Crosstime Traffic [Mass Market Paperback]

Lawrence Watt-Evans (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 23, 1992

Travelers from Earth's alternate realities take breaks for dinner at Harry's hamburger joint and relate their experiences to Mitsopoulas, a police officer accustomed to hearing about flying whales and feline vacuum cleaners.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the first half of his first collection of short stories, Watt-Evans comes up with some clever variations on a standard SF theme: imagine that you can travel from world to world among an infinite number of alternate realities, but with no way to return to where you started. Watt-Evans introduces us to a New York City cop whose job it is to deal with chunks of other universes--such as a 200-foot flying whale--periodically dropped onto Earth by "reality storms"; a mourning widower who travels doggedly from universe to universe in a desperate attempt to resurrect his marriage; and an entrepreneur who has discovered a way to bring back marketable ideas from other worlds. Unfortunately, although the book promises "an infinite number of possibilities" for tales of travel between alternate realities, Watt-Evans ( The Misenchanted Sword ) seems to run out of ideas about midway through the collection. The result is an oddly disjointed book whose second half is composed of a few fantasies and some self-consciously old-fashioned stories about martians, monsters and a couple of space-colony kids who decide to build a spaceship.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Del Rey; First Edition edition (September 23, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345373952
• ISBN-13: 978-0345373953
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 3.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,790,352 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I've been writing fantasy for thirty years... no, my fantasy's been published for thirty years. I've been writing it since I was eight. It's what I always wanted to do for a living, and I've been very fortunate in that I've been able to manage that. I try to write fantasy with an element of common sense to it -- not so much mythic archetypes as sensible people.

Other than my job, my life's pretty ordinary -- a nice house in a quiet neighborhood, a wife, two grown kids, and an overweight cat.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very good short story collection, July 28, 2010

By 

Kurt A. Johnson (North-Central Illinois, USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Crosstime Traffic (Paperback)

Lawrence Watt-Evans is an excellent author, writing in a number of genres, but most known for his science-fiction and fantasy stories. This book is a collection of some nineteen of his short stories. Some of the stories are indeed crosstime - dealing with the movement between parallel universes. The rest are either fantasy or science-fiction or a bit unclassifiable.

Some of the stories are quite short, coming in at under two pages(!), but the rest are of a more descent length. In general I really like the stories, especially the crosstime ones - I wish that he had written more of them. The story Storm Trooper is probably the best of the lot, but The Drifter was very interesting, and The Final Folly of Captain Dancy was quite entertaining.

So, if you are a fan of good science-fiction and fantasy, then you will like this book. And, if you are a fan of Lawrence Watt-Evans, as I am, then I can guarantee that you will love it!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great stuff!, February 20, 2002

By 

Avi Dardik (Kfar-Saba Israel) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Crosstime Traffic (Paperback)

I'm not a big sci-fi buff. I mean I LOVE sci-fi, but not the HEAVY stuff. I may get there one day, but for now, the "Ender series" is more or less the most "hardcore" science-fiction books I've read.
Now, this said, it maybe explains why my most favorite theme is time-travel/parallel universes.
Too bad it's one of those less written-about sub-genres in science-fiction.

Anyhow, I think it was almost 10 years ago (I think I was about 16) when I picked an issue of "Amazing Stories", and fell in love with a certain short story there. It was called "The Drifter", written by Lawrence Watt-Evans; A beautiful, parallel-universe short story. It was the best short sci-fi story I ever read. (Again, I never read those "heavy" Asimov stories and the likes..). I liked it a lot, put the magazine away someplace, and didn't give it much thought for a few years.

A few months ago, I found the magazine and read the story. And it rekindled my love for it. But now - I've got Amazon. I logged in and searched for Lawrence Watt-Evans items.

And among various novels he's written, I've found this book - a collection of short stories. One of which is the Drifter!!! Wow... Moreover, there are a couple of stories here that actually won the Hugo award!
I had to have this book!

I got it, I read it, and I enjoyed. All the stories were just right for my love of "soft core" science-fiction and fantasy. Twenty of them.

I enjoyed most of the stories very much. There were a couple of very bad stories as well (Luckily they were very short), that the author himself describe as his early, premature, work.

In short, I can recommend this book. If you want to remember the stories that got you hooked on it as a kid. If you love short, science fiction and fantasy stories, dealing with different aspects not always touched by other writers, time-travel, parallel-worlds, and other cool stuff - buy this book!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent time-travel/alternate-universe short stories., May 13, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Crosstime Traffic (Mass Market Paperback)

This is perhaps the best collection I've ever read of short stories on time travel and alternate universes -- all by the same author. In my opinion, some of the tales are as good as anything written by Ray Bradbury.