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The Amazing, Incredible, Shrinking Colossal, Bikini-Crazed Creature From the Public Domain by E. Mitchell is the story of a scientist in lust who travels through the plots of various science fiction movies that are now out of copyright. Normally I love this kind of thing; a farcical mash-up playing with the tropes of classic science fiction cinema. In this case, however, it falls flat. The biggest problem with it is not the jokes or the humour (which matched up with my sensibilities quite well) or the integration of the movie plots but rather the complete lack of personalities.

The main character was a letch of a mad scientist who hit on anything with breasts. This was not terribly problematic as there was only one person with breasts in the book. She was his female scientists's counterpart who, in addition to having a part to play in numerous running gags regarding lab coats, was also there to feed the main character straight lines with which he could make double entendres. The final main character was the romantic rival, and research partner of the female.

If this book had something more to it than just a series of scenes from movies, if it had some kind of plot other than just Scientist Meets Girl, Scientist Loses Girl due to humorous radioactive mishap, Scientist Gets Girl because she transplants his brain into a better endowed robot body and had characters with slightly more depth than said robot body, it would have been way more engaging. As it was, the characters were just not interesting and the trappings of the story were not fantastic enough to let me ignore the characters.

Perhaps this does make it fairly true to the source material after all.

John Enzinas reads frequently and passionately. In his spare time he plays with swords.