Paradox Alley by John Dechancie

Skyway #3

by John DeChancie

Jake McGraw, independent space trucker, has been shanghaied. He and his crew, fresh off their adventures in STARRIGGER and RED LIMIT FREEWAY, are plucked off the Skyway by a creature of unknown power. Now on an alien planet where most of the rules of the regular universe don’t seem to apply, Jake confronts the builders of the Skyway once and for all. Will he and his crew make it out alive?PARADOX ALLEY is the thrilling conclusion of the classic Starrigger series.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Adventure

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

From his website:
John DeChancie is the author of over two dozen books, fiction and nonfiction, and has written for periodicals as widely varied as Penthouse and Cult Movies. His novels in the science fiction and fantasy genres have been attracting a wide readership for more than fifteen years, and over a million copies of his books have seen print, many in foreign languages.

John's first work was Starrigger (Berkley/Ace ,1984), followed by Red Limit Freeway (1985) and Paradox Alley (1987), completing the Skyway Trilogy, one of the most imaginative, mind-expanding series in science fiction. Beloved of SF readers around the world, the trilogy has become a cult classic. It is no exaggeration to say that the trilogy has found a place in the hearts of readers along with the works of Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke. Jerry Pournelle, co-author with Larry Niven of the classics The Mote in God's Eye and Lucifer's Hammer, has compared the series to the best of A. E. van Vogt, and better written. The convoluted plot takes the reader on a mind-bending journey to the end of the universe and back.

His humorous fantasy series, beginning with Castle Perilous, became a best seller for Berkley/Ace. William Morrow published MagicNet, which Booklist said was "a welcome sigh of comic relief ... shamelessly droll, literate, and thoroughly entertaining. Magicnet is the fantasy genre's whimsical answer to Neuromancer." He has also written in the horror genre. His short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and in numerous original anthologies, the latest of which is Spell Fantastic. His story collection, Other States of Being, was recently published by Pulpless.com, Inc., an online and print-on-demand publisher.

He currently lives in Los Angeles and is at work writing novels, articles, short stories, and screenplays. His latest book was the short story collection THE LITTLE GRAY BOOK OF ALIEN STORIES published by Borderlands Press. John's most recent short story publication was in the original anthology SPACE CADETS, edited by Mike Resnick and published by LAcon IV, the 64th World Science Fiction Convention. The book was published in both limited and trade hardback editions. The book is available here . He has just completed a mystery novel and information on this new book (something different from anything he has ever written) is forthcoming. He will also have two new film articles in the second big issue of the new cult film magazine MONDO CULT, also forthcoming.

Reviews

[Jacob Proffitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the wrap up for the series. You'll definitely want to read in order.

This starts pretty slow. And stupid. If you get to some planet at the end (beginning, whatever) of the universe after four weeks of unending escort where your current food supply is a few crackers and a past-ripe apple and the guy in charge of the planet you arrive at invites you to lunch at his place, what the crap is there to discuss about this invitation?!?. We get pages, maybe a whole chapter of the motley crew discussing this with Jake being super-conscientious to solicit everybody's opinion. And I'm all, "um. Can nobody see the alternative is literal starvation?" This isn't a hard calculation to make.

And don't get me started on how frustrating Carl is in this book. Sure, he's a bit traumatized. Kidnapping and torture will do that to a guy. And he's not even twenty at this point. But his emotional outbursts are so extreme I lost pretty much all respect for him as a person by the end of the story. The only thing Jake can count on from him is to do the exact wrong thing in any given circumstance.

Anyway, you get a bunch of chapters of blather discussion and mysterious goings on for the first maybe 80 pages. And then Jake kicks off some contrarian hijinks and we're off to the races. The action is fast. The noodle-wank (sorry, philosophy) is interesting enough not to drive me out of the story even a little bit (this is quite an accomplishment, actually). And the author manages to wrap all the mysteries up while showing us some great, flavorful set pieces, and throws in a sympathetic stint in 1960s California without making it silly or glossing over the grit (um, beach sand in this case. Heh).

Something harder to do than DeChancie makes it appear is the last chapters consist of making Jake the motive force for resolving all the paradoxes that they've accumulated to this point. He has some tough choices to make and some trauma to deliver to the innocent (and retribution to withhold from the deserving) all so that things can happen the way he experienced. He's invested in the outcome, as hard as things are, so having him essentially pull the trigger on everything he has to go through is just as weighty as it should be.

And I cried at the end. Yeah, that's not a great accomplishment. I am, as Jude Law put it so succinctly in the Holiday, a weeper. Still, it's a great catharsis and every bit as fun as I remember from all those times I've read this in the past. The central romance even comes together satisfactorily, though not with the finesse a true romance writer would have managed.

So yeah, this is an enthusiastic five stars and makes that middle book slog totally worth it (slow start, and Carl, notwithstanding).

A note about publication: This is the worst of the new covers. And the Kindle edition isn't quite as good at the OCR as the second book was. In fact, there are a lot of single-line dialogue pieces that should have been their own paragraphs that end up tacked onto the prior paragraph. This makes some of the back and forth dialogue unnecessarily confusing at times as a speaker shift happens without tagging it (as you can do as a convention if you have single-quote dialogue paragraphs). It's not the complete embarrassment of the first book, but it's not great.

A note about Steamy: There are a few intimate windows in this, but it's not terribly steamy. Again, enough for the tag, but extremely lightly.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paradox Alley is the final book of the Skyway trilogy and was DeChancie's third published novel. It's a fun space&time-opera adventure series, with the neat twist that the orientation and culture of the interstellar travel is based on long-distance highway truck drivers, not space cadets zipping about in rocket ships. It's not a great novel; the characterization is a little slim, and there are long stretches where not much happens to advance the plot (which is perhaps typical of a long-distance haul? Hmmm...), but it's a fun story after a somewhat glacially slow beginning. The story follows Jake, his unlikely navigator (the computer companion who was formerly just his Dad), a perky and friendly hitchhiker named Darla, and an ever-growing list of passengers. Some of them talk and emote too much, but, hey... They face trials and tribulations to keep the business afloat despite problems raised by such as the evil rival Tatoo and the nasty Reticulans and, again, an ever-growing list of baddies. And then there's the roadmap to the end of the universe... or is there? It's a fun, clever romp. The second volume ended on a literal cliffhanger (quite annoying to have a three-year wait for the climax), but this one ties up all of the loose ends quite neatly. As before, your soundtrack options include Deep Purple and C.W. McCall, and the 1987 Ace edition came out with another of James Gurney's best non-dinosaur covers.

[Aricia Gavriel · Rating 3 out of 5]

After a glacially slow start (read: yaaaawn), this third installment in the Starrigger (Skyway) Trilogy comes to life around the halfway point, and keeps up enough momentum to be an enjoyable read through to an oddly shorthand, truncated final segment. I'd love to say the novel is thrilling, but overall, it isn't , unlike the other two, and especially the first...

However, it is interesting throughout, with the exception of a few dull segments in the first half (ye gods, I could be talking about a football match...). It would be truer to say that the book provides an extremely thorough "wrap" to the whole story of time travel and warped dimensions. It's clever. It's ingenious. It's also lumpy, with the tendency to become bogged down (one hesitates to say tedious) as an enormous cast of characters essentially sit, eat and talk, for the first hundred or so pages --

By 1987, when Paradox Alley appeared after a three-year hiatus following the second of the trilogy, Red Limit Freeway, DeChancie had become a name to be reckoned with in SF writing, and Ace allowed him to literally get away with blue murder. A new(er) writer would have been told to restructure the book. In fact, a pickier publisher might have demanded this of a well-established writer (I've heard authors from Robert Silverberg through to Colleen McCullough relate how they were told to rework their material, long after they were best sellers. Hmm).

Paradox Alley does pick up its pace in the middle third, but by then DeChancie must have realized he was on his way to writing a 600pp book, if he properly developed the latter material. The truncation and shorthand begin about 50pp out from the end, and it can be odd. Material that would have been richly developed in the previous books, or even in the early segments of this one, rates no more than a one-line description or flippant remark as the synopsized plot rushes to conclusion.

Sure, it's an efficient way of chopping a 600pp page book down to 314pp, and does get the story told, but it doesn't make for a satisfying experience, from the reader's perspective.

I do believe DeChancie was struggling in places. Perhaps this was "a book too far," which would explain the three-year gap between Red Limit Freeway and this final volume. Once or twice, I'd swear he was either bored with his own themes, or fighting for a grasp on them. Example: the temporal transition from the end of the universe (!) to 1964. This jump should have been momentous, should have rocked one's soul. As the scene comes off the page, it's so mundane, I had to go back and reread a page and a half, wondering if I'd missed something. More than likely, DeChancie was riding a suffocating deadline and just wanted to be done, finished, and go on to greener pastures. Shame, because the potential was immense.

So, only three stars for this one. I'll still give it a strong recommendation, but you do need to be aware of what you're getting into. This third part is very different from the other two, both in thematic nature and in the writing style. Simply put, it's usually interesting, occasionally thrilling, but not very well crafted. Smoky and the Bandit meets Stargate meets Doctor Who meets Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy ... and I hate to say this, but it could have been better. Hey ho. :/

[Tina · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this novel did explain everything introduced in the first and second novels (and I mean everything), it was not nearly as entertaining as Starrigger. While it definitely wasn’t terrible by any means, it just seemed to be one big wrap up: there’s no new enemy, no new characters, no new real plot. It’s definitely not a stand-alone book. My major issues:

1. We’re still focusing on the same boring enemies from Red Limit Freeway. Starrigger introduced two enemies to contend with: Twrrrl and Wilkes. They both had a reason to be Jake’s nemeses and they posed threats. In the second book, a lot of the tension with them was dissolved as Twrrrl’s two 8’2” buddies were killed by Jake somehow and Wilkes died and a new enemy was introduced, but there is nothing interesting about him at all. There is not a lot of tension in this novel, as a result.

2. The characters. Jake and Darla stay the same, but I never really got the whole Susan romance and it seems to get thrown away pretty quickly in this novel. Perhaps it would have been better if there weren’t like 16 characters to deal with. You have Jake, his AI Dad, Darla, Carl, Lori, two Russian people, two aliens, two more aliens, two random logger guys, and the three pseudo-religious people. That’s a huge cast for such a small book. And, in all truth, you really only needed the first five for this novel. John, Ray and Susan and the rest could have been artfully dropped off last book or something, as they didn’t do much here.

3. The plot is JUST wrapping up loose ends from the first two books! Seriously, there is NOTHING else. And while making links to time travel paradoxes is fun, to go through every single step of the way again, but briefly, with no tension, is boring.

While the complex time travel paradox was artfully done in terms of making everything fit, it’s not interesting to read about. This book lost all the humour, tension, and, quite frankly, magic, that Starrigger had.

[Shawn Fahy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ordered the last book in the Starrigger series, “Paradox Alley” by John DeChancie (1987) and finished it yesterday. First, about the book itself: this is the first of the three books in the series where I couldn’t find an original printing, this one being a reprint from 2014. This was no big deal, but I kind of would have liked to have all three original books. Also, the reprint has radically different cover art than the first two and has some spelling and grammar errors that didn’t exist in the first two either. It’s a sad state of affairs that modern book printing seems to virtually guarantee these sorts of errors when such would have been considered unacceptable not that long ago.

The story picks up where “Red Limit Freeway” left off, with the party stranded on a mysterious world that might never have been visited before by any known race. From here, the various members of the party learn that they have the choice of possibly returning home, wherever that may be, or joining a mysterious Culmination, whatever that is. If the members choose the first option, they will have to delicately return to where - and when - they’re from, for fear of encountering their past selves and possibly keeping history from progressing as it should, a classic time-travel paradox. If they choose the Culmination, well, what might come next seemingly can’t even be explained, but it might be a path to godhood.

Paradox Alley has the same humor, intrigue, action, and creativity as the first two novels in the series but the plot was, to me, a lot more complicated; previous books followed the “bad guys chase good guys, good guys evade bad guys” formula and while this exists in Paradox Alley, there’s also a lot of focus on tying up loose ends of the paradox. I struggle with understanding how theoretical faster-than-light (FTL) travel would affect time itself and this was a central part of the plot, leaving me to just shrug and assume that the author knows what he’s talking about.

This was definitely the most different of the three books in the series but it’s hard to say which was my favorite. How different the formula was both made me want to like it less, somehow, while also making me appreciate how well it integrated into the series itself as well as the style of story that the author was going for.

Overall this book (and, indeed, the whole series) was very easy to read and a lot of fun too. The humorous aspects allow the story to “get away with” things that might be scrutinized more in a “serious” story, even a sci-fi one. I thought it was great entertainment and I can see myself reading this series again one day.

[Geoff Field · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was prepared to dislike this book, thinking "truckers in space", but it's actually quite a readable and enjoyable example of its genre.
Unlike some other books I've read recently, this one is going back into my library.

[William E. Ferreira · Rating 3 out of 5]

A trip on LSD

After reading these 3 books, I think that I know what it is like to take LSD. I've never taken a hallucinogenic drug but now I know. Don't expect anything to make sense.

[Charl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the whole trilogy. And no cliff-hanger, stop-in-the-middle-of-the-story endings, either. Well done, well worth reading.

[Joe Newcomb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guns, a big truck and a GPS that is your dad, too cool!

[Beth Friedman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth a reread, though definitely of its time.

[Mark White · Rating 4 out of 5]

The conclusion of the series and I can confirm all the loose ends are tied up, mysteries explained and all the possibilities of a time traveling truck fully explored. The pacing in this book is quite uneven with the first half very slow and talky, full of metaphysical discussions, the pace picking up in the second half and the final chapters feeling a bit perfunctory. However, the outcomes are believable and satisfying. Solid stuff and very enjoyable withal. Certainly if you have read the first two you need to read this one.

Down side? The pacing as noted above and the cover art grates - the Chevy has turned from red to yellow and there's no T-Bird in the story, much less a truck crash and ejector seat. Being an engineer I also don't enjoy the inconsistency of speed and power units and magnitudes across the series but I doubt most would notice.

[Bob Phule · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my all time favorite books. Starrigger. Jake is an interstellar trucker who picks up a hitchhiker and things go bad, as you would expect. Most of the interstellar roadway is unmapped and of course he heads off the map to shake those after them, Jake, the truck and the hitcher.

Book two, Red Limit Freeway. Book three, Paradox Alley.

[Dantegideon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Take out the action of the previous books, and you're left with a bunch of unlikeable dicks sitting around pontificating. Hard to muster up interest or sympathy for them. Didn't care what happened to them in the end.

[bluetyson]

isbn,original

[Nuranar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great ending to the Skyway series.

[Mark Palmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great finish. Resolves almost all unresolved questions.

[Glenn Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very satisfactory conclusion to the "Skyway" trilogy.