Ghosts of the Multiverse

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$5.99


Jeremy Fade is a successful engineer turned unsuccessful software salesman after making a lateral move within his company in the hopes of making more money. The good part of that, for a character in a novel, is that author Harald Hansen has the opportunity to put Fade in interesting places, such as universities, where he can have interesting conversations with interesting people who say interesting things. For instance, this light-hearted observation about modern American culture: “Ah ha!” said Ahbed. “The new form of American puritanism. You want the sex in your culture, but simultaneously don’t want to expose your children to it.”

There is quite a lot going on in Ghosts of the Multiverse: a nuclear terrorist, the power of the super-rich to effectively do whatever they want, the usual racial prejudices, and, oh yes, Fade sees ghosts at the side of the bed he shares with his wife, Leigh. Or are they ghosts? Tune in and find out. Essentially Hansen is trying to write a very big book explaining American life in the early Twenty-First Century along with a scintillating view of universal dynamics. Authors do deserve applause for taking on big projects.

The degree to which a reader will enjoy Ghosts of the Multiverse will depend on his or her acceptance of the more metaphysical aspects of Hansen’s novel. While there is no intent to imply that one needs a great amount of understanding of quantum physics or sociology to understand the book, the suspicion is that the more educated the reader, the greater the fun.

Hansen is a very good writer, adept at dialogue, and his characters are all – major and minor alike – well-conceived individuals with no sense dulling over-writing. If there is a criticism to be made, it is that some cutting might have helped the novel’s pace. There are no badly-written or dull scenes; far from it. However, several scenes, once having made their point towards the narrative advancement do tend to linger around a page or two longer than they should. That is not a major criticism, just a suggestion that would likely increase this intriguing story’s potential popularity.


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Author
Star Count 4/5
Format eBook
Page Count 420 pages
Publisher Harald Hansen
Publish Date 21-Dec-2012
ISBN 9780985729608
Bookshop.org Buy this Book
Issue June 2013
Category Science Fiction & Fantasy
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