Arc of the Dream by A.A. Attanasio
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is one of those books. It not only has a slow start to it but there's a rocky shoal that crashes our boat and leaves us bereft of anything to anchor ourselves until much later.

I'm not saying this is a bad book. Indeed, later on, once we get to know our four main characters and a multidimensional alien that needs their help to save the earth, it fairly rocks.

BUT first, we need to get through the mind-trippy extradimensional dense worldbuilding that makes me both very happy and bewildered because it requires some close attention to get through it without the initial investment/payoff that we normally achieve long before such a thing crosses our eyes -- if it ever crosses our eyes. Most books don't go off the deep end with fantastical hard-SF quantum physics extrapolations and theories about life forms or how they slip into our universe or get snagged on matter, hurting them so badly that they reach out -- quasi-unsuccessfully -- to humans all over the world for help.

From there, however, it's a pretty neat Theodore Sturgeon-esq More Than Human adventure/romp that gifts all four humans with cool powers. Massive foresight, massive physical abilities, or massive telepathy make this character-driven novel pretty rocking... LATER ON.

I guess I'd say this is a cool-idea novel that suffers from a few writing snags but it is still worth the effort, regardless.

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