While John Barnes has written a number of simply outstanding books (Mother of Storms, One for the Morning Glory), this Pohl-esque entry into the alternate worlds genre isn't one of them.

Finity gets off to a good start. The (first-person) narrator speaks in stilted, self-centered prose like, perhaps, a character from a R.A. Lafferty novel. It becomes apparent, after a while, that he inhabits a world that seems to have a changing past. Not only that but this changing past seems to be different for everyone. And then there is the matter of the United States having gone missing.

It's an interesting premise until it turns into a road trip. Then the story begins leaking steam. One of the characters turns out to be a red herring. (Or something very much like a red herring.) People you've just begun to know turn out to be expendable or not around for all that long for other reasons.

The mess is polished off with a couple of dream sequences that might have been adapted from the rendezvous of Picard and Kirk (well, not really, but ...). Quirks of physics and mathematics explain everything away.

Overall, underwhelming. Not a bad book to be stuck on an airplane with (which is where I read most of it) but there's better reading to be had. Much of it, in fact, with Barnes's own name on it!

Good read, bad ending. The beginning was very well done and had me hooked before I knew it. Looked forward to see how it would resolve. Unfortunately, the ending never resolved anything, except to end the book. Seemed like the ending was rushed, put the book down with a feeling of disappointment.

I have only recently discovered John Barnes, but I can say that he is a very talented writer. I had had this book on my shelf for a good while now, and I am glad I finally picked it up to read it. I found this novel very entertaining and "gripping." Granted, the story is disjointed at points, but so is the world that Barnes has created here, one where people "jump" back and forth between dimensions or universes. Some of the characters are quite forgettable, but the narrator and Iphwin stand out from the crowd. Despite this, I would like to have seen more "fleshing out" of Iphwin in the novel; there were aspects about him that lingered in my mind until the end. I expected to get some insight on these traits, but the lines were left dangling somewhat. What I remember most about the narrator is his detailed explanations of and conjectures based on "abductive reasoning." Maybe I have managed to get away from hard science fiction long enough to be impressed by Barnes' elaboration of these ideas, but the fact of the matter is that I was impressed (in a similar way as I am impressed--though somewhat bored--by Jules Verne's prosaic "scientific" tangents). The ending of the story was indeed somewhat anticlimactic. With just a few pages to go, I kept wondering how the author was going to tie everything up into a neat little bow in so short a time. In point of fact, Barnes did the opposite of what I was looking for and resolved very little. In a way, though, it is nice for an author to resist the pressure to achieve balance and full illumination in his writing. All in all, I found this to be a very good novel; before I was halfway through it, in fact, I had already gone out to buy all of Barnes' books that I could find locally. I have read a couple of his other novels since reading Finity, but I found this book to be the most interesting and memorable of the group.

I Just wanted to clarify that the review below is erroneous and this is, in fact, the same John Barnes, as explained in a note from Barnes on the Amazon page of the first Time Raider novel, Wartide. The text of the note is as follows: The author, John Barnes , July 31, 1998 I really am the same John Barnes. No kidding. Wartide and Mother of Storms are both by me. I write a lot of different stuff. I am reminded of the story of Picasso wandering through a gallery and pointing at one of his own paintings, and saying "That one's a fake." A friend with him said, "But I saw you paint that one myself!" Picasso shrugged. "Sometimes, I paint fakes."

This book wasn't written by the same guy who wrote all the Sci-Fi tales. He has the same name but it isn't the same guy.

Poorly written is being nice. This is probably the worst book I've ever had the misfortune of buying.

I made the mistake, I thought it was the other John Barnes. Don't do the same. You have been warned.

I think the premise and story behind the Time Raider Series is awesome! John,please continue your stories and don't let a few bad online reviews discourage you from revisiting it!

If you liked Encounter With Tiber and Patton's Spaceship, don't even think about buying this book. I liked all the timeline wars books, so I got this one. Unlike a previous reviewer, I read the whole thing but by the end, I was sorry the hero survived into at least one more book.

If you are considering getting this book under the pretense that this is written by the same guy who wrote Caesars bike and all those other great Sci-Fi books, it isn't. No- this guy is a really, really, bad writer who happens to have the same name.

It was like reading something a 12 year old might put together if you asked him to write a war story.

I am posting this because I made the mistake of buying this and I don't want others to make the same mistake, wasting their money.

I'm not averse to good military fiction, and the Time Raider books are defiantly in this category, but when a time traveling, spiritual element are added, you get magic. What if reincarnation was real but instead of moving forward, as you progressed toward enlightenment, you had to go back through your past lives on a near impossible mission to redeem your soul.

Dan Samson is a 20th century man who has finally passed a moral threshold, earning the right to make just such a backward journey. He dies and wakes as a past version of himself, usually selfish, petty and often evil. In every case Dan seems to arrive just in time to realize what crap his past incarnation has dug himself into but also in time to have a slim chance of turning things around. The other common thread is that he always seems to die in battle. Fate plays a big part in his career choices, friends and particularly, his enemies. You see, Dan is not the only one with past lives.

John Barnes' writing is tight and riveting but it's the ideas that make his books special. Each of us struggles with inner demons but nothing like Dan's. He is a good man who must constantly work to convert garbage into gladiolas despite the hatred and entrenched expectations of everyone around him. I have often wanted to go back and do things differently, through Time Raider we get to share in the ultimate extension of that desire.