Raymond's Reviews #147

%T The Rim-World Legacy, and Beyond
%A Frank A Javor
%I DAW
%D September 1991
%O paperback, US$4.50
%P 253
%G ISBN 0-88677-505-1

In reviewing Scor-Sting (RR#40) and The Ice Beast (RR#84) I managed to clean forget the original Eli Pike novel from twenty or so years back. Here it is again, packaged with a couple of throwaway shorts. It's another excercise in Chandleresque first-person-gritty, not quite as well executed as the more recent ones but competent, overall (the science is poor, though). If you like the other Pike books, add this to your collection; otherwise, don't bother with it.

%T Red Iron Nights
%A Glen Cook
%I ROC
%D September 1991
%O paperback, US$3.99
%P 270
%G ISBN 0-451-45108-2

Garrett, that tough-guy P.I. in a city full of elves, trolls, mages, dwarves, ratmen, dwarves and corruption, is back. Maybe he shouldn't be; the previous books (beginning with Sweet Silver Blues) were a lot of fun, but this one reads as though Cook was just going through the motions. Let's hope the series either improves or dies a quiet death.

%T A Bridge of Years
%A Robert Charles Wilson
%I Doubleday
%D September 1991
%O trade paperback, US$12.00
%P 333
%G ISBN 

A corridor built by a human-descended superrace of the far future stretches back through time, connecting eras and places in their remote past. A soldier from the nightmare 21st century accidentally breaks into one of the way stations and goes on the ultimate AWOL, fleeing to the late 1950s. The way station, vacant, an ordinary-appearing house in a small town, is left vacant and rented in 1989 by an ordinary man fleeing no less scarifying conflicts of his own...and that's when the real story begins. Wilson explores as no other author has what the pyschology of the time traveler, and what it might really mean to be in love with the past. Despite a fair amount of violence and action, this tale has a gentle, humanistic core. It's well-written enough to incline one to tolerance for the dismissive way the author treats the potential for temporal paradox. Recommended, though not at trade-paperback prices.