There is also a lot of technical data in some field or other, usually the career of the protagonist. In Reflex, of course, he is a photographer. So am I - and there was some information that I would not have even been able to guess at the meaning of if I hadn't spent those years at the gallery school learning and teaching alternate photoprocesses and such. In this one, it is computer geekery, extremely dated computer geekery. Perhaps not so dated for the early eighties when the book came out - on the other hand, I had been working in the field for a good few years by then and the processes he described were definitely old school even then. And he inserts a fourteen year gap while the big bad is, as they say, out of circulation, and at the end of that time his computer geeks are chunking away pretty much in exactly the same way. And we all know better than that.
Aside from that, this was a rather good fantasy. It all centers around a system for betting on horse races - that works. Francis might be considered to have cheated on his "longer story" thing here because approximately half the story is narrated by Jonathan Derry, a physics teacher who accidently stumbles onto the gambling system through the stupidity of a friend. The second part is narrated by his much younger brother, William, who, although he is legitimately involved with horse racing, gets caught up in it because the big bad is too stupid to realize that he is not his brother.
The big bad is almost more like the troll under the bridge than a human being - no character development there. The rest of the characters sit around and try to rationalize the existence of such a monster, but really don't get very far with the project.
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