J. Michael Reaves (1950–2023)

If this had just been written by an author I'd never heard of, I might've given it two stars, but since it has Gaiman's name on it I hold it to a higher standard. After reading this, I can only think of sketchy reasons for why Gaiman's name is on this piece of garbage.

It doesn't read like his collaboration with Terry Pratchett: "Good Omens". There is no mark of his hand at all. The writing is clunky and the similes are just so bad that they are like leftover school pizza (almost exactly like that). The protagonist is an idiot, and unfortunately it is only by his idiocy that the plot moves at all. Any good possible uses of the many-worlds setting are wasted in favor of paper villains and a war that fails to feel like it matters in any way.

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I quick and captivating read, as it's actually a young adult book. The story is very Gaimanesque, the writing style not so much - it's obvious that Gaiman's partner in crime did most of the writing. I found the writing style a bit naive, it reads like someone's first book ever. Having read the bit about the authors in the back cover, it's obvious why; Michael Reaves is actually a television writer who wrote Emmy winning Star Trek episodes. Interworld was originally supposed to be a TV show, and it does seem a bit like a pilot - the big plot is solved in the end, but there are some lose ends left.

I like the concept of the book, it made me think that Buffy the Vampire Slayer would be a HEX show and Doctor Who would be a binary show, sort of...… (more)

The novel is not bad, but it's not great, either. The new characters are -- with a decent exception or two -- largely forgettable tropes (the ace fighter pilot, the attractive bartender, the conscripted surgeon, etc.), and the established ones ring slightly off to me. Particularly Tarkin is not quite as I know him from the films and cartoons -- though in fairness, this might be due to established EU personality traits I'm not aware of. Vader is better, though his sections suffer from the bending over backwards to make sense of his actions and dialogue in light of both the prequel films and the vast EU continuity largely grown before those films were made.

I was hoping for a political thriller about the creation of the galaxy's most horrific invention, and instead I got a street-level-view of said invention's launch and demise. But it's decent, and once the novel hit the halfway point, it picked up a lot of steam carrying through to the end, which I enjoy as a reader.… (more)