Finity | ||||||||
John Barnes | ||||||||
Tor Books, 304 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Peter D. Tillman
Experienced SF readers will have little doubt as to what's happening -- the Many Worlds hypothesis has been a fertile SF
breeding-ground for quite some time -- but, as always, the genius is in the details. In Finity we get such goodies as
robot taxicabs with easily-hurt feelings, private suborbital jump-boats (but no automobiles) for the middle-class,
and a neat new quantum-computing rationale for Many Worlds slippage. Not to mention -- finally! -- an explanation for
all those 1- or 2-ring phantom phone calls I get.
What we don't get is a particularly consistent or well-thought-out plot or backstory 1. I
didn't have any problems suspending disbelief while reading Finity -- a matter of 3 or 4 hours -- but if you're a
critical reader, this one may not be for you. If you're looking for a light, fast, read-once entertainment -- as I
was -- Finity will fill the bill nicely.
Barnes dedicates Finity to a reader who asked, "Just once, would it kill you to write an adventure story, with a
reasonably happy ending, and only a little weird?"
Pete Tillman has been reading SF for better than 40 years now. He reviews SF -- and other books -- for Usenet, "Under the Covers", Infinity-Plus, Dark Planet, and SF Site. He's a mineral exploration geologist based in Arizona. More of his reviews are posted at www.silcom.com/~manatee/reviewer.html#tillman . |
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