Dominic "Nicky" DeSota is a Chicago mortgage broker in trouble. Arrested by the FBI, he is accused of breaking into a nearby government lab — only at the time, DeSota was on a weekend trip to New York City. This isn't good enough, however, for a moralistic and oppressive federal government, because if it wasn't DeSota, who else could it have been?

Dominic DeSota is a United States senator enjoying a romantic night with the world-renowned violinist with whom he is having an affair when he is asked to fly to a military research lab in Sandia, New Mexico. When he arrives he learns that the military police have Dominic DeSota in custody, a man who is the senator's exact double. Under interrogation, the captive DeSota provides only cryptic answers — just before vanishing right before them.

Dominic DeSota is a United States Army major who has been assigned to an assault team invading another world. Their mission is part of a larger plan designed to use the newfound ability to cross over onto parallel Earths to defeat the Soviet Union and win the Cold War. This plan begins to fall apart, though, when the America they invade proves less than cooperative. And then there is the growing problem of ballistic recoil . . .

Frederick Pohl was one of the grand masters of science fiction's Golden Age. During a career that spanned over seventy years he wrote or co-wrote nearly five dozen novels, some of which endure as classics of the genre. This book is not regarded as one of his best works, in part because of its focus on a particular time and place. Set in the then-contemporary world of 1983, the novel follows the different incarnations of three characters as they discover the existence of their counterparts. As their worlds come into conflict with one another, these characters confront their alternate selves and ponder the differences suddenly before them.

While Pohl uses his premise to address the allure of the life unlived and the degree to which we are defined by the world around us, his main interest is on commenting on the growing conflict between the various Americas he describes. For the most part these worlds are satirical takes on the America of his time, consisting of a police state run by religious fundamentalists, a thinly-veiled military dictatorship, and a complacent self-obsessed superpower. What makes Pohl's novel stand out from similar works of its type is in how he presents these worlds, not by scattering extended infodumps in his text but through the differences between the characters from them. By showing how the lives of Dominic DeSota, Nyla Christophe, and Larry Douglas differed because of their circumstances, he provides a work of alternate history that is among the best of its type. This is why, for all of its datedness, it is still a novel that is very much worth reading.

(Original Review, 1980-12-01)



Egads! We have met the Joymaker and it is us! While my Teleray terminal has not (yet) begun dispensing contraceptives, the rest of the parallel is strikingly clear. It brings up some interesting questions concerning how a WORLDNET will function. With the amount of netmail, messages, informational data and similar niceties flying about this VERY LIMITED POPULATION network, what would a "real" WORLDNET be like?

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

(Original Review, 1980)


It is true that Gödel numbering by itself is not an information compression technique. Its purpose is merely to represent a message as a number so that the message can be operated on with arithmetic and number theory. Gödel's original use of this device was to enable statements in number theory to talk about statements in number theory, possibly even about themselves, unambiguously. In Pohl's "The Gold at the Starbow's End", some very smart people want to send a very long message with a very small amount of energy. They Gödelized the message, and then converted it to a compact expression (perhaps by magic - these are VERY smart people) which evaluates to the original number:

354 852 2008 47 9606 88
1973 + 331 + 17 + 5 + 3 + 2 - 78

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

In a vastly overpopulated near-future world, businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold all political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge transnational corporations. Advertising has become hugely aggressive and boasts some of the world's most powerful executives. Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that all the products on the market improve the quality of life. However, the most basic elements are incredibly scarce, including water and fuel. The planet Venus has just been visited and judged fit for human settlement, despite its inhospitable surface and climate; colonists would have to endure a harsh climate for many generations until the planet could be terraformed. Mitch Courtenay is a star-class copywriter in the Fowler Schocken advertising agency and has been assigned the ad campaign that would attract colonists to Venus, but a lot more is happening than he knows about. Mitch is soon thrown into a world of danger, mystery, and intrigue, where the people in his life are never quite what they seem, and his loyalties and core beliefs will be put to the test.

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Business and consumerism have replaced government and politics. The population has exploded. Problematically, food sources have vastly diminished. Panicked scientists are pushing Earthlings to maybe start considering the idea of colonizing Venus. Mitch Courtenay works as a copywriter for an advertising firm, his latest project tasking him with making Venus colonization an appealing prospect to citizens via slick adverts. 

Once the idea becomes an actual project being executed by the government, space ships are designed by Walmart Kitchen Appliance Division through Defense Dept. contracts. Mitch is chosen as a leader for the mission. Before long, Mitch begins receiving death threats, but from whom? Searching for the answers, Mitch is thrown into an unexpected journey of mystery and danger, often finding himself left with only mounting questions rather than answers. 

Having originally been published in 1953, this sci-fi classic has had plenty of time to gather quite the following. A quick search and you'll find pages of glowing reviews. Seeing that, combined with a plot that sounded fantastic and apropo to today's times, I went in with mighty high expectations! 

While certainly enjoyable, not to mention eerie with the still-relatable social commentary, I closed this book feeling it had been a middling adventure for my mind, but one that was largely forgettable. The world building didn't strike me as all that well detailed, some plot details insufficiently explained, leaving it difficult for me to fully immerse myself in this dystopian world. Also surprised to see that in this " Revised 21st Century Edition" (as the cover proclaims) the term "midget" was left in the text. 

As for comedy or action, not much was to be found in the early portions of the book. Things pick up around Chapter 7, with a mistaken identity element thrown into the storyline. There are some twists and turns near the end but this was one of those ones where it all felt a bit rushed to give everything a tidy closing.