Logopolis by: Christopher H. Bidmead

 

Logopolis was written by Christopher H. Bidmead, based on his story of the same name.  It was the 72^nd story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

Tom Baker’s final television story is kind of an interesting one.  Season 18 was from a completely new production team and the entire season essentially dealt with the idea of entropy increasing somehow.  Logopolis was the conclusion and directly dealt with the Master taking control of the titular planet which has kept entropy at bay which destroys a large part of the universe including the home planet (and solar system) of new companion Nyssa of Traken.  It’s also a very slow story, intentionally taking its time to drape itself in an atmosphere of dread with some brilliant imagery even if the plot doesn’t quite explain itself.  Some of these problems are still present in the novel, especially since the events are the same and the sequence of the Doctor flooding the TARDIS in particular goes on for far too long here.  Novelizing it Christopher H. Bidmead actually has a really good opportunity to go back to the script and make some of the things just explored in the script without really making it onto television.  The novel itself doesn’t diverge from the television serial, but like many of the best novelizations it is one where things are expanded upon especially in terms of characters.

 

Tegan Jovanka was certainly not a 1980s companion without character, but her appearance in the novelization of Logopolis goes a long way to explore her desire to become an air stewardess, with subtle hints that she will eventually wish to become a pilot due to her life as a child on a farm in Australia where her father instilled a love of flying.  She also knows how to fly a plane, which is something that is exclusive here and I don’t think has even been used in Big Finish Productions, but here it allows insight into why she would stay on the TARDIS.  This also implies that the continuing drive to get back to Heathrow in Season 19 is more to do with being unable to cope with the regeneration or just being an act to throw the Doctor off which I actually really like.  Bidmead also does an excellent job of making the Watcher more than just the mysterious looming figure, there are actual scenes making explicit the character as this transitory thing that’s appearing outside of time itself.  Adric gets an extra scene where he talks to the Watcher and can’t quite recall just how that conversation ended up happening, though there is this certainty that information was relayed, but not by whom.  It’s a really interesting idea to explore that also makes the Watcher a more active participant in the plot while not taking away the nature of this spectre.

 

Overall, Logopolis may be a slightly better version of the television story in novel form since Christopher H. Bidmead’s clinical and scientific prose help retain the feeling of dread while there are genuinely excellent character additions that make things feel more well rounded.  8/10.

Dying in the Sun by: John de Burgh Miller

 

The Second Doctor is a tricky Doctor to get right.  Patrick Troughton’s performance was layered and often relied on quite a bit of improvisation (especially with Frazer Hines) to get right.  While this is difficult for actors to recreate, Frazer Hines, David Troughton, and Michael Troughton have done so exceptionally well on audio, it makes it even more difficult for authors to capture in prose.  From the novels I have read only Steve Lyons and Justin Richards have really managed to do so well, and in terms of the Past Doctor Adventures, he is a Doctor who appears less often as the main Doctor than others.  Dying in the Sun is the sixth Past Doctor Adventures novel to heavily feature the Second Doctor and the second to place itself in the gap between The Power of the Daleks and The Highlanders.  It is also the only Doctor Who novel to be written by John de Burgh Miller, an American interested in film noir and the Golden Age of Hollywood which works incredibly well as a setting for a pseudo-historical.  It’s a setting that would be far too close for the production team to actually realize, plus the lavish Hollywood parties and film premieres being too expensive to realize on the show’s budget.  Something about the setting, however, just feels right and I believe that’s down to de Burgh Miller’s almost old fashioned style of writing.

 

The Second Doctor just feels at home in Hollywood, able to mingle using humor and his often clown like nature to get himself into parties and explore just exactly what is happening with the film Dying in the Sun and the grisly murders that have been taking place.  Ben is also incredibly well characterized as the sidekick to the Doctor, though de Burgh Miller has this tendency to rely on the fact that he’s cockney and a sailor as his only two character traits.  I understand where that is coming from, at the time of publication only The War Machines would have been available on home media in visual format while The Power of the Daleks, The Highlanders, and The Macra Terror were available on audio format, so there wasn’t as much you could see from Michael Craze’s performance but de Burgh Miller makes an attempt.  It is certainly a performance that’s better replicated than de Burgh Miller’s attempt at crafting something for Polly Wright.  Polly is perhaps where the book really falls flat.  She starts out fine, with some of the snark and optimistic attitude that the character was known for but because this is a film noir novel she gets propositioned by a film producer and then hypnotized by the aliens by the end of what would be the first episode if this were a serial.  After that, she’s basically gone from the novel which is kind of a shame as she and Ben barely get to work together as characters and that’s when they’re at their best.  It’s also something that extends to the supporting characters, they’re kind of stock characters which does work for the setting of Dying in the Sun.

 

John de Burgh Miller does also excel with crafting the narrative around the titular Dying in the Sun while paralleling the Golden Age of Hollywood and the influence that art can have on somebody.  In the novel, it’s not just influence but mania and madness, drawing people into the events of the film but without the ability to describe what made it great.  Part of it feels as if de Burgh Miller is exploring the idea of film as a spectacle, the effects are impossibly good and the projectors have to be specially altered to properly play the film reels.  The director has his magnum opus and has snuck in an entire alien species into the film stock itself.  Aptly called the Selyoids, we have a very 1960’s science fiction idea for a Doctor Who monster which allows for some grisly gore and sequences of them literally emerging and embodying film.  Their desires are essentially parasites obsessed with creativity so this time period is perfect for an invasion as the film industry is about to explode in terms of style in the post-World War II environment which I absolutely love.

 

Overall, despite being a Doctor Who novel not a lot of people discuss it’s one that I found myself enjoying quite a bit.  It’s a genuinely rare success in characterizing the Second Doctor and the ideas contained in it just jump off the page despite the rest of the characters kind of suffering.  7/10.

The Enemy Within by: Richard Matheson and directed by: Leo Penn

 

“The Enemy Within” is written by Richard Matheson and directed by Leo Penn.  It was filmed under production code 5, was the 5^th episode of Star Trek Season 1, and was broadcast on October 6, 1966.

 

Okay, let’s try this again.  Yes I tried to watch Star Trek five years ago and got in four episodes before I kind of stopped, though not for any particular reason for said stopping.  I think it might have just been getting into college and not knowing what I could dedicate to writing on a television series.  It wasn’t from not enjoying the four episodes I ended up watching, though I have rewatched them in preparation for reviving these reviews and still enjoyed them all to various degrees.  My good friend Joey Morgan is doing a series of video reactions to Star Trek with his brother so I thought maybe now would be a good time to rip him off and write actual reviews, picking up where I left off all those years ago.

 

Initially I was a little surprised to see the name Richard Matheson as a writer for Star Trek, though I honestly shouldn’t have been.  While my familiarity with Matheson is the novel I Am Legend, he was a prolific science fiction writer of novels and short stories, many of which he would adapt himself to film and television.  He also is famous for writing another television appearance of William Shatner, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” for The Twilight Zone in 1961, which is fitting as “The Enemy Within” is the best, at least of the first five episodes, at featuring the acting abilities of Shatner.  Yes, Shatner as an actor has a tendency to go over the top in his performances and as a person he’s not great, but here there are moments that Shatner sells by understating the emotions.  The premise of the episode is a classic science fiction yarn of technology splitting someone into two halves, Captain Kirk being transported to the Enterprise and splitting his good and bad qualities into separate entities.  Now this premise does lead to the inclusion of the assault of one of the female crewmembers which is sadly not handled well by really any standard.  The best thing I can say about that plot point is that it is at least outright condemned, but it’s quickly brushed under the rug and not necessarily explored that the character of Kirk could be driven to assault and using his power as Captain over others.  The exploration and conclusion that people need both good and evil inside them is perhaps an astute one, it’s what makes them human and very much seems in line with the philosophy Gene Roddenberry has set out for Star Trek.

 

The directing of the episode honestly is great with Leo Penn’s camera work knowing just when to cut to keep the confrontations between the good and evil Kirk together, as well as attempts to make the tension in the close-up shots wonderful.  It adds a sense of desperation to two of the aspects of the episode.  First, there is a group of crewman stuck on the planet the Enterprise is orbiting and the temperature is continually dropping where George Takei’s Sulu gives a stirring performance despite his appearance just being a status report.  Second, there is this desperation that both Kirk’s may die if they do not recombine, with the good Kirk at points genuinely crying out to his double, pleading to let them both live.  Leonard Nimoy and DeForrest Kelley assist in this essentially acting as devil and angel as Spock and McCoy in this episode as this is the first time Star Trek is really establishing these three characters as the lead trio with the rest of the cast being supporting.

 

Overall, “The Enemy Within” has some very nice musings on human nature and the necessity for the potential of darkness, something that overcomes some very dodgy set pieces and dated plot points.  It continues a thread of speculative fiction tropes that do an excellent job of understanding what this show wants and needs to be in order to succeed.  While some of it drags, the performances are brilliant and it’s show defining.  8/10.

Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils by: Malcolm Hulke

 

Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils was written by Malcolm Hulke, based on his story The Sea Devils.  It was the 9^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

Sometimes there’s a novelization that you just struggle to find an angle to talk about.  There are plenty of novelizations that just take the television story and transplant it to prose with nothing special and those are difficult but usually there’s some minor changes you can latch onto.  Doctor Who and the Sea Devils is kind of a special case in that while there are changes (there are two particular continuity errors where Jo is mentioned to have been there for Doctor Who and the Silurians and the events of Frontier in Space are mentioned), most of the changes are artificial.  At this point I’ve covered five of the seven novelizations from Malcolm Hulke and all of them have been some of the best novelizations, so it’s sad to see Doctor Who and the Sea Devils kind of struggle to reach those heights.  The Sea Devils is a story I enjoy quite a bit on television, but a lot of that comes down to the performances of Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning, and Roger Delgado.  The plot itself is essentially a repeat of Doctor Who and the Silurians, something that Hulke really doesn’t do much of to expand upon for Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils.  Now the plot itself does move at a very nice pace in novelization form, simply because Hulke is one of the few novelists to understand that he can play around with format instead of just translating the television episodes to some form of prose flexibly.

 

Now that isn’t to say Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils is by any means bad.  It’s not, it’s actually quite a fun time since the plot to Doctor Who and the Silurians and The Sea Devils is a great plot that explores the Doctor, but what really saves this novelization from being fine to being a good time is some little added character moments.  Early on in the novelization, there is this expanded explanation that the Doctor fought in the court system to give the Master life imprisonment instead of the death penalty, as well as this added idea to ensure he is given reading material while in prison.  There is also an added implication that had the Master stayed imprisoned the Doctor would continually visit as time went by which is honestly wonderful.  There are also small sequences from Trenchard’s perspective up to his death which also make for an exhilarating climax of the novel, even if it still follows the TV series beat for beat.  Minor cuts also include some of the improvised jokes between Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning which have sadly dated the serial so it’s honestly nice to realize they are gone and Hulke didn’t intend them in the script.

 

Overall, Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils suffers from just translating a television story that is regarded as a classic due to its performances while it’s plot is something that had only happened a few stories previously (and broadcast only two years before), though added character moments save the book and perhaps is why it had several reprints.  7/10.

The Martian by: Andy Weir

 

Andy Weir’s path to publication is a non-traditional one.  According to Wikipedia, he began writing science fiction and publishing on his website, as well as working on several web comics, for years before his big hit.  The Martian was originally published online in 2011, stemming from the idea to explore scientifically and technically what it would take to survive on Mars, once again on his website.  It gained popularity and Weir would place a copy for sale on Kindle at 99 cents, the lowest price allowed, before becoming popular enough to be traditionally published in 2014 by Crown Books.  This makes this book significant as one in a gaining trend of self-published works slowly gaining the respect that they deserve and the path towards more traditional publishing.  While far from the norm, Weir is a perfect example of the potential of self-published works and the markets they can tap into.  The Martian is a fairly hard science fiction novel, something that in terms of popular science fiction fell out of fashion as general trends moved away from a very clinical style of speculative fiction towards more plot and character based stories.  Andy Weir’s pitch for The Martian, at least when discussed after its release, is an essential blend of the two, taking the time to explore how Mark Watney survives on Mars after being stranded by his team.  It is set 34 years in the future (from the perspective of its publication) where the third manned mission to Mars is cut short after six Martian days, a dust storm causes the rest of the team to flee while Watney is seemingly killed by a piece of machinery.

 

Weir’s novel is an interesting beast, at least in attempting to review it.  It bounces back and forth between two formats, the first person logs of Mark Watney which take up the majority of the novel and third person limited prose giving the reader insights to NASA working around the clock to rescue him and the rest of the Ares 3 mission on their way back to Earth (and later back to Mars post mutiny to rescue Watney).  Of all of the books I’ve read and reviewed, I do not think I’ve ever come across one that even attempts to switch perspective like this, nor doing so sometimes in the same chapter.  This could be a quirk of the original format of the novel, being published in serial installments, but it doesn’t feel like Weir is being unintentional with the way he is switching perspectives.  It should be something that disrupts the narrative and drags you out of the story, but it isn’t.  Watney’s perspective is the most prevalent but the lead in to the shifts in perspective, especially the first one, is done so excellently and quickly you hardly notice the shift happening.  The Martian also succeeds at easily conveying the scientific material, something Weir focuses on throughout the novel as a possible way for a man to survive on Mars based on what a potential one-month mission would have on hand.  The science is not dumbed down for a general audience, but conveyed in a way that lays out what exactly Watney is doing, while the larger scale projects at NASA (especially any building of rockets) are given just enough information for the reader to understand the principle but none of the details.  This leads to the book being a genuine survival guide for Mars if it weren’t for discoveries of the red planet after publication that would make specifically the way Watney gets crops to grow false.

 

If there were one place where The Martian falls the slightest bit flat, it would be a lot of the characters not being entirely fleshed out, especially those who aren’t Mark Watney.  This makes obvious sense since they all have to share about a quarter of the book while Watney is physically logging everything else, and that the book ends without an entirely proper resolution for everyone.  Weir had honestly knocked it out of the park with a near perfect first novel.  It reads incredibly as a survival thriller in space, something where I don’t want to give away pretty much anything that actually happens in the plot outside of the vaguest premise and the setup.  If you somehow haven’t gone and read this, go do that.  10/10.

Doctor Who and the Daemons by: Barry Letts

 

Doctor Who and the Daemons was written by Barry Letts, based on The Daemons by Guy Leopold (a pseudonym for Barry Letts and Robert Sloman).  It was the 8^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

Barry Letts is a great producer and a writer with great ideas.  The Daemons, The Time Monster, The Green Death, and Planet of the Spiders are the four Jon Pertwee serials that he cowrote, albeit without credit due to being a producer, but there is a reason that Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke were responsible for novelizing three of those stories.  That reason is Doctor Who and the Daemons.  The Daemons on television is a fan favorite, one of only three serials to be five episodes long and playing out like a folk horror story at an isolated village against an alien demonic entity summoned by the Master.  Letts and Sloman craft a near perfect end to Jon Pertwee’s second season, so why does the novel not work?

 

Doctor Who and the Daemons as a novel follows the television serial beat for beat, and hey for a lot of novelizations that works.  Terrance Dicks is a master of doing a simple script translation to prose that at worst will create just a nice piece of fluff, examples of that include Doctor Who and the Time Warrior, Doctor Who and an Unearthly Child, and The Ambassadors of Death.  So why doesn’t that work for Letts?  Well, Barry Letts as an author has a tendency to underwrite scenes, providing almost too many descriptors and actions in a scene while maintaining this very simplistic style.  There are far too many sequences where the action is almost reported on without letting us get inside the characters’ heads or understanding the motivation.  This makes the novelization drag and feel closer to a script in prose form than an actual novel.  Compounding this is the length of the novelization at 172 pages, which while short for any of the other book ranges is quite long for the novelizations.  The audiobook release comes out to just under 6 hours, while other stories are generally 3-4 hours comfortably making this a more difficult listen due to the issues with prose.  Letts would only contribute one other novelization at the end of the range, The Paradise of Death, novelizing the radio play of the same name.  He would contribute to the Virgin Missing Adventures (with a novelization of The Ghosts of N-Space) and the Past Doctor Adventures (Deadly Reunion and Island of Death), but if Doctor Who and the Daemons is any indication he didn’t actually grow as a writer by the 1990s.

 

This isn’t to say Doctor Who and the Daemons is terrible.  The script it is adapting is still a cracking story, and whenever Letts attempts to capture Christopher Barry’s marvelous direction in the prose it is excellent.  He also does an excellent job with replicating the dynamic between the Third Doctor, Jo Grant, and as the book goes on the Master who form the centerpiece of the novel.  This means that it is not a massive problem with telling the story, just keeping its reader engaged throughout.  The side characters don’t always fare as well, with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart perhaps the most out of character, acting more like an incompetent leader instead of the strong character readers would know from the television series.

 

Overall, Doctor Who and the Daemons is sadly one you should skip if you have the VHS/DVD/Blu-ray release of the television story.  It’s let down by weak prose and poor characterization that makes the novel more difficult to get through while the plot itself is preserved rather nicely.  It’s not a bad book, but it becomes the definition of a middle of the road book.  5/10.

Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon by: Malcolm Hulke

 

Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon was written by Malcolm Hulke, based on his story, Colony in Space.  It was the 6^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

This one is an interesting adaptation to look at.  Since it is only the 6^th novel to be published, and only the 3^rd formally commissioned by Target Books, it serves as an anomaly.  There were no plans to ever novelize every Doctor Who serial, only the first four of Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, and Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks were considered for publication.  Because of this in adapting Colony in Space into Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, Malcolm Hulke was tasked with introducing the companion of Jo Grant to an audience that may not have ever seen Terror of the Autons, would potentially never see it due to a lack of rebroadcasts, and there was no guarantee it would ever be novelized.  This introduction is one that I actually find a bit more interesting than what was presented on television, certainly it gives Jo Grant a bit more agency in wanting to work for UNIT.  There is something romantic about Jo convincing her uncle to allow her to become a spy, being annoyed with how boring the job is, and then begging him a second time to get her hired at UNIT.  This surprisingly goes a long way to compensate that this book is being written from a perspective that Terror of the Autons, The Mind of Evil, and The Claws of Axos would never have happened.  This also allows Jo to really serve as an audience surrogate as this is her first adventure, while Colony in Space has already begun to develop her further while still putting her as a damsel in distress at multiple points in the serial.

 

Hulke’s prose is also magnificent.  Okay, it’s simple and written for children, but there is this magical wonder about the TARDIS taking off and landing on a mysterious planet for the first time in a very long time for the Doctor.  The television serial’s exterior scenes were in a quarry that honestly was a detriment, but here the rocky and near desolate planet of Uxareius feels genuinely threatening making the colony’s plight all the more harrowing.  There’s also somehow more emphasis placed on the capitalist system that allowed IMC to thrive in this environment, describing the control corporations have over their employees.  Those under IMC control are given benefits and luxury, including their own selected wives and better housing, as long as they are willing to go out and rob other planets of their precious minerals and resources.  It makes Dent’s already ruthless character somehow the more ruthless as there are pieces from his perspective.  Caldwell is also more explicitly an innocent duped by the system, perhaps not the best message for advocating against capitalism, but certainly an intriguing one.  Parallel this to the Master “impersonating” the Adjudicator Martin Jurgens, you have a recipe to bring out a lot more of the social commentary that Hulke excels at.  Hulke also just makes several of the lengthier sequences go by much quicker to allow for more worldbuilding with the inhabitants, the Primitives, who are much more alien and allowed to speak telepathically more often here.  There are these sequences made more explicit meaning that Hulke’s themes are brought to the forefront which is perfect.

 

Overall, Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon is certainly a more interesting and in depth way to experience the plot and themes of Colony in Space.  Malcolm Hulke’s second novelization continues to explore generally anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian themes through the lens of the 1970s, commenting quite a bit on the oppression most obvious to him.  By no means is that oppression explored completely or even expanding out of small glimpses, it’s still makes this book just work on a deeper level than others. 9/10.

Grimm Reality by: Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale

 

After reading all four books he has written set in the Doctor Who universe, I perhaps think Simon Bucher-Jones is better suited for writing short fiction than novel length Doctor Who and Doctor Who spin-off adventures and that is no better exemplified than Grimm Reality, his second Eighth Doctor Adventure cowritten with Kelly Hale.  Grimm Reality Or The Marvellous Adventures of Doctor Know-All are Bucher-Jones’ and Hale’s tribute to the fairy tales of the Brother’s Grimm (and the like) but in a Doctor Who context, attempting to mash together several fairy tales and fairy tale tropes into a single novel.  Primarily Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk come to mind when reading the book, though at different points, while being wrapped in two alien races on the planet Albert and the science fiction tropes of quantum activity and black holes.  Now, blending a science-fiction story and fairy tales is actually nothing new for Doctor Who, Paul Cornell did it excellently in Oh No It Isn’t!, the inaugural New Adventure led by Bernice Summerfield, and where it succeeds is perhaps where Grimm Reality most readily fails.  Oh No It Isn’t! is a book that doesn’t attempt to always take itself seriously, reveling in the absurdity of the pantomime and fairy tales Bernice finds herself in, while Bucher-Jones and Hale take the direct opposite approach, making Grimm Reality a book taking itself all too seriously.  This means that the morals of fairy tales and cultural legends play themselves essentially straight here, which isn’t a bad thing, but in the structure of a novel means that there isn’t entirely one thesis that the book can come to.  Had Grimm Reality been split into multiple shorter works of fiction from the pair about the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji on Albert, it would have flowed better and tightened focus in on individual ideas that could be resolved long before the book ends.

 

Bucher-Jones as an author also suffers from having a style that is almost impenetrable for the casual reader.  He has a tendency to use purple prose that is almost incomprehensible, most apparent in The Death of Art, his first novel, where the plot is a rather thin mystery that suffers from a writing style concerned with how ‘clever’ the author thinks he is.  That air of cleverness is here in Grimm Reality especially whenever the science fiction elements appear, often cloaked in the fairy tale elements which are often made needlessly complex.  Bucher-Jones’ penchant for complexity worked brilliantly in The Taking of Planet 5 but that was dealing with more esoteric matters while Grimm Reality simply isn’t.  This makes the book drag and fall into the trap of boring its reader.  Bucher-Jones and Hale also don’t really have a consistent characterization or any real idea on how Anji Kapoor should be portrayed, which is such a shame after books like EarthWorld, The Year of Intelligent Tigers, and The City of the Dead handle her really well.  She makes a deal with a witch early on which is this tremendous lapse in judgment, being written as not taking any skepticism of the deal itself, and is later essentially put into the role of Cinderella as she continuously tries to wish for things that will help her situation.  While the ironic ways they do not work have a tendency to be fun and one of the better portions of the book, it doesn’t feel like what her character would or should be doing.  It’s a shame as the Doctor and Fitz are excellent, Fitz enjoying the fantastical nature of the setting as someone who grew up in the age of 1950s B movies and The Lord of the Rings and the Doctor being romantically aloof about the situation.  This is a slight shame on the front of the Doctor after Lloyd Rose’s treatment of the character in The City of the Dead, but on the other hand there is a nice pause between two books with emotionally wrenching reputations.

 

Overall, Grimm Reality Or The Marvellous Adventures of Doctor Know-All is at it’s core a Simon Bucher-Jones novel, something that will never be perfectly appealing to me, falling into many of that author’s traps despite sharing credit with Kelly Hale.  It covers ground that has been done better by other authors but is at least an inconsequential book in the grand scheme of things with some nice ideas that need to be in a different format to really, truly work.  4/10.

Psi-ence Fiction by: Chris Boucher

 

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.