In this novel set in the distant future, a prisoner searches for the truth of the universe.

In 2967, humans have achieved immortality, though they still enjoy such 20th-century staples as IHOP, Nokia phones, and syndicated television. Writer Tobias Travis is serving time for a drug offense on the planet Oceanus when he experiences a remarkable dream. He sees himself as “an indispensable girl beginning a fab voyage toward a revelatory day when I would know everything.” The girl is named Marisol Montoya, and she is riding through the cosmos on a psychedelic bus driven by “a burly, mullet-coifed driver in a Wackenhut outfit, on whose shabby high-browed baseball cap was the word ‘Watchmaster.’ ” With an Earth girl named the Caramel Unit, Tobias locates on his prison planet an ancient machine—the Luminous Artifact—of the mysterious Dr. Sam Hein, a figure whose physical absence does not mitigate his godlike influence over the inmate’s life. After Tobias unintentionally enters the machine, he undergoes a video-gamelike simulation wherein he encounters Sheena Destin, to whom he forms a quick and powerful romantic attachment, only to painfully lose her before too long. Waking up back in his real world, Tobias attempts to uncover the purpose behind the Artifact and Hein as well as the meaning of his vision of Marisol and the New Vagabonds, a religious sect with which she is associated. What follows is a journey through time and space into the secret history of his own universe—the Archipelago—and the nature of its creation. As it turns out, every universe has its creator, and reality might not be as real as it initially seems. With its layers of reality and history, Rovina’s (Jack Slater, Pooka Sloan, Planet Earth, 2013) sci-fi novel makes for a complex and often challenging read. The author displays an appreciable command of language, though his prose has the approximate density of a black hole and is replete with rarely explained slang and jargon: “For you newbs and aliens I’m talking here about the great wave of dual-consciousness, the tangerine flowas the skater clans and game-boys call it or the soul trainas per the old pharma-voyàgeurs or the primitive zazzas per the latter’s even more ancient predecessors.” Likewise, the mythology of the story—with its sea otters, sqwirls, Precarnationists, and a Distant Dark Designer—surpasses that of Dunein its intricacy, and is made all the more surreal by the occasional pop-culture references (including the film Gremlins). Casual fans of space opera or cyberpunk may find Rovina’s storytelling style—which has little concern for pacing or traditional character development—a bit too alienating to tolerate for more than 300 pages. But for those readers willing to stick it out, a thoroughly immersive world awaits: one that becomes increasingly dynamic as Tobias moves through it. With its interrogations of identity, God, creation, metaphysics, and reality itself, the author’s philosophical epic is one of those few fictional works that aim to be mind-blowing and actually succeed.

An ambitious, cerebral sci-fi tale that deftly questions every assumption about the world portrayed.

An alcoholic, epileptic gunsmith-cum–adventure novelist navigates Key West’s criminal underworld in Rovina’s rollicking debut.

Jack Slater and his stepsister, pediatrician Danielle “Pooka” Sloan, have retreated to South Florida’s Cheeca Lodge for some R & R after the slew of dangerous exploits documented in Slater’s semi-autobiographical novels. As well as fictionalizing family feats, Slater refurbishes guns for Davy Jones’s Locker. He gets a tip about antique ammunition to be salvaged from a 1930s shipwreck and sold to the Sicilian mob. The setup promises a lighthearted gangster romp, but Rovina adds layers of complexity through Slater’s seizures and vivid daydreams, including encounters with alluring sphinxlike alien Lucasia McCall. Slater’s charming first-person narration echoes that of an Ernest Hemingway hero or a hard-boiled Raymond Chandler detective. The salvage plot gets rather lost, though, in a welter of drunken visions, pleasure cruisers, operatic arias, Greek mythological allusions, manga imagery and eccentric minor characters. The reliance on potted superficial descriptions dooms the characters to be similarly shallow (women are especially stereotypical: either 1940s femmes fatales or soft-porn anime heroines). While breathlessly overfull at times, the novel, ironically, takes off slowly. Pages pass with little happening apart from characters lounging waterside, drinking cocktails, enjoying steel-pan music and liaising with criminals. Such languid pacing might suit the breezy, Jimmy Buffett atmosphere, but it does little to hold attention. Readers may also be somewhat alienated by the outmoded technology: The book’s origin in 2000 is reflected in Slater’s devotion to his Cassiopeia PDA (simply replacing it with an iPad could have made this up-to-the-minute). Rovina’s descriptive passages are strong, however, and occasional made-up words (“bumpkinishly,” “sad-sackness”) lend the prose a playful sophistication. With a gangsters-’n’-guns plot, mild raunchiness, preoccupation with technology past and present, and unexplained phenomena, the novel shows traces of nouveau steampunk-lite gems, like Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker (2012), but a silly deus ex machina ending shortchanges the novel.

A pleasingly madcap but not quite coherent Caribbean mystery.