Timestorm

Rating:
Summary: Multidimensional and Fun!
Review: I love this book. I have read it 3 times, and I never read anything more than once. Dickson has written a fantastic story about time travel, multidimensionality, and the versatility of the human being. Dickson has the ability to make his characters come completely alive, and the plot is versatile, imaginative and interesting. This is NOT your typical time travel story; in everything Dickson writes there is a deeper message. This is a writer that knows how to convey meaning on many levels of consciousness. Besides, it's just a GREAT read, and a lot of fun too!

Rating:
Summary: A Memorable book
Review: This is a book I've read more than once. It is full of suprising characters. A mute girl, a crazy lepoard, a displaced stock broker, and a world gone mad.

Set in some indeterminate time (SF) it is the story of a group of people who come together when their world is swept away by 'timestorms'. These are waves of time which drift across the world changing the land and the people who live in it as at a seemingly random way.

It's also the story of how, by working together these people managed to survive in this newly harsh world and even triumph.

It's a story which sticks in your mind long after you have read it. If you come across a copy second hand,pick it up. It's a good read.

Rating:
Summary: A Memorable book
Review: This is a book I've read more than once. It is full of suprising characters. A mute girl, a crazy lepoard, a displaced stock broker, and a world gone mad.

Set in some indeterminate time (SF) it is the story of a group of people who come together when their world is swept away by 'timestorms'. These are waves of time which drift across the world changing the land and the people who live in it as at a seemingly random way.

It's also the story of how, by working together these people managed to survive in this newly harsh world and even triumph.

It's a story which sticks in your mind long after you have read it. If you come across a copy second hand,pick it up. It's a good read.

Rating:
Summary: So I ask again, why is this out of print?
Review: This is a rant I haven't done in a while. More and more I find that the best SF books out there are kept out of print for whatever reason, leaving us fans to discover these lost treasures by scouring bookstores, hardly even aware of their existences. I found this one by sheer chance and it turns out to have been a happy find. Dickson is mostly known for his Childe cycle (sidenote on that, it says in the author bio that after he finishes the "futuristic" part of said Cycle, he was going to do a bunch of historical type novels as a prelude . . . any idea whatever happened to those?) among other things but this has been unjustly forgotten. Told in first person narration by a man named Marc, it deals with world set slightly in the future where the Earth is ravaged by shifting lines of time. His only companions are a very friendly jaguar and a very silent girl. That's how it starts. Where it goes you'll never be able to guess. Half the fun is watching Dickson constantly twist the reader's expectations inside out, taking the story in abrupt curves just when you think you know where it's going. It's almost like a whole series of books in one, part survival tale, part metaphysical journey, part SF world building and part philosophical musing. His characterization of Marc is key as well, here we have one of his more complex characters, Marc is basically a decent guy that you want to root for, but at the same time he's tightly focused almost to the detriment of everyone around him. And yet he feels more real than most characters I've seen lately. Fortunately Dickson helps by surrounding him with a multifaceted cast of characters and constnatly switching the situation. Sometimes it may get a littel bit too metaphysical for my tastes, but at least it's far from ordinary. People coming in thinking it's just an average time travel novel are going to be (hopefully) pleasantly surprised. It's an underrated classic that deserves to be back in print.

Rating:
Summary: So I ask again, why is this out of print?
Review: This is a rant I haven't done in a while. More and more I find that the best SF books out there are kept out of print for whatever reason, leaving us fans to discover these lost treasures by scouring bookstores, hardly even aware of their existences. I found this one by sheer chance and it turns out to have been a happy find. Dickson is mostly known for his Childe cycle (sidenote on that, it says in the author bio that after he finishes the "futuristic" part of said Cycle, he was going to do a bunch of historical type novels as a prelude . . . any idea whatever happened to those?) among other things but this has been unjustly forgotten. Told in first person narration by a man named Marc, it deals with world set slightly in the future where the Earth is ravaged by shifting lines of time. His only companions are a very friendly jaguar and a very silent girl. That's how it starts. Where it goes you'll never be able to guess. Half the fun is watching Dickson constantly twist the reader's expectations inside out, taking the story in abrupt curves just when you think you know where it's going. It's almost like a whole series of books in one, part survival tale, part metaphysical journey, part SF world building and part philosophical musing. His characterization of Marc is key as well, here we have one of his more complex characters, Marc is basically a decent guy that you want to root for, but at the same time he's tightly focused almost to the detriment of everyone around him. And yet he feels more real than most characters I've seen lately. Fortunately Dickson helps by surrounding him with a multifaceted cast of characters and constnatly switching the situation. Sometimes it may get a littel bit too metaphysical for my tastes, but at least it's far from ordinary. People coming in thinking it's just an average time travel novel are going to be (hopefully) pleasantly surprised. It's an underrated classic that deserves to be back in print.