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kilroyPrint date: 1973 (20s: 1, 50s: 1, 60s: 2, 70s: 6, 80s: 5, 90s: 3, 00s: 7)
A book that seeks to answer the age-old question "What would happen if a narcissist discovered time-travel?"-- have sex with himself a lot, apparently.
I laughed out loud while reading this book, once in public so hard I had to put the book down. The main character is such an idiot. He's not the worst person you could possibly give time travel to, but he's at least totally unworthy of the honor. He's deeply insecure and flawed in all sorts of ways that make you shake your head and sigh. Credit to the author, I believe this is what he was supposed to be-- but it's so not the character I expected to be at the head of a story like this.
All time-travel fiction ultimately comes down to the implacable logic of paradoxes, and this book is no exception; there are pages upon pages of expounding the practical difficulties of crossing your own timestream. But what separates time-travel fiction that works from that which doesn't is a sense of irony-- the characters have to either walk knowingly into their fate, or they have to blunder deservingly into it. There has to be a reason outside temporal causality that things happen. In this case, the book ends up in the only logical place it can--the one you know is going to be the ending from page 10, with a few elaborations--but it does so for the reason given above: the main character is an unbelievable moron. And that, at least, is something I hadn't seen in time-travel fiction before.
The narcissism of the main character is reflected quite completely in the actual events of the plot, and I have to give Gerrold credit for having the thematic mirror the actual so well. But while this is a book I will certainly be joking about for a long time, it's not one that I need to read again. It's the book-length equivalent of a three-panel comic. I got a laugh, and now I'm going to move on.
Verdict: Worth reading once, will recycle. (15.5/45 keepers)
Page count: 147 (9092 total)
Completed: 25 (12 female authors, 13 male authors)
Rejected: 20 (12 male authors, 8 female authors)
Next book due: 8/13
A book that seeks to answer the age-old question "What would happen if a narcissist discovered time-travel?"-- have sex with himself a lot, apparently.
I laughed out loud while reading this book, once in public so hard I had to put the book down. The main character is such an idiot. He's not the worst person you could possibly give time travel to, but he's at least totally unworthy of the honor. He's deeply insecure and flawed in all sorts of ways that make you shake your head and sigh. Credit to the author, I believe this is what he was supposed to be-- but it's so not the character I expected to be at the head of a story like this.
All time-travel fiction ultimately comes down to the implacable logic of paradoxes, and this book is no exception; there are pages upon pages of expounding the practical difficulties of crossing your own timestream. But what separates time-travel fiction that works from that which doesn't is a sense of irony-- the characters have to either walk knowingly into their fate, or they have to blunder deservingly into it. There has to be a reason outside temporal causality that things happen. In this case, the book ends up in the only logical place it can--the one you know is going to be the ending from page 10, with a few elaborations--but it does so for the reason given above: the main character is an unbelievable moron. And that, at least, is something I hadn't seen in time-travel fiction before.
The narcissism of the main character is reflected quite completely in the actual events of the plot, and I have to give Gerrold credit for having the thematic mirror the actual so well. But while this is a book I will certainly be joking about for a long time, it's not one that I need to read again. It's the book-length equivalent of a three-panel comic. I got a laugh, and now I'm going to move on.
Verdict: Worth reading once, will recycle. (15.5/45 keepers)
Page count: 147 (9092 total)
Completed: 25 (12 female authors, 13 male authors)
Rejected: 20 (12 male authors, 8 female authors)
Next book due: 8/13