Stealers of Dreams is a Doctor Who novel by Steve Lyons featuring the 9th Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and Rose Tyler. This review contains spoilers. If you're considering reading the book and don't want to spoil it, then suffice it to say that this is a pretty good one.
There's a throw-away line in The Long Game episode in series 1 of [new] Doctor Who, when The Editor detects an intruder on Satellite Five. He says (I'm paraphrasing because I don't have the DVD on hand as I type) "I sense a lie, something fictional." I wonder whether that line is the inspiration for this novel, because in this story it's illegal to use your imagination. A whole human colony exists, out on Colony World 4378976.Delta-Four (its old name, Arkannis Major, was deemed too imaginative), with no imagination, no lies, no stories aside from literal fact.
When the Doctor, Rose, and Captain Jack arrive, they immediately violate several laws just by using everyday idioms. It becomes apparent to them quickly that the people of this colony don't tolerate even the barest simile or metaphor. Everything is strictly literal, all the time.
In a weird way, I have to confess it's a little refreshing at first. It gets old eventually though, when a group of rebels surface, determined to let imagination run free. They're storytellers and poets and musicians. It's liberating and visceral, and also actually deadly.
It turns out that there actually are consequences for fiction on Colony World 4378976.Delta-Four. The rebels are actually dying from their dreams.
After the Doctor runs off to solve the puzzle, Rose Tyler eventually starts to hallucinate. She runs off with a fake Doctor to solve the puzzle. I admit the story can start to get confusing, because there are so many things that aren't real mixed in with things that are real, and of course until you've read it to the end you don't know what's real and unreal. Is it cleverly disorienting or is the story just poorly explained? I'm still not sure, to be honest. Definitely one of those.
In the end, of course, the Doctor gets to the bottom of it all. It's not nanotech, as in The Empty Child, but micro organisms native to Arkannis Major. When humans arrived, the micro organisms discovered they had an appetite for neuroelecro-chemical signals (the activity of the brain, but not the brain itself). The problem is, the micro organisms can't handle all the activity of an imaginative mind, and so the signals get looped back into the brain, causing hallucinations.
According to my technobabble dictionary, that all checks out.
If you go in expecting confusion, I think the novel would probably be less confusing for you than it was for me. I can be a slow and methodical reader, I guess, so I took far too much of this book as literal before I understood that most of it was hallucinatory. Even so, I enjoyed the book and thought it had some really clever ideas in it. It's good Doctor Who, and more broadly it's good pulp SF.
Photo by Charlie Seaman on Unsplash