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The Hundredfold Problem

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by Kassandra Washington

THE HUNDREDFOLD PROBLEM by John Grant is an interesting science fiction novel that begins millions of years in the past. Electronic sentient beings search the universe for intelligent and organic life worthy of their assistance in climbing the evolutionary ladder. On one such planet, the leader of these beings, called Persons, choses a child to be re-planted in an artificially created world, granted immortality and set up as the deity of her people. She is named after the Persons leader, LoChi.

The novel then fast-forwards to the future, where a scantily clad woman, bearing a very big gun called the Multigob, is sent to the world named the Donut; a name coined by the Terries, no less. Her name is Petula McTavish and she's sent to investigate the sudden change in stability of the Donut. Her employers are concerned that any instability may result in financial loses to their interests. The instability seems to involve the introduction of two other religious factions into a native society of Skysouls that previously only worshipped the Girl-Child LoChi.

Then there is evidence that there's a gangster type, Dennis the Complete Bloody Sadist, attempting to gain control. If that's not enough problems, when Petula's partner, the muscle backup, is transported to the planet, he ends up in exactly one hundred pieces, literally! Now McTavish has to round up these hundred killing machines and reintegrate them back into one Knuckle. Without Knuckle, Petula doesn't have a chance of stabilizing the Donut.

THE HUNDREDFOLD PROBLEM provides amusing entertainment. However, the jargon, reminiscent of gangster style of talking, is heavy at times and a little confusing, if not disconcerting. Otherwise the plot is a completely different approach to a science fiction novel. The author successfully focuses on the interaction between two societies in which one considers the other subhuman and man's inhumanity to his neighbors. The fastpaced novel that brandishes outrageous dangers around every corner will keep the reader wondering what could possibly happen next.

This is the "director's cut" of a book that was first published in 1994 in a very different form. Here is the blurb from the back of the new -- and, by me, vastly preferred -- edition.

Please accept no substitutes!

-- John Grant

The story begins several million years ago, when sentient machines from an alien civilization build a Dyson Sphere around the sun's Red Dwarf companion star (which is why we've never seen it) and seed the Sphere with Neanderthals . . .

Or maybe it begins in the future, after terrestrial humanity has discovered the Sphere (now called the Big Dunkin Donut), colonized it, and enslaved the natives.

Whatever ... the Donut is in peril.

Atheist fundamentalist preachers - Rev Rick "The Man" Hamfist and Rev Bo "No Messin" Fingers - inspired by dastardly Dennis the Complete Bloody Sadist, are waging an evangelical war there with the aim of destroying the local, very real, goddess LoChi.

Using a matter transmitter, Earth sends holochips of two plucky adventurers to sort this out: heavy-weapons-toting xeno-anthropologist and scantily clad babe Petula McTavish; and by-the-rules supercop Dave Knuckle. But Knuckle's holochip is accidentally shattered on arrival into one hundred fragments, which are reconstituted to form one hundred lethally diverse partial versions of the supercop.

McTavish now has a hundredfold problem to solve. Actually a one-hundred-and-one-fold problem, but that wouldn't have made as good a title.

And that's before she falls in love . . .

The Hundredfold Problem is that rarest of things - a gloriously funny romp, populated by outrageous, larger-than-life characters, that's also an extremely imaginative, challenging sf novel.