By Matt Gray. Take a beautiful heroine transported by astral projection to another universe in which she undergoes perils unheard of in our mundane world, overcoming every obstacle with courage and ingenuity in her relentless quest to defeat dictators bent on universal conquest, free a people held in virtual slavery and fight her way home against insurmountable odds, and what have you got?
Not this book.
No deep issues or world-shaking events here. Instead of taking hundreds of pages delving deep into imponderable imponderables, ultimately deciding that nothing is worthwhile and you might as well go jump off a bridge and end it all before somebody ends it for us in a nuclear or economic holocaust, this novella presents a light diversion for a few hours’ amusement. One or two things might make you pause and think, and (if so) the author offers his most sincere apologies. The effort to create something that a reader doesn’t feel he or she has to hide under the mattress from his or her mother, as well as entertain resulted in something above the usual literary pabulum offered these days. In addition, you will not see:
• Gratuitous sex and violence (anything along those lines is absolutely necessary . . . trust us),
• Gratuitous sax and violins (no music at all, that we recall, although the reader is free to improvise something exciting during the fight scenes),
• Gratuitous . . . okay, we’ve done that one to death,
• Bad (or good) pastiches of other humorous fantasy and science fiction (why buy fake Robert Aspirin or Keith Laumer when the real thing is one, better, and two, cheaper?),
• Forced, non-situational jokes that won’t make sense to anyone outside the inner circle when this book achieves the status of cult classic (next week some time).
What have you got? Just an enjoyable piece of science fiction that doesn’t pretend to be more than it is.
Take and read — you’ll be glad you did.
