Look like someone wanted to write a screenplay for a Hollywood blockbuster but run over and ended up with a short story. ( )

Meddling with reality is dangerous.

It's especially dangerous when your enemy has gotten possession of your device and doesn't understand important aspects of it, has removed all safety features--and intends to use it as a weapon.

And when the device itself has its own opinions on what's "harmful" and what's not.

Florrian is traveling with the device that will prove all his scientific theories when a rival organization attempts to steal it. The drastic action he takes can potentially threaten the fabric of reality unless he--or some alternate version of him--or is it her?--can come up with a way to set things right.

I had no idea where this was going at first, and it's a wild ride, but it's a lot of fun.

Recommended.

I bought this audiobook. ( )

What happens when a scientist invents a machine that connects parallel realities and that machine gets shot - and the scientist is surprised by how the machine behaves? Something not so good obviously.

Meet Dran Florrian. He invented Palimpsest - a machine that can get anything from another parallel world. There is only one rule - no weapons can be brought through - or anything that can harm anyone. Add a psychopath that wants to use the machine as a weapon and Florrian's ex-wife and the story can start. The machine get damaged surprising everyone and instead of exploding or just shutting down, it starts playing protector - it merges reality to save its inventor.

The first time the characters change, I wondered where the editor was. It took a few pages to start suspecting what really is going on, a lot longer for it to be confirmed. Or for Dran to figure it out.

At the end of the day, it is a pretty good novella about parallel realities and hard choices. Not the best I had ever read, probably won't be the best this year even but it was a nice read and it made me think about choices. The parallel realities were different enough to make them interesting (even the small part that we saw of them) and the explanations on why they are was fascinating. And the end is almost perfect - it opens the door for additional stories but it also closes the story that it started to tell.

Novellas are hard to sell - too long for most collections and magazines, too short to be published on their own. I am very happy that Tor started the current line - the novella is a perfect length for Science Fiction and Fantasy. And that one proves exactly what the length can do - it could have been a lot longer and overwritten story but by allowing it to be as long as that, the story is a lot stronger. And it is allowed to have a single storyline instead of the usual multiple stories in a novel. ( )

Dran Florrian has invented a machine he calls Palimpsest and, afraid it might be used as a weapon, he decides to do a runner with it. But his arch rival, Harlan Dorric, tracks him down and tries to take Palimpsest for himself. Oh, and Florian’s ex-wife, Karen is now with Doric too. Palimpsest apparently provides a means of viewing, and even manipulating, alternate realities – as is revealed when Doric and his goons attack Florrian, and Florrian and Karen find themselves in a completely different world (a steampunkish one, in fact). And so it goes. As the chase continued across alternate realities, it occurred to me this was a very cunning way to expand a short story to novella-length. Because the resolution of the story is not dependent on the realities Florrian and Karen visit – in fact, all they do is delay, or perhaps even obstruct, the resolution. But this is hardly a problem as the story is fast-paced, very readable and manages a more-than-sufficient level of invention. Perhaps the various backgrounds are a little sketchy, and Florrian has a tendency to over-analyse at times; but at short-story length this would probably have been too light on detail to be satisfying, and there really isn’t enough plot to justify novel length. But it works just fine as a novella. ( )