reamworld is a futuristic amusement park which has eclipsed Disney as the most popular tourist attraction in the world. Featuring characters and concepts from the music of John Lennon, the fiction of Robert Heinlein, the universe of William Goldman's The Princess Bride and the adventures of the patrons at Callahan's Bar, among other places, it is that rarity: a tourist destination exactly as wonderful as it is cracked up to be. Its high-tech design, based in part on mood-altering technology, is dedicated to ensuring that nobody spends time there without feeling wonderful.
Enter Mike, a teen-age runaway fleeing a tragedy from his recent past. It's Mike's bright idea to go underground at Dreamworld, becoming a permanent resident. But within his first day there, he discovers that he's not the first person to have this idea. Dreamworld is also the full-time address of a midget named Annie, who moved in 10 years ago following her own bitter disappointment with the real world.
The tough and resourceful (not to mention dangerous) Annie, who becomes Mike's mentor, fancies herself the protector of this special place. Known to the staff as the Mother Elf, she troubleshoots from behind the scenes, secretly alerting the staff to technical problems and warding off the occasional attempts at industrial sabotage on the part of the evil Alonzo Haines, owner of an ugly, violent rival amusement park named Thrillworld.
The trouble starts when both Haines and Annie discover a discomfiting phenomenon: the number of employees who walk out the gate after their work shifts now exceeds the number known to have come to work by two or three workers a day. Where are all these extra people coming from? Are they the threat that will permit Haines to destroy Dreamworld once and for all? Or are they evidence of a stranger phenomenon entirely?
An amusing theme-park adventure
The Free Lunch, originally conceived as a John Varley/Spider Robinson collaboration but completed many years later by Robinson alone, is a fun book. It posits adventure and intrigue at an amusement park which, unlike certain other overhyped tourist destinations of our acquaintance, is every bit as wonderful as it's advertised to be--a place designed to uplift people as well as entertain them, which surely deserves the protector it's found in the brave and resourceful Annie. Indeed, the descriptions of its various attractions, centering on the John Lennon and Robert Heinlein lands but referencing others, are so delightful to anybody with familiarity with either that the book would have been fun even if the plot had never decided to kick in.
It works fine as an SF/adventure novel, too, with evil villains, hairsbreadth escapes, abundant humor and Robinson's usual compassionate treatment of his protagonists.
It's also a frustrating novel in some ways. For instance, while the concept of a covert war between "good" and "bad" amusement parks is clever and amusing, possibly even brilliant, Robinson doesn't develop it as fully as he should. The "evil" park, Thrillworld, is described as filled with violent attractions, but Robinson never elaborates on this. The guy who owns Thrillworld may be a sociopathic thug who employs assassins, but that's just upper management. Robinson never actually takes us inside the place, and he never shows us why it's such a poor alternative to Dreamworld itself, the place which after all uses mood manipulation to keep its patrons happy. (Invoking Lennon and Heinlein as Dreamworld's patron saints may be a good start, but really, amusement parks trivialize sources just as noble all the time--and it would have been nice to specify what Thrillworld glorifies instead.)
Then there's the fact that the explanation for the discrepancy in the employee count turns out to have almost nothing to do with the amusement-park milieu. Never mind what it is, exactly. Suffice it to say that readers will recognize a well-worn (if intelligently handled) science-fictional trope that could have been invoked in any number of other settings, from suburbs to space stations. Its handling here is not bad. It would have made an excellent story anywhere else. But since its resonance with the amusement-park theme is only tangential--since in fact it renders the war between amusement parks a red herring--it feels more like an unwelcome intrusion in the book this could have been than the main plot it's intended to be. It's hard not to wish that the Dreamworld/Thrillworld conflict had been played up more, instead of treated as background to something far more familiar.
The frustrations are there, no doubt about it. But so's the fun. Separating one from the other may be difficult, but readers should find that familiar, too. It's a lot like waiting on line at Disney.
