Review: A different approach to a time travel story but it taxed my linear brain
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 7, 2013
Kudos to Kagle for developing a different approach to his time travel story, but I'll freely admit that I doubt I caught all the subtleties that he brought together in "Pinhole", which is an apparently set of disconnected stories that are clearly interconnected - the same in fact? - when viewed through the four dimensional filter of wormholes that ripple through space and time.It is a compelling, if brain bending approach, but my problem was holding all these narrative threads together outside of the usual linear time line that most novels provide. Even when they jump around from present, past and future, cause and effect remain in play with a normal story. Not so with "Pinhole", because time travel has the potential to turn cause and effect on its head and Kagle goes to town on this aspect. Sometimes it was pretty clear (to me at least) what is going on...and sometimes it was not.For example, the Cassandra thread was reasonably straightforward, if somewhat distressing. But I still don't really get how the Joseph(s) thread worked or what it was about. The other threads sat between these extremes for me, and sometimes I had to backtrack to unravel who was doing what to whom in terms of plot lineage.While the characters were generally well described and had consistent motivations, the opening sequence with the uranolophiae felt contrived. But Kagle hit his stride quickly and "Pinhole" was an easy read in the sense that it was not peppered with grammatical errors and typos.If you like time travel stories, for less than a dollar "Pinhole" is definitely worth buying. Just don't expect a run of the mill variant on Heinlein's classic "All You Zombies-" concept because "Pinhole" is an order of magnitude more brain bending than that.