The Hundredfold Problem

Judge Dredd novels from Virgin Books #7

by John Grant

The story begins several million years ago, when sentient machines from an alien civilization build a Dyson Sphere around the sun's Red Dwarf companion star (which is why we've never seen it) and seed the Sphere with Neanderthals . . .Or maybe it begins in the future, after terrestrial humanity has discovered the Sphere (now called the Big Dunkin Donut), colonized it, and enslaved the natives.Whatever . the Donut is in peril.Atheist fundamentalist preachers - Rev Rick "The Man" Hamfist and Rev Bo "No Messin" Fingers - inspired by dastardly Dennis the Complete Bloody Sadist, are waging an evangelical war there with the aim of destroying the local, very real, goddess Korax.Using a matter transmitter, Earth sends holochips of two plucky adventurers to sort this out: heavy-weapons-toting xeno-anthropologist and scantily clad babe Petula McTavish; and by-the-rules supercop Dave Knuckle. But Knuckle's holochip is accidentally shattered on arrival into one hundred fragments, which are reconstituted to form one hundred lethally diverse partial versions of the supercop.McTavish now has a one hundredfold problem to solve. Actually a hundred and one, but that wouldn't have made as good a title.And that's before she falls in love . . .The Hundredfold Problem is that rarest of things - a gloriously funny romp, populated by outrageous, larger-than-life characters, that's also an extremely imaginative, challenging sf novel.

Paperback

First published August 11, 2015

About the author

John Grant is author of over eighty books, of which about twenty-five are fiction, including novels like The World, The Hundredfold Problem, The Far-Enough Window and most recently The Dragons of Manhattan and Leaving Fortusa. His “book-length fiction” Dragonhenge, illustrated by Bob Eggleton, was shortlisted for a Hugo Award in 2003; its successor was The Stardragons. His first story collection, Take No Prisoners, appeared in 2004. He is editor of the anthology New Writings in the Fantastic, which was shortlisted for a British Fantasy Award. His novellas The City in These Pages and The Lonely Hunter have appeared from PS Publishing.

His latest fiction book is Tell No Lies , his second story collection; it's published by Alchemy Press. His most recent nonfiction is A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir . Earlier, he coedited with John Clute The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and wrote in their entirety all three editions of The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters; both encyclopedias are standard reference works in their field. Among other recent nonfictions have been Discarded Science, Corrupted Science (a USA Today Book of the Year), Bogus Science and Denying Science.

As John Grant he has to date received two Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award, and a number of other international literary awards. He has written books under other names, even including his real one: as Paul Barnett, he has written a few books (like the space operas Strider’s Galaxy and Strider’s Universe) and for a number of years ran the world-famous fantasy-artbook imprint Paper Tiger, for this work earning a Chesley Award and a nomination for the World Fantasy Award.

Reviews

[Mj Castañeda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I stopped reading this confusing mess when I realized it's not really a Judge Dredd story. In fact it's BARELY a story... No wonder it got republished without any references to Dredd...

[Henry Eggleton]

A reasonable novel spoiled by the lack of Dredd in it