Customer Reviews

Finity

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

While John Barnes has written a number of simply outstanding books (Mother of Storms, One for the Morning Glory), this Pohl-esque entry into the alternate worlds genre isn't one of them.

Finity gets off to a good start. The (first-person) narrator speaks in stilted, self-centered prose like, perhaps, a character from a R.A. Lafferty novel. It becomes apparent, after a while, that he inhabits a world that seems to have a changing past. Not only that but this changing past seems to be different for everyone. And then there is the matter of the United States having gone missing.

It's an interesting premise until it turns into a road trip. Then the story begins leaking steam. One of the characters turns out to be a red herring. (Or something very much like a red herring.) People you've just begun to know turn out to be expendable or not around for all that long for other reasons.

The mess is polished off with a couple of dream sequences that might have been adapted from the rendezvous of Picard and Kirk (well, not really, but ...). Quirks of physics and mathematics explain everything away.

Overall, underwhelming. Not a bad book to be stuck on an airplane with (which is where I read most of it) but there's better reading to be had. Much of it, in fact, with Barnes's own name on it!

Somewhere out there in a a parallel world a version of me enjoyed a better version of this book - one in which interesting characters cleverly outwit sinister adversaries without resorting to the scientific version of "it was all a dream". To be fair - the story started well, has some nice ideas, but doesn't go anywhere. Perhaps like the citizens of America it should have sought a happier future.

The notion of parallel worlds is not one that science fiction fans find hard to digest. In Barnes' "Finity," we find ourselves on a world where the Nazi's won WW-II, America fell, and communities of "Expat" Americans live elsewhere.

Enter Lyle, the main character of the story, an expat professor, whose life is about to take a turn for the... parallel.

Barnes' style is great, and the plot is replete with substance and fantastic ideas. Lyle watches in total confusion as his wife seems to transform from the woman he loves to a trained military soldier - in the blink of an eye. Likewise, the entirety of his world seems to start functioning this way: people are of one sort one second, then change to have different memories from what might be a parallel universe the next.

As Lyle is hired by a mysterious organization to attempt to unravel this confusing situation, things get even more confusing: no matter who they interview, no one seems to come from a world where America still stands. And so, the terrified professor and a team of remarkable characters head off for just that place: what is there? I won't ruin it - refuse to ruin it.

Now, all that said, the quantum physics in this book was a tad overwhelming for the amateur such as myself. I had to read passages a few times to wrap my head around the explanations of what was happening (when, to be honest, a 'dumbed-down' version would have sufficed in my mind). So, the novel has a bit of "work" to it: this is not brain-candy SF, it's SF you'll have to think, learn, and process.

Lyle is a lackluster hero, a normal joe-average, and that can also get a little frustrating at points, especially since everyone else seems so qualified and important, and you start to wonder why anyone wanted him on this mission in the first place.

Despite those two failings, the book was quite good, and I enjoyed it. I'm not sure I'll be re-reading it anytime soon (and if I do, I'll skip the physics lessons), but it was defitely a worthwhile read.

'Nathan

Fans of Barnes' Time Wars series will certainly find this book familiar. The similarities stretch beyond the basic theme of the investigation of multiple worlds, to similarities in the personalities of the lead characters and their relationships. Although this book does develop some rather interesting ideas, such as the notion of abduction (vs. induction or deduction as ways of forming conclusions), the story simply doesn't work. A large part of the problem seems to be that Barnes decided that he would try and force the story into a happy ending. His highly uncharacteristic insistence that the story end well for the main character leaves many loose threads and questions. One of the things that I admire most about Barnes is his honesty--when the story calls for a character to die, he or she does, even if it is rather a likeable character. Although this is true for most of Finity, the ending is a peculiar departure into La La land which left me very annoyed. Another basic problem with this book is the complete lack of likeable characters. By twenty pages in I seriously wanted to poke the main character with a sharp stick, which made it hard to sympathize with him. All in all, not a successful book, and I'd only recommend it to die hard Barnes fans who've already exhausted all his other writing.

I am not new to John Barnes and I have greatly enjoyed his other books that I've read. That's what makes this one a real disappointment. Here there are some good general ideas but with atrocious writing, weak characters, and a plot structure that is surprisingly amateurish for an established author. The story concerns the trusty sci-fi concept of infinite worlds branching off from each other whenever someone makes a decision, and here those infinite realities are coming back together in calamitous ways. Barnes' concept for why this is happening, involving future uses of quantum technology, is actually very creative and based on real science. But beyond that serviceable basic concept, this novel is mostly a failure. The collapsing realities merely take the form of completely typical alternate histories - conceptions that any beginning author would come up with - as Barnes' ideas of alternate histories are just the simplistic outcomes of wars being won by the other side. (By the way, other reviewers are accusing Barnes of ripping off Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle," but I see that as more of an influence or inspiration. In any case, it's been done better.)

Notwithstanding the completely unchallenging alternate histories, the characters in this novel are flat and contrived, with stereotypical personalities and stilted personal dialogue - that is, when they're not speechifying in nerdy multi-paragraph dissertations on dense concepts. Meanwhile the lackluster protagonist Lyle is little more than a whiny self-obsessed nerd. Then there are the regular plot contrivances, such as the mysterious mastermind who regularly pops up out of nowhere when the other characters are in trouble, and who keeps all the characters active with unlimited wealth and the effortless ability to make things happen anywhere in infinitely multiple worlds. Add to all this Barnes' completely amateurish method of creating suspense, which is to have the character who knows all the answers refuse to explain things to everyone else until a later time, then having that same character go on and on for several pages in a row when the attempted suspense falls apart. I could write a few more paragraphs about all of the story's plot holes, inconsistencies, and loose ends, especially how only the main characters even notice all the drastically altering realities. In closing I must state that John Barnes has written several brilliant and powerful sci-fi novels, and he has a deserved reputation as a rising master of the field. For that reason, he might consider disowning this one. [~doomsdayer520~]

John Barnes has written some first class books. This isn't one of them. First, it's full of inconsistencies. Do people's minds travel among parallel universes, or their bodies? The answer: both, with no reason given for why it's sometimes one and sometimes the other. Second, the basic plot is mostly hackneyed. The one original twist is a heavyhanded allusion to TV channel-surfing that isn't enough to sustain a novel. It might have worked for a short story. Perhaps that's what this book is: a short story stretched into a short novel. Anyway, I left it feeling cheated, an experience I have never had with a Barnes book before.

The book starts out strong, with an intriguing series of puzzles about missing memories and a tense, fast-paced plot--which makes the book's second- and third-act fizzles all the more disappointing. Barnes is at his best in this book setting the scene; worthy of note are his descriptions and characterizations of the artifical-intelligence-controlled vehicles. However, the effective characterization ends there. One progresses through the book without meeting a fully developed or even terribly interesting human or seeming-human character; most of the weak stabs at characterization come in descriptions of personality quirks (Ipwhin's fidgeting) or in cliched, simplistic, and occasionally borderline-offensive terms (Ipwhin's characterization of Billie Beard, herself a one-dimensional stereotype). The book bogs down in the middle with excessive dialogue and theory, which become almost irrelevant--why did I have to know this again?--by the time the final "quest" sequence rolls around. Action yields to incomprehensibility and deflation as the book falls apart in an "I give up" ending. Unanswered questions (e.g., How did all those apparently critical people end up in the same chat room for years? Why are certain members of the team even there?) are balanced out by unneeded information (all the details about the Reichs lead to nothing, for example). All in all, a good idea gone awry.

FINITY takes place in the year 2062, in a world where the Axis powers won World War II. Most of the world is divided up into reichs, with just a few remote free zones, such as the New Zealand expatriate community to which professor Lyle Peripart belongs. One day Lyle is contacted by the extraordinarily wealthy industrialist Geoffrey Iphwin to work within his company. The offer is too good to refuse.

Then strange things begin to happen.

Lyle starts noticing unexplained inconsistencies in the automated logs. People around him, including his fiancé, are replaced at seemingly random times with identical duplicates who have different memories and skills.

The other mystery involves the disappearance of the United States of America. Not physically, but perceptually - no one can recall ever speaking to anyone within its borders. Even thinking about the place is difficult. For all intents and purposes, it has ceased to exist.

FINITY deals with alternate realities - a concept which has fascinated me since I read Madeleine L'Engle's A SWIFTLY TILTING PLANET in elementary school - and quantum theory. The book gets off to a ponderously slow start. There is a lot of scientific and mathematical mumbo-jumbo to wade through right at the beginning, and a considerable amount of scene-setting which is, frankly, annoying. (Everything in this world - vehicles, houses, etc. - is completely automated and outfitted with something akin to Douglas Adams' "genuine people personalities.") Things do clear up eventually, though both the reader and the characters are kept in the dark for a good two thirds of the story, after which it suddenly becomes a non-stop action adventure.

The biggest flaw of the novel for me was the flatness of the characters. There's a good sized cast, but put together they don't have half the personality of Melpomene Murray, the central heroine in Barnes' ORBITAL RESONANCE. If I didn't know better, I'd think the books were by different authors; the style is that different. The pacing is also something of a problem. The solution to the mystery is revealed literally in the final few pages, so the ending feels rushed.

It's an alright book that could have been much better. I recommend seeking out Frederik Pohl's THE COMING OF THE QUANTUM CATS, which is a stronger, better developed exploration of these themes.

Well, I didn't have high hopes for this one based on the reviews I read, but I decided to give it a shot anyhow. It didn't help that I knew something about the ending based on another customer's review! The story is driven by the concept of parallel dimensions and is something I have read about in Factoring Humanity by Robert Sawyer and Michael Crichton's Timeline recently, so it was all very familiar. Regardless, Barnes did a good job explaining. I think you can learn a little about quantum theory from the book. I though the first half of the book was great and really expected it might fall apart, but it didn't; it just got sort of slow. Any good sci-fi book needs to answer the mysteries it poses and I think Finity does a good job with this. I found only a few unanswered questions in my mind, but nothing major that disturbed my enjoyment of the book. Overall, it is an enjoyable read, and I would recommend it if you are interested in the "Many Worlds/Parallel Dimensions" concept.

This is one of those books that just doesn't seem to be the right length. Some of the concepts would make great short stories, but stuffing everything into about 300 pages left a number of spots that either needed to be expanded on or left out.

While I can't say that I want my six bucks back, I also can't really feel comfortable telling all my friends that they should run out and buy this book. I can say that if you haven't read some of Mr. Barnes' other books, this is probably not the best one to start with.