Title: A lame effort from a usually-good writer.
Review: John Barnes has written some first class books. This isn't one of them. First, it's full of inconsistencies. Do people's minds travel among parallel universes, or their bodies? The answer: both, with no reason given for why it's sometimes one and sometimes the other. Second, the basic plot is mostly hackneyed. The one original twist is a heavyhanded allusion to TV channel-surfing that isn't enough to sustain a novel. It might have worked for a short story. Perhaps that's what this book is: a short story stretched into a short novel. Anyway, I left it feeling cheated, an experience I have never had with a Barnes book before.
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