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Reckless Sleep
Roger Levy
Gollancz, hardback, 432 pages; trade paperback also available
Review by Mike Don (2000)

An ambitious first novel which almost succeeds. Jon Sciler, combat vet from the losing side in an interstellar military venture, returns to a dying Earth. Damaged and alienated by his experiences, and alienated further by the effects of relativistic time dilation (shades of Joe Haldeman?), he accepts an offer to field test a new virtual reality game environment.

There’s no doubt that Levy can write, and Sciler is an impressively sympathetic figure as the tragic hero, but Reckless Sleep suffers from an overcrowding of themes. There’s the Dirangesept episode, told in flashbacks; the sleazily decaying London, the mysteries of the VR world. Add a kind of murder mystery plot and a sub plot involving a deranged, psychopathetic policeman, and you get too rich a mix, with a damaging effect on both characterisation (Sciler apart) and plot, which doesn’t so much flow as jerk forward in bursts of amphetamine energy. It was (for me) rather like eating plum duff laced with Methedrine.

The glitch, perhaps, lies in the decaying Earth area. Levy’s chosen road, tectonic instability, doesn’t ring true. If a Sumatran volcano really was pumping out enough ash to regularly blanket London, there’d be nobody around to worry about virtual reality, Dirangesept, or anything else.