Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews Read Free

infodump.
    Despite such quibbles, this is an admirable piece of work – but, as I say, for space scientists rather than for sf readers. There's none of that Sense of Wonder sf readers have come to expect. Like reality, A Step Beyond is a bit dull.
    —Infinity Plus

Hopscotch
    by Kevin J. Anderson
    Bantam, 354 pages, hardback, 2002
    My own personal Golden Age of Science Fiction came when I was about 15-17, which happened to coincide with the time when the remainder bin of the Woolworths just round the corner was replenished every few days with copious heaps of American sf paperbacks. At that price I could afford to buy almost as many as I wanted, which I duly did; and I read them at the rate of one a day or, often, two a day. Every now and then I'd discover a gem – Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land was one, Brian Aldiss's Hothouse another, the two Robert Randall books, Henry Kuttner's Bypass to Otherness , Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano , most of the Pohl/Kornbluth collaborations ... Many prizes there were, far too many for my memory to encompass.
    But at least 95% of these books were far from treasurable: they were good, honest, uninspired journeyman efforts churned out by all the countless minor sf authors of the day. Devoid of much originality and certainly not illuminated by any stylistic flair, these texts filled their allotted number of pages with plodding competence. I can't remember any of them in particular because, to be honest, there wasn't much to be remembered; if I'd been quizzed on any one of them the day after I'd read it I might well have had trouble remembering its plot. Don't misunderstand: I didn't feel in any way cheated or short-changed by them. They had little aspiration beyond (aside from earning their authors the next rent-cheque) filling a few hours of the reader's time relatively pleasantly, and this they fulfilled with – to repeat the word – competence.
    I was strongly reminded of this era of my life while reading Kevin J. Anderson's Hopscotch . Although it is two or three times longer than any of those nameless old pulp paperbacks would ever have been permitted to be, it has exactly the same atmosphere of dutiful journeyman sf. The pages get turned OK, but without any great deal of enthusiasm because there's no real narrative drive and, quite rightly, we anticipate no ideative surprises. This is a long book based on a premise drawn from sf's common stockpot.
    Sometime in the future the technology has been developed whereby human beings can swap ("hopscotch") bodies with each other at will. The opportunities for crime are obvious: a murderer could borrow a body to perform the slaying, then swap back or swap onward, so that evidence like fingerprints and securicam images would be valueless. Thus the establishment of the Bureau of Tracing and Locations, or BTL (which, through no fault of the author's, I read as BLT throughout), whose task is to keep track of individuals no matter how many bodies they might flit through.
    Our four central characters have just emerged from the orphanage; it is a nice insight that, with it being all too easy for unwanted conceptions to occur in the "wrong" body, this future world would contain lots of unwanted children. The four are Garth (wannabe artist), Daragon (one of the rare individuals unable to hopscotch, but with the compensatory ability to see who people really are no matter what body they're currently wearing), Eduard (who makes a living by getting paid to hopscotch into people's bodies while they undergo things like dental surgery) and Teresa (token warm-hearted female, submissive, because of warm-heartedness gets laid a lot whichever body she's in).
    Daragon, because of his rare talent, is recruited from the orphanage straight into the BTL and there groomed for stardom by its charismatic leader Mordecai Ob. Garth, aided by a grant from Ob, becomes a monumentally rich and famous artist, gaining his experience of life by hopscotching around to