From Publishers Weekly
With tongue firmly in cheek, the prolific and dependably daffy Di Filippo (Little Doors; Babylon Sisters; etc.) clowns his way through this transdimensional travelogue cut from the same cloth as Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Paul Girard, a bored bookstore clerk, is pondering the point of his directionless life (a dilemma he refers to as "the Ontological Pickle") when he is visited by Hans, a cyborg from the future. In exchange for a download of his human essence, Hans gives Paul a yo-yo on a superstring that allows him to travel effortlessly to alternate universes in the cosmic Monobloc. Paul soon becomes a dimension-hopping Gulliver, walking the dog to a succession of paratimes and places that include the cosmic void before the Big Bang, the two-dimensional world of a computer simulation template and, in the book's giddy high point, an alternate America where the hippies overthrew the Nixon administration. The picaresque plot amounts to little more than a Baedeker of vividly imagined micro- and macroworlds that Paul plunks down on, gets a crash-course history of, and barely escapes assimilation into. Though the pattern and elaboration of each new adventure grows repetitive, Di Filippo keeps the proceedings lively with satiric winks at our own world and a profusion of comically apt pop culture references ranging from Charles Dickens to Yellow Submarine. Readers will find this novel as close as SF gets to vicarious enjoyment of the class cut-up's antics. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Description
How badly could you screw up when granted access to infinite worlds conforming to your heart's most intimate desires? No matter how much of a disaster you or I might make of such a miraculous gift, rest assured that Paul Girard, hapless middle-aged bookstore clerk, can hilariously surpass your worst fumblings and missteps. Visited one morning by a dimension-hopping artificial intelligence named Hans, Paul is given the ability to jump instantly to any world he can envision. But without truly knowing himself, Paul soon discovers that framing a wish that gets the expected results is not as easy as it first appears. From the depths of the Big Bang to a world where hippies rule; from a land of Amazons to one where life is a video-game; from a society where cooperation means everything to one where individual chaos rules-across these bizarre dimensions and many others, Paul races in the search for happiness, love, wealth, status... and the answer to the Ontological Pickle. Acquiring comrades and enemies along the way, our feckless alternaut reaches a cul-de-sac from which the only exit is death. And then his adventures really begin....

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
In Paul Di Filippo's Fuzzy Dice, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland meets Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, resulting in an irreverent romp through time and space that begins when a middle-aged bookstore clerk meets a creature from the future while eating his morning Egg McMuffin.

Paul Girard, a 45-year-old stuck in a dead-end job at an independent bookstore, looks at his life objectively for the first time -- and doesn't like what he sees. Having given up his literary aspirations long ago, he now miserably sells bestsellers "based on television shows, video games and trading cards. Half the bestselling authors had been dead for decades." When Girard meets a being from the future, a "cybershrub" named Hans, and receives a yo-yo (a cross-dimensional transport device) and a mysterious Richard Nixon Pez dispenser, the wild adventure begins. Powered by his yo-yo, Girard travels to the initial singularity before the Big Bang, a 1970s world inhabited by free-love hippies -- a realm created entirely from black-and-white children's TV shows -- and, finally, to the Omega Point at the end of time.

Fuzzy Dice is not only highly recommended for fans of fantastical fiction but also for anyone who has ever worked or spent time in a bookstore. Di Filippo's description of the wide variety of subject matter of new releases -- products created by "the evil forces of modern publishing" -- is absolutely priceless. Bizarre, sardonic, and surprisingly sentimental, this novel is classic Di Filippo. Paul Goat Allen

FROM THE PUBLISHER

How badly could you screw up when granted access to infinite worlds conforming to your heart's most intimate desires? No matter how much of a disaster you or I might make of such a miraculous gift, rest assured that Paul Girard, hapless middle-aged bookstore clerk, can hilariously surpass your worst fumblings and missteps. Visited one morning by a dimension-hopping artificial intelligence named Hans, Paul is given the ability to jump instantly to any world he can envision. But without truly knowing himself, Paul soon discovers that framing a wish that gets the expected results is not as easy as it first appears. From the depths of the Big Bang to a world where hippies rule; from a land of Amazons to one where life is a video-game; from a society where cooperation means everything to one where individual chaos rules-across these bizarre dimensions and many others, Paul races in the search for happiness, love, wealth, status and the answer to the Ontological Pickle. Acquiring comrades and enemies along the way, our feckless alternaut reaches a cul-de-sac from which the only exit is death. And then his adventures really begin . . .

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly