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Maze of Worlds
Author(s): Brian Lumley (Author)
- Publisher: Tor Books
- Publication Date: January 1, 1998
- Edition: First Edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 380 pages
- ISBN-10: 0312866046
- ISBN-13: 9780312866044
Book Description
When a group of renegade aliens attacks the Earth with strange hybrid machines that create four-dimensional mazes, four humans attempt to solve the mystery of the alien machines that are capable of manipulating their worst fears
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Once before, the alien civilization of the Thone administered a deadly test to determine humanity’s worth. Now an outcast of the Thone returns to conduct his own vendetta against machine-empath Spencer Gill and the others who acted as Earth’s champions. Lumley’s sequel to House of Doors (Tor, 1990) covers familiar territory as his characters confront a series of nightmarish realities contained within an extra-dimensional alien machine. The author’s penchant for gore will appeal to fans of visceral horror. Purchase where Lumley has a following.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Spencer Gill reassembles his old team to defeat renegade Ggyddns in this sequel to The House of Doors (1990), in which aliens constructed a chimerical castle for their mental tortures. This time, the miscreants erect a massive though unreal pagoda in the South China Sea. Spencer is a sort of empath-with-machinery, which in the end is what the alien invasion is all about: machinery creating illusions convincing enough to overcome reality. Thus, in perhaps the most interesting aspect of this novel, the Ggyddns push the earth into steep ecological decline, and the condition is real enough to cause real human suffering. Somehow, Spencer is able not only to divine the machinery of illusion but also to leap through dimensions in pursuit of Ggyddn secrets. Yet he and his team would not triumph without the intervention of yet another alien species, the Thones, who deem the Ggyddns “unworthy.” Talky and overlong, but sometimes startlingly imaginative. John Mort
From Kirkus Reviews
Sequel to British fantasy writer Lumley’s hybrid sf/games fantasy The House of Doors (1990, not reviewed) in which alien Thones try to take over the Earth. The Thones’s original House of Doors was a gamesmaster’s torture chamber built to test the adaptability and intelligence of native species. When a small group of earthlings, led by Spencer Gill, defeated the House of Doors, the aliens acknowledged our smarts and, going by their own moral code, departed, granting our right to survive. Now they’re back–or a renegade group is–and set on using Earth as a breeding ground. First to notice them is a fisherman in Shantung Province who finds that a hundred-foot-tall, doorless and windowless pagoda has suddenly appeared on the shore below his house in the brief moment it took for him to put on his hat. Rowing out to the pagoda, he finds that it’s a kind of virtual-reality structure that shimmers, although he can step onto its steps–well, momentarily, until a terrific suction within the pagoda frightens him into leaping back into the sea. Meantime, in Egypt a doorless pyramid appears, while in the ocean a large iceberg has become stationary. In England, “Machine Man” Spencer Gill is again called in, this time to study some simultaneous glitches in the world’s radio telescopes. Gill himself represents a quantum leap in human intelligence, since he understands computers and all machines by touch, taste, smell, sight, and listening to and feeling for them. The telescope glitches are eight spatial anomalies–holes in space!that equidistantly form a cube around the globe. Then all the oceans start to clog with massive outbreaks of algae, which is what the Thones plan to use to suffocate the human population. But first they must capture Gill and his party in a House of Doors. More straightforward than Lumley’s Necroscope series, and fun on a heroic sf level. — Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
