(...) Then there's a quite ridiculous, pretentious "afterward" where the author tells of his struggle to achieve "aesthetic perfection" with this book and compares himself to Richard Wagner.
All of this is made "profound" by the author telling us that the victim is really the rescuer and the rescuer is really the villain and the villain is really the victim and hip bone's connected to the thigh bone and the...
A piece of depth psychology: "maybe if I rape somebody often enough, she'll fall in love with me." (I paraphrase, but only to improve the grammar.)
If you like extreme sexual psychopathology -- stick with "The End of Alice." Space jockeys would do better to re-read their Heinlein. ( )

See Forbidden Knowledge and This Day All Gods Die. ( )

I've read this book, or parts of it, twice, and found it very hard to get through. I like Donaldson's other books very much, but the plot, sequence and theme of this book bothers me, and the writing itself is not up to his style. I read the afterword and discovered how this book came about, but the question remains, why? Why write a book about a pirate/thug/rapist/villain, only to make him the victim in a later book? Why?
In addition, Donaldson is much more suited to fantasy than scifi. His universe just isn't well crafted. Don't read this unless you feel compelled by some mysterious force to read everything he's ever written, or every sci-fi book ever written. Save yourself some time and pain and read Asimov or Heinlein instead, if you are looking for sci-fi without reading an epic. ( )

The Gap Series, stark, confrontational, and non-stop action all the way. ( )

This is, in my experience, a truly unique book . . . a really bad first book in a series that turned out to be really quite good (doesn't it usually seem to work the other way around?). The Real Story disappointed on many levels. There's not much plot: a sadistic criminal captures and then repeatedly rapes the sole surviver of a space accident. That pretty much sums up the book. With that information in hand, you might well be advised to skip this first book altogether and move directly to the second in the series.

The Real Story's sole redeeming quality is that it sets up Donaldson's later transformation of the three key characters in the series (who are very one dimensional here) to pretty much the polar opposite of where they stand when first introduced (the good guys become bad guys, the jailer becomes the rescuer, the powerless become the powerful, etc.). In fact, my recollection is that (in the forward or afterward) Donaldson suggests that this book was as more of an etude in character transformation than anything else.

Despite my disappointment with this one, I did go ahead and buy the second book of the series at a used book store. I found it much, much better, leading me to go ahead and ultimately read the entire series, which I recommend. ( )