With the amazing cover art from Boris Vallejo and what I thought was a play on words for a book title: a warped reality, I imagined this to be a surreal alternate reality adventure with strange creatures on a strange world etc. What I got was a war story. Starts simple. Ex-mercenary turned ship-for-hire guy comes upon a ship floating in space. He boards it. Finds guy dying. The guy says, there is a mercenary code wherein he, ex-merc, has to finish the job and save these people. The people are an alien race that no one likes. There is also a snooty reporter lady with him. She thinks he’s crazy for risking his life to save this asshole race. The whole part is pretty pointless other than to show you what kind of character the ex-mercenary has. So yeah, he saves the alien race. He gets a call to head back to Earth from the group leader of his old mercenary guild. Once a Bladerunner, always a Bladerunner.
They want him for a special assignment that is basically a suicide mission. He has no choice but to do it. Hello giant chapter of black hole physics jargon. It goes on and on wherein the scientist over explains it in the most technical terms. Maybe it’s just a little something for the physicists? Maybe the author over-did his research and didn’t want all that time to be for nothing? Either way, I got the gist, black hole destroying our universe created by scientists in a parallel universe.
Mercenary goes through the black hole. We then start in after he’s been there for months. No introduction to anything. No setting. We don’t even know it’s been months for a while. They’re talking about people and things going on. I checked to make sure some pages didn’t fall out. It was like you just pulled into town and someone on the street tells you there’s a house on Peach Street and walks away.
He gets recruited into the revolutionary militia to lead it. Sure. Meets Lieutenant lady the first day. Barely says a word to her and then BAM they end up in bed together. The Author even says, “and he doesn’t know how it happened, but they ended up in bed.” I died laughing. Twenty pages of physics but when it comes to how a man and woman might end up in bed together the author has nothing.
Anyway. Mercenary takes charge of militia. Wins battles. Wins the hearts of his troops. The scene on the cover does take place but it’s short lived. Most of the book is revolutionary war planning and executing. His mission was supposed to be find the machine making the black holes in his universe and destroy it. Honestly, I had totally forgotten about it until the end when he was like oh yeah, where is the machine that makes the black holes. The main plot became a subplot. I was so disappointed. Mainly because I wanted to read an alternate reality sci-fi story not a war story. Had I been in the mood for the war stuff I might have enjoyed it more.
Ballantine Books- 1976.
Ballantine Books- 1976
\\\\ Review by Nick Anderson Instagram:@next_stop_willoughy
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