The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer

Amanda Jaworski is an astronaut who is destined to be the first person to land on Mars. She is brilliant, beautiful, eccentric and sexy. She owns a strange cat called Schrodinger who is asleep nearly all the time. She is torn between the love of two men, sexy pilot Bronco McCloud, and intense engineer Donald Hoskiss. Very weird things begin to happen in the area, all the Indians disapear from the local reservation, much to the bafflement of Sheriff Eberly, there are bizarre disruptions with the weather, sinsiter robots appear from nowhere, and Schrodinger starts to do some very odd things indeed. Will amanda ever get to Mars? This book is a peculiar but engaging mixture of fantasy, science fiction, mystery, physics, philosophy, and enough touches of humour to stop it getting too pretentious.

The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer is a rich and comic blend of science and romance. The case of characters includes the president of the U.S., 10,000 American Indians, a Texas sheriff, and a cat who learns to order off a Chinese menu. As they collide in a satiric melee around the beautiful and brave Amanda Jaworski...America's leading and most troublesome astronaut...atoms, molecules, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and even the U.S. government are put to unexpected tests. Amanda challenges everything, but her ultimate challenge is the Eleven Million Mile High Dancer. In that encounter, a fairy tale fully grounded in the laws of physics, Amanda's journey become a moving odyssey not only through space and time but through the darkness and potential human mind.

I enjoyed the first half of this book so much, filled as it was with original characters and fresh situations. Who could resist a cat who was comatose 23 hours out of 24, but whose owner loved him madly nevertheless? And a female astronaut who learned faster than anyone else, but who was still prey to love problems? Once I got to the second half, though, somewhere in a star system far far away, the goings-on weren't as much fun for me. I was never the least bit tempted to quit reading, but I wanted to get back to the home planet where the characters were REAL, not giant red and blue robots, a creature named Ooze, something called Rastus, computer consoles that saw and knew all (well, not so unreal after all), and a very smelly overlord, or whatever he was. In other words, the story went from magic realism to total fantasy, even though, I must say, the author makes a good case for the physics of what's happening. The quotes about quantum physics interspersed throughout, by the way, added a lot for me. All in all, a funny, tongue-in-cheek, and sometimes thought-provoking novel.

This book influenced my adolescent life more than any other. It is wonderfully written and should be mandatory reading for all young females.

I was truly excited to see this book in paperback, because it meant I could share it with even more people than I did when it was first published years ago! Carol Hill has managed to blend fantasy, sci-fi and thoughtful philosophy into a real character-driven story that never lets up. She displays a unique imagination, and I invite all readers to join in the fun and discover a whole new world.