If Elfland will not go to Poughkeepsie ...

 

 

Tinker -- Wen Spencer -- 2003

My membership for Balticon 2020 was rolled over to Balticon 2021, then rolled over to Balticon 2022. Hopefully it'll stop rolling. If it starts to gather some moss, I'll see you in Baltimore over Memorial Day weekend.

One of the scheduled guests is Wen Spencer, from whom I've read nothing. I decided to try something, in my quest to discover new SF authors -- by new, I mean someone not publishing before the present century. One of her earliest novels, "Tinker", was highly recommended in on-line reviews. Even though it was awarded Best Science Fiction Romance novel of 2004, I decided to take a flyer.

In the near future, the Chinese have built an orbiting inter-dimensional gateway that sends out colonists for interstellar exploration. An unexpected side effect from the gate's operation sends the city of Pittsburgh to a parallel Earth where magic exists. This mirrored Earth, Elfhome, is populated by a race of elves who have eschewed technology for magic and live in a caste-based pastoral system.

Our heroine is a native of the severely de-populated Pittsburgh. She's 18, with no formal education, but smarter than Einstein, and a world-class mathematician -- certainly better than Uncle Albert ever was. She's also a computer genius, an electronics genius, a mechanical genius, and has invented and builds highly coveted semi-magical hovercycles, on which she is a champion racer. But all those interests are merely hobbies. To support herself (ugh! sigh!) most of her time is spent running a scrap yard.

After suffering through her interactions with the piggy and terrifically intellectually inferior human males of neo-Pittsburgh, our virginal heroine is swept off her feet by a gorgeous and mysterious elven prince. Cue sex scenes that skate around the edge of explicit, which I believe is standard in Romance novels.

After an interesting tour of the landscape and customs of both Neo-Pittsburgh and Elfhome, the villains arrive and the action begins.

Some of the plot holes in the novel could use a semi-magical hoverbackhoe to fill. For example, the people of neo-Pittsburgh couldn't survive on Elfhome, except that one day out of every 28 the city returns to Earth, enabling restocking of food and supplies. The enemy can read your mind, except our heroine's when she's blocking them by doing complicated computation in her head. Magic arrows can shoot through this, but not through that.

But I'm being a little too negative. It's really an OK novel, a fairly well written comic book style mashup of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Romance. I enjoyed reading it, but it's not really my bag.  If you're into multi-genre grrl power novels with impossibly talented heroines, check it out. If you dig it, it's first of a series.

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