of the universe and the modern-day university setting she and the Doctor visit. There's something delightfully surreal about primitive Leela trying to interact with a parapsychology professor and his students, and there are moments in an otherwise erratically paced plot where that works quite well.

The last issue I had with the story is the biggest, though: I felt it was a cop-out, since the Doctor doesn't actually get to be the one to resolve the problem at all. To have that just when the book was finally coming together for me threw it off the rails at the last minute. So ultimately, I'm giving this one two stars.

[David Layton · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Doctor and Leela land in England ca. 2001 near a second-tier university where ill-conceived experiments in psi powers have caused an apparent rip in the universe. The book is typical of Boucher's science fiction in a number of ways, and reminds me a bit of Star Cops. One way is that characters are just a bit rounder than "types." They have backgrounds and hidden depths both good and bad. Another is the dialogue, which involves much sniping back and forth, with characters exercising power through sarcasm. A third is that investigators, the Doctor and Leela in this case, sort of blunder into the correct answer rather than discover it. Some areas of this book are not as good as I have seen in other Boucher works. The college students are not differentiated enough in their dialogue, which makes them difficult to distinguish from each other and difficult to sympathize with. Another is that Leela seems to me to be too primitive, a surprising aspect given that Leela is Boucher's creation. A third is a problem haunting it seems all novels using Doctor 4, namely that he is just a bit too distracted and scatter-brained. Boucher puts this down to the effect of the rip in the universe, but even so, on TV Doctor 4 could give a straight answer now and again and could give a coherent explanation every once in a while. Not in this book. The merits of the book are mainly related to some tight plotting regarding the who, how, and why of the evil scheme. It's a decent enough read, but not hugely compelling.

[Nicholas Whyte]

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1014841.html#cutid5[return][return]Psi-Ence Fiction is certainly the best of the four Boucher novels. It is something of a re-take of Image of the Fendahl, with research in contemporary Britain (2001 rather than 1978, of course) unlocking dangerous space-time anomalies and tapping into the plans of sinister entities. The setting this time round is a university campus, a familiar setting which liberates Boucher from trying too hard at world-building (as noted above, not his strongest point), as he can rely on smart-aleck students, infighting academics, and the local police trying to sort things out. Leela, as ever, excels; the biggest problem with the book is the resolution, where the Tardis itself plays an unexpected role, and the ending is a bit of a cop-out. But it was a good read.

[Travis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting idea of having the 4th Doctor and Leela in a story set 'now', as I don't think they did many of them on the TV show but the story itself is just okay.
Liked the setting of the college campus and having the primitive Leela dealing with the modern world, but the bad guy was not terribly interesting and the sub-plots involving the circle of students felt a bit over done.

The two leads were well written, but the story wasn't the best.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

There was a bit about half way through that it seemed to lose itself. However it redeemed itself and I have really enjoyed it.