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

attraction of hopscotching hijinks. Each of a couple who swapped bodies with each other would know exactly what gave the most delight to the partner, and by administering it would in due course have it administered back. The enormous educative and self-educative possibilities for enhancing their mutual sex life to a degree otherwise impossible would surely be explored by every couple, probably endlessly, in an orgy of giving ; yet all we seem to find here is a sort of short-sighted philosophy of taking , with the partners seeking only the thrill they can get from the particular act of sex in which they are currently engaged.
    Also omitted is any real discussion of the technology of hopscotching. Somewhere early on Anderson has realized he really ought to do something about this deficiency in what is, after all, ostentatiously a work of sf rather than a fantasy. (A fantasist might be able to do a whole lot more with the premise, come to think of it – but that's just an aside.) So he gives us the nearest we get to an explanation using the clumsy technique of an overheard bar conversation:
    "And you want to know the biophysics? Does it matter?" The first man sucked delicately on his cigarette. "When you use a COM terminal, do you care about the network electronics? No. You simply tap in, extract the information you need, engage the communication link you want, access your accounts. You don't need a degree in organic matrix management to use the thing. You don't need to understand the dirty details about hopscotching, either."
    That's it! If you, dear reader, want to know more about the principles underlying the technology of hopscotching, you're just being extremely stupid to keep asking silly questions about something you have no need to know.
    This is an enormous copout. Of course, no one expects sf writers to come up with genuine explanations of their impossible technologies – otherwise we'd be awash with workable real-life time machines, matter transmitters and the rest built according to verbal blueprints first published in story form in old issues of Shocking Science Wonder Stories – but not only does the reader have a right to expect the author to have worked up at least a dose or two of vaguely convincing flimflam, the very integrity of a science-fiction novel depends upon it. Yet Anderson blithely tells us that "you don't need to understand the dirty details about hopscotching" ... and his editor let him get away with it !
    Coincidences run rampant in the book. The worst offender comes when some of Daragon's overenthusiastic BTL sidekicks gun down a man they believe to be Eduard; in fact, as Daragon learns during a two-Kleenex moment while cradling the dying man in his arms, this individual is none other than ... Daragon's own long-lost father. Elsewhere the major players are constantly encountering each other by chance, a fact that leads one to believe that the whole tale is being told within a very small geographical scope indeed.
    Following the geographical train of thought leads us to the book's most glaring deficiency of all: there is no sense of place anywhere throughout the telling. We know that we're somewhere on Earth, because, in the only instance of there being any reference to somewhere outside the city where the rest of the action is staged, Garth goes on vacation to Hawaii. But that's our sole clue. The city otherwise floats in a vacuum: if the advent of the ability to hopscotch has had consequences nationally or internationally, we're told nothing of them. Is there commerce between this city and the others that must surely exist? Well, search me. Daragon's dad is supposed to have been on the run for hundreds of years, but has never thought to put as much distance as possible between himself and his pursuers by going to another part of the country or even abroad. Mordecai Ob is the top gun of the Bureau of Tracing and Locations, but is he its national head or just its head within the city? Presumably