SLIPSTREAM by MICHAEL OFFUTT
GENRE: SCI-FI
NOVEL
TBR REVIEWER– MARK WOODS
GENRE: SCI-FI
NOVEL
TBR REVIEWER– MARK WOODS
After a car accident puts Jordan Pendragon in hospital, he awakes able to manipulate space and time and finds himself seemingly being followed by a mysterious British male with an unhealthy interest in Jordan. After tackling his pursuer, Jordan finds himself transported to an alternate dimension, put in peril by the Manhattan Projects Atomic experiments in our world way back in 1945. With an insane Super-Computer now in control of this new world, Jordan quickly discovers that events happening in this parallel reality have dire ramifications and consequences for his own dimension unless he can utilise his new abilities to alter the future. But time is running out...
This was a bit of a strange book that never really fully came together for me. Jordan himself is a bit of a contradiction - a sporty guy who loves Ice Hockey but who is also a bit of a science geek who spends his down-time considering Schrodinger’s cat in some detail. His sister as well remains something of an enigma for much of this novel and neither character ever really develops much beyond the first page. The plot felt highly derivative and a bit
of a mish-mash of ideas better utilised by other authors who have come before. This seemed to borrow heavily from such fare as Stephen King’s Dark Tower series with its themes of destruction able to cross between worlds. There are even two towers, one Black, one White, that co-exist (one in our world, one in Avalon, the parallel reality) and which seem to hold all reality together! Even though this book may have held a little shred of promise in its opening chapters, ultimately it never really delivered and the end result was something
of a disappointment!
I didn’t think it was possible to be offended by an accent, let alone reading it in a book, but the British character seemed to just spout as many generic and stereotypical British cuss words as was possible as soon as he was properly introduced. Think a cruder version of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins and you will come close! But that was just a small thing. Overall, this whole novel just felt a little clumsy and unstructured and I think it was about the half-way point that I realised that not only could I not associate or find it in myself to care about the characters, but that I still didn’t feel as though I really knew them. I felt no connection with them whatsoever and this made it very hard for me to even care what happened to them...
This is the first book in a series and I can honestly say that it has kind of put me off wanting to continue any further.
This was a bit of a strange book that never really fully came together for me. Jordan himself is a bit of a contradiction - a sporty guy who loves Ice Hockey but who is also a bit of a science geek who spends his down-time considering Schrodinger’s cat in some detail. His sister as well remains something of an enigma for much of this novel and neither character ever really develops much beyond the first page. The plot felt highly derivative and a bit
of a mish-mash of ideas better utilised by other authors who have come before. This seemed to borrow heavily from such fare as Stephen King’s Dark Tower series with its themes of destruction able to cross between worlds. There are even two towers, one Black, one White, that co-exist (one in our world, one in Avalon, the parallel reality) and which seem to hold all reality together! Even though this book may have held a little shred of promise in its opening chapters, ultimately it never really delivered and the end result was something
of a disappointment!
I didn’t think it was possible to be offended by an accent, let alone reading it in a book, but the British character seemed to just spout as many generic and stereotypical British cuss words as was possible as soon as he was properly introduced. Think a cruder version of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins and you will come close! But that was just a small thing. Overall, this whole novel just felt a little clumsy and unstructured and I think it was about the half-way point that I realised that not only could I not associate or find it in myself to care about the characters, but that I still didn’t feel as though I really knew them. I felt no connection with them whatsoever and this made it very hard for me to even care what happened to them...
This is the first book in a series and I can honestly say that it has kind of put me off wanting to continue any further.
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