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markk's review
5.0
What would you do if you discovered a path to alternate worlds? This question is at the heart of Michael P. Kube-McDowell’s novel, which begins with a businessman from a different America who stumbles across a gateway to a number of parallel Earths. His discovery is exploited by a U.S. government in a world where it is losing the Cold War. Initially using it as a means of gaining new technologies, the president is emboldened by its existence to take increasingly aggressive measures that risk annihilation by the superior Soviet forces, secure in the existence of an alternate world refuge should it occur. Yet as he pushes the world closer to nuclear war, a growing number of people in his world and another work to stop him before it is too late.
Kube-McDowell’s novel is an impressively imaginative work, one that succeeds through quality writing. His genius is in respecting the reader’s intelligence; whereas many alternate history authors convey the differences of their worlds through clumsy exposition, Kube-Mcdowell lets readers discover his worlds slowly through the story itself and “documentation” that he intersperses between the chapters. Though I found this approach frustrating at first, it created a real sense of investment in the text that paid off as the novel went along. Though his explanation of the gateway phenomenon at the end of the novel was not to my taste, it is a minor quibble, and one that is presented in a way that detracts neither from the plot or the ability to enjoy the novel as a whole. In short, this is a quality novel, one worth the time of any fan of science fiction.
Kube-McDowell’s novel is an impressively imaginative work, one that succeeds through quality writing. His genius is in respecting the reader’s intelligence; whereas many alternate history authors convey the differences of their worlds through clumsy exposition, Kube-Mcdowell lets readers discover his worlds slowly through the story itself and “documentation” that he intersperses between the chapters. Though I found this approach frustrating at first, it created a real sense of investment in the text that paid off as the novel went along. Though his explanation of the gateway phenomenon at the end of the novel was not to my taste, it is a minor quibble, and one that is presented in a way that detracts neither from the plot or the ability to enjoy the novel as a whole. In short, this is a quality novel, one worth the time of any fan of science fiction.
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