Subject: _Wildside_ by Steven Gould

From: [email-masked] (Christina Schulman, A.S.B.R.)
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 1996 22:04:09 GMT

_Wildside_ by Steven Gould
	Review copyright 1996 Christina Schulman

Charlie Newell has his own private earth, untouched by humans.  On the other
side of the hidden door in his dead uncle's Texas ranch, the bison still
roam, as do mastodon and sabretooth tigers and bears (oh my).  With the help
of four newly-graduated high school friends, Charlie plans to use the gate
to become very, very rich, and he traps and sells twenty passenger pigeons
at extortionate prices to fund his scheme.  The sudden appearance of extinct
birds doesn't go unnoticed, however, and while Charlie and his friends are
hauling and hammering and flying and skydiving and camping on the other side
of the gate, the Feds are tracking them down.

The relationships among the main characters resemble a soap opera at times,
but I suppose that's inevitable when you cram five teenagers and their
hormones into close quarters, and _Wildside_ is mercifully free of the
armchair psychoanalysis that irritated me in Gould's first novel, _Jumper_.
Gould also refrains from environmentalist chest-beating, to my happy
surprise.  The characters are constantly jumping into and out of small
airplanes, and there's a tremendous amount of detail about flying, from the
preflight checklist to putting the plane away and cleaning off the bugs.  My
eyes glazed over whenever I hit another passage of pilot jargon, but much of
the detail is important to the story, and it does add a degree of
plausibility.

For most of the the book, _Wildside_ is an absorbing adventure story, with a
minimum of attention paid to the science fiction aspects.  Events move
rapidly enough that my suspension of disbelief only had time for the
occasional twinge at the idea of a handful of 18-year-olds turning into
steely-eyed Frontier Commandos.  The "how" and "why" of the alternate earth
don't come to the fore until the kids are embroiled in a battle to keep the
gate out of the hands of the Evil Government Boogeymen.  The "why" is wildly
implausible, but the story is so much fun that I don't care.

I enjoyed _Wildside_ immensely.  If you're looking for something fun but not
particularly deep, I recommend it highly.  And if you haven't read _Jumper_,
I recommend that too.

        Want power in another universe?  Use an extension cord.  Want 
    water? Run a hose.
        Okay, so I had to send Rick into town to buy enough heavy duty 
    extension cord and industrial water hose to reach, but it 
    worked.  I had my doubts.  First time I drove the tractor into 
    the tunnel, to see if it would fit, I'd expected it to stop 
    working halfway down the tunnel.
        After all, if it's a different universe, who says it has to  
    have the same laws?
        I think I've read too much science fiction.

%A Steven Gould
%T Wildside
%I Tor
%C New York
%D April 1996
%G ISBN 0-312-85473-0
%P 316 pp.
%O hardback, US $22.95, Canada $33.95

Christina Schulman   http://www.pitt.edu/~schulman     [email-masked]
"Ah, publication!  The magical process by which amateur writers are
 transmogrified into amateurish writers." -- SubG

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