It starts slowly despite spectacle, picks up in the middle, gets weird, and ends on an extended anti-climax.
Well World is the central control computer for the universe. Hexes across its surface contain microcosms of many worlds, with differing climates and dominant races. Come to Well World and you will be assigned to a new hex in a new body. When dangerous researchers stumble through the Well Gate and seek ultimate control, a motley crew follows them and learns much about themselves.
The introduction is too long. We have a twenty-page prologue before meeting the protagonist, forty pages before reaching the planet where the story takes place, and another thirty pages of exposition before really entering Well World. If this is your first time reading an author, are you willing to give him ninety pages of leeway before getting on with it? Luckily, I am a giving soul.
The plot is not terribly unified. There is the thread that the characters are headed towards reunion and conflict, but the story events are just things that happen to them along the way. They pass through various hexes, discover and face the associated hazards, then move on, usually transformed in some way. Most of the characters do not even know where they are going, except that it is bad.
There is some small amount of character development, but it comes in fits and starts rather than showing growth over time. People change in mind as quickly as in body, and this is a planet where people get transformed whenever the author is bored.
There is some playing with karmic transformations, where what is inside is brought out, penance is imposed on a sinner, or the virtuous are rewarded. Other times the external change precedes the internal, so the change in body provides a change in perspective that leads to a change of mind. (Given that teleportation can accompany transformation, it might also be just the related change in setting that changes minds.) And sometimes the transformation is arbitrary, because hey, centaurs and mermaids!
The scattered plot creates difficulties for character development because we are following too many paths. The characters get scattered to their new bodies, and we spend a chapter or two with each character before unifying them into a smaller number of plot threads. It feels like a series of vignettes, and it was not clear that anything was going to come back together until it became clear that absolutely everything was destined to come together at the same time.
One character gets a turn as the point of view character then has no meaningful role again beyond "mount." Another has a huge character change that is explicitly announced at the end to have had no bearing on events whatsoever. Two theoretically plot-critical characters spend most of the book at center stage without character development, important lines, or much impact on the plot.
When the bad guys get their comeuppance at the end, it is hard to care much. They did some bad things before the main story (or perhaps the entire book) started, but they commit few sins on-page despite being repeatedly described as horrible people. Vengeance against...that guy who has been standing next to the main cast not doing anything for the entire book. Yay?
It does not help to have the protagonist lording his knowledge over everyone else for the last third of the book without explaining anything. It is like a mystery story where the detective finds half the clues "off-camera," then spends most of the book laughing about how no one else can figure it all out. It's not mysterious; it's irritating. Hiding all the explanations until the ending did not improve them.
The ending manages to be an anti-climax despite an appearance by God Himself to explain His creation. We get to the end only to discover that absolutely none of it mattered except for having a couple of people learn that striving is better than sameness. The ending is neither plot- nor character-driven. God takes over at midnight at the Well of Souls, and then we have bonus exposition as denouement. It is perhaps mollifying that you do not care much about the characters by that point anyway.
Before reading this book, I never needed to wonder whether the phrase "antelope-centaur sex" would be interpreted as a centaur having sex with an antelope, as someone having sex with a centaur whose lower body was an antelope rather than a horse, as two of those antelope-centaurs having sex with each other, or as sex involving a centaur who has been turned into an antelope (or vice versa). There are more permutations possible, so you can guess which ones the book chose to explore.
On a visual note, my edition's cover makes the centaur white, despite her being described as chocolate brown. Maybe no one told the illustrator. Maybe they decided that having a black girl on the cover would reduce sales. Maybe they thought interracial romance would offend people reading a book with interspecies romance. They did, however, make sure she was topless.
This book has not been compelling enough to have me read more Well World novels, especially when I'm told that the author descends into depicting his assorted transformation fetishes at the expense of writing quality. I am, however, interested in how someone might play with transformation themes in writing, and Downtiming the Night Side
is reportedly his best work, so I should pursue that sometime.Amazon link
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