The Punch Escrow by Tal M. Klein – Review

Published: July 25, 2017

Publisher: Geek & Sundry

Genre: Science Fiction

Series: Stand Alone

Pages: 319 (Paperback)

My Rating: 4.0/5.0

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis:

It’s the year 2147. Advancements in nanotechnology have enabled us to control aging. We’ve genetically engineered mosquitoes to feast on carbon fumes instead of blood, ending air pollution. And teleportation has become the ideal mode of transportation, offered exclusively by International Transport—a secretive firm headquartered in New York City. Their slogan: Departure… Arrival… Delight!

Joel Byram, our smartass protagonist, is an everyday twenty-second century guy. He spends his days training artificial intelligence engines to act more human, jamming out to 1980’s new wave—an extremely obscure genre, and trying to salvage his deteriorating marriage. Joel is pretty much an everyday guy with everyday problems—until he’s accidentally duplicated while teleporting.

Now Joel must outsmart the shadowy organization that controls teleportation, outrun the religious sect out to destroy it, and find a way to get back to the woman he loves in a world that now has two of him.

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The Punch Escrow is book that came to my attention through the reviews of several fellow bloggers. Mere hours after my curiosity was piqued, I was contacted by the publisher about receiving a copy for review… could they have possibly used quantum entanglement (or something equally physics-y) to predict my interest? Unlikely, but the subject matter of this book might make you wonder such things.

Image a world run by corporations, where teleportation is a totally mundane way of travelling from point A to point B. That’s the world we have here, but we the readers are immediately thrust into crisis – the main character, Joel Byram, is being hunted down by International Transport, the inventors of human teleportation and the most powerful corporation in the world. It’s not even poor Joel’s fault, he’s just trying to use a TC terminal to get to his vacation in Costa Rica when an anti-teleportation terrorist decided to blow up said terminal. Joel’s life is quite immediately thrust into chaos because his very existence now has the power to destroy IT and proves the truth of some very dangerous secrets. You see, there are now two Joels – the one who made it to Costa Rica and the one that exited the terminal in New York…

I found Joel to be a likable character that was easy to sympathize with and the same can be said for Joel² (aka Costa Rica Joel). The strong affinity with Joel is largely due to the fact that this story is a narrative as told by him – other characters are present (his wife, IT employees, undercover travel agents) but I never felt a strong like or dislike for them. Those who we can identify as the ‘bad guys’ didn’t elicit any really strong emotion from me, just a passive dislike which is definitely a drawback of this type of story. The author’s building of this future Earth was well done and through Joel’s eyes we get a good feel for what the world is like, though it’s definitely an overview and doesn’t get to the nitty-gritty details for the most part. The footnotes regarding certain technologies and scientific developments were and interesting addition, though the physics stuff mostly went over my head and eventually I just ended up skipping over them.

Overall, The Punch Escrow was a really cool book that I hope will actually make it through the production phase and appear as a movie! I think it will adapt very well to that format and I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for updates on that front. The ending was satisfying, the pacing quick, and the set-up for a potential sequel has me pretty stoked.