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Doorways in the Sand

Cover for Doorways in the Sand

Review:

This was a quick read. Then again, I was just fin­ish­ing "The great book of am­ber" which is about the size of a phone book and has al­most as many char­ac­ter­s, so the Torah could have seemed a quick read, too.

This is a gim­icky book, and al­most ev­ery re­view men­tions it: each chap­ter starts with the main char­ac­ter in Big Trou­ble (t­m) and then he has a flash­back that ex­plains how he got there, then he gets away in­to a cliffhang­er, which is re­solved in the fol­low­ing chap­ter's flash­back.

Strange­ly, that is not at all con­fus­ing. I am a Ze­lazny fan, though, and most of his books have a gim­mick of some kind. For ex­am­ple, in the first Am­ber book, the char­ac­ter is am­ne­si­ac, so his own past is news to him (as it is for us).

An­oth­er nice touch is that while the main char­ac­ter is the clas­sic im­pos­si­bly eru­dite sci­fi hero, there is a rea­son for that (and it's not "he's a freak"): he has had a 13-year full­time col­lege ed­u­ca­tion (no de­grees yet!).

The flash­back trick pro­vides chance for some fun pieces. For ex­am­ple, the pro­tag­o­nist says he is hold­ing a "amolpid" in "y­golo­porht­na". Why? Well, we find out about 20 pages lat­er.

I re­al­ly en­joyed it.


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