Secure A Copy Out Of This World (Three Worlds, #1) Composed By Lawrence Watt-Evans Ready In Digital Version
series is a deconstruction of the nowcliched "modern man goes through a portal to Fantasy Land" plot, It is also crushingly depressing and is the purest distillation of mood whiplash I've ever read, so be warned, Pel Brown has troubles in his basement, But it's not water leaking in it's magic, Swordcarrying barbarians are spilling through, demanding that Pel help them defeat Shadow, a dark force taking over their world, Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a spaceship has crashed in Amy Jewell's backyard, and the aliens want Amy's help against the Shadow seeking to conquer their world.
When Pel and Amy go through the basement portal into the world of magic, the Shadow attacks and traps them inside, Now Pel and Amy find themselves entangled in escapades that will make them into heroes, . . or corpses. Pel brown lives a normal suburban life, with a wife and daughter, never suspecting that there's more to the universe than the mundane existence he's used to.
That changes when a strange gnome like creature steps through his basement wall, telling Pel it's from a different world and looking for help.
As strange an event as that was, Pel chalks it up to a possible hallucination, . . until he gets another visitor from his basement wall, this time a normal looking man, but dressed in archaic clothes and carrying a sword.
As Pel tries to make sense of this, across down a spaceship appears out of thin air, and immediately plummets into Amy's backyard.
She is half afraid and half curious, but relieved when a squad of blonde men exit and is torn between her curiosity and being upset with their trespassing.
Soon Pel and Amy and their respective other worldly visitors meet up, and learn that each visitor is from a different world other than earth, one based on magic and the other on high tech science, neither of which work on Earth.
After consulting with their respective lawyers, and talking to each group, they decide to play out the strange stories, despite tales of an evil force both groups are fighting.
Pel and Amy still feel they can't quite figure out the marketing angle for some new scifi show, and decide to push to find out for themselves.
After returning through the portal in Pel's basement, things suddenly take a turn from whimsical fantasy lark to a harsh reality of violence across multiple dimensions, with a handful of Earthlings caught along in the flow.
Pel and Amy and their friends and family try to survive while applying logical Earth sensibilities to strange worlds,
Wattevans applies his typical rational protagonists into what turns out to be a much darker fantasic world than his more common light hearted fare.
It's a great change from his standard, while still keeping much of his normal style and tone, Very interested to see where the rest of the series goes, I have been thinking about this novel recently, I read it when I was young either in middle school or early high school, Too young for some of the content in this novel, either way, Out of This World stands out in my memory as one of the worst examples of baitandswitch writing I have ever read.
Packaged as a humorous sci fi/fantasy romp, this book turned unexpectedly dark at about theormark, At that point, the characters that had been traipsing around from world to world spouting humorous dialog suddenly started dying off, getting enslaved, raped, tortured, etc.
I was more outraged at the Out of This World's abrupt change in tone than I was by the dark content itself, I remember thinking, "this author lied to me, " I don't usually write reviews, but there are only two for this book and they are way negative, While I don't think this is WattEvans' greatest book The Lure of the Basilisk is still my favorite, followed by Dragon Weather, I think the other reviews miss what he's trying to do here.
SciFi/Fant has a tendency to put way too much plot into a book hero grows up and saves the universe three times in a trilogy.
I think what the author is doing here is to try to give that impossible task some reality, The book reads at first as the typical fast paced light hearted romp, and you might expect the universe to be saved right on time without the hero getting a scratch.
Nope.
The author tries to show
you it's real the antigrav cars have cheap flip top ashtrays, tells you it's real Ted thinks the whole thing is a dream and there's a plain speech attempt to talk him out of it, and finally the whole thing does what reality tends to do and a whole bunch of characters die.
The ones that don't are sold into slavery, tortured and raped, All in the light scifi/fant style, A little heavy handed maybe, but the author does warn us, He says it straight out several times,
There are a lot of fun references to things only us older folks would remember flip top ashtrays Horatio Hornblower no wait they made a movie of that, and the pacing and character development are what you'd expect from the genre.
Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, There are certainly lots of other authors who have tried to make fantasy more realistic, This book takes a different approach than Donaldson's heavy narrative style, Cherryh's elaborate FTL, or Dick's dark and dirty kibble, This is more tongueincheek.
I liked it, The ztart for any journey begins with the first step,
I do not know where the end of the mental sidewalk ends and the real world begins I do know that thest page in a book opens the crack of creativity that resides within this creative geniuses head and finds the way to share these wonders with those who read.
Like Pel, not all hero's and their ilk are to be seen as major identifiable characters, rather they are the backbones of great writing.
I want to write like Lawrence, Burrows, Doyle and others to whom word craft is the talent they share with us, Life would not be as rich as it is with their thoughts a d perspectives, Also publishes as sitelink Nathan Archer Also publishes as sitelink Nathan Archer sitelink,