Lyle Peripart's world is coming apart. Up to just a few days ago he was an obscure professor, quietly unenthusiastic about the Reichs that have dominated the world since the Axis victory over a century ago--but not looking for a fight with anyone.
Then Lyle was recruited for private industry by the mysterious industrialist Geoffrey Iphwin--and that's when everything stopped making sense.
His mild-mannered fiancee turns out to be a gun-toting weapons expert who grew up in a world in which America surrendered to the USSR in the 1970s. And several of their friends turn out to have grown up in different worlds still. Worse, they gradually realize that not one of them has ever talked to anyone inside the continental United States. In fact, just thinking about the United States is hard,/I>--as if something is trying to stop them.
Something, in fact, seems to be trying to kill each of them. And Geoffrey Iphwin is trying to pull them together--for a quest into what's actually going on.
I think I buy two or three books for every one that I read. In '96 or '97 when Charlie recommended I read something by John Barnes. I got one maybe more. I read Orbital Resonance and liked it. So on my future trips to the bookstores I would make a point of scanning the Ba...'s. Bringing me to today, I have eight Barnes' and Finity is the fifth that I've read.
Finity starts with Prof. Lyle Peripat, an American expat living in New Zealand, going for a corporate job interview. Outside his door he sees a note saying to skip the interview, which is weird because he hadn't even told anyone he had applied. He starts noticing discrepancies in what he perceives and what other people recollect.
He gets the job. Turns out that they are also interested in hiring his girlfriend. More things start happening. He asks his girlfriend how they met. She says, they came to the University in the same year, and were seated next to each other at orientation. He remembers being there a year before her, and having met her when she placed an ad for her lost cat, and he found it.
It's not limited to just personal history, but what has happened in the world as well. History seems to be fluid. Is it Saigon or Ho Chi Minh city? Later on we find out that people are traveling between parallel universes. I haven't given the away a big secret, the mystery of the story has more to do with how or why are people moving, and what the heck is up with the USA?
When I finished the book, I was kind of disappointed in the ending, but now that I've had about a month to let it sink in, he did OK. I was happy all along with the rest of the book.
