Gérard Klein

For the first third of the book, each chapter seems to be from a different subgenre of SF. The opening chapter seems presciently modern space opera, a la Hamilton (Peter, not Edmond). Our hero and a monster plummet to a planet from an exploding spaceship, and it's revealed our hero is bringing the monster so it can reproduce and kill everyone in a year, and our hero's primary goal is to kill himself in such a way that no traces of his presence are left. But all that is thrown away in chapter 2, where our hero has been thrown 6000 years into the future, meets a woman named Floria, who speaks his language, and the story now seems like a throwback to the 1930s. Then, a few chapters later, he finds himself on a world where battles are fought endlessly between soldiers resurrected from history, in a setting not unlike Farmer's Riverworld, including everyone is brought back to life when they die. I'll go no further than these initial chapters to avoid spoilers, except to say this is a time travel novel through and through, with all that entails. Towards the end the hero takes a disturbing action that spoiled the novel for me. The context and outcome was such a stretch that it's presence can't be argued as necessary in any way. I docked it a point for that. Your mileage may vary. Note: translated by John Brunner and there are speculative detours that are much like Brunner's work of this period.… (more)