Maze of Worlds

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Its abundance of futuristic technojargon and gizmology notwithstanding, this sequel to Lumley's 1990 SF adventure, The House of Doors, is a throwback to drive-in B-movies of the 1950s, replete with evil space invaders bent on world domination and selfless human heroes. Here the villains are the Ggydnn, a renegade clan of the alien Thone, who, under the direction of disgraced mastermind Sith, have unleashed a sort of killer kudzu that is rapidly terraforming Earth to conditions noxious to humans but comfy for extraterrestrial habitation. The invasion is just a sneaky scheme to lure Spencer Gill, the agent of Sith's undoing in the previous novel, back for another showdown in the House of Doors, a Thone supercomputer whose interior contains a multitude of virtual worlds built from the nightmares of those who become trapped inside it. There is little doubt from the moment Gill, Angela Denholm and five other unlikely commandos enter the alien construct that they will find a way to master its monsters and turn its false realities to their advantagealthough not before enduring ordeals with sentient machines, mutant births, grotesque physical transformations and other horrors fashioned from their subconscious fears. Lumley's stereotypically sneering aliens and virtuous humans often seem little more than computer constructs themselves, but the novel's plot speeds briskly over these shortcomings. Cutting-edge SF this isn't, but readers looking for the same audacious imagination that enlivens Lumley's Necroscope series will find this a pleasantly distracting substitute. (June)

Library Journal

Once before, the alien civilization of the Thone administered a deadly test to determine humanity's worth. Now an outcast of the Thone returns to conduct his own vendetta against machine-empath Spencer Gill and the others who acted as Earth's champions. Lumley's sequel to House of Doors (Tor, 1990) covers familiar territory as his characters confront a series of nightmarish realities contained within an extra-dimensional alien machine. The author's penchant for gore will appeal to fans of visceral horror. Purchase where Lumley has a following.

Library Journal

In this sequel to The House of Doors, a group of dedicated humans must again struggle through the House's lethal four-dimensional maze to save Earth from a group of aliens.

San Francisco Chronicle

"Lumley's strength is in his jovial voice, a diction that dominates the narrative. Lumley's love of his pulp-horror subjectsis gleefully apparent. He revels in every telling detail, in stories-within-stories..."

Phoenix Gazette

"Lumley never oversteps the delicate line between blood-chilling horror and cold grue. An accomlished wordsmith, Lumleywields a pen with the deft skill of a surgeon, drawing just enough blood to titillate without offending his readers."

Kirkus Reviews

Sequel to British fantasy writer Lumley's hybrid sf/games fantasy The House of Doors (1990, not reviewed) in which alien Thones try to take over the Earth. The Thones's original House of Doors was a gamesmaster's torture chamber built to test the adaptability and intelligence of native species. When a small group of earthlings, led by Spencer Gill, defeated the House of Doors, the aliens acknowledged our smarts and, going by their own moral code, departed, granting our right to survive. Now they're back—or a renegade group is—and set on using Earth as a breeding ground. First to notice them is a fisherman in Shantung Province who finds that a hundred-foot-tall, doorless and windowless pagoda has suddenly appeared on the shore below his house in the brief moment it took for him to put on his hat. Rowing out to the pagoda, he finds that it's a kind of virtual-reality structure that shimmers, although he can step onto its steps—well, momentarily, until a terrific suction within the pagoda frightens him into leaping back into the sea. Meantime, in Egypt a doorless pyramid appears, while in the ocean a large iceberg has become stationary. In England, "Machine Man" Spencer Gill is again called in, this time to study some simultaneous glitches in the world's radio telescopes. Gill himself represents a quantum leap in human intelligence, since he understands computers and all machines by touch, taste, smell, sight, and listening to and feeling for them. The telescope glitches are eight spatial anomalies—holes in space!þthat equidistantly form a cube around the globe. Then all the oceans start to clog with massive outbreaks of algae, which is what the Thones plan to useto suffocate the human population. But first they must capture Gill and his party in a House of Doors. More straightforward than Lumley's Necroscope series, and fun on a heroic sf level.