Customer Reviews

Psi-Ence Fiction (Doctor Who)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Seances, Ouija boards, demons, graveyards, haunted woods, sensory-deprivation tanks, telepathy, smart-alecky college students, well-meaning professors, confused coppers, a savage companion, a loopier-than-usual Doctor and bottled water.

How it all comes together is a fun ride, but the end is rushed and just a bit dissapointing. The Leela passages were very enjoyable, as was the Doctor's interaction with the cops.

All in all, a fun read, with no nutritional value whatsoever.

Although Peter Davison (believe it or not) is my personal favorite DOCTOR WHO (this because of childhood nostalgia I won't go into any further- red) I also am a big fan of Tom Baker's fourth doctor. It's been said he's the ultimate Doctor Who and tv story highlights like GENESIS OF THE DALEKS, PLANET OF EVIL and REVENGE OF THE CYBERMAN are proof of that.

So, it was an immense delight for me finding out that PSI-ENCE FICTION featured Baker's fourth doctor and his pre-Xena like female warrior sidekick Leela.
The book is about our favorite characters winding up in modern day England on the campus of a university, were a quirky professor has started all kinds of experiments involving a group of students and their so called 'psychic' powers.
I won't spoil the plot but it involves murder and a device that may be able to destroy the universe (talking about painting yourself a broad canvas, but since it's DOCTOR WHO, I wouldn't expect otherwise). I also loved the pop culture references to THE X-FILES, The MATRIX and, yes...XENA, WARRIOR PRINCES.

This is an enjoyable romp, not to heavy on characterisation and almost pulpy in parts. It passes the time and I myself really got a kick out of the murder mystery subplot. Boucher even has one of the main characters saying: 'I'm a sucker for a locked room mystery' at one point.
Well, so am I. And the solution is something that comes as totally unsuspected.

As you might have guessed I'm really into WHO books (I even try to hunt down one of Virgin's WHO adventures once in a while). PSI-ENCE FICTION passes the grade for a 'WHO-geek' like me. I just don't know if it's worth reading for somebody else though.

I'd give it a little more than three stars, it's just not good enough to receive four. You'll have to read anything by Mark Gatiss, or maybe David McIntee if you want that good a WHO story.

The TARDIS lands the Doctor and Leela in the middle of a forest due to a time distortion affect. In the search to uncover what is going on, they must deal with murder, dangerous university experiments regarding ESP, annoying students and dodgy water.

From the outset you can tell this isn't going to be one of the greatest WHO novels around as it introduces us to a bunch of 5 university students who has a love/hate comedy routine that, at the beginning was quite fun, but when it continues on until the end of the novel with every scene including them, becomes very annoying and monotonous.

Character development in practically nil except for the two main characters of the Doctor and Leela. The Doctor is acting a bit (not much though) more quirky than usual (due to the effects of the time distortion thingy) and doesn't really do anything proactive for the first 2/3's of the novel. Leela is the most interesting character in the novel, as in the other Boucher books, you get to see what is going on in the warrior's mind and her ways of thinking and trying to break free of her 'primitive' reasoning's. Something the tv series would find hard to do. (Unless they had her talking to herself which would look stupid).

The book did have potential with it's 'hauntings' and 'other realms' aspects, which were kind of creepy but s essentially let down by the discovery of who/what is responsible at the end. The ending is also a huge let down - the whole story builds up to it's height and is then over in just 2 quick short, mildly confusing pages. (Maybe he was late for his deadline or something?)

I would recommend this as a no brainer, no stress read, but be prepared to be disappointed.

this is the latest dr. who novel from chris boucher, writer of several dr. who scripts during the 4th doctor/leela time period of the series. overall, it's a fun read. parts of it were genuinely spooky and suspenseful, although several of the stock-suspense sequences weren't as successful, perhaps because of their stock-ness. the characters are witty, although at times the wittiness got a bit annoying--the characters are perhaps a little too pleased with themselves. oddly, the characterization of the doctor and of leela seem off to me, albeit not by much--although boucher created leela to begin with! still, the characterization is strong in places, and there are some laugh-out-loud lines, especially near the end, that i can pretty much hear tom baker saying (no spoilers here, but they're the lines to the rats and regarding evolution). i found the ending a bit of a letdown, but i was quite pleasantly entertained throughout, and although i could put it down, i eagerly returned.

I just watched a montage of some of the cheez-iest moments in "Doctor Who" history, in a special "40th Anniversary" montage on the new DVD release of "The Dalek Invasion of Earth". This is the way "Doctor Who" was meant to be seen -- rapid-fire clips of men in rubber masks; BBC-repertory actors gesticulating wildly; random shots of the Doctor pumping his fists; cheap special effects and wobbly models. The last chapter of "Psi-ence Fiction", if filmed, would look an awful lot like something out of this montage. There are strobe lights, shouting villains, and Tom Baker yelling out characters' surnames.

The rest of "Psi-ence Fiction" is clearly meant to be contemporary, not retro. Author Chris Boucher, who wrote three scripts for "Who" back in the seventies, populates his English university with lots of modern-day pop culture references: "The X-Files", Kevin Williamson-style horror movies, and the Doctor reflecting nostalgically on the works of Charles M. Schulz. But I could never decide if Boucher was writing this story on a modern day, Russell T. Davies-sized budget... or for that old, studio-bound, Seventies "Who" feel.

The best parts of "Psi-ence Fiction" involve Leela and the Doctor. One of the great things about "Doctor Who", that has sustained it for forty years of ongoing adventure, is that the adventure is never really done. Louise Jameson the actress quit the TV show in 1978, but here's Boucher in 2001 still generating new insights into Leela the character. The Fourth Doctor, likewise, still has a zany head to be explored, and Boucher has fun parroting his thought processes.

The story itself is a bit thin, and the cast is small. Oddly, the lack of death in this story takes some edge off the horror sequences: no-one ever dies on-screen. The order of the day instead is witty banter: five college kids insult each other with winks and nods; a couple of policemen tease each other in a way that Briscoe and Logan would never have tolerated.

It's all fun in small doses, but there's that budget factor again: this all would have played badly in the Seventies, with hammy actors interpreting the scripts. It would look flashy today on a Hollywood budget, but every time I was ready to picture Gwyneth Paltrow as Chloe, the nominal female protagonist (who's described as a "leggy blonde" and who's fetchingly nude for pages at a time), she kept devolving into Elisha Cuthbert. Maybe watching all that "Doctor Who" has rendered my theater-of-the-mind incapable of thinking big.

With a title that sounds like they're not even trying (it's the kind of title that friends and I would have high-fived each other in high school over when we came up with our new clever name for our totally awesome video game) how can you possibly go wrong? Why not just call it "Two Hundred and Eighty Three Pages" and be done with it. At least there would be some truth in advertising.

As I've mentioned before, Chris Boucher gets a lot of leftover goodwill for writing two pretty decent TV stories and giving us Leela to delight the dreams of dads and young lads the world over ("Whoa, son, maybe this sci-fi stuff isn't so bad after all!") but either he's lost the magic over the years or script writing versus novel writing is different enough that said magic doesn't quite translate. I say "I've mentioned this before" because this feels like the third Boucher novel I've read in the Past Doctor series, probably more than any particular author. Or maybe it just sticks out in my mind because none of them could be construed as "excellent".

Amusingly, the problems wind up being different each time, so it can't be an inherent flaw. Here the Doctor and Leela land near an English university where one of the professors is testing the students for psionic powers. The experiments don't seem to be giving him any decent results (it doesn't help that the students aren't really taking this seriously) and yet at the same time some of the students are being harassed on campus by a mysterious voice and visions of a murder. Are the experiments unlocking some hidden force, or does it have something to do with the delicious spring water that everyone is drinking? And will Leela get to stab somebody?

Unfortunately the story is no great shakes, but writers have managed to overcome that before with a sense of flair and pizazz. The majority of the plot forwarding action can be boiled down to stuff the Doctor does, which feels limited to about ten scenes, which means he's vamping for most of the story, being that typically cRaZy Fourth Doctor and doing his Fourth Doctor comedy act with various people until it gets to the point where he has no choice but to do something to resolve the story.

However, he's doing more than maybe everyone else in the story. For reasons that are probably clear only to the author and maybe his editor, way more than enough of the book is taken up by the supporting cast, all of whom are distinctly annoying. Even worse, none of them talk like real people. Apparently the author thought it was a great idea for the college students (there's about five we keep seeing over and over) to engage in witty "comedy" banter in Every. Single. Scene. they're in, no matter how they are talking to, whether it's with each other or the cops or other professors. It makes them sound flippant and irritating, since every conversation devolves into them insulting each other in a cutesy fashion. At first I thought he was doing it just to set up the characters and then later I was hoping it was being done with some sense of irony. I would have been kind of okay with some kind of satire of horror movie characters, but no, this is being utterly straight.

What's worse is that nearly every character as a tendency to talk in semi-serious asides and quips, which makes it hard to take any of this seriously. Even the cops. What's worse is that nearly every character has the same dialogue rhythms and patterns, making it hard to distinguish anyone and making it feel like you're reading the same voice coming at you from six different angles. Even the Doctor falls for it, and while he does admit that he's acting erratically, it means that most of his dialogue is throwaway stuff, quirky for the sake of quirky.

It's a shame because there are some genuinely creepy moments in the story. Boucher has a good sense of atmosphere when he gets his head in the game and the horror movie feel of it is welcome when it's not wholeheartedly embracing cliches. The first Ouija board scene is unsettling and some of the bits of people being chased through the woods do achieve some degree of being unsettling. This all leads to a very confused "bwah-ha-ha I'm mad!" sort of climax where it's not even clear how it gets resolved or if there's even any consequences to it. When you can skip from the opening scenes straight to said climax (making the book all of thirty pages) and not feel like you missed anything, that's generally not a good sign.

As usual, about the only bright spot in this is Leela. Unsurprisingly since he created her, Boucher really gets this character and her passages are far more detailed and interesting than just about anything else in here, mostly because it sounds like he's trying and really thinking it through. Alas, it has little to do with the plot either, but it's nice to delve into someone who isn't totally annoying. Sometimes I think that Boucher only writes these so he has an excuse to write Leela again, because he sure doesn't seem to pay attention to any of the other aspects of the plot or character. If the BBC didn't require the presence of the Doctor to bounce off of, I would not have a problem purchasing a Leela solo story from him. Until then, it seems, he's going to keep giving us these novels, which is the equivalent of digging through some deep mud to find the little nuggets of pearls that have fallen into the murk. Whether the mess is worth slogging through is, of course, entirely up to you.

Chris Boucher is Leela's creator, and yet in this book-- as in his other books-- Boucher writes like he hates her. However, in this mess of a story, Leela comes off a lot better than the Fourth Doctor who spends much of his time on the sidelines of the story until the end.

We have a tale of murder and suicide, a phantom stalker, and the possible end of...
well, everything. But the problem with this book is that all of those elements don't come together in any kind of cohesive plot. And in fact, when it does come to an end, it's basically a meaningless end that is gaurenteed to make you go "huh?"

The biggest mystery about this book is why so many people here have said it was such a great book; it isn't. Once again Boucher writes a story where the Doctor tends to treat Leela like a retarded child, not like the valued companion he missed so much when she left. Here it seems he was happy to get rid of her in places. The plot collapses in on itself like a literary black hole to be quickly forgotten by all the characters, but the reader will never have that luxury.

Stay away from this book. It's not badly written, but it is ultimately a very unsatisfying book that you will wish you have spent so much money on it. Save your nickels for something better.


Ron

It's not a good thing when a novel starts out with a nine page section containing six truly annoying characters exchanging tedious insults and quips. It's an even worse thing when all six characters (and the group they form) are an integral part of the novel. Chloe, Meg, Joan, Ralph, Tommy and Josh are the most grating characters I've read in a long while. It's not that their necessarily uninteresting, but every bit of dialogue they have seems to be insulting comments about one another, tedious attempts at humour. This continues throughout the book.

The story itself isn't too bad. There are interesting puzzles: what is really going on in the parapsychology research laboratory at East Wessex college? Just what is it that Chloe is seeing and running from? Is it the same as what seems to be stalking Leela? Does it have something to do with the water?

Unfortunately, the story's resolution devolves into bunches of technobabble. Quite a few pages are devoted to it as the Doctor tries to stop the villain of the piece. It's too bad, too, because the book was refreshingly free of it until this point. Everything was being described in terms of psychological suspense. The technobabble-filled finale then ends up leading to a truly unsatisfying resolution that I can't mention without spoilers.

The strength of the novel, as with any of the Chris Boucher novels, is Leela. Boucher knows Leela intimately, and she always comes to life when he writes her. She is a warrior, trained to fight, but also trained to think. She's a simple woman from a primitive society, but that doesn't make her stupid. Boucher does a good job of showing that. She thinks through her actions, but yet she also acts instinctively. She sees things in terms that she's familiar with. Her internal monologues work really well as she works through everything. Her exchanges with the Doctor are even better.

In the end, though, the book is unsatisfying. It's not a bad story, but the characters (except Leela) and the really bad ending bring it down. It may be worth reading, but I'm not sure it's worth buying.

This book was interesting read with the 4th Doctor and Leela. The Doctor and Leela land in a forest outside a college. They get involved with the college 's ESP department and some college students. Something is wrong at the school. There are students trying to call up the dead with terrible results. Other things are wrong as well. Of course Leela belives it's a Tesh from her home planet. Eventually the Doctor finds out who has been behind all the madness. The villian(s) get their reward. The Doctor and Leela leave. This book was a interesting read as I felt like a part horror/ science fiction book. One of the author's better books.

If you like the 4th Doctor and Leela, you might like this novel.

The Doctor is marginally involved and solves the dilemma in "the last three minutes". Leela is still a savage and you get bored with hearing her pedigree every time she's mentioned. The university types are shallow and the evil not defined enough. "Check the water" even fails. But read it on a rainy day when there's nothing else to do and you'll be entertained.