Subject: Time_Pressure, by Spider Robinson

From: [email-masked] (Felix Lee)
Date: 17 Nov 87 14:30:27 GMT

Time_Pressure
Spider Robinson
Ace Books, 1987

When I finished it, my thought was, "This should have been a short story."
It's an okay idea poorly done.

It is 1973, and a beautiful woman time traveller has just dropped into the
backwoods of Nova Scotia.  But the book is really about the hippie culture
that lives in retreat in the Canadian wilderness.

Most of the narrative is pretty dull:
  The woodshed grunted a dire warning as I passed.  I ignored it; it had
  been threatening to fall over ever since I had known it, back in the days
  when it had been a goat-shed.  As I went by the outhouse I half turned to
  see if the new plastic window I'd stapled up last week had torn itself to
  pieces yet, and as I saw that it had, a shingle left the tiny roof with
  the sound of a busted E-string and came spinning at my eyes like a ninja
  deathstar.  I'm pretty quick, but the distance was short and the closing
  velocity high; I took most of it on my hat but a corner of it put a small
  slice on my forehead.  I was almost glad then for the cold.  It numbed my
  forehead, the bleeding stopped fairly quickly for a forehead wound, and
  what there was swiftly froze and could be easily brushed off.  [p. 5]

This sort of thing continues for the next hundred pages.  Relatively little
happens in the first half of the book.  It's mostly descriptions of Canadian
wilderness in winter, portraits of hippies and hippie culture, self-conscious
references to science fiction, various episodes of sex, and Heinlein-esque
conversations about love.  Then, all of a sudden, you're bombarded with the
climax.  After that, it just peters out.

A major theme of the book is Cosmic Oneness, but the narrator (Sam) is an
outsider:
  I had loved no one; few had loved me.  I had pissed away my talent.  I
  had, in general and with rare exceptions, hated my neighbour.  I had left
  the music business when the folk music market collapsed--not because I
  didn't like other kinds of music; I did--but because folk music was the
  only kind you could play alone.  I had never truly learned to stand other
  people.  [p. 185]
Reading 200 pages of this person's introspection tried my patience.

SERIOUS SPOILER WARNING.


Time_Pressure is a sequel to Mindkiller (a book worth reading by itself).
Nowhere on the cover, on the jacket, in the first hundred-plus pages is this
fact telegraphed.  It is not a "prequel", despite being set earlier in time.

You don't need to read all of Time_Pressure; reading the history-of-the-world
speech on page 192 (about a dozen pages) is enough.
--
Felix Lee	[email-masked]	*!psuvax1!gondor!flee