Grimwood, Ken

• Replay (9)

  • Very engrossing story about a man who dies and then wakes up again 25 years earlier. What would you do? Invest in IBM? Tell the FBI about Lee Harvey Oswald (he dies in 1988 and comes back in 1963)? Then he dies again...and wakes up again...and so on. One of the best stand-alone books I've read in a long time. I recommend it very highly. I've written a full length review for rec.arts.sf.written if you're interested in reading more about this.

• Into the Deep (6)

  • Well, after Replay, I suppose the letdown was inevitable. The main plot is about the "first contact" between humans and dolphins thanks to the research in dolphin communication by a beleaguered researcher in California. Grimwood offers a point of view from both human and dolphin subplots, and the dolphin subplots are clearly the strongest. Maybe that's because we know better than to believe some of the characterizations he makes of the humans. There are a few brief passages in this book (sometimes a single sentence is enough) that I can't believe an editor didn't catch (in a semantic rather than a syntactical sense). To be sure, this is an interesting book, very upbeat, and at times, exciting. Just not that great.

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