Rating: 
Summary: A competent page-turner
Review: This is the sort of book for which little in the way of plot synopsis can be presented without giving away too many of the twists its readers will want to experience for themselves, so the bare-bones introduction provided by the cover blurbs will have to suffice for you. That said, the plot turns Hogan provides are rather predictable, and his hints are heavy-handed. If you haven't figured out exactly what is going on long before Jarrow or the members of the "Pipeline" have, you haven't been paying attention. Even the final plot twist is foreseeable by the novel's midpoint. Before I begin to sound like some jaded know-it-all, I should note that this is not necessarily a bad thing for this sort of fiction; it means at the very least that Hogan is an honest writer who keeps all of his cards on the table for his readers--no deus ex machina, no magical rescues here. I find it hard to judge a writer from a single example of his novels, but if this one is any indication Hogan is a member of the right-wing libertarian school of hard SF writers, who believe (as do all good libertarians) that government is at best a necessary evil, and seldom necessary at that, and whose vision of a utopian future involves total freedom in a free-market capitalist vein. Thus the dystopia under which his main character must operate is a left-wing authoritarian government that believes industry is inherently bad and all human activity must be regulated, originating in the environmental or "green" movement we see around us today. For anyone mindful of the fact that money is power, this extrapolation is almost hilariously naive, but I was willing to suspend my disbelief in this case. Still, it is hugely disappointing to encounter a writer who seems to be aware of the tools of totalitarianism (the education system, mass media, etc.) and how they are used in a nominally "free" culture for social control, but remains blind to how such methods of indoctrination are in use _right now_ in propagandizing the very values he seems to hold so dear. That said, some details of his extrapolation leave something to be desired. If having a baby in this hyper-controlled future society, where meat carries warning labels and the goverment is encouraging its citizens to switch from coffee to a soy-based substitute, involves giving up control of your life to over-ecoconscious bureaucrats, would those bureaucrats ever allow the parents to have cigarettes in the house? Would cigarettes be legal at all? Does any historical analysis support the idea that subjection to generations of totalitarian rule instills a desire for freedom, rather than for more totalitarian rule? These are minor quibbles. On the other hand, the politics may turn off some readers, and the dependence of the plot on the reader not quite knowing exactly what is happening would seem to preclude multiple readings. In addition, a previous reviewer was accurate in noting that everything here has been done before; to this I would add that the superspy-with-amnesia bit was perhaps most notably done before by Robert Ludlum in his "Bourne" series. The book is a competently written page-turner that should take 1-3 evenings to complete.
Rating: 
Summary: You're no Philip K. Dick.
Review: Ugh. This type of book is something Philip K. Dick does -way- better. The whole misplaced identity and 'tyranical' government thing is just handled so poorly here.
The attempts at philosphing are such poor straw-man scenarios (Do you want your government telling you where you can go! Don't give out any personal information!). And the whole multiple identity thing is just chunky.
At least Dick kept you in suspense as to which identity was valid, and made you care/humanize with the poor guy. This book is nothing more than a cheap execuse for Mr. Hogan to expouse on how much he hates government intrusion (yet I bet he'll complain if the roads aren't plowed).
I really regret picking this up, I don't regret putting it down.
Rating: 
Summary: An intellectual roller-coaster ride
Review: What if you weren't . . . you?
(What if you were a writer _telling the story_ of someone in that situation? How would you organize it?)
If you're the protagonist in this fascinating SF novel, you're probably in for some interesting experiences. But will you get to keep them?
(If you're James P. Hogan, you tell the story in chunks, cycling through the various nonoverlapping personalities and telling the parts of the tale for which each is "present," as it were.)
Who do you turn out to be? Are you one person or several? Which hero saves the day, and which hero _gets_ saved? Are they the same person? Are you sure?
Hogan is in fine narrative form here. I've seen his writing described as "textbook-dry," but that's not likely to dissuade those of us who regard, say, Kernighan and Ritchie's _The C Programming Language_ as the pinnacle of expository prose style. Hogan writes like a _good_ engineer; his prose does the job he wants it to do, and the meat is in the story. (You don't need mannered digressions about the splendid colors of the autumn leaves in a book whose theme is that the universe isn't what you think it is.)
In fact this is a fun book, full of Hogan's trademark mind-blowing coolness. The underlying technology is rendered plausible and the story is interesting from beginning to end. Even if you know what must be going on -- and you will, by midway through the second chapter, even if you hadn't figured it out from the title -- you'll still be kept guessing until the very end about (a) how and why it happened, and (b) how it will ultimately turn out.
Hogan is one of my two favorite living SF writers (the other is Spider Robinson, who doesn't write "hard" SF). If you like SF, you'll like him.
Rating:
Summary: An intellectual roller-coaster ride
Review: What if you weren't . . . you?(What if you were a writer _telling the story_ of someone in that situation? How would you organize it?) If you're the protagonist in this fascinating SF novel, you're probably in for some interesting experiences. But will you get to keep them? (If you're James P. Hogan, you tell the story in chunks, cycling through the various nonoverlapping personalities and telling the parts of the tale for which each is "present," as it were.) Who do you turn out to be? Are you one person or several? Which hero saves the day, and which hero _gets_ saved? Are they the same person? Are you sure? Hogan is in fine narrative form here. I've seen his writing described as "textbook-dry," but that's not likely to dissuade those of us who regard, say, Kernighan and Ritchie's _The C Programming Language_ as the pinnacle of expository prose style. Hogan writes like a _good_ engineer; his prose does the job he wants it to do, and the meat is in the story. (You don't need mannered digressions about the spelndid colors of the autumn leaves in a book whose theme is that the universe isn't what you think it is.) In fact this is a fun book, full of Hogan's trademark mind-blowing coolness. The underlying technology is rendered plausible and the story is interesting from beginning to end. Even if you know what must be going on -- and you will, by midway through the second chapter, even if you hadn't figured it out from the title -- you'll still be kept guessing until the very end about (a) how and why it happened, and (b) how it will ultimately turn out. Hogan is one of my two favorite living SF writers (the other is Spider Robinson, who doesn't write "hard" SF). If you like SF, you'll like him.
Rating:
Summary: Started out ok, but devolved into a worthless piece of crap.
Review: When starting this book, I thought the premise looked pretty interesting and I had read other things by Hogan, so I thought it might be pretty good.
It started out a little slow, but once it got going, it seemed like it was going to be ok. Several times there were plot developments that made me think, this is really going to pick up now, but it never really did. Fairly early on in the story, I thought of something that I thought would have been an interesting twist for the end, but later events led me to discard it as a possibility. However, when I got to the end, what I had thought of did turn out to be the twist. Even though events in the story made it difficult. Which was made worse by an entire section of the book that tried to explain how the events unfolded without offering anything of value to the story. Add to this a protagonist who was completely discarded halfway through the story, an abrupt unsatisfying ending, and you get a pretty worthless book.
I wouldn't recommend this book. If you want to read something by Hogan, try Inherit the Stars instead.
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