Finity

by John Barnes

Book Overview

When Lyle's world begins to fall apart, he finds that his friends each remember growing up in worlds with different histories. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812571452
• ISBN13: 9780812571455
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Tor Books
• Length: 303 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.2" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Fast-paced and fun, but YMMV. Barnes light

______________________________________________ Lyle Peripart is reasonably content with his quiet life as an expatriate American academic in New Zealand, a pleasant backwater in a world ruled by the Twelve Reichs. Until he accepts a plum job offer from billionaire industrialist Iphwin -- and he's roughed up by the Gestapo in Surabaya, shot at in Saigon, and comes home to a smoking crater where his house used to be. Then things get *really* weird... Experienced SF readers will have little doubt as to what's happening -- the Many Worlds hypothesis has been a fertile SF breeding-ground for quite some time -- but, as always, the genius is in the details. In Finity we get such goodies as robot taxicabs with easily-hurt feelings, private suborbital jump-boats (but no automobiles) for the middle-class, and a neat new quantum-computing rationale for Many Worlds slippage. Not to mention -- finally! -- an explanation for all those 1 or 2-ring phantom phone calls I get. What we *don't* get is a particularly consistent or well-thought-out plot or backstory [note 1]. I didn't have any problems suspending disbelief while reading Finity -- a matter of 3 or 4 hours -- but if you're a critical reader, this one may not be for you. But if you're looking for a light, fast, read-once entertainment -- as I was -- Finity will fill the bill nicely. Barnes dedicates Finity to a reader who asked, "Just once, would it kill you to write an adventure story, with a reasonably happy ending, and only a *little* weird?" _________________________ Note 1.) There's a bunch of Finity-gripes below. I don't recommend reading them just before you read the book, as *SPOILERS* abound. It is worth looking up Gerald Jonas' (spoiler-free)review at the NY Times (google); he liked it, too. review copyright 2000 by Peter D. Tillman

An Interesting, Stimulating Read

I have only recently discovered John Barnes, but I can say that he is a very talented writer. I had had this book on my shelf for a good while now, and I am glad I finally picked it up to read it. I found this novel very entertaining and "gripping." Granted, the story is disjointed at points, but so is the world that Barnes has created here, one where people "jump" back and forth between dimensions or universes. Some of the characters are quite forgettable, but the narrator and Iphwin stand out from the crowd. Despite this, I would like to have seen more "fleshing out" of Iphwin in the novel; there were aspects about him that lingered in my mind until the end. I expected to get some insight on these traits, but the lines were left dangling somewhat. What I remember most about the narrator is his detailed explanations of and conjectures based on "abductive reasoning." Maybe I have managed to get away from hard science fiction long enough to be impressed by Barnes' elaboration of these ideas, but the fact of the matter is that I was impressed (in a similar way as I am impressed--though somewhat bored--by Jules Verne's prosaic "scientific" tangents). The ending of the story was indeed somewhat anticlimactic. With just a few pages to go, I kept wondering how the author was going to tie everything up into a neat little bow in so short a time. In point of fact, Barnes did the opposite of what I was looking for and resolved very little. In a way, though, it is nice for an author to resist the pressure to achieve balance and full illumination in his writing. All in all, I found this to be a very good novel; before I was halfway through it, in fact, I had already gone out to buy all of Barnes' books that I could find locally. I have read a couple of his other novels since reading Finity, but I found this book to be the most interesting and memorable of the group.

Better than I expected

Well, I didn't have high hopes for this one based on the reviews I read, but I decided to give it a shot anyhow. It didn't help that I knew something about the ending based on another customer's review! The story is driven by the concept of parallel dimensions and is something I have read about in Factoring Humanity by Robert Sawyer and Michael Crichton's Timeline recently, so it was all very familiar. Regardless, Barnes did a good job explaining. I think you can learn a little about quantum theory from the book. I though the first half of the book was great and really expected it might fall apart, but it didn't; it just got sort of slow. Any good sci-fi book needs to answer the mysteries it poses and I think Finity does a good job with this. I found only a few unanswered questions in my mind, but nothing major that disturbed my enjoyment of the book. Overall, it is an enjoyable read, and I would recommend it if you are interested in the "Many Worlds/Parallel Dimensions" concept.

Possibly the best multi-worlds story I've encountered

I've only started reading John Barnes' books lately, but this one really caught my interest. There have been a number of attempts to write a multi-worlds story that made sense, but most of them were either drowned in pointless hard-sf jargon or almost without any science whatsoever. The ending is a little unsatisfying, but does go okay with some of the character's standpoints. It was a story that kept my interest the whole way.