justifiedsinner
8/23/2013
Slow moving, confused and vague. This parallel universe story recounts the meanderings of Sam Dance who is given the plans for a device by a mysterious woman at the start of WWII. The woman a cartoonish deus ex machina who control events in some unspecified manner is a genius of quatum physics, neurology and molecular biology. She was the woman who apparently worked on the crystallographic structure of DNA. Watson is briefly mentioned in this regard. (Thus, I suppose, completing his erasure of the work of Rosalind Franklin whose work the misogynistic Watson purloined for his Nobel Prize).
The science is gobbledygook, the plot confused by excerpts from the author's fathers' wartime notebooks (which would have made a better novel).
Hard to see why it won the Campbell and hard to see why I'm wasting so much time reviewing it when I could be reading something better.