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Escaping Infinity by [Richard Paolinelli]

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Richard Paolinelli

Escaping Infinity Kindle Edition

by Richard Paolinelli (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

72 ratings

Book 1 of 2: Infinity

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“As we crossed the threshold the temperature difference between the air outside and the building we were entering was slight. But for some reason I felt a harsh, icy shiver travel the length of my spine.”Lost on a dark desert highway, Pete Childress just wanted a good night's sleep. Now he must find a way back out of a hotel with no exits and where tomorrow never comes. Worse yet, the fate of a ruined world, and the future of all humanity, hangs in the balance.Working with the lovely, yet mysterious, Hotel Desk Clerk, Liz, and under the ever-watchful eyes of the hotel manager, Pete explores the many mysteries that lay within the walls of The Infinity seeking the answer to the mystery and the way back to the outside world.AWARDS 2017 Dragon Award Finalist – Best Sci-Fi Novel2017 Readers' Favorite Awards - Honorable Mention2017 New Apple Summer E-Book Awards - Official Selection2017 ETWG Blue Ribbon Book Cover Contest – 2nd Place

Print length

332 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publication date

January 14, 2017
Grade level

8 - 12
File size

4488 KB
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Escaping Infinity
Richard Paolinelli

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Editorial Reviews

Review

4-Star Review by Liz Amri for Readers Favorite
Engineers Peter Childress and Charlie Womack are on their way to Phoenix for an important presentation, but Charlie's shortcuts have gotten them lost. They stumble across the Infinity Hotel and the promise of a meal, fuel and a good night's sleep before resuming their journey is too good to pass up. However, Peter soon realizes the hotel is frighteningly strange - an unlimited number of floors, guests that appear out of time and place, and the entrance to the hotel has disappeared. No one is allowed to leave.
The concept of Escaping Infinity by Richard Paolinelli takes the sense of wonder of classic science fiction tales that readers would love. Its prologue gives an intriguing foreshadowing to start the story, grabbing my interest right away. The plot is deftly formative, as we follow Peter's attempt to get him and his friend Charlie out of the deceiving hotel, while trying to avoid the watchful eyes of the hotel's manager and the front desk clerk named Liz.
The narrative is flawless, with its concise and clear prose. The pacing overall is solid, although there were some events that I thought could unfold quicker. That said, it's not necessarily a weakness, but merely my personal preference for the story.
Paolinelli's Escaping Infinity is a mixture of hard science fiction, mystery, and some interest in transcendence. There's a subtle metaphor of fixing societal problems when the opportunity arises in the last half of the story, as the protagonists discover more truth about the hotel and its purpose. All in all, a solid read.///REVIEW BY THE LITERARY REBEL (literaryrebel.com/books/)/Escaping Infinity is an interesting book that can only be billed as one part Twilight Zone, one part Hotel California. It is definitely worth a read if you are into speculative science fiction. We don't want to spoil anything for you, so we'll just give you the set up; two guys are on their way to Phoenix when they stop for the night at a hotel. What they don't know is that no one who checks in ever checks out.
/The Good: Paolinelli understands what a good mystery is all about. That's right, mystery. At it's heart, this is a mystery book. The author does a better than average job of placing all the puzzle pieces in the opening of the book and giving the reader a chance to figure it out. Despite that, I was still guessing at the 3/4 mark.
/The Bad: This book starts off at an almost leisurely pace but patience is will be rewarded. Other than that minor complaint, there are a lot of characters in this book and they all have back stories. While Paolinelli works hard to keep them separate and interesting, a few of them could have been edited out without the tale loosing any of it's impact.
/Why we like it: The author thumbs his nose at the science fiction establishment with his verdict that the natural state of mankind is not improving, but rather spiraling into chaos. That is a grand departure from the current crop of science fiction cannon which suggests the future will be sunny and bright as mankind continues to adopt more and more SocJus from the enlightened progressive playbook. The author even has the audacity to suggest that Americans from earlier centuries may have known something we have lost or forgotten. To which Literary Rebel replies; Two Thumbs Up!

About the Author

Born in Turlock, California in 1964, Richard Paolinelli began his writing career as a freelance writer in 1984 in Odessa, TX and gained his first fiction credit serving as the lead writer for the first two issues of the Elite Comics sci-fi/fantasy series, Seadragon. In 1991 Richard began his sports writing career at the Gallup Independent before moving on to work for the Modesto Bee, Turlock Journal, Merced Sun-Star, Tracy Press, San Mateo County Times and the San Francisco Examiner. He also served as an editor and photographer with some of the newspapers. He won the 2001 California Newspaper Publishers Association award for Best Sports Story while at the Turlock Journal. In 2010, Richard retired as a sportswriter and decided to return to his fiction writing roots. He released two short stories - The Invited and Legacy of Death - as well as a full-length sci-fi novel, Maelstrom. In 2015, Richard completed nearly two years of research and interviews and published, From The Fields: A History of Prep Football in Turlock, California, chronicling 95 years of high school football in his hometown. One month later, the first book of the Jack Del Rio series, Reservations, was published by Oak Tree Press. In 2016, Richard was one of a dozen authors selected to participate in, Beyond Watson, an anthology of original Sherlock Holmes stories. Perfection's Arbiter, a biography of National League Umpire, Babe Pinelli, was released on October 8th. W & B Books acquired the Jack Del Rio series and released the second book, Betrayals, in November. The remaining two books in the Jack Del Rio series will follow in 2017 & 2018. His website is: www.richardpaolinelli.com --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01MU7VO42
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 14, 2017
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4488 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 332 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1541392582

Best Sellers Rank: #1,188,893 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,668 in Time Travel Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #6,577 in First Contact Science Fiction eBooks
- #7,919 in First Contact Science Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
72 ratings

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Richard Paolinelli

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Richard Paolinelli's official website: https://scifiscribe.com/

Richard began his writing journey as a freelance writer in 1984 and gained his first fiction credit serving as the lead writer for the first two issues of the Elite Comics sci-fi/fantasy series, Seadragon. His 20-year sports writing career was highlighted by the 2001 California Newspaper Publishers Association award for Best Sports Story.

In 2010, Richard retired as a sportswriter and returned to his fiction writing roots. Since then he has written seven novels, two non-fiction sports books, and has appeared in several anthologies including five Sherlock Holmes collections. He has won several awards and his novel, Escaping Infinity, was a 2017 Dragon Award Finalist for Best Sci-Fi novel.

He is currently co-writing the six-novella Timeless series with his grandson, and offers exclusive content to premium subscribers to his blog as well as excellent free content to non-subscribers: www.scifiscribe.com

Customer reviews

4 out of 5

72 global ratings

5 star		50%
4 star		22%
3 star		18%
2 star		1%
1 star		9%

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Jeff

A good read, up until the climax, then... meh...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 7, 2022

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*** WARNING *** SPOILERS AHEAD ***

The first chapter certainly captured my attention. Earth has been destroyed. By accident. Yikes, what happens now? I'm hooked. Can't wait to see what happens next.

Then we shift gears and find Pete and Charlie driving through the desert. Okay, I'm intrigued. They find a mysterious hotel. I still have the "destruction of Earth" thing rolling around in the back of my mind. How is this related? Hmm. Interesting. Then Pete begins to realize something isn't right about this place. He investigates. He finds clues. Still interesting. Then he finds a door. Ooh, I love doors, open it! Open it! Then he finds... a monster...? What the...? Okay, the monster seems a little out of place here, but I'll go with it. Still interesting. Then Liz. A love interest. Some steamy romance. Okay, you gotta put that in there, I suppose. Cringe. But still interesting. Then a plan. Defeat the monster. Get to the door. Okay. Monsters aren't my thing, but the door looks interesting. Behind the door there are caverns. Lots and lots of caverns. I love caverns! This is getting good now! Explore the caverns, meet a stranger, compare notes, explore some more, end up...back in the hotel. Wow, that was unexpected. And still interesting. Defeated, our heroes become like everyone else in the hotel, accepting their fate, becoming part of the facade. There's no way out. But we all knew that wasn't the end of it. A new plan. Success! The hotel manager is revealed to be the commander of the ship that accidentally destroyed Earth! I kind of suspected that by about midway through, but the way it was revealed made it seem less of a "well, duh" revelation. Well done. So it turns out the hotel was all a simulation meant to keep humans alive until a new Earth could be terraformed, and the commander has been traveling through time, luring people into people before the destruction of Earth happened, keeping them there, and searching for "The One" who could bring the simulation to an end and set them all free.

Then the wheels come off. Completely. The book should have ended there. Pete is somehow granted god-like powers. For some reason. He is the Chosen One. Because he...found the control panel and turned off the computer...? Or something. Because obviously it was completely necessary to find someone smart enough to turn off a computer before terminating the simulation. Obviously the manager had to wait patiently for hundreds upon hundreds of years to find "The One" who was clever enough to find the control panel and turn it off. Obviously he couldn't have just turned it off himself after New Earth was done terraforming, no... oh, wait. Yeah, he could have just turned it off himself. That made no sense at all.

Then it gets worse. Pete's god-like powers come with immortality for all of humanity. Why, you ask? No reason. Just because. We blow through the next 1500 years of human history. Pete and Liz live happily ever after, raising their 12 children and 30 grandchildren and 400 great-grandchildren and 10,000 great-great-great-grandchildren (or something like that), and then they (as one does) decide to go into space and explore the Andromeda Galaxy. Of course. Because what else would you do on your 1500th birthday? And on the way there, they stop off at the home planet of the commander who accidentally destroyed Earth, and they decide to bring him back to life and take him along for the ride. Because that's what you do when you take a trip to the Andromeda Galaxy on your 1500th birthday, of course.

And they live happily ever after. Or something. I guess.

So yeah. The book is interesting. It should have ended when they escaped the hotel. With a better explanation for *why* they had to escape the hotel, and what it was about Pete that made him "The Chosen One". I'll give it 3 stars for being interesting up to that point. I think the author couldn't decide if he wanted to write a space opera or a time travel mystery thriller. So it's a little of both, held together with duct tape. Worth the read, but I'm glad it was short enough that I didn't invest too much time in it.

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James Pyles

Could have used a much tighter focus

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 26, 2019

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I’ve wanted to read and review one of Richard Paolinelli’s novels for quite some time now, since I previously reviewed his short story "The Last Hunt" which was featured in last year’s Superversive Press anthology "To Be Men: Stories Celebrating Masculinity." I finally got my opportunity with "Escaping Infinity," a 2017 Dragon Award Finalist.

As I got into Paolinelli’s book, I found it had some similarities to Australian SciFi writer Matt Reilly’s 2000 novel "Contest." In both books, an innocent couple are thrown into a highly unlikely environment where they must solve a series of challenges in order to survive. In Reilly’s case, the location was the main branch of the New York City Public Library, and in Paolinelli’s novel, it’s a seemingly five-star hotel located in the middle of the Arizona desert, miles away from where any such structure has a right to be.

Peter and his friend and co-worker Charlie are driving to Phoenix for a business trip and become lost. Running out of gas and miles from nowhere, they come across an incredibly futuristic and opulent hotel called “Infinity.” Once inside, they realize the hotel and casino can provide a virtually unlimited supply of pleasures and experiences, enough to keep them there for a lifetime, which seems to be the idea.

Quickly, Peter realizes that not only has Charlie fallen under the Infinity’s spell, but so have the rest of the guests, who seem to come, not only from every country and culture on Earth, but from across time, reaching all the way back to ancient Egypt. Surprisingly, no one seems to be aware of this, and each of them are seeing a different version of “Infinity.”

Peter discovers that besides the mysterious hotel manager, the only other person with this awareness is Liz, who is one of the hotel’s employees. Only later does he find out, she is actually a woman who has been in the Infinity since the mid 1850s, stranded there as the only survivor of a doomed wagon train that was decimated in southern Utah.

Peter and Liz attempt to avoid the manager’s attention while they seek a way out of the hotel’s environment, which has no windows or doors leading to the outside. However, without them realizing it, this is exactly what the manager wants, because only if Peter proves himself can the inhabitants of Infinity, including the manager, be able to finally get free.

Peter and Liz manage to eventually succeed with the result of the Infinity vanishing, depositing thousands of people near a bay, but are they still on Earth?

The manager reveals himself to be the former commander of a fleet of interstellar spacecraft who had inadvertently destroyed all life on Earth at some point in the future past Peter’s lifetime. As a way to compensate, the aliens use highly advanced technology to restore Earth’s biosphere, but it’s the commander alone who uses time travel tech to create the Infinity, a structure that exists all at once across Earth’s past timeline and in multiple geographic locations for the purpose of collecting human beings, animals and plants, and transporting them to the far future, the reconstructed “New Earth.”

If the book had stopped here, it would have been just fine, but it goes on.

There’s no real explanation as to why Peter (or someone) must solve the puzzle of Infinity that is kept in the manager’s office, except that once Peter does, he is gifted with godlike powers to alter matter at the atomic level, enabling him to reshape anything on the rebuilt Earth. After this, Paolinelli takes the reader on a relatively quick leap forward in human history (people now being all but immortal), lightly skipping over a ton of details, first to colonize the solar system, and then to visit their benefactor’s planet.

The manager has died thousands of years previously, but Peter’s unique abilities allow him to resurrect the alien and ultimately take him with their crew aboard their starship Infinity to explore the Andromeda galaxy (as if the Milky Way and its companion galaxies weren’t enough of a challenge).

The book could have used a much tighter focus, more attention to detail, and some better explanation as to why only certain people were able to understand the secret of the hotel. Also, no matter what tricks you play, I can’t imagine that an ancient Egyptian could ride with a 21st century American on a high-speed elevator controlled by electronic key cards. Sure, the Egyptian would be seeing their environment as consistent with what they’re used to, but how would these two people be able to reconcile their experiences together.

Unfortunately, there are any number of similar plot holes that present themselves throughout the novel, and the narrative descended into expositional description at several points, rather than letting the characters tell and show their own stories.

It was an interesting puzzle up until the solution that deposits the survivors on future Earth, but after the climax, the rest was really unnecessary, or Paolinelli could have saved it for a sequel, inserting sufficient challenges for Peter and company who, after having become the new supernatural savior of mankind, seemed capable of anything, making any problem they encountered far too easy to solve, and thus depriving the latter portion of his book of any drama.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

domo-kun

Charlie is quickly distracted by a beautiful woman, leaving Peter to try to figure out ...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 31, 2017

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Peter and his friend Charlie are on a business trip, and get sidetacked along the way. They decide to stay in the Infinity Hotel, but the hotel is not what it seems. Charlie is quickly distracted by a beautiful woman, leaving Peter to try to figure out just what’s up with the hotel.

Turns out the hotel exists outside of time. People from all across the world, and time, are essentially trapped in the hotel. This is a little spoilerish, but it turns out that an alien space fleet accidentally destroyed Earth, killing everyone and everything on it. The alien fleet commander does something incredible to try to fix the situation - go back in time and collect as many people, plants and materials, keep them in the hotel until he, the fleet commander, finds the one person capable of restoring Earth to its former glory.

I don’t want to say much else because I’ll give too much away. I liked that the alien race was not purely evil or even purely good, and that the alien fleet commander did so much to try to fix his mistake.

I really hope a sequel is forthcoming. Let’s just say that interstellar space travel — to whole different galaxies, no less — is really, really interesting. And I just loved the epilogue.

So if you’re like me, and you love aliens and space exploration, you will like this one.

3 people found this helpful

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R. Jensen

Fun read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 15, 2022

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I enjoyed this novel. It's an easy, engaging read that is optimistic in outlook, like the best of science fiction. I felt the main characters were relatable and had well thought out personalities and backgrounds.

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Glenn

Engaging and clever science fiction

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 12, 2017

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It's a bold move to begin a book with a prologue in which an entire planet is accidentally destroyed; once you've obliterated the world, you run the risk that what follows could seem … a bit mundane. Yet that wasn't at all the case here. There was nothing boring about Peter Childress and his arrival, seemingly by accident, in the middle of a mystery. The book makes good use of multiple perspectives, and cleverly combines humour, threat, romance, and deceit. And yes, I did find myself humming the tune of a certain song by the Eagles as I read ;)

If I had to (constructively!) criticise anything, I would say that the final couple of chapters following the revelation of the mystery behind the Infinity Hotel felt a bit unnecessary to me (although they're certainly grand in vision). If the novel had ended earlier, I think it would have seemed a little tighter and more focused.

Nevertheless, it was a great read. Five stars.

One person found this helpful

Pleiades

Bloody awful, juvenile stuff...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 18, 2021

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Amazingly over-rated, childish sub-par sci-fi. Couldn't finish it, just got worse and worse as it ground relentlessly and boringly on... got half way before I thought, enough is enough.

A tedious and dreary example of 'pop' sci-fi with no redeeming features I could find...

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