Billy is a clever and well-read grad student. He’s also incredibly ill, and no one is entirely sure what’s wrong with him. So when the company of tech billionaire David Frost reaches out with an offer, Billy is inclined to take it. At best, he could be cured; at worst, he’ll leave this world potentially having helped science cure others. But the trial involves a great deal of cloak-and-dagger dealings, up to and including rescinding his US citizenship. After much trial and error, he goes all the way—and “all the way” is further than Billy accounted for.
When Billy eventually awakens from his latest “novel intervention,” he finds himself forever changed. Part man, part machine, and lost in a maze of government buildings, Billy only has one thing on his mind: getting back to Sam, the woman with whom he was just beginning to build a relationship. But it would seem Sam is just as wrapped up in Frost’s affairs as Billy himself is. Getting her back, and getting back home alive, will mean traversing time and space, crossing paths with otherworldly beings, and looking the nature of reality in the eye. Wherever they both end up, it’s clear there’s no going back to normal.
Daniel Brown’s NOVEL INTERVENTIONS comes in at under 200 pages, but it is by no means a simplistic read. Those pages are packed with action, told through the hazy observances of Billy himself. A much broader multiverse is hinted at with every new scene: aliens, demons, and magic play at the edges of this otherwise hard sci-fi narrative. The reader is left just as bewildered as Billy, but that never feels like a bad thing. The whole story is told at breakneck pace, with barely any time for Billy to get his head around his own circumstances. It’s clear there’s a massive amount of worldbuilding here, from the biologically engineered Shades to the eleventh hour threat of the Ombudsman. But even with things never fully explained, this is a strangely satisfying read.
Brown throws early hat tips to both Terry Pratchett and P.G. Wodehouse in NOVEL INTERVENTIONS, and their influence is clear. The novel is sprinkled with Pratchett-esque footnotes that inform and entertain in equal parts. And, much like Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster, Billy is beholden to the machinations of a world he can only barely understand—bearing up under new and strange problems with irrepressible wit. The ending, as odd as it is, feels right. Without spoiling anything, it’s an ending that might be unsatisfying for any other book; but here, it’s the only end that fits.
Clever, dramatic, and extremely weird, Daniel Brown’s NOVEL INTERVENTIONS is a surprisingly engaging sci-fi action romp. Readers will be bewildered in the best of ways as they view an ever-expanding multiverse through the eyes of the novel’s grad student protagonist.
~Kara Dennison for IndieReader