The Maker of Universes - Philip José Farmer

   1965; 247 pages.  New Author? : No. Book 1 (out of 7) in the “World of Tiers” series.  Genres : Classic Sci-Fi; multiverses, pulp fiction.   Overall Rating: 4*/10.

 

    Robert Wolff is in his 60s and has just realized he is losing his mind.  Well, this sometimes happens to people his age, but it’s especially unfair to Robert, since he also has zero memories of the first twenty years of his life.

 

    His latest realization is also ill-timed.  He and his wife Brenda are doing a walkthrough of an empty house they’re considering buying for their retirement years.  And Robert keeps hearing a bugle playing behind one of the closet doors.

 

    Apparently neither his wife nor the real estate agent accompanying them hear the blaring horn, which is why Robert is sure he’s losing his mind.  Maybe he should just get it over with: open the closet door, discover there’s nothing there, and accept his mental deterioration.

 

    Don’t do it, Robert!  If that bugling you hear is unsettling, you’re going to freak out when you see what and who is causing it!

 

What’s To Like...

    The Maker of Universes is the opening volume in Philip José Farmer’s World of Tiers 7-book sci-fi series.  We tag along with our hero, Robert Wolff, as he gets dropped into a strange, multi-tiered world, ruled by a Lord who seems to like kidnapping beings from other dimensions and time-periods to populate his domain.  Each of the five tiers resembles a specific time and place in terrestrial history, but it would be a spoiler to give full details.

 

    The book is written in what I’d call “classic 1950s science fiction” style.  That means non-stop action, paper-thin character development, and a hero who can perform feats of bravery while attracting every female he meets.  Here, our protagonist is initially in his sixties, but magically tones-up and ages-down in the new universe he’s plopped into.

 

    There are lots of creatures for Wolff to cross paths with.  Some are helpful; others want to kill and eat him.  Philip José Farmer gives a name to just about every beast, being, or geographical area and I’m sure he amused himself greatly when doing this.

 

    The Maker of Universes may be written in classic-50s style which targets YA male readers, but Philip José Farmer does some tweaking to that to spice things up.  Lots of humanoids run around unclothed and several rolls-in-the-hay are hinted at.  Natives enjoy eating something called a punchnut, which is an alcoholic fruit, and chewing the leaves of a plant called dhiz, which turns their teeth black, gives their eyes a smoldering look, and slows down their physical motions.  Hmmm.

 

    The ending is typical for classical sci-fi tales.  The old Lord is vanquished, the new Lord assumes the throne, and Wolff is a changed man, and of course, for the better.  However, a chance still exists of thwarting all that, in the form of a cliffhanger ending, which is one of my pet peeves.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.2*/5, based on 132 ratings and 24 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.82*/5, based on 2,094 ratings and 132 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “The histoikhthys is handy.  They seem almost too much of a good thing.”

    “The Lord designed and made them for our pleasure and his,” Ipsewas replied.

    “The Lord made this universe?” Wolff said, no longer sure that the story was a myth.

    “You better believe it,” Ipsewas replied, and took another drink.  “Because if you don’t, the Lord will end you.  As it is, I doubt he’ll let you continue anyway.  He doesn’t like uninvited guests.”  (pg. 65)

 

    “I am as much the enemy of the Lord as you, and he hates me, he would kill me!  He knows I stole the horn and that I’m a danger to him.  His eyes rove the four levels of the world and fly up and down the mountains to find me.  And . . .”

    “Where is this horn you said you stole from the Lord?  Why don’t you have it now?  I think you are lying to save your worthless carcass!”

    “I told you that I opened a gate to the next world and that I threw it to a man who appeared at the gate.  He stands before you now.”

    Podarge turned her head as an eagle swivels hers, and she glared at Wolff.  “I see no horn.  I see only some tough stringy meat behind a black beard!”  (pg. 81)

 

“You Lords are a mean, crafty, sneaky bunch.”  (. . .)  “But I like your style, anyway.”  (pg. 239)

    The cussing is sparse in The Maker of Universes, just 16 instances in the entire book, and limited to damns and hells.  A possible rape is mentioned, and one of the females suffers a miscarriage.  Those sorts of things are atypical in old-time science fiction.

 

    There were a few typos, such as: decible/decibel; slivery/silvery; muscial/musical; carnivous/carnivorous; tired/tried; and wll/will.  I’d make a bigger fuss about this, except the paperback version I read was published in 1965, long before spellchecker existed.

 

    My biggest issue was with the storytelling itself.  Even for the 1950s-60s timeframe, it was terrible.  The plotline teemed with dei ex machina.  Wolff and his companions repeatedly travel hundreds of miles through perilous lands within a single sentence.  A bunch of the humans in the alternate dimension speak Mycenaean, an ancient Greek dialect, and wouldn’t you know it, so does Wolff!  And somehow, his newly-acquired muscle tone is bigger and better than anybody else’s.

 

    Then there are the ethical slurs.  The “negroid” fighters encountered are portrayed as stereotypical savages.  At one point, Wolff is encouraged to make some passes at the ladies at a social gathering, because if he doesn’t, “they’ll think you’re queer.”  And last but not least, Wolff—our hero!—cavorts with several beautiful well-endowed damsels in the new world, since he’s lost interest in his 60-ish wife because she’s fat and wrinkly.  No matter that he was fat and wrinkly too, before his coming to this dimension magically rejuvenated him.

 

    All these issues will make for a terrible read for any adult.  But I have a funny feeling I would’ve loved this book when I was 12 years old.

 

    4 Stars.  One last thing.  At one point (page 147), a chemical reference is made about water, calling it “hydrogen oxide.” Folks, you can call it “dihydrogen oxide’, or “hydrogen hydroxide”, but not “hydrogen oxide”.  Trust me.  I’m a chemist.

Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen - H. Beam Piper

   1965; 215 pages.  Book 1 (out of 8) in the “Lord Kalvan” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Classic Sci-Fi; Multiverses.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

 

    It had to be some sort of time-machine.  One minute Corporal Calvin Morrison of the Pennsylvania State Police was leading a raid on a farmhouse where an escaped murderer was holed up, the next minute some dude in a flying saucer popped up and zapped Calvin into some other time and place.

 

    Check that.  Some other time, obviously, but not some other place.  Calvin grew up in this area.  Things like trees and houses are different in the world he's been transported to, but the basic terrain – the mountains, cliffs, rivers, etc. – are still where they always were.

 

    So that flying saucer thingy must’ve been a time-machine.  The farmhouse he was sneaking up on has now disappeared, and Calvin finds himself alone, out in the sticks.  The first thing he needs to do is find some civilization – assuming it exists – and see what year it is.  Right now, he can’t tell whether he got zapped into the future or into the past.  Until he figures that out, he’ll call this place—

 

    Otherwhen.

 

What’s To Like...

    Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen was published in 1965, and was intended to be the start of a series featuring the then-newly hypothesized concept of multiverses.  The countless array of parallel worlds are monitored by the dimension-hopping Paratime Police, and they occasionally screw up.  Alas, the book was published posthumously, H. Beam Piper having taken his life a year earlier. The remaining seven more books in the series were written by John F. Carr, sometimes by himself, sometimes with a co-author.

 

    We follow Calvin, later dubbed Kalvan, as he acclimates to the world he’s just been dropped in.  He surmises correctly that he has little prospect of returning to his home world.  I liked that Calvin’s first order of business is to learn the local language.  No magic translating gizmos here.

 

    Otherwhen has attained a sword-and-musketry level of technology, where the key compound needed to fire projectiles, gunpowder, is in extreme demand.  The process to make the gunpowder is a carefully-guarded secret,  developed by a sinister quasi-religious group called Styphon’s House.  Luckily, Calvin apparently has a chemistry background and knows all about the three main ingredients needed to make gunpowder – sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter.  More luckily, Calvin knows a more powerful ratio of mixing those three components, much to the distress of Styphon’s House.

 

    The book felt well-researched to me for a 1960’s sci-fi novel.  Calvin may be in an alternate time-line, but the technology to make a metal ball explode out of the end of a musket is the same.  I also enjoyed the Eastern Pennsylvania setting: it’s H. Beam Piper’s home turf, and just north of where I grew up.

 

    The world-building shows its age in places.  Most notably, there’s a lot of smoking going on, without any social stigma.  Heroes do it, so do baddies.  Men do it, so do women.  Drinking is equally acceptable, and I was amused that the Paratime Police had developed a handy medication for dealing with hangovers for when they’re fraternizing with the natives on a parallel world.  It’s called the “First Level Alcodote-Vitamin Pills”.  The brief mention of the Pennsylvania Dutch and one of their signature dishes called “scrapple” resonated with me as well.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Antiphonally (adv.) : sung or played by two groups in turn.

Others: Nitriary (n.); Fluviatile (adj.); Auto-da-fé (n.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.7/5 based on 276 ratings and 94 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.20/5 based on 1,380 ratings and 58 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    The masters complained that the journeymen and apprentices were becoming intractable, meaning that they’d started thinking for themselves.  The peasants objected to having their byres invaded and their dunghills forked down, and to being put to unfamiliar work.  The landlords objected to having their peasants taken out of the fields, predicting that the year’s crop would be lost.

    “Don’t worry about that,” he told them.  “If we win, we’ll eat Gormoth’s crops.  If we lose, we’ll all be too dead to eat.”  (pg. 47)

 

    “Kalvan, this is General Klestreus, late of Prince Gormoth’s service, now of ours.”

    “And most happy at the change, Lord Kalvan,” the mercenary said.  “An honor to have been conquered by such a soldier.”

    “Our honor, General.  You fought most brilliantly and valiantly.”  He’d fought like a damned imbecile, and gotten his army chopped to hamburger, but let’s be polite.  (pg. 137)

 

 

“The gods would do what they wanted to without impertinent human suggestions.”  (pg. 173)

    The quibbles are minor and mostly inherent with any science-fiction work written in the 1940s-60s.

 

    There’s not a lot of cussing in Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, just nine instances in the first 50%.  When H. Beam Piper wants to simulate cussing, he often makes phrases up, usually based on the names of the local deities.  Some examples here are: “Dralm-dammit”, “Great Galzar!”, and “Galzar only knows!”  I love it when authors do this.

 

    The ending is okay, but way too convenient to be believable.  Everything goes just too perfectly for Kalvan and company.  But keep in mind that the target audience for sci-fi books in 1964 was teenage boys, who didn’t mind an ending lacking twists, as long as the white-hats triumphed.

 

    Lastly, it should be noted that there is lots of verbiage devoted to lots of battles. Even YA readers will most likely get tired of all the minutiae H. Beam Piper imparts to the fighting scenes.  Several other reviewers at Goodreads felt the same way.

 

    None of that kept me from enjoying Lard Kalvan of Otherwhen.  Writing a sci-fi tale set in multiverses surely was a groundbreaking task back then, and in that regard H. Beam Piper does an admirable job.  It may not be on  par with Star Wars or even the author’s Little Fuzzy novels, but it’s a better-than-average effort from the heyday of science-fiction.

 

    7 Stars.  Some plot threads remain unresolved at the end.  Calvin may be “Lord Kalvan”, but uneasy rests the head that wears the crown.  Styphon’s House has had its proverbial nose bloodied, but they are still very much a threat.  And the Paratime Police are certainly capable of tinkering with the time-line some more.  None of that is a criticism, though.  That’s why the rest of the series exists.

T-Rexes & Tax Law - Rachel Ford

   2019; 217 pages.  Book 1 (out of 9) in the “Time Travelling Taxman” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres: Time Travel Sci-Fi; Multiverses; Humorous Science Fiction.  Overall Rating : 6½*/10.

 

    Meet Alfred Favero, Senior Analyst for the IRS.  He may or may not be the best agent they have, but he certainly is the most zealous one.  Some might also describe him as conceited, but they’re probably just jealous.

 

    Alfred holds a special scorn for people who cheat on their taxes, and he’s just been assigned an important case: to hunt down the executives of a company called Futureprise, which specializes in some murkily-defined sort of speculative venture.  Whatever they’re into, it doesn’t matter, the IRS suspects them of underreporting their taxes, and now the whole company – from CEO to bottle-washers, has mysteriously packed up and left town.

 

    The prime IRS target is Futureprise’s CEO and founder David Garrity, and Alfred is willing to go to the ends of the Earth to find him and bring him to justice.

 

    That’s mighty noble of you, Alfred, but the more apropos question is: are you willing to go to the beginning of Time to bring him in?

 

What’s To Like...

    T-Rexes & Tax Law is an ambitious effort to combine several of my favorite Science Fiction subgenres, namely Time-Travel, Multiverses, Anti-Heroes, and Humor; then tossing in the Tax-Cheat angle, which results in a really unique storyline.

 

    I liked that Alfred is quite a butthead to start out with.  The banter between him and his fellow IRS agent and IT specialist, Nancy Abbot, is witty and entertaining.  It was fun to watch how Alfred’s demeanor mellows and matures in the presence of Nancy.  Could he possibly be ever-so-slightly falling in love?  I also enjoyed the fact that the David Garrity and his Futureprise employees are not simply portrayed as “black hats”.  There are some understandable reasons for their sudden disappearance.

 

    As the book’s title and cover image indicate, dinosaurs show up, including the mightiest of them all, T-Rex.  He’s joined by some pterosaurs, hadrosaurs, and a particularly pesky plesiosaur; and all these were indeed present in the Cretaceous Period, which is where our time-traveling agents are dumped, some 67 million years ago.

 

    The Multiverse slant is ambitious as well.  Most sci-fi novels assiduously avoid any chrono-hopping paradoxes (what if I go back in time and shoot my parents before I was born?); but Rachel Ford revels in them.  Humor in a work of fiction is always a personal taste, but I liked the way it was done here.

 

    If you hate having to keep track of dozens of characters in a storyline, then T-Rexes and Tax Law is your kind of book.  The only folks to keep close watch on are our two IRS protagonists, the CEO of Futureprise, and the company driver, Josh, a hunk about whom Nancy and Alfred have differing opinions.

 

    The ending is okay, but nothing special.  It resolves the primary Multiverse conundrum, but it’s not very tense and leaves all sorts of facets unresolved, such as the superior weaponry of beings from other dimensions.  But there’s another eight books in this series to address all that.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Disapprobation (n.) : strong disapproval, typically on moral grounds.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.2*/5, based on 129 ratings and 83 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.91*/5, based on 231 ratings and 67 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Alfred’s sleep became uneasy, and he started and twitched, drawing away from the water.  But the spray continued.

    Finally, he woke.  He was not at sea, or the victim of churning waters.  On the contrary, his situation was far, far worse.  He was propped in a chair, with a great, drooling reptile standing over him, slobbering on his face and arms.

    Piercing shrieks split the early morning stillness.  Later, he was glad that the campus was deserted; those screams, he was sure, would have been audible from one end of the oasis to the other.  (loc. 297)

 

    “What I’m saying is, Alfred, you heard the words, but you didn’t listen to my point.  You just responded.  You didn’t think about what I was saying.  You just – you always – want to be right.”

    “But…I usually am,” he said.  It sounded conceited, but he didn’t mean it that way.  On balance, he was right more often than he was wrong; and it seemed as a general rule simpler and safer to operate on the assumption that, in a conflict situation, he was in the right.

    She was incredulous.  “Do you hear yourself?”  (loc. 610)

 

Kindle Details…

    T-Rexes & Tax Law currently costs $0.99 at Amazon.  The other eight books in the series are all priced at $3.99 each.  Rachel Ford has several more series for your reading enjoyment, plus a few standalone novels.  Those e-books run anywhere from $2.99 to $6.49, with most of them costing $4.99.

 

 

If a Mars rover and Humvee had a love child, this, he thought, is what it would look like.  (loc. 783)

    There are some other issues besides the already-mentioned ho-hum ending in T-Rexes & Tax Law.  In brief:

 

    Dinosaurs may be present, but they don’t play a big part in the storyline.  The T-Rex scares our heroes, and the plesiosaur rocks the boat, but that’s about it.  Late in the story, a bunch of them dwelling in our present-day world get rounded-up and time-deported, and all that easy task is worth is a passing mention.

 

    The book is plagued by “spellchecker” typos, such as Garrity’s/Garritys, wroth/wrath, and at least five cases of hanger/hangar.  Commas were also frequently misused.

 

    The cussing is not excessive, but more than I’d expect if the target audience is YA.  I counted 12 instances in the first 25% of the book, including two f-bombs.

 

    Finally, the storyline itself is not compelling.  We start off with a Time-Traveling tale sprinkled with lots of Humor.  Then the humor tails off, and Multiverses pretty much push the Time-Traveling out of the spotlight.  The ending felt rushed, and I was left wondering if any proofreading, beta-reading, and/or polishing was done before publishing this.

 

    6½ Stars.  Despite the technical flaws, T-Rexes & Tax Law still held my interest and kept me turning the pages.  I think that says something about Rachel Ford’s writing skills.

The Long Mars - Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett

   2014; 445 pages.  Book #3 (out of 5) in The Long Earth series.  New Author? : No, and No.  Genre : Hard Science Fiction; Multiverses.  Overall Rating : 4½*/10.

    You and I would call them “Multiverses”, but in the near future (2040 AD or so), when humans first learn how to transverse them (which they call “stepping”), the preferred term is “the Long Earth”.  Each parallel world is different, often only marginally so, but you are always in the same geographic spot.  If you "step" from Oshkosh, by gosh, you still end up in the same geographical spot on the neighboring "Earth".

    Oshkosh may or may not be there, of course, depending on how the timeline played out in that particular dimension.  So here’s a handy tip:  Don’t ever go stepping from the basement of a house.  In the next Earth, you may find yourself ten feet underground, buried alive.

    Just how many multiverses are there?  No one knows, but earlier “stepping voyages” have made it across millions of Earths.  Perhaps the answer is “infinite”.  Or maybe we should say “double infinity”, since you “step the other direction” and return through the worlds you came from.

    Now there is a new revelation.  If you journey to Mars (in a few select multiverses) and “step” away from there, you come across what appears to be a whole new set of multiverses, based on the timelines of Mars, not Earth.  And it’s pretty obvious what we should call that phenomenon.

    The Long Mars.

What’s To Like...

    There are three main storylines in The Long Mars, each one getting about equal time.  1.) Captain Maggie Kauffman heads a two-ship expedition across the Long Earth determined to set a new record for the number of multiverses in one direction.  There are whispers that some of her passengers have ulterior motives for making the journey, but no one has any details.  2.) Sally Linsay and two others start the inaugural voyage across the Long Mars, and it's anybody's guess what to expect on that trip.  3.) Joshua befriends a precocious-but-troubled youth named Paul Spencer Wagner to try to figure out why he’s so extraordinarily bright.

    I thought the writing was well done, which you’d expect from Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter.  The story takes place mainly in the US, which is impressive given that both authors are British.  The story is written in English, not American, so your flashlight is called a torch, your grey and ageing plough might be made of aluminium, and you have tyres on your car.

      I liked the nods given to other writrs of science fiction and fantasy, including Tolkien, Niven, Clarke, Asimov, and Herbert.  There was an obscure (for me) nod given to one Chesley Bonestell, which I had to look up in Wikipedia to understand.  The Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, also gets a nod, and I smiled when some Dune-esque sandworms appeared.

     The emphasis here is on “Hard Science Fiction”, and I think the aim of the authors was to give some idea of what it might be like if we ever did discover how to explore multiverses.  The inclusion of the “beanstalk” apparatus was a nice touch in this regard.  There is a minor story thread concerning rejuvenation, which I’m hoping will be followed up on later in this series.  And the brief mention of canisters of sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide gave me a chuckle; I’ve worked with them both in my career.; they make thiosulfates.

    There are lots of space beasties to meet and avoid being eaten by.  The trolls, elves, kobolds, and “First Person Singular” are all from the previous two books; now we get to deal with talking cats, beagles, sentient crustaceans, and “the Next”.  And thanks to multiverses, we learn that the Plural of Mars is “Marses”.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Extirpation (n.) : the act of totally destroying or killing off of something.

Excerpts...

    “I do see that going through a soft place would be like wearing seven-league boots, Wotan – may I call you Wotan?”

    “No, you may not.”

    “But it would help if I understood how you can make these seven-league-boot jumps.”

    “Actually a better metaphor for a soft place is a wormhole.  A fixed passageway between two points.  As in the movie Contact.  You remember that?”

    “Is that the porno where-“

    “No.  Stargate, then.  What about that?  Oh, for some modern cultural references.”  (pg. 211)

    They weren’t like ordinary kids in the way that the nearest of them immediately rounded on Joshua when he stepped in with Paul, all armed with bronze knives, and a couple further out with raised crossbows.

    “It’s OK,” Paul said, hands held high.  He squirted out some of the high-speed babble.

    Joshua was still subject to suspicious stares, but the knives were lowered. (…)

    “What did you say to them?”

    “That you’re a dim-bulb.  No offence, Joshua, but that was obvious to them already.  Just from the way you looked around, with your jaw slack.  Like you showed up dragging your knuckles, you know?”

    “A dim-bulb?”  (pg. 261)

“You look as blank as a chimp faced with a banana fitted with a zip.”  (pg. 212 )

    Sadly, the disappointments I encountered in the previous book in this series, The Long War, reviewed here, continue in The Long Mars.  There is no advancement of the overall plot of this series, whatever that might be.   Even worse, the story is almost devoid of any action, a sci-fi requisite.  Here’s a list of every bit of excitement (without spoilers) over the course of the book:

a.) one gunshot is fired, but it's of no consequence,

b.) the survivors of a wrecked spaceship are found, with minimal intrigue ensuing.

c.) a being dies, onscreen no less, but it has no consequence on subsequent events,

d.) there’s a jailbreak, but it happens off-screen and we aren’t given the details.

    That’s it.  The rest of the book is predominantly character interaction and world(s)-building.

    The ending is mediocre at best.  The three storylines are hastily tied together, but nothing gets resolved.  Things close with Maggie listening to a scholarly debate about the plusses and minuses of extirpation.  Yawn.  Overall, it felt like the only purpose for The Long Mars is to set up events in the sequel.  At least I hope it does that.

    One last disappointment: The Chinese depicted in the book are markedly stereotyped. They're uncooperative with Maggie and her crew, only give vital food shipments for a starving Earth if attached political strings are complied with, and should first and foremost be remembered for their  repression of Tibet.  It would've been nice if some of them were a bit "gray" in character.

    4½ Stars.  I’m beginning to think this is one literary collaboration that just didn’t work out well.  The Pratchett wit is completely missing here, along with any semblance of a story.  Maybe each author was afraid to mess up whatever plotline the other was planning.  Two books remain in this 5-book series, and there's no doubt that I’ll read them.  But I no longer expect much out of this series.

Doughnut - Tom Holt

   2011; 344 pages.  Book 1 (out of 4) in Tom Holt’s (completed) Doughnut series.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Fantasy; British Humor, Multiverses.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Decimal points are such small things.  A mere dot on the spreadsheet.  A period.  A ‘full stop', if you happen to be British.  So easily overlooked.

    Theo Bernstein was supposed to move the decimal point one place to the right.  Instead, he moved it one place to the left.  If he was an accountant, that would probably cost somebody a few dollars.  Or give somebody a few bucks extra.

    But Theo operates the VVLHC.  That stands for “Very Very Large Hadron Collider”.  He was hoping to generate and detect some new subatomic particle.  Instead he generated an explosion.  Which wiped out an entire mountain in Switzerland.  Along with the VVLHC.  His mistake was detected by all sorts of people.

   No VVLHC means Theo Bernstein no longer has a job.  And you know what they say:

    “The world is an unfair place.  Blow up just one multi-billion-dollar research facility, and suddenly nobody wants to be your friend.”

What’s To Like...

    Doughnut is chronologically the first book in Tom Holt’s 4-volume “YouSpace” series, aka the “Doughnut” series.  I’ve read the other three books and this one follows the standard format.  Theo, our hapless protagonist, finds himself at a new job, with a bunch of bizarre coworkers and strange, nonsensical rules to follow.  The first half of the book is utter mayhem, and the second half of it works slowly but diligently to straighten things out.

    Doughnut is divided into five sections, with some imaginative titles such as “Doughnut Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and “One Empty San Miguel Bottle To Bring Them All And In The Darkness Bind Them”.   There are no chapters, but you can always find a good place to stop: they’re signaled with a cute little doughnut icon.

    The main motif of both this book and this series is Tom Holt having fun with Quantum Physics, with particular emphasis on Multiverses.  The titular doughnut is explained on page 78, although I was already familiar with it, since I read the series out-of-order.   I chuckled at the VVLHC, as well as the “Rope Theory”, a playful poke at Stephen Hawking’s “String Theory”, which seems hauntingly timely, since Hawking just passed away last week.  If you’re a lover of calculus, you’ll enjoy the Ultimate Doomsday Equation, which poor Theo has to solve on page 35.

    Most of the critters to meet are cartoon characters.  Yes, a goblin makes a cameo appearance early on, and a talking bird shows up a short time later.  But the real fun starts when one of the multiverses is inhabited by Disney characters with decidedly unfriendly attitudes.  Ditto for the beasties from A.A. Milne’s Winnie The Pooh stories.  Still, Theoretical Quantum Physics dictates that when there are an infinite number of parallel universes, at least one of them will feature Minnie Mouse looking for a fight and packing an automatic rifle.

    As always, there is an abundance of dry humor and British wit.  Indeed, this is the main reason to read any Tom Holt book.  The ending has a couple of twists and adequately addresses all the bizarre things that happen to Theo.  Doughnut is a standalone novel, as well as being part of a mini-series.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Secateurs (n.) : a pair of pruning clippers for use with one hand.  (a Britishism)

Others : Whinneting (v., a made-up word).

Excerpts...

    In the beginning was the Word.

    Hardly likely, is it?  In order for it to be a word, it would’ve had to belong to a language; otherwise it’d just have been a random, meaningless noise – zwwgmf, prblwbl, bweeeg.   You can’t have a one-word language; words need context.  Therefore, of all the things that could possibly exist in isolation at the Beginning, a word is the least plausible.  All right, back-burnerise the Word for now, let’s try something else.  (pg. 199)

    He’d never really thought about death before, except in a vague, objective kind of way.  He was aware that it existed, but so did Omsk; both of them were distant, irrelevant and not particularly attractive, and he had no intention of visiting either of them.  The thought that he might die alone, pointlessly, unnoticed, unaided and quite possibly at the paws of a viciously predatory cartoon character would never have occurred to him, and he was entirely unprepared to deal with it.  (pg. 207)

  

 Sucrofens, ergo est; it’s sticky; therefore it exists.  (pg. 84)

    I enjoyed Doughnut, although I admit that reading Tom Holt books is an acquired taste.  You have to be ready for a convoluted plotline, which meanders hither, thither, and yon, often seemingly without any literary control by the author.  You can rest assured that Tom Holt will eventually pull it all together, but the fun in each story is in seeing how long it takes him to do so.

        Holt's books also invariably contain some cusswords, which may seem an awkward fit with all the tomfoolery and satire going on.  But somehow, it always works.  Doughnut is no exception, and bear in mind that the cussing in sot excessive.

    Finally, it should be noted that Tom Holt writes in English, not American.  So you will meet words and spellings like colour, realise, Selloptape, maths, whisky, sceptic, and storeys.  This may be off-putting to some (Spellcheck certainly doesn’t like it), but I find novels written in 'English' to be fascinating.

    8 Stars.  There is no such thing as a poor Tom Holt book, although my favorite ones are from his earlier years, when he uses themes from myths and legends, such as the ones reviewed here and here .  All his works are highly recommended.

The Long War - Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

   2013; 422 pages.  Book #2 (out of 5) in The Long Earth series.  New Author? : No, and No.  Genre : Science Fiction; Multiverses.  Overall Rating : 6½*/10.

    The Colonials are revolting!  Some of those “steppers” who have transported themselves ("stepped") into parallel universes have sent a sort of Declaration of Independence back to this world (aka “Datum”).  It seems they’re tired of being taxed by the Datum government for some very minimal services.

    The Datum government is reacting!  They’re sending a bunch of military airships, including the Benjamin Franklin commanded by Maggie Kauffman, on a “goodwill tour” to those uppity otherworlds, reminding them of their taxation responsibilities and showing them a sample of the armed protection it provides.

    The trolls are retreating!  Apparently being used as cheap and menial beasts of labor, they’re stepping away to other multiverses.  Or maybe just one specially-chosen dimension.  Nobody is quite sure where they’ve gone to hide out.  Hey, someone should talk Joshua Valienté, the original stepper and a living legend, into heading out to find them trolls.

    But Joshua’s retired now, happily married and raising a kid out in the sticks in some piddling little town called Hell-Know-Where.  And while he still might have a wanderlust bone or two left in him, it’s a good bet that his family won’t be thrilled if he gets talked into to travel again.

    Especially since it’s an old lover who comes knocking on his door, calling him to adventure.

What’s To Like...

    The Long War is part of a “hard” Science Fiction pentalogy that explores the popular Quantum Physics concept of multiverses.   It is a collaboration of the talents of Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, two of my favorite authors.  It feels like Baxter contributed a lot more to this book than Pratchett, possibly due to the latter’s health issues, and it's set in 2040 AD, 25 years after the first “Step Day”.

    The reader is introduced to a slew of characters right away, and it is advisable to take notes of who’s doing what and traveling where with whom.  The characters quickly separate themselves into 4 or 5 storylines, mostly dealing with exploring the millions of other dimensions, which was also the main theme of Book One, The Long Earth.

    The main topics addressed whilst everyone goes exploring are: Slavery – using the trolls as the persecuted race; Colonization – presented with a rather balanced viewpoint; and Sentience – when is a species intelligent enough to be communicated with instead of eaten?

    The chapters are short – 69 of them for 422 pages, and the book is written in English, not American.  There are lots of creatures to meet – the aforementioned trolls, elves (who are baddies here), kobolds, bipedal wolves, walking tortoises, some nasty beagles, and crest-roos.  Oh yeah, and a talking cat named Shi-Mi.  I also liked the music references – Jim Steinman, John Lennon, Bonnie Tyler, The Kinks, and Buddy Holly.  And I appreciated the tip-of-the-hat to Robert Heinlein and the esoteric Ginnungagap.

    It would’ve been nice to have a brief “The Story So Far” section at the beginning, and even a Cast of Characters, since it’s been a while since I read Book One.  I liked the thread of a western child prodigy exploring with a Chinese expedition, even if there was a bit of trite stereotyping of Chinese culture.

    Pratchett’s wit shines through at times – such as the naming of one of the characters Bosun Higgs, and the concept of “the Outernet”, sort of a multi-world Internet.  But Baxter’s influence predominates in epic sci-fi fashion.  It should be noted that there is some cussing.   The focus is on the diversity of the multiverses, and it was a joy to watch Pratchett/Baxter describe the various worlds.  I never got tired of visiting a new world.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Glebe (n.) : a piece of land serving as part of a clergyman’s benefice, and providing income.

Others :  Irruption (n.); Scry (v.).

Excerpts...

    “Lobsang did this to you.”

    “He did,” she said warningly, “though he used some careless talk from you as an excuse to do it, young man.  We’ll have to have a serious chat about that.”

    “How?  I mean-“

    “Either I was downloaded from my poor dying brain via some kind of neural scan into a bucket of gel, or I was brought back by Tibetan monks chanting the Book of the Dead over my already interred corpse for forty-nine days.  Lobsang tried both ways, he says.”

    Joshua smiled weakly.  “That’s Lobsang, all right.  Always have a backup.”  (pg. 164)

    He knew how she felt.  It was the way he felt, sometimes, if he woke in the small hours, at three a.m., a time when the world seemed empty and stripped of comforting illusion.  A time when you knew you were a mote, transient and fragile in a vast universe, a candle flame in an empty hall.  Luckily the sun always came up, people stirred, and you got on with stuff that distracted you from the reality.

    The problem for Roberta Golding was that she was too smart to be distracted.  For her, it was three a.m. all the time.  (pg. 343)

Humanity … was nothing but the thin residue left when you subtracted the baffled chimp.  (pg. 238 )

    The Long War gets low marks from lots of reviewers over at Amazon, and deservedly so.  First and foremost of the issues is what I call “PWP?”, or “Plot?  What Plot?”  Basically, there is none.  Our various teams of protagonists traipse all over the multiverse, but mostly they're just on sightseeing trips.  Some token action befalls Joshua late in the story, and there’s a seismic occurrence (on several dimensions) at the very end, which is essentially a cliffhanger (I hate cliffhangers) and presumably serves as a teaser for the next book.

    I kept waiting for the titular “Long War” to start, and was informed with about 50 pages to go that it had come to an end, which totally astounded me  There wasn’t any shooting and killing in this “long war”, and I’ve yet to figure out if the title refers to the uppity colonists or the disappearing trolls.

    Maybe this is an inherent drawback from two authors collaborating on a novel.  Perhaps Pratchett thought Baxter would provide the plotline and Baxter thought Pratchett would.  In fairness, it should be noted that Baxter epics are sometimes light on the action and long on the drama, but that’s Hard Sci-Fi for ya.  It’s also possible that Pratchett’s health issues prevented him from adding a ton of his trademark wit to the series.  He did a much better job of that when he collaborated with Neil Gaiman in Good Omens (reviewed here).

    6½ Stars.  The somewhat-blah storyline is saved by the masterful writing skills of both Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, but just barely.  I’ve read the first two books in this series, and have #4 and #5 on my Kindle.  Now it’s just a matter of deciding whether to skip Book 3, The Long Mars, and "step" directly to the last two books in this series.