...okay, so I just finished
Yet Another Book (with a Blue Cover) by Award-winning Author---a book that deserves some serious fun-poking.*
But then I thought, aw, c'mon. The sun is shining, the birds are singing. A-W. Author's never written speculative fiction before, and frankly, I'm bored to tears with all the negativity floating around (so last year. And the year before that and the year before that) in this bad old world.
Besides, I've been writing gangbusters. So, instead of reviewing some very bad s/f, I give you a very nice snippet of pure fun, bright and burnished as the time-space continuum itself:
Henry continued his innocent gaze upward. “And what’s so hard about chronos rays, anyway? Even I understand ‘em.”
He fitted his elbows to his palms and nodded. “The sun has been shining on the earth for billions of years. Every day a bit of sunlight is absorbed into the chronos ray belt beneath the earth’s crust. That means the ray belt contains light particles from yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. Light from the Protozoan Era, light from 1066; light from last week. Particles of light from every moment since the sun began to shine. Right?”
Mara stared in surprise. “Right.”
“Well then. Eventually, the pressure from the past builds to the boiling point. And chronos rays, saturated by all that old light, hiss out of the ground and mix with the sunlight from the present. That’s why every brand-new day seems so familiar. It’s got a little bit of every day that’s already happened mixed up in it. Right?”
“That was—well, that was right, Stupe. How do you know that? You cut every class except Ancient Cultures.”
__________
*It's a three-drink book what with two kill-that-mockingbird and a Shakespeare reference---though to be fair, there's some big love for L. Frank Baum as well.
Parts of it read like a bad social studies textbook. For instance, there's the evil Land of the Fathers---North Korea-ish in its drab awfulness----versus the Western Province which..."we're informed, is a beautiful place, still partly wild, where animals roam freely and the people try to live in harmony with nature. The families build their own homes, choose their own livelihood, and coexist peacefully with the red natives (sic) of the land. Their government is a democracy, operating within the framework of a robust Constitution...Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Suquamish tribal chief Seattle hold equal positions in the executive branch. The legislative and judicial branches are similar to those in the United States, blah blah blah (p.217).
