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BooksScifi

The Tourist by Robert Dickinson (book review).

With Robert Dickinson’s novel, ‘The Tourist’, you are thrown in at the deep end and have to work out what is going on from the start. There is Spens, a female prisoner in isolation whose crime you aren’t really informed of but she’s been there a long time. A few chapters in, you discover that she killed someone in a time travel trip into the past. The current authorities now need Spens for another trip as someone is missing in one of the time zones she frequented. She is accompanied by Riemann Aldis and, if successful, might actually be finally released. That’s the plot in a nutshell but struggles to stay with it.

thetourist

The time travel trope of time tourists going missing isn’t new neither. Unfortunately, ‘The Tourist’ is a bit of a mess. You barely get glimpses of the different time zones and, a lot of the time, its swamped in dialogue and there is no sense of what is really going on and I’m still puzzling over what conspiracy there is from the title. It’s all pretty writing but the plot really gets lost. You come away from this hoping something has been done but, well and truly, I really was no wiser when I got to the end.

GF Willmetts

October 2016

(pub: Orbit. 283 page hardback. Price: £12.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-0-356-50815-3)

check out website: www.orbitbooks.net

UncleGeoff

Geoff Willmetts has been editor at SFCrowsnest for some 21 plus years now, showing a versatility and knowledge in not only Science Fiction, but also the sciences and arts, all of which has been displayed here through editorials, reviews, articles and stories. With the latter, he has been running a short story series under the title of ‘Psi-Kicks’ If you want to contribute to SFCrowsnest, read the guidelines and show him what you can do. If it isn’t usable, he spends as much time telling you what the problems is as he would with material he accepts. This is largely how he got called an Uncle, as in Dutch Uncle. He’s not actually Dutch but hails from the west country in the UK.

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