Through the Reality Warp

by Donald J. Pfeil, Boris Vallejo (Illustrator)

Ballantine Books; First Edition edition (1976)

Genres: Science Fiction

164 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1976

About the author

Used These Alternate Names: Donald Pfeil , Don Pfeil

Reviews

[Derek · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wasteful and unpolished.

The book starts in the middle of a rescue mission, where the Crusty Retired Mercenary drops his ship onto the planet's surface, over the objection of the Cynical Reporter Hottie. This, and the potentially-interesting budding relationship, are immediately tossed out as Crusty Retired Mercenary is re-activated for duty, to solve, oh, the entire universe. After ditching ten to sixteen pages of entirely superfluous book, the reader is then subjected to five to ten more pages of deadly dull exposition about why the universe is in danger and how C.R.M. can leave the universe and save it.

Then the book really starts: C.R.M. is launched into an alien universe to find and stop the threat. The alien universe is peopled by humans (convenient!) in a galactic civilization in the midst of rebellious war (familiar!).

The book then more or less plays out according to a plot-by-numbers, and nothing really surprising or original occurs. The entire 'alien universe' angle pushes into the background; C.R.M. conveniently takes some machine learning thing to acclimate himself to the language and culture, depriving the author of the opportunity to flex some narrative muscle.

[Sam Dow · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sometimes fun space adventure. They initial set-up scenes were fun, until it turned into the main plot, also interesting, but an okay space mission story. A lot of the other side of the reality warp stuff didn’t interest me much. Finished the book, for what it’s worth. It was a cheap find.

[CJ Beshara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fast-paced, rip-roaring male power fantasy nonsense. The overall premise is interesting, but the execution is campy, laughable, and implausible. Great fun if you can turn your brain off.

[Scott Nieradka · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bleh, what a piece of hackery. The first 15 pages are a pointless rescue mission with our crusty mercenary hero in what would have made a better book, but instead the plot jettisons itself into a discussion of multiple universes, terrible science, and how in some other universe (a universe in which out universe is a 2 foot wide ball that can be conviently carried around.) they found our universe and are drilling black holes in it to suck out the sweet, sweet energy. There is so much wrong with that, but lets move on. The power plan is to send our crusty mercenary through a black hole into the other universe. Conviently when you go through you scale up to the right size, and dont get crushed by gravity. Then he will go about finding our universe and save it. (wait a sec you might say, shouldnt he appear on the other side of the black hole and crash his space ship into the lab right next to our universe thats sitting on the table? What about the 15 suns that got sucked through? Shhhhh....) Conviently, the other side is populated by humans (!) I mean really our universes in this book are less diffrent than new hampshire and vermont. Hell the other universe has the same type of ships, "kill-torps", guns, female characters as the one hes left. Its pathetic.

So whats our heros plan to save our football sized universe? Well, to answer a newspaper ad for a job as a commander of some revolutionary forces! Brilliant. Anyway, after that it degrades into 4th rate unbelievable military sci-fi, and muddles on for 150 pages. Woot.

[Eric N. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found this at a used store in Brattleboro,Vt. A quick Flash Gordon style space adventure really liked the author's approach to explaining future technology-informative but easy to grasp. The cover image is a brief story point and not representative of the book.