Planet Dreams

Inhabitant of a homogeneous pocket of anarchy in the Pacific Northwest, beautiful young Astrid has everything she desires from life: a fulfilling job as a genetic engineer, an accommodating lover, nice friends, a cozy house, psychic abilities and spiritually enlightened dreams. Everything, that is, but the baby she longs for. Although postmillennial America is a much more peaceful, psychically aware place since the advent seven years before of the so-called UFO virus (source unknown), which generated ""endocrine changes which made violence and physical aggression a thing of the past,"" a recent recurrence of violent crime is creating pressure for a moratorium on new births in order to prevent damaged genetic material from being passed on. Moreover, Astrid's dreams indicate that the fate of her near-utopian world has become linked to that of an alternate Earth of Orwellian horrors, reachable only by ""dimensional windows"" between the worlds. In order to save both Earths, Astrid and her enlightened friends must fight growing public disorder at home and across the dream interface before the scientist who opened the dimensional windows can close them again. Carlock's speedily paced debut is billed by the publisher as New Age fiction, but age-old problems with the novel--including two-dimensional characters, absurd pseudoscience and a plot that turns on coincidence and simplistic solutions to complex problems--will keep most readers, even crystal gazers, from taking it seriously. (May)