TIME OUT OF JOINT

This is a fast moving excursion into a fantasy world of the future. Ragle Gumm, 46, lived with his sister Margo and his brother-in-law Vincent and earned his living by consistently winning a daily newspaper contest labeled Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? Ragle has moments when his world, recognizably 1959, disappears; he is left alone, seemingly thrust through a hole in the universe, and in place of his surroundings he finds cryptic pieces of paper — one word messages. After an attempted escape, Ragle and Vincent break through the borders of the town, discover that the year is actually 1998 and that for three years a civil war has been raging between the moon colonists — lunatics-and the earth isolationists. Ragle's heightened ability to discern patterns had been used to predict and prepare for colonist missiles. When he became convinced that the colonists were right and tried to join them he was brainwashed by the isolationists, regressed to scenes of his childhood and continued his predictions, through the contest, without ethical conflicts. His escape is deviously engineered and the outcome of the war guarantees to be a compromise. Perching on the rim of the real and the unreal, precariously vacillating, this effort is marred by some obvious, unexplained and distracting inconsistencies.