Customer Reviews

Alternities

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a powerfully realised parallel universe novel, set in the 1970s. Its two main threads are:

- The experiences of everyman agent Rayne Wallace, whose marriage is disintegrating as he is drawn ever-deeper into his government's secret infiltration of a number of accidentally discovered parallel earths.

- The plot of the reckless US president Robinson to launch a sneak attack on the USSR.

The whole premise is fully thought through, and is realised brilliantly. The parallel worlds feel completely real, inhabited by real people. The story is full of astute observations about relationships and political machinations.

McDowell is a master of the thriller style. The writing, by and large, is excellent. I have just one criticism of the way the book is written - he has a tendency to over-describe emotional passages, and particular those involving physical intimacy. A tad more subtlety would have helped in these instances. This over-description notwithstanding, these scenes are intelligent and well-observed.

One striking facet of the novel is the way Alternity Blue's Norfolk nuclear incident is so evocative of the World Trade Centre attack. This book was written in the late 80s, and so obviously this was not intentional. But it's a mark of the writer's intelligence that it seems so apt in 2008.

All in all, this is an exceptionally good science fiction/political thriller novel. McDowell is clearly a writer of burning intelligence, and I look forward to reading more of his books.

This was the perfect combination of SF and political drama. It really outlined the dangers of too much power falling into the wrong hands. All of the characters' stories were compelling. It really pulled you right in from the start. Definitely worth the read!

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.

I had a very different reaction to this book than other reviewers; I felt that it is an homage to the hard-boiled sf novels of old-time (forties, fifties) science fiction.

Perhaps because the split between the parallel universes was set in 1950, all of the universes have a cold war fifties feel, where men are white men and women are sexual/love objects for the men. I did not get a strong sense of the different versions for a long time into the book, and even then only two of them came clear.

Just saying that in one of them the US goverment is controlled by the mafia, and that it's not really that different, doesn't give me a clear sense of what that world is like. None of the worlds seemed to be remotely ours. The evil characters also seemed to be way overblown in their ruthlessness, and the good ones were mostly weak and clueless.

The plot was strong enough to get me through the end, but I felt that the setting and characters could easily have been more effective. I kept checking the dates to be clear that it was written in 1988 and set in 1977, not thirty years earlier on both counts. The best thing about this book is the concept.

This is not a perfect parallel worlds story, and is slightly unsatisfying to the extent it doesn't tie up all the plot developments. Overall, however, "Alternities" is a superior work of this genre; a satisfying, even thought-provoking read. The non-science components of the book turn heavily on modern politics and world history, and, hooray, they ring very true. Kube-McDowell obviously is a student of history, and understands the American political system down to the nuances of rank and custom.

The novel provides, as these things go, a relatively high sense of verisimilitude, especially in its media extracts (book reviews, news articles, encyclopedia entries and so forth, provided to give quick context to the events in the multiverse that we are invited to observe).

Even though the book was first published in the late '80s, it makes for a great cautionary tale about 21st Century politics in general and a certain US president in particular. The subplots and supporting characters are well developed -- in several cases to an extent that's electric and eye-opening, In other aspects the book is your standard, science-fictional, one-man-against-all tale, but everything is not as it seems and villains and heroes seem quite interchangeable, depending on your point of view and the passage of events.

Overall: A good, solid read, especially for lovers of contemporary politics and SF in general.

Alternities

by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

Parallel universes. Reminiscent of "Sliders". A nuclear blast around 1950 has somehow triggered a 5-way split of multiverses which start to diverge from each other. No explanation is given of who discovered or created "gates" between the "Alternities".

In the 21st century the USA from 1 alternity seeks to obtain hi-tech secrets from another alternity in a bid to overthrow Soviet dominance...but their attempts come unstuck.

Alternities is a sometimes frightening, but all the time captivating novel that shows, among other things, some of the othe paths the Cold War might have taken. My only wish is that we coud see more stories set in these set of alternate universes.

--Mark R. Whittington (...)

An excellent parralel universe novel. Good characters investigating several alternative 1970s universes. Worth reading if you can find it.