Prelude to a Change of Mind

Rating:
Summary: Speaking Intelligibly of the Hubris of our Species
Review: If you think yourself a reader, if through your reading experiences you have begun to understand the word and its connotations, you seek stories that are edgy, with serious themes, stories that dare leave you thinking.

You let yourself be surprised by stories like Rob Lewis' Prelude to a Change of Mind because, for starters, his story isn't classifiable or formulaic. Is it a coming of age SF story, a Middle Earth spin-off, an ecologist's philosophical treatise? It's all of these, more or less, expressed in a prose that is at once beautiful, technical, and memorable.

And from recent fiction you'll not find a character more endearing than Jackanapes Plenty, a poet, a raconteur extraordinaire -- no, poet, the unofficial bard of Dvarsh culture though he is of questionable, mixed ancestry (Says his cousin, Ekaterina Rigidstick, "Pureblood Dvarsh seem to lack a crucial faculty for garbling concepts and phraseology."). With a diction and lexicon as twisted as DNA strands, he is not always there (pun intended), but he is well-meaning, a friend to our heroine, Meg Christmas, his "little buddy," a metamathemage, naive still of the futures she plays a role in. Jackanapes' poems deserve as close a reading as the story itself.

This novel, the first in a planned series, values any reader's time. Its characters speak intelligibly of the hubris of our species, and so they speak to us. To his credit, Mr. Lewis has pulled off such a thing -- while remaining entertaining and free of pedantry.

James Rossignol
Professor of English, San Antonio College