It’s not a bad setup for the story, but what follows doesn’t do it any justice. While teleporting to Costa Rica to meet his wife for a second honeymoon, a terrorist attack on the facility leaves him in limbo, causing his wife to panic and create a duplicate of him, not knowing that the “original” Joel rematerialized at the embarkation point. Set in the year 2147, Joel Byram is the husband of one of the leading scientists in teleportation technology.

Teleportation – a longtime staple of the science fiction genre that is nonetheless ripe for further exploration – is the subject of The Punch Escrow. I’m probably not going to do it, but I am thinking about it. In fact, my dislike for this novel is so intense that I am actually considering adding a second star to at least one of my other 1 star reviews out of fairness. So I promise you, if you see a lone star at the top of one of my reviews, there is some really intense dissatisfaction in play. More often than not, if I’m not as high on a book that everyone else loves, there are at least enough redeeming qualities to warrant a third star. 2 stars are a little more common, but not by much. I can count the number of 1 star reviews I’ve written on one hand, with room to spare. Truly I tell you, I am almost never that guy. Wherever you see a “high average” book on Amazon or Goodreads (such as this one – a 4.13/5 on GR at the time of my writing this) and you scroll through the reviews, there is always a least one prick among the 4 and 5 star gushers who has to poop in the punch bowl. But I have no patience for a novel that fails spectacularly and aggressively at both. I can forgive an ambitious novel for falling a little short of its goals. I can forgive an entertaining novel for lacking ambition. Good authors tend to excel at one of those aims to the detriment of the other, or excel adequately enough at both to find artistic and/or commercial success. Great authors do both of those things brilliantly and produce great works, but great authors are few and far between. Fiction can do quite a lot of things, but most often it aims to entertain or to express ambitious ideas.

The punch escrow by tal m klein