Silly, Mostly Pointless Book

In The Red Tape War, authors Jack L. Chalker, Mike Resnick, and George Alec Effinger have written a novel round-robin style, each taking turns to write a chapter. They start with a story idea and have at it; it quickly turned into a battle of who could end a chapter as absurdly as possible, leaving the next author a task to pick up where it leaves off.

Sounds fun.

For the first few chapters, it was.

But…it soon becomes a little tedious. In the end, this is a silly novel that should never have been released in hardcover (how I originally bought it as a big Chalker fan).

If you still care to know more, this is a novel set 6,700 years in the future and humanity is at the center of a Galactic Arm wide federation of 73 species and 1,786 worlds. Sound like a bureaucratic nightmare? That is the premise of the book. How absurd can a bureaucracy that large get? That was the point of the book. ( )