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.