Book Review: Logan's Search

Logan is running again, with the fate of the world in his hands. Earth is free and at peace at last. But not the Earth on which Logan stands. For him a nightmare has just begun...In the 23rd century on Parallel Earth your 21st Birthday is your Lastday. Parallel Earth is a dazzling paradise of pleasure and infinite joy. Here, in a terrifying computerized society controlled by ruthless police assassins, is the world that Logan once destroyed. Now his fate is to live that horror once again.

Logan's Search, William F. Nolan's third book in the Logan's Run series, was first published by Bantam Books in October of 1980. It continues the story from where the second book Logan's World left off.

Unlike the first novel (which I knew from the film) and the second novel (which I had owned and read as a pre-teen), this one was brand new to me.

My first thought as we get through the starting chapters is that Nolan was clearly influenced by Close Encounters of the Third Kind as Logan finds himself abducted by aliens. Taking a character out of their known element and into a new can be revealing and allow for character growth. However, the author instead uses this as a method to go back and rehash some of the earlier concepts of his now-defunct world with his same main characters Logan and Jessica now back to a younger age (thanks to a parallel Earth and a body-swap maneuver). Sounds off-the-wall? Yes, it is.

Now this is not a new concept in sci-fi. I've seen variants of it before, especially in some comic books I'd read in my younger days. It can sometimes work but often times it does not. Here, for me, it definitely does not. It seems like the author was still cashing in on the interest of the property that came out of the 1976 film. Maybe he managed to get a book deal with Bantam for follow-ups and this one was fulfilling the contract. In either case, I was getting very tired very quickly with this one. Thankfully, like its predecessors, this one was comparatively shorter (145 pages) than most novels published today so I was able to get through it at a decent pace.