I feel somebody in my head!! And he's giving me bad dialogue!
Written: Apr 17 '04 (Updated Apr 22 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Leela! Leela! Leela! Too bad you can't see her skimpy costume in a book!
Cons: dialogue, the other characters, technobabble.
The Bottom Line: The bottom line can read your mind!
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| hist's Full Review: Chris Boucher - Psi-Ence Fiction |
A Brief Description of Doctor Who
Doctor Who is a science fiction adventure series about the Doctor and one (or more) of his companions. They travel around in the TARDIS, which looks like an English police box, but is really a time travel machine. It's bigger on the inside then on the outside. The Doctor is a Time Lord, a race of beings who can regenerate when their current body is dying. So far, the Doctor has regenerated seven times, which means he's on his eighth incarnation.
The book series consists of two lines: a line about the Eighth Doctor and his companions, and a line that consists of "past Doctors" (Numbers 1-7). The past Doctors are from the TV series that ended in 1989, while the Eighth has only been seen on television in a movie on the Fox network in 1996.
Psi-ence Fiction
This is a novel starring the 4th Doctor and Leela
What do you get when you have the creator of one of the more interesting televised Dr. Who characters actually write a book starring her? It would certainly help if he were a novel writer. This is actually not Chris Boucher’s first novel starring Leela (that would be Last Man Running, and he has certainly improved from that tedious outing). Psi-ence Fiction, Boucher’s third book, is a strictly middle-of-the-road novel, with a few good things, a few bad things, and a few things that make you go “eh.”
Where do you want to start?
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 they're necessarily uninteresting, but every bit of dialogue they have seems to be insulting comments about one another and tedious attempts at humour. This continues throughout the book.
The story itself isn't too bad. The Doctor and Leela show up in the forest outside a university where some strange research in telepathy is going on in the Parapsychology department. What are these six students and their professor up to? Is a local unsolved murder related to the psychic research going on there? 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? Just why does the Doctor like the water so much? As events spiral out of control, murder isn’t the only thing on people’s mind. Reality as we know it may be coming to an end.
That doesn’t sound too bad
It isn’t, really. It has a good idea at the core, but the execution of it fails utterly. The characters, as mentioned above, are completely idiotic. We spend pages and pages watching them insult each other (in better books, that would be called “banter”). The Doctor is fairly ineffective until the end, though he does sound a lot more like Tom Baker from the series then many authors manage to get. The Fourth Doctor is one of the hardest to get into print because so much of his characterization was Baker’s zaniness. Boucher manages to capture him fairly well, even as he sidelines him. It’s quite the feat, actually.
So the characters suck. What else is wrong with it?
One word: technobabble. Unfortunately, the story's resolution devolves into bunches of it. 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. Then there is some telepathic psychobabble that quickly gets on the nerves as well. While the prose is ok, the dialogue leaves much to be desired. Whether that’s because Boucher can’t be inspired to write good stuff for such wooden characters, I can’t tell. Whatever the reason, it’s pretty bad.
It can’t be all bad, can it?
No, it isn’t. 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. Many times, she gets right to the heart of the matter even as she’s not quite understanding it.
Is that it?
Yeah, pretty much. In the end, Psi-ence Fiction 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. Since not many libraries will be carrying this one, I’d either find a Who fan gullible enough to buy it (no comments from the peanut gallery please) or just skip it. Believe me, it’s not worth your time.
note the back-cover blurb of my copy of the book contains a rather humorous typo, speaking of a “grizzly murder,” which made me wonder if there were bears in the book or if the copy editor just didn’t read it. Maybe he was telling us something...
Recommended:
No
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Member: David Roy
Location: Vancouver, BC
Reviews written: 723
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