The Hundredfold Problem
by John Grant
Category: Fiction

The story begins several million years ago, when sentient machines from an alien civilization build a Dyson Sphere around the sun's Red Dwarf companion star (which is why we've never seen it) and seed the Sphere with Neanderthals . . .Or maybe it begins in the future, after terrestrial humanity has discovered the Sphere (now called the Big Dunkin Donut), colonized it, and enslaved the natives.Whatever . the Donut is in peril.Atheist fundamentalist preachers - Rev Rick "The Man" Hamfist and Rev Bo "No Messin" Fingers - inspired by dastardly Dennis the Complete Bloody Sadist, are waging an evangelical war there with the aim of destroying the local, very real, goddess Korax.Using a matter transmitter, Earth sends holochips of two plucky adventurers to sort this out: heavy-weapons-toting xeno-anthropologist and scantily clad babe Petula McTavish; and by-the-rules supercop Dave Knuckle. But Knuckle's holochip is accidentally shattered on arrival into one hundred fragments, which are reconstituted to form one hundred lethally diverse partial versions of the supercop.McTavish now has a one hundredfold problem to solve. Actually a hundred and one, but that wouldn't have made as good a title.And that's before she falls in love . . .The Hundredfold Problem is that rarest of things - a gloriously funny romp, populated by outrageous, larger-than-life characters, that's also an extremely imaginative, challenging sf novel.