The Paradox Hotel by Rob Hart
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think this is a case of I must have expected more out of this than I might have, otherwise. I loved the Warehouse and I've been glutting on a stream of great, quirky time travel novels by Jodi Taylor (St. Mary's, Time Police) that deal with institutional absurdities, politics, chaos while giving us a light humorous touch.

The Paradox Hotel is something like that. Selling joy-rides to the past for the rich and powerful, having a badass security-woman suffering from a PTSD-like time-ghost haunting condition, and a hotel as a base of operations with its own mysteries. It reads like harried insider officials and institutional/spook fiction.

Unfortunately for me, it felt a bit disorganized even for the disorganized attempt. Even in the chaos, there's self-consistency and the opportunity for some great humor just screams opportunity, but there were a number of missteps and pacing problems that let those fizzle out until I had to accept that it wasn't meant to be funny at all. And that's okay. But this also slapped this book back down to the level of some much older SF that did have a lot of the same institutional feel and focus -- including the realization that the rich will absolutely destroy us all.

I didn't hate this book, mind you. I just thought that my impression of missed opportunities overwhelmed my outright enjoyment of a book that might have been written fifty or sixty years ago.


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