Escaping Infinity

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This is a very nice book about very nice people. That's not intended as a criticism; it is a relaxing change of pace not to have to deal with one of the surly anti-heroes that populate contemporary urban fantasy/science fiction.

The story opens with Peter and Charlie lost in the desert. They are rising young stars in the world of industrial construction. They are fortunate to run into a futuristic resort hotel in the middle of nowhere. Once inside the hotel, Charlie disappears into the casino where he is having the luckiest night of his life. Peter, on the other hand, begins to sense that there is something wrong about the hotel. The fact that he can't get to the highest level of the hotel after traveling 300 stories in the hotel elevator. Or the fact that hotel guests are dressed in togas, as Egyptians, as cowboys and in costumes from every time and place, but they all speak English. Or the fact that time doesn't seem to be passing.

Actually, I was a little bit mistaken when I said that the story started with Peter and Charlie. The story actually starts with a planet with a solitary moon orbiting approximately 93 million miles from its sun being destroyed by a miniscule navigational error. After that scenario, the story about the hotel begins.

What we have here is a puzzle.

Peter is the person we follow as he tries to solve the puzzle. During the course of his exploration, Peter meets and immediately falls in love with the front desk girl, Liz, who is also trying to solve the puzzle of the hotel and its existential weirdness.

The story is well-written and very engaging. I was pulled along for over half the story with my theories about how the story of the hotel intertwined with the story about the accidentally destroyed planet, and who the manager of the hotel was, and what purpose the hotel was intended to play.

Ultimately, the story is about grace and redemption. We ultimately learn that the aliens who destroyed the planet with the single moon are an admirably ethical people, and we - or at least me - end the story with a feeling of “gosh, how nice that it worked out that way” feeling.

You can't ask much more from a book of entertainment.

Nonetheless, as a life-long science fiction reader, I had some questions about the story.

For example, what about Charlie? We burn some time at the beginning hearing about how Peter and Charlie are a team, but when the pair hit the hotel, Charlie essentially disappears from the story until we see him get a pat on the back at the end. I get the feeling that author Richard Paolinelli originally planned a “buddy book” featuring Charlie and Peter until Charlie was ditched instead of becoming a third wheel to the Liz and Peter show.

Likewise, why did we “deify” Peter at the end? Giving Peter the powers of creation at the end seemed like a nice thing to do, albeit somewhat impetuous based merely on his staying on mission. Apart from a kind of authorial wish-fulfillment, what did that add to the story?

Finally, did we need the “coda”? The story was basically about a problem and a solution to the problem, but at the end we get twenty to thirty pages of human evolution into the stars. As a reader, I wondered, what that added to the story. It was very nice, admittedly, but it seemed to distract from the tidiness of the end of the main story (although it was nice to see the the “manager,” again.)

In some ways, this a book that I would give to a young adult as an introduction to science fiction. The hero is a scientist who approaches a scientific problem using reason, logic, decency, determination, and virtue. Unfortunately, there is a sort of mild, non-explicit sex scene, which would probably make me reluctant to give it to a “tween” or early teen inasmuch as it models the idea that a good relationship starts with sex. (My prudishness wouldn't prevent me from giving it to anyone 16 years old or older, I suspect.) Apart from that mild concern, the niceness and decency of the characters, and the interesting puzzles presented by the author, make it a book I wouldn't mind sharing with readers beginning to cut their teeth on the science fiction genre.