Wheels Within Wheels [Import] [Hardcover]

F. Paul Wilson (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Sidgwick and Jackson (1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0283986050
• ISBN-13: 978-0283986055
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,672,754 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born toward the end of the Jurassic Period and raised in New Jersey where I misspent my youth playing with matches, poring over Uncle Scrooge and E.C. comics, reading Lovecraft, Matheson, Bradbury, and Heinlein, listening to Chuck Berry and Alan Freed, and watching Soupy Sales and horror movies. I sold my first story in the Cretaceous Period and have been writing ever since. (Even that dinosaur-killer asteroid couldn't stop me.)

I've written in just about every genre - science fiction, fantasy, horror, a children's Christmas book (with a monster, of course), medical thrillers, political thrillers, even a religious thriller (long before that DaVinci thing). So far I've got about 33 books and 100 or so short stories under my name in 24 languages.

THE KEEP, THE TOMB, HARBINGERS, and BY THE SWORD all appeared on the New York Times Bestsellers List. WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS won the first Prometheus Award in 1979; THE TOMB received the Porgie Award from The West Coast Review of Books. My novelette "Aftershock" received the 1999 Bram Stoker Award for short fiction. DYDEETOWN WORLD was on the young adult recommended reading lists of the American Library Association and the New York Public Library, among others (God knows why). I received the prestigious Inkpot Award from San Diego ComiCon and the Pioneer Award from the RT Booklovers Convention. I'm listed in the 50th anniversary edition of Who's Who in America. (That plus $3 will buy you a girly coffee at Starbuck's.)

My novel THE KEEP was made into a visually striking but otherwise incomprehensible movie (screenplay and direction by Michael Mann) from Paramount in 1983. My original teleplay "Glim-Glim" first aired on Monsters. An adaptation of my short story "Menage a Trois" was part of the pilot for The Hunger series that debuted on Showtime in July 1997.

And then there's the epic saga of the Repairman Jack film. After 14 years in development hell with half a dozen writers and at least a dozen scripts, THE TOMB is finally moving toward production as "Repairman Jack" from Beacon Films and Touchstone. The plan is to make Jack a franchise character. (Gotta tell you: all the years of this has worn me out.)

I've done a few collaborations too. One with Steve Spruill on NIGHTKILL, and a bunch with Matthew J. Costello. Matt and I did world design, characters, and story arcs for Sci-Fi Channel's FTL NewsFeed, a daily newscast set 150 years in the future. An FTL NewsFeed was the first program broadcast by the new channel when it launched in September 1992. We took over scripting the Newsfeeds (the equivalent of a 4-1/2 hour movie per year) in 1994 and continued until its cancellation in December 1996.

We did script and design for MATHQUEST WITH ALADDIN (Disney Interactive - 1997) with voices by Robin Williams and Jonathan Winters, and the same for The Interactive DARK HALF for Orion Pictures, based on the Stephen King novel, but this project was orphaned when MGM bought Orion. (It's officially vaporware now.) We even wrote a stageplay, "Syzygy," which opened in St. Augustine, Florida, in March, 2000.

I'm tired of talking about myself, so I'll close by saying that I live and work at the Jersey Shore where I'm usually pounding away on a new Repairman Jack novel and haunting eBay for strange clocks and Daddy Warbucks memorabilia. (No, we don't have a cat.)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Part II or...?, October 8, 2008

By 

Sam R. Bird - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wheels within Wheels (Paperback)

This was a nice read.

But... I don't see it as a strong continuation of a series.

It is more of a sideline that takes place in the future regarding the first book.

If you're a fan you will probably enjoy it.

Just don't make the assumption it going to further the first book in a deeply meaningful way.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Early Wilson work is all plot, no characters, July 21, 2010

By 

Joshua Mauthe (Nashville, TN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wheels Within Wheels (Mass Market Paperback)

Another early Wilson book, and this one is in many ways the exact inverse of Healer (The LaNague Federation, Book 3) - it has an intriguing story and an interesting world, but characters so thin they're barely present. Wheels Within Wheels is the middle book of Wilson's very loose LaNague trilogy, so it has the advantage of a world already constructed to play around in. And its labyrinthine plotting - which involves an effort to bring down the federation, a long-dead father who may have been murdered, a strange alien world, and lots and lots of libertarian thinking - makes for an intriguing story, but it's hard to care all that much when the characters have almost no personality whatsoever. Still, it's worth remembering that this is an early work for Wilson, and you can see him trying out different ideas here and experimenting. In the end, though, it's only really interesting for fans; new readers should definitely start elsewhere.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Wheels Within Wheels F. Paul Wilson, August 8, 2008

By 

R. Gauthier "Robin" (Plymouth, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wheels within Wheels (Paperback)

Sequel to Enemy of the State. I am a huge fan of F. Paul Wilson, and I enjoyed Enemy of the State, but I started to lose interest a little bit with this more complicated followup.