Best Gay Sci-Fi / Fantasy: Paradox by Chris Quinton

[reviews_and_ramblings]

This wasn’t really a time travel story, but the feeling was like reading one. Phil is travelling on a country road near Bath and he has an accident; alone and trapped in the car, he goes into a semi-coma that basically transport him back to the Roman Empire age and in the body of Caius, a younger man who was in an accident in the same point, only, more or less, 2000 years before. While Caius wasn’t really an expert in deception, Phil is and he is able to recognize that Caius’s accident wasn’t casual, but a plot to kill him. Problem is that, among the people around him, and possible suspect, there is also Rianorix, a barbarian who resembles strongly Ryan, Phil’s partner in the XXI century, and a man Phil was starting to find quite attractive.

If I have to be sincere, I enjoyed a lot the XXI century plot, and wasn’t really drawn into the Roman Empire one; and that is probably a good thing, cause the real romance is the modern one. Phil and Ryan are both bisexual, but they are also coming from a past where it was better to not being open on their sexual preferences; and so they haven’t confessed to each other, and when they start to feel a sexual interest stirring between them, they try to deny it.

While the story is pretty much a friends with benefits plot, or maybe even an office affair, sex isn’t really on the front stage; actually, when they really have a sexual encounter, it happens in blackness, both literally than practically. Despite that, the story is very sensual, and I had the physical perception of both characters, and the attraction between them, even without the graphic detailed sex.

Amazon: Paradox
Amazon Kindle: Paradox
Paperback: 316 pages
Publisher: Silver Publishing (May 21, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1614956766
ISBN-13: 978-1614956761



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