Reluctantly, he finds himself teaming up with a semi-senile turtle wizard a thieving, backstabbing otter and a bewildered Marxist dragon to rally an army for the war about to come. Here, when he plays a strange instrument called a duar, peculiar things happen: powerful magic that may be the only way to stop a dark force that threatens his new world-and his old one. But when a journey through an interdimensional portal lands him in a world of talking animals and ominous sorcery, he finds he is on a very different trip indeed. Jonathan Thomas Meriweather is a typical college student, interested in girls, music, and an occasional taste of reefer. (Jan.A musician is transported into a land of magic-from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Star Trek Into Darkness. Major ad/promo simultaneous Time Warner AudioBook. And so it goes with Foster's crew, along a monotonously linear plot line that touches on the sort of simplistic metaphysics (can disembodied intelligences be happy?) sadly typical of computer games. As any gamer knows, computer heroes run around collecting objects, solving puzzles and, often, deciding which of three tunnels to go down.

Foster (Mid-Flinx, Forecasts, Oct.16), who's an old hand at adaptations (Alien 3, etc.), doesn't get past Go here, as he's roundly defeated by stock characters-a phlegmatic German scientist, an ingenious American one, etc.-and, above all, by the computer gaming form. The premise is simple: a party of astronauts travels to an asteroid that has veered too close to Earth when they set off atomic charges to spin the rock into a stable orbit, they uncover a deserted alien civilization and go exploring.

That this isn't an everyday SF novel is evident from the book's credits: ``LucasArts Entertainment Company presents The Dig, by Alan Dean Foster, based on a story by Sean Clark, inspired by Steven Spielberg.'' The text reveals that, in fact, this is scarcely a novel at all rather, it's a computer adventure game-specifically, The Dig, available later this year on CD-ROM for PCs-translated onto the page.

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