Only Forward (Mass Market Paperback)

This book is just not the rave that everyone here seems to think. if you love the New Wave of the 60s and 70s, based on always-shifting, psychedelic, "if i think it, it can happen" style of fantasy, you'll love it. [i'm thinking of Amber, here - which i thought was interesting.]

that said, I don't demand hard scientific explanations for fantastic situations, but i need something more than just [*SPOILER AHEAD*] "We stood on the beach and imagined that the water behind us would become a different world and when we turned around, it did, and it turns out to be the future, and my girlfriend got an abortion that made me sad so i became a tough guy even though i used to be a bookworm." ok. great.

i can see how Dreamworks would eat this up. It's just the kind of pablum they could turn into a $500M picture.

by the way, this is the FIRST book where the author is reduced to bragging about his movie-options in his bio. what a creepy, corporate thing to do. maybe this is the wave of the future and i'm too old-school, but that just seems embarassing.

at least i bought it at a used book store for $2. i think they'll give me a buck back if i return it. so i'm out 4 hours and a dollar. all in all, i'd pay another buck to get the four hours back.

I liked the first half. It started out seeming like a fun hard-boiled P.I.-type novel set in a zany science fictional alternate universe, filled with action and wacky hijinks. In this world, everthing is divided into different neighborhoods. There's Action Center, where everything is all about business and being productive; Color, where artists live and experiment with, you guessed it, color; Red Neighborhood, where you can get anything you want if you've got enough money; and so on. Everyone is divided into these little sub-sections of humanity and almost no one ventures outside of their little corner of it. All you know is your Neighborhood. I liked the concept of the Neighborhoods, and the author certainly seemed to have a lot of fun with it. But that's just the tip of the iceburg.

Every other novel I've ever read follows a pattern. A roadmap, if you will. Once you've read the first few chapters, once you know what kind of book you've got, you know in general where it will end up. You may not know all the twists and turns of the plot, but you're familiar with the general landscape. Not so with _Only Forward_. This book ended in a completely different place than it began. It began with wacky hijinks and wisecracking P.I.s, but it ended...somewhere else entirely. I don't what to be more specific than that, so I don't spoil it for unsuspecting readers out there. I'm still not sure if I'm glad I went there, but it was interesting, without a doubt. Original, unquestionably. Intense, with plenty of food for thought.

At the beginning of this review, I said I wasn't sure what to rate this book because I wasn't sure if I liked it. I'm still not sure. But I gave it a 4 because I didn't dislike it, and I still think about it and ponder the issues it raised to this day. _Only Forward_ is unusual. It stays with you. It's worth a read for that alone.