Customer Reviews

Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold's Chronomaster: A Novel

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Rene Korda is a renowned and retired designer of pocket universes. One day he gets a call from the regional representative that two pocket universes (not of his own design) have been put into stasis (their time has been turned off) and they want him to investigate. He reluctantly agrees to do it just because he's curious.

The pocket universes are very different, one a desert world based on the tales of the Arabian Knights, the other a total war zone. There is only one thing these worlds have in common and Korda has to find out why someone would put them into stasis.

With his nearly limitless supply of "bottled time" and the help of "Jester," his ship's artificial intelligence (usually in the form of a remote hover-bot called a PDA or her on-ship hologram), he must avoid the hazards of a universe in stasis: giant spiders, ever-hungry ketter beasts, a giant brain that can kill, and much more!

The mystery unravels slowly as he works toward returning the two pocket universes to normal time. In the process, he finds a deeper evil that has been cleverly hidden for decades.

The novel is adapted from the hit CD-ROM game of the same name. The game is fun and challenging while showing the true style and personality of the late Roger Zelazny, the greatest science-fiction novelist of the twentieth century.
There are numerous differences between the novel and the game, but the plot is essentially the same and both are refreshing and fun.

If you don't have either the book or the game, get them both now!

I interviewed Zelazny once and am a huge fan of his work. But I could not force myself to finish this deadly dull novel after getting half way through it. Korda (a universe builder) is a pale imitation of Zelazny's much more interesting Francis Sandow (a terraformer who reforms planets). Korda's overly cute banter with his robot assistant Jester makes the book childish instead of (like To Die in Italbar and other Zelazny novels) engaging and compelling.