Echoes Of The Well Of Souls (1993) - Plot & Excerpts
I stumbled across this series in the 50-cent paperback section at The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles on a recent vacation. I had read the original Well World series in high school in the 1970s and remembered it somewhat fondly. It made me wonder what had happened to Jack L. Chalker. He was a longtime science fiction fan, computer nerd and history teacher who hit it big with the original series. In the introduction to this early 90s effort, he hints that he was offered enough money to revisit the compelling stories of a world where people are reincarnated in different bodies (and sexes) so he penned these books. He's a quite readable writer, but this is entertaining pulp sci-fi, which means the science is a bit sketchy and the characterizations are more shorthand than developed. But he is a grammatical, smooth writer who knows his way around a plot. I gulped this down in a few days, and I plan to finish the next ones soon. He cleverly addresses one little anachronism from the past series -- the fall of the Soviet Union sort of wrecked the timeline of the past series so that is explained as an alternate universe. After a brief setup on the earth of the 1980s, the action shifts to the far-off Well World, with no danger of further anachronisms. I have recently been satisfying my nostalgia for the pulpy sci-fi / fantasy reading of my youth. The Riverworld novels and others were a disappointment, so this was a pleasant surprise, especially since I didn't notice the series when it came out the first time, or a subsequent series that Chalker wrote early in the last decade. I looked him up and was saddened to see that he died at the rather young age of 61 in 2005 from heart-related ailments.
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