Chris

I picked up Something Rotten in the airport bookshop yesterday while I was waiting to fly home. I bought it after being hit smack between the eyes by the most unbelievably surreal opening I've ever read in any book.

A pair of special detectives are on the trail of a minotaur who has escaped from his own novel and has gone to ground in the back-story of a third-rate western. And it gets a whole lot wierder than that. I bought it and am now reading avidly.

I just finished Ben Bova's latest 'tour of the solar system' novel, Mercury. It is by far the weakest of the four I've read so far (already finished Mars, Return to Mars and Venus). Mercury suffers from a disappointingly thin plot and a series of increasingly unlikely coincidences about two-thirds of the way through a flash-back that itself occupies about three quarters of the entire book. The whole thing reads like he knew he had to write Mercury to add to the series but didn't have much in the way of ideas for an actual story. Unless you're particularly a fan of the series (and so are interested in how the characters and events fit into the overall back story he's created) I wouldn't bother.

Hey, I used 'back story' twice in one post. Does that make me a real critic?