..there was a brilliant trilogy by three
different authors.
This is the second volume, and may well be the
best considered strictly as a novel - - that
is, as a coherent story that succeeds by
narrative technique, plot and storytelling, as
opposed to the FIRST book, Chester Anderson's
"The Butterfly Kid", which fires off so many
fireworks, jokes, wacko characters, warped
logics and assorted whiz-bangs that one merely
goes along, helplessly laughing, for the ride,
or T.A.Waters's third book in the series, "The
Probability Pad", which is well-worth reading
if only for one of the most wonderful Dracula
sequences ever set on paper (not to mention
"Altamont" and "Dr Hudson").
Kurland has always reveled in alternate
universes (his continuations of Randall
Garrett's "Lord Darcy" stories, set in an
alternate universe where the Plantagenets are
still on the throne and magic works do full
justice to Garrett's concepts and characters),
and here he takes the idea and runs with it.
Some of the alternate realities his characters
(who are, naturally, himself, Chester and
[picked up halfway] T.A.) go through are
semi-rational, some are simply hilarious. I
first read this book many years ago; i have
never forgotten the class of earnest
dragonettes learning the story of "Ethyl the
Martyr and The Man In The Tin Suit", nor the
sentence that contains three unjustified
assumptions in as many words...
Their mutual friend Randall Garrett based his
briliant wizard Sir Thomas Leseaux on
T.A.Waters, and Kurland takes us through
Garrett's universe on the trip, by the way. He
also plays a neat little trick with the
inherent possibilities of alternate universe
travel that i had never thought of nor
encountered elsewhere, having to do with just
how close adjacent alternate universes can be.
Wonderful book. Read it. Read it AFTER "The
Butterfly Kid", if you can (though "Kid" seems
to be out of print again) and try to read
"Probability Pad" afterward.
(Sadly, Chester and T.A. have, in Kinky
Friedman's evocative phrase, stepped on a
rainbow, and we can expect no new books from
them; Kurland, however, seems to be still
active, with Holmesiana -- including editing a
collection of original Holmesian pastiches --
and at least two 1930s-set mysteries. Find
anything he has written -- particularly
"Transmission Error" and "Pluribus" and read
them; i doubt that you will be disappointed. A
warning, however -- virtually everything he
writes reads like the first volume of a series
you'd enjoy... but he never seems to write the
sequels.) |
