For this reviewer's money, Alan Dean Foster is the most criminally underappreciated science fiction / fantasy writer out there today. Foster remembers a time when rocket ships and ray guns were fun, gosh-darn it, and the genre neither clanked along laboriously under its burden of technical virtuosity nor dealt with grim dystopian futures.
His characters tend to start out likeable and maintain that likability even as the world/galaxy/universe/dimensional reality around them spins wildly out of control, and that tried-and-true notion comes back for another romp in Cat-A-Lyst.
Don't try to dissect the plot too carefully. It has to do with conflict between a Monitor set on Earth to oversee the appropriate development of its two intelligent species and a Renegade agent of chaos with exactly the opposite goal. Along the way there's a search for hidden treasure, revenge plots for a centuries-old outrage, and a trek into the Peruvian jungle that includes a bored B-movie actor between engagements, a feisty 50-year-old wardrobe mistress with a hidden past, an amateur archaeologist with a Freudian axe to grind, a tabloid journalist with more ambition than good sense, and a cast of characters that gets larger and more unwieldy (not to mention unlikely) as the tale rolls on.
Part of The Big Reveal is obvious pretty early on, but that's okay. Foster keeps pulling more rabbits out of the hat to keep the reader occupied as the adventure gallops from the Peruvian jungle to the Nazca Lines to the slimy depths of Televisionland with stopovers in a couple of the aforementioned dimensional realities before he wraps the whole thing up with an ending where almost everyone gets their just rewards. Especially the reader.
His characters tend to start out likeable and maintain that likability even as the world/galaxy/universe/dimensional reality around them spins wildly out of control, and that tried-and-true notion comes back for another romp in Cat-A-Lyst.
Don't try to dissect the plot too carefully. It has to do with conflict between a Monitor set on Earth to oversee the appropriate development of its two intelligent species and a Renegade agent of chaos with exactly the opposite goal. Along the way there's a search for hidden treasure, revenge plots for a centuries-old outrage, and a trek into the Peruvian jungle that includes a bored B-movie actor between engagements, a feisty 50-year-old wardrobe mistress with a hidden past, an amateur archaeologist with a Freudian axe to grind, a tabloid journalist with more ambition than good sense, and a cast of characters that gets larger and more unwieldy (not to mention unlikely) as the tale rolls on.
Part of The Big Reveal is obvious pretty early on, but that's okay. Foster keeps pulling more rabbits out of the hat to keep the reader occupied as the adventure gallops from the Peruvian jungle to the Nazca Lines to the slimy depths of Televisionland with stopovers in a couple of the aforementioned dimensional realities before he wraps the whole thing up with an ending where almost everyone gets their just rewards. Especially the reader.
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