Apologies for continued absence of carriage returns. Once more I must defer to lulu who told me my reviews would always be crlfless. Read this review in less blocky form at www.leostableford.com ... Continuity Slip is a solid thriller and, joy of joys, it presents the inquisitive reader with eccentricities of personality that make it an involving read even when it's not barrelling along at 500 miles per hour. The first thing that you notice is that for a thriller it really doesn't indulge in proper thriller stuff for a long time. It's very talky and almost a third of the novel's up before we even glimpse a dead body or anything similarly thrillery. There's also the potentially fascinating SF angle on the events in the story, the titular continuity slip. Unfortunately there's not much the novel's hero, Ray Shannon, or anyone he encounters can do to explain what really happened. The resolution to this strand is annoyingly woolly and even a little glib. "Proper" SF luminaries will be extremely annoyed that no scientific things happen to attempt a proof of the central theory of the story. The fact is that the slip is a narrative device and is treated as such. This means that the high concept is pressed into the service of a pretty decent thriller and then kind of discarded. Our main couple Ray and Alyssa spend, perhaps, more time talking than might have been allowed in a more conventional story of this type. The dialogue is intriguing enough to be put down to "character". Other characters are either information ciphers, proof of the central conceit or cardboardy foils for the central pair. Most intriguing is that the slip puts Ray in a situation of marital infidelity. This move is almost entirely unnecessary, there are some plot reasons why Ray's wife exists but she could equally well have been Ray's sister or even Ray's estranged daughter and then huge swathes of moral to and froing (that don't always make Ray look like a hero) could have been abandoned in service of something more interesting. (Well, more interesting to me.) As an author I always wonder why authors take the hard road for no reason. In the end my speculation rarely yields any solid reason if that reason isn't in the prose itself. The fact is Ray's wife Debbie didn't need to be Ray's wife and if she hadn't been it would have made the protagonist far easier to like. To complain about things like this is churlish, however, especially when your objective is to read good POD because it's more interesting than mediocre commercial fare. This definitely satisfies on that level. Continuity Slip is dynamic and purposeful writing. That it has a few things which seem odd is something to be celebrated, not mourned. If you can resign yourself to the the fact that it's never going to get seriously quantum and you can put up with a main character who philanders and then has the philandering rewarded by the vagaries of parallel universe theory you will probably enjoy this. I did.

Continuity Slip reads like an archetypal summer Hollywood movie. The writing is clean and polished. The narrative pushes forward relentlessly. Parallel universes are always fun, and the philosophical conceit at the heart of the novel -- the way little changes in experience might cumulatively impact a person's entire nature -- is intriguing. The protagonists make a likable couple, and their romance is not only part of the plot, but cleverly explains the plot as well (and yes, I know that sounds rather cryptic).

However, also like many big-studio films, Continuity Slip feels a little shallow. Although the novel raises interesting concepts, it never fully explores them. All of the recondite discussion about alternate realities ends up serving only as background color for a standard murder mystery that could just as well have happened in this reality. The two plot threads never significantly mesh. Indeed, once the mystery is resolved, the shifting realities thread is wrapped-up very quickly, almost as an afterthought.

I look forward to reading more works by Till Noever. He plainly is very talented, and Continuity Slip is nothing if not professionally written. The strength of Noever's style and the affability of his characters easily carried me through the novel. I only wish that the journey had lived up to its full potential.

Another awesome Noever novel, and definitely my favorite. As usual, the writing is fast, direct, gripping, and as usual I couldn’t wait to find out what happened on the next page, in the next chapter. Especially approaching the end. In Noever’s characteristic style, the story is driven by its people and their dialogues.

Continuity Slip is, in essence, an example of the 'many worlds' theory of quantum physics, and thus engages the reader to think. Woven through it is a love story where the entire universe seems posed against the characters. The reader follows Ray when two of these many worlds collide, and to the end I was left in a spin wondering which reality was 'real.' Was there one ramp or two? Did Ray temporarily slip into a new reality, or did he leave one and enter another, or was it all in the mind? Makes you think, what is 'reality?' Does the question even make sense within the framework of the author’s cosmology? The concepts go well beyond the book and had me thinking about reality in a very real sense, something few books pull off.