The Transmigration of Souls

by William Barton

In the twenty-first century, American explorers discover alien teleportation and time-travel equipment on the moon, which leads them into a multi-dimensional struggle with a maleficent entity who plans to obliterate the universe

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

411 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

William Renald Barton III (born September 28, 1950) is an American science fiction writer. In addition to his standalone novels, he is also known for collaborations with Michael Capobianco. Many of their novels deal with themes such as the Cold War, space travel, and space opera.

Barton also has written short stories that put an emphasis on sexuality and human morality in otherwise traditional science fiction. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov's and Sci Fiction, and has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Sidewise Award, and the HOMer Award, and three of his novels (The Transmigration of Souls, Acts of Conscience, and When We Were Real) have been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award.

Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Matthew Reads Junk · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book doesn't know what it wants to be. It starts out as military sci-fi, moves into a tale of the multi-verse, and ends up mired down in psychobabble about probability and the nature of things. Throughout this the characters who are all astronauts, engineers, etc, all come off like horny teenagers. The author clearly has some issues.

[Peel · Rating 1 out of 5]

The writer might have forgotten what they were writing midway through. Gave up.

[Ashley Lambert-Maberly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really didn't get far on this one (15 pages) before it started to smell like Book I Won't Like, so (not wanting to repeat the recent horror of reading 1/2 of Portrait of a Lady before noticing I hated it) I thought I'd check out reviews to see if what was rubbing me the wrong way would pass. But it seems there's not a strong case for this book, with a low 3ish rating (on a site where it sometimes seems to me people award 5 stars if the title is spelled correctly, no matter how derivitive the contents—you know who you are!)

I was only reading it in the first place because it was listed in Broderick's Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, and I do like at least trying all the somewhat-canonized books just to be sure I'm not missing out on anything I'd love. And I'm fairly sure, now that I've sampled it, I won't be missing out on anything I'd love, so I can move on.

In the first 15 pages we met 3 separate people with 3 separate points-of-view from 3 separate cultures—that's a lot to take in already, but he managed to cram in a disturbing sex scene with a Japanese-girl-robot that took about 3 or those pages. It's not the way I want my narratives to unfold ... this kind of story leaves me with more "huh?" than "hurrah," so-to-speak. There's a reason so many books begin with some version of "sheltered farmer's boy realise they have some sort of destiny" ... you can introduce your characters, your world building, your stakes, gradually. It's The Hobbit, or even The Lord of the Rings for that matter ... you don't spend 3 pages on Frodo, 3 on Aragorn, 5 on Eowyn, 4 on Galadriel (and a sex scene) and then pop back to Frodo, no, you ground the book in the Shire and gradually reach out and expand as you need to.

That's my take, anyway. Note for future self: this was the one where rival nations were building spaceships because the USA had shut itself off after apparently seeing something nasty in the woodshed Moon base.

(Note: I'm a writer, so I suffer when I offer fewer than five stars. But these aren't ratings of quality, they're a subjective account of how much I liked the book: 5* = an unalloyed pleasure from start to finish, 4* = really enjoyed it, 3* = readable but not thrilling, 2* = disappointing, and 1* = hated it.)

[Patrick Scheele · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read the setup for this story and I was sold: The Americans discover some kind of stargate on the moon, but after a while they flee back to Earth and use new technology to lock themselves in their own country. How cool is that? There's mystery, science and the rest of the world struggling to repeat what the USA did a century before. But that's as far as the cool goes. When the stargate is rediscovered, the author sadly loses his sanity and starts to write gibberish.


In short, the stargate is really a doorway to a lot of fictional universes, because everything, including the real world, is fiction. A weird group of people, constantly changing because new fictional characters are added or old ones are killed, jump from one book to another. Maybe it would have made more sense if I had read the books in question. Riverworld by P.J. Farmer is the only one I recognized and I haven't even read that one yet.

Anyway, if you do plan on reading the book in spite of my warning, be prepared for an incoherent story and sex. Lots of sex. And not the fun kind. Green ants raping red ants. A human married to an ant. They have sex of course, but no details of how that would actually work. Thank God. And then there's the moving story of a young woman who changed her body through surgery so she looks like a spider and a man with the cute nickname of Brucie Big Dick who fall in love and get it on.


In short: yuck!

[Desmond Killian · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked this book out at a used bookstore because 1. the cover looked cool and 2. I was interested in finding a great undiscovered author. But no wonder nobody talks about this book. It's weird and gross. Needless to say DNF at 133/411.

So good sci-fi books tend to do this thing where one character will ask another how they think the plot is going. Like:

C1: So what do you think is happening?
C2: Well, [recap for the reader's sake].
C1: Cool. Thank you.

But this book throws a bunch of inane technobabble at you. Absolutely trite $%^& about Platonic Reality and String Theory. So their conversations look more like this.

C1: So what do you think is happening?
C2: Well, [math bullshit].
C1: Um. Sure.

And besides this book's complete unwillingness to explain itself, it is way too horny. I read a few selections for my boyfriend and we were dying laughing. "Conscious now of an erection pushing out the front of his underpants. A thousand choruses of, If only..." Is this supposed to get me hot? I just felt kind of queasy. 1/5

[Rachel Adiyah · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is a waste - a waste of time, ideas and paper. The central ideas in this book literally are the stuff of wonders, but the writer is not up to the task of rendering them into words. He's just not good enough. I've never read this writer before, and I never will again; he's a run-of-the-mill sci-fi writer who can handle stories that are bad echoes of "Starship Troopers", yet he happened to stumble upon a brilliant idea. The idea, however, was beyond him in conception and description.

Other flaws are that there are no likable or believable characters, and that it takes 70 agonizing pages before the book even approaches the great "idea".

It's not worth your time.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recent Rereads: The Transmigration Of Souls. William Barton's multiversal road trip is a dialogue with Heinlein's World As Myth by way of Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld and The Unreasoning Mask. A thoughtful book, asking questions about the nature of reality and fiction in a probabilistic universe.

[J. Lurie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Starts interesting, starts to introduce pretty trippy ideas but vaguely, then turns into a philosophy/pornography mashup at the end where the potentially rich characters are basically puppets or actors. Could have been really good if it had somehow ended halfway through. The last 175 pages or so are just a sexist, almost obnoxiously dirty (and usually that last part is often a good thing but not here) mess. Too bad!

[Justin Slotman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rereading this now. Probably my favorite "cosmic" SF novel.

[Scott · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was absolutely terrible. Terrible writing and avoid at all cause.

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liked this book. Has a grand scale and a gritty sense of reality to it for a SF tale.

[Mhd]

Put on this list after reading review in "Science Fiction the Best 101 Novels 1985-2010."