Review: He does it again!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 18, 2011
I was (and am) a big fan ofTumbler. Brand wrote the kind of old school sci-fi that hooked me and dragged me in. He did it again with The Hidden Institute.This feels like a cross between Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens. Put an upwardly mobile Huck Finn in a Dickensian dystopia and shoot him through a brass geared time machine to a world not that far removed from us. That gives you a story something like this (with as the other reviewers have said, bear polo). It's not quite steampunk, though if you enjoy that, you're likely to enjoy this.Whatever your literary cup of tea, I think you'll enjoy the characters (particularly the robot), the intrigue, and the solid plot Brand presents us with.