Oracle, by Mike Resnick
Space-toughguy potboiler with a little twist
(Review posted 2 Mar 2006 00:57:10)

This is the middle volume of a trilogy about Penelope Bailey, who for some reason can see (within limits) into the future, and select (within limits) which of the possible courses of events that she sees actually comes to pass. But Penelope only shows up in the last thirty pages of a 240-page book; the main bulk is a nice straightforward "tough guys on the frontier" pulp-style SF novel about hired killers with their own rough senses of justice, a saloon called the End of the Line on a planet called Last Chance, characters named The Iceman and The Whistler and like that, and the covert government agencies that enlist them as a last resort when all of their own best men have vanished when sent to investigate etc etc etc.

And that's not a bad thing. The clichés are done with a deft touch, a certain freshness, and the showing up of The Oracle herself at the end (and the odd circumstances that she is in, and the stage of development of her powers) puts a nice final cherry on it all.

This is certainly escapism: it doesn't hold up under nit-picking examination (the tough guys too often escape death because their potential killers stop to gloat, the Oracle's powers don't really make consistent sense under close scrutiny, and so on). But it's fun escapism. And despite being Volume Two of a Trilogy it's a fine read all by itself, without having read the first one first, and without having the third one immediately on hand to pick up. Although I may very well look for them both on some future occasion when I want to escape again to that same place.