Mindsurfer

by Mark Leon

Coping with a dead-end job and a lackluster romance, computer programmer Lew Slack finds his world turned upside down when a mysterious stranger hands him a crystal, a woman he has never met claims to be his lover, and his cat disappears. Original.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Jesse Toldness · Rating 3 out of 5]

Setting is king. This is the first of Mark Leon's trilogy of new age fantasy novels. The Mark Leon books are difficult to describe and this is more so than the two that follow (the Gaia War and the Unified Field). Setting is the strength of these books. Leon has constructed an internally consistent living universe-as-organism and spends most of the trilogy exploring it, and nowhere more so than in this first novel, where he uses POV everyman Lew Slack to write what is effectively a travelogue to the New Age-inspired Otherworld he has created. Note I haven't mentioned character or plot yet, that's because they both exist only to serve the setting, exploring the setting IS largely the plot and characters are the people who explore/experience it. And it is a good setting, alien and complex and logical. Recommended for setting nerds (like me!) and probably those who really do believe in a sentient, loving universe...