REVIEWS

San Francisco Chronicle review of Here, There & Everywhere
April 24, 2005
by Michael Berry

Entertainment Weekly review of Here, There & Everywhere
April 22, 2005
Young Roxanne Bonaventure receives a powerful bracelet that opens bridges to branching and often divergent time lines--her actions in the past don't change the future.

Story's Little Helper: She names the bracelet Sofia, Greek for wisdom, since "these early Christian guys called the Gnostics worshipped Sofia almost like a goddess...."

Upshot: Roberson's irreverent alternate histories of the Beatles, Sherlock Holmes, and H.G. Wells are a welcome stitch in the age-old time-travel tradition.

Grade: B

Library Journal review of Here, There & Everywhere
April 15, 2005
Roxanne, the precocious only child of widower Professor Bonaventure, receives a mysterious silver bracelet, the Sofia, that allows her to travel to different times and alternate worlds. In the course of her journeys to the Middle Ages, Elizabethan England, ancient Egypt, and future Oxford, she searches for answers to the questions that have always plagued her life-how can she keep her dying father alive? Will she ever find someone to spend her life with? What is the origin of the Sofia, and why was she chosen to wear it for life? Roberson's deceptively lighthearted take on the phenomena of time travel and alternate universes features a likable heroine whose quick mind and caring heart should appeal to adult and YA fans of sf adventure with a conscience. For most libraries. (from the Science Fiction/Fantasy column by Jackie Cassada)

Publishers Weekly review of Here, There & Everywhere
February 14, 2005
If Roberson tends to tell in his first novel rather than show as he does in his short fiction (his stories have been finalists for World Fantasy and Sidewise awards), this episodic romp through the Myriad, where literally every version of events plays out, offers many felicities, not least a spunky heroine. As a schoolgirl, wisecracking Roxanne Bonaventure stumbles across a wounded old woman, who gives her a bracelet. After the woman disappears, Roxanne accidentally discovers that the bracelet, the Sofia, permits travel to any point in the multiverse. Roxanne slowly learns to use the Sofia, and later, with the help of her scientist father, to control it. Her travels then begin in earnest. But several questions dog her: Was the old woman a future version of herself? Where did the Sofia come from? And why are there so few other venues that permit cross–time stream travel in the Myriad? Just when Roxanne believes her life is over, she finds herself in the far future, with one more adventure before her—one that may answer all her questions. Clever popular culture references, amusing showdowns and true human feeling lift this well-crafted debut.
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South Florida Sun-Sentinel review of Here, There & Everywhere
by David Kirby
March 6, 2005
The first two sentences of Chapter 6 of Here, There & Everywhere speak volumes about its parentage. Here they are: "The microscopic fibers of cosmic string material retracting into the housing of the Sofia, the temporal bridge irised shut, returning to the probabilistic chaos of the quantum foam" and "Roxanne slumped down on the bed, fully dressed, her battered backpack falling with a muffled thud on the carpeted floor, and within seconds was already asleep."

The love child of H.G. Wells and Helen Fielding, author of the Bridget Jones novels, sci-fi writer Chris Roberson's latest hurls its heroine through time and space at the speed of a turning page, and then, just as quickly, it sets her down on her battered sofa for a cup of tea so she can stew over her boyfriend problems.

Not that Roxanne Bonaventure has to stew that long: in one of the book's most charming sequences, she uses her fast-forward powers to find out what her would-be boyfriend Nigel likes and then goes back in time to startle and please him when, as it turns out, she just happens to like synth band Tangerine Dream and the films of Ingmar Bergman as much as he does.

Would that the whole novel were that engaging. After a promising beginning, in which a documentary filmmaker notices that the same woman shows up in concert photos through the years even though she never ages, the reader learns how Roxanne acquires the Sofia, a magical bracelet that opens doors in time. A quick learner, she touches all the bases and then some: ancient Egypt, Victorian England, the grouping of the Beatles.

Along the way, Roxanne has oodles of girly fun and finesses a couple of tasty real estate deals in the bargain. When you convert present-day money to gold and whisk it back to the 1860s, you can pick up some pretty decent property and, with the Sofia on your wrist, skate ahead to plop down in housing that Donald Trump can't afford.

Roxanne notes in her diary, "To be honest, I don't know how anybody else manages it, being stuck in the regular hours of the day and night." For the first half of the book, the reader agrees, envying Roxanne her heady powers yet happy to speed through the eons with her on her breathtaking journeys.

After that, though, the special effects take over, and Roxanne, with whom, by this time, the reader is not a little in love, disappears into a maelstrom of quick shifts and plot changes, as though the Sofia is short-circuiting and directing the human action rather than the other way around.

Ultimately, the novel's title says it all: the adorable Roxanne Bonaventure was once the novel's center. But by the end, the focus is here, there and everywhere.

Locus Magazine review of Here, There & Everywhere
by Damien Broderick
March 2005 issue
Three years ago, Texas writer and small press publisher Chris Roberson released a short novel, Any Time at All, through Clockwork Storybook, a writers' collective. In 2002, it seemed that Print on Demand technology was about to revolutionize genre publishing, making it feasible for unusual new work to find readers via the Internet and the mail, bypassing the lumbering dinosaurs in New York and the big bookselling chains with their ever-more restrictive policies and bestseller myopia. Bad luck. As Roberson notes, his small book was handsomely received by reviewers at Asimov's (`a blithe and giddy romp across the multiverse') and the online Infinity Plus (`highly enjoyable'), but managed only `extremely tepid sales.'

Not content to let the book subside and die, Roberson expanded it by one-third and tried the mainstream publishers again. No luck. It was rejected, he tells us in an interesting endnote, as `not commercial' and `too smart.' Luckily, Lou Anders has lately become founding editor of Prometheus Book's new sf line, Pyr. He liked the revision (by now called Here, There & Everywhere and not just because that's where it had been), and it's one of the new imprint's early offerings, Pyr's first `original' novel.

That is a frustrating history, and probably more common than we know; I suspect many interesting but quirky novels never have the good fortune to be saved by a newly empowered editorial director. Taking the PoD route, however, now seems the road to doom. (This might change when hand-held viewer technology improves.) So one question we have to ask at once is whether the major traditional sf publishers were blindly wrong in rejecting Roberson's `giddy' and `enjoyable' novel? I think I can see their rationale, although I don't accept it.

As a fractious and alienated eleven year old, Roxanne Bonaventure receives from a dying old woman a bracelet allowing her passage back and forth along her own unique worldline, and sideways into any alternative history of the Myriad. That this is a closed circle tale—`By Her Bootstraps', so to speak—is never really in question, and the metaphysical nature of that closure does provide a transcendental, if by now routine, sf climax. Along the way to her death and beyond, Roxanne has more than her fair share of ripping good adventures, and of heartbreak and hard-won insight.

But is it hard-won? She is effortlessly competent, with martial arts skills we never see her acquire. Nothing even seems at stake, at the level of threat and action anyway, because her Sofia device shunts her away from hazard in slippery knight's moves. Roberson uses a device that makes it hard to take Roxanne's story seriously even during immersion in her tale. The very structure of the book tries to make us read it as a jest or jeu d'esprit: it is a faux fix-up, a mosaic, a pretended gathering of stories independently published in magazines (as van Vogt's The Voyage of the Space Beagle was, half a century ago). This is an odd conceit—somewhat subverted by the fact that several segments in fact have been e-published separately, in Opi8.com and elsewhere—but it has the virtue of allowing Roberson to switch register now and then, from young adult to 19th century pulp mystery, from early Wellsian to adventures with Egyptologists and Nazis in the desert, from Beatles fancier tracking the lads through all the variant worlds to Kuttner-like confrontations at the end of time. Good trick, especially in these cross-genre days. But the device makes it hard to treat the book as a novel rather than a collection of novelty items.

Roberson has thought hard about the implication of travel in time and across the multiverse or Myriad. Surprisingly, given the number of writers who've explored this trope ahead of him, he comes up with some notions that seemed to me plausible and new. Whether they'd convince a physicist is irrelevant; they are contributions to the long and entertaining conversation within the genre.

I was rather disheartened, though, by a sort of narrow tough-minded conservatism in his chart of the future. As Roxanne's father lies dying sometime soon, she goes ahead a decade or so, a century, two centuries, trying one medical cure after another. But you can't cheat death; he ups and dies each time, no matter how advanced the treatment. This might seem a satisfying moral to many readers, but really it's about as likely as learning that a time traveler treating septicemia with antibiotics in the 10th century is doomed to fail. The only sense one can make of this death-embracing fatalism is that some deliberate instrumentality, as in Cordwainer Smith's tales or Asimov's The End of Eternity, must be paralyzing change in the future, halting science in its tracks. This, though, is not Roberson's point. No, it seems that people in the future just don't care, rather as we today haven't bothered going back to the Moon. It seems an oddly resigned and blinkered view, at a time when a small robot spacecraft has lately sent us data from the surface of Titan, as genomic research homes in on cures for what maims and kills us.

Perhaps I'm treating Roberson's light-hearted book too pompously. It is a frolic, after all. But it yearns to be more than that. I was reminded of the 1990s' BBC television series Goodnight, Sweetheart, about a bamboozled man shuffling back and forth between now and the Second World War. That comedy had a bitter-sweet edge which enriched and layered the jokes. Roxanne's tangled history gets there now and then. Yet her moral—`in the end, technology was simply a tool to allow people more easily to live the lives they would have led regardless'—seems highly doubtful, pretty much exactly the opposite of what such time-leaping abilities would truly demonstrate.

Locus Magazine review of "Red Hands, Black Hands"
by Nick Gevers
November 2004
The highly talented Chris Roberson, recent winner of the Sidewise Award for his story “O One”, continues that tale’s vein of opulent Sinophilia in “Red Hands, Black Hands” – in this alternate timeline, Imperial China dominates the world in place of Europe – but exacerbates the peculiarity of the setting by transferring it to a partly terraformed Mars ruled by the Mandarins. The Emperor’s oppressive writ runs severely, and a woman novelist, part of a circle of rather dilettantish bohemians, becomes involved in serious seditious activity, falling in love with a revolutionary and spreading his propaganda via her writings (which include an opera libretto portraying a uchronia under Aztec supremacy, wheels within counterfactual wheels…). The atmosphere is sumptuous, the invention lavish; the experience of reading the story is mind-expanding."