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Quantum Leap #11
Double or Nothing
Leaping into two different bodies at once, Sam finds himself in the lives of a financially troubled trucker and a successful university professor, an assignment that is complicated when Ziggy calls out sick. Original.
240 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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About the author
C.J. Henderson
241 books57 followersThere is more than one author with this name
CJ Henderson is the creator of both the Jack Hagee hardboiled PI series and the Teddy London supernatural detective series. He is also the author of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies, several score novels, plus hundreds of short stories and thousands of non-fiction pieces. In the wonderful world of comics he has written everything from Batman and the Punisher to Archie and Cherry Poptart.
He also writes under the name Robert Morgan.
CJ Henderson is the creator of both the Jack Hagee hardboiled PI series and the Teddy London supernatural detective series. He is also the author of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies, several score novels, plus hundreds of short stories and thousands of non-fiction pieces. In the wonderful world of comics he has written everything from Batman and the Punisher to Archie and Cherry Poptart.
He also writes under the name Robert Morgan.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 9, 2021
You know, I read three books in the QUANTUM LEAP series earlier this year and they were all generally… okay. This isn’t the height of literature here, and most of the time it fails to capture the tone or feel of the show, but it’s the characters at least and it basically follows the template. Somehow I got it in my mind that I wanted to read another book in the series. Somehow I was looking back *fondly* on the ones I had read. So I looked online and picked the one that I thought had the coolest cover/synopsis. This book, in which Dr. Sam Beckett leaps into two people SIMULTANEOUSLY, and which features his two halves fistfighting each other in front of a plume of fire on the cover seemed just the ticket.
And as it turns out, this book too was… okay. As I said, Sam leaps into two people—identical twins—and his soul is split in half, the age-old trope of two sides of one’s personality becoming two people (think starfish Rachel from ANIMORPHS… you *have* read ANIMORPHS, haven’t you?). So we’ve got “good” Sam and “bad” Sam, or at least altruistic versus self-interested. They spend almost the entirety of the book separate from one another; it’s only toward the very end that there’s any Sam-on-Sam action. Also, this is another book where there’s some fuckup with the Project preventing Al from hologramming in to help Sam. Of the four books I own, Al existed as he does in the show in only one of them. In the others he either can’t find Sam until the last minute and must spend the majority of his time in 1999 or else he leaped as well so that nobody is a hologram for the book. Lame. I hate this. Just let Al be a hologram.
Mostly it’s just scenes of the two Sams living their lives, or the lives of the brothers they’ve leapt into I mean, without much of a goal in mind. Ward (“bad” Sam) does spend some time trying to repair his marriage but that’s about it. Then it zips through scenes of Al frustrated with Ziggy in the future for not being able to center him on Sam. I kind of despised Ziggy’s “I’m not religious, I’m just spiritual!” bullshit when she claims she’s being prevented from being fixed by a higher power—not necessarily God, maybe just Nature or something!
But I will say that the discussions about how Sam’s actions change the timeline and how that affects Al as the only person who remembers the previous timelines were kind of affecting (and reminded me of Blake Crouch’s RECURSION to some degree). There’s even a moment where the timeline changes mid-scene, where Al begins a conversation talking to Tina but ends it talking to Gushie. I thought this was extremely cool. Unless that was just an editing error and I’m giving the book too much credit, which is possible. After all, even though Sam leapt into Ward Ralston, the book *frequently* misspells his name as “Wade”. So I wouldn’t put it past the book to just have forgotten who was involved in the scene with Al, rather than it being intentional. Still, Al’s questioning whether anything really matters in a world where everything could be different tomorrow is surprisingly poignant.
There’s also a beat where “bad” Sam resents leaping and says he plans to keep Ward’s life. He’s tired of leaping in and fixing people’s problems; let somebody else leap into him and fix *his* problems for once! That got me thinking: Sam leaping into *himself* is a pretty neat idea. I don’t mean himself as a child, as the series did, but himself as an adult. I thought that might have been a better series wrap, even. Instead of a weird surreal episode where Sam talks to a bartender who is also God, he should have leapt back into his own body, but like three days before he sent himself back in time. The actual finale ends with a matter-of-fact caption that Sam never returned home which I know many saw as depressing but I believe the idea is that he *wanted* to continue his journey. In my imagined finale, he has to change something in his life from just before he stepped into the quantum accelerator but then *has to choose whether to do it again*, now knowing that he is going to get lost in time. Make it come full circle. Hell, suggest he’s caught in a time loop for all I care: just make it so that he, on-screen, *chooses* to do it again, with full knowledge of what he’s doing. THAT would have been powerful.
Anyway, all that has nothing to do with the book except it is an idea the book spurred. On the topic of DOUBLE OR NOTHING, ultimately the cover is more exciting than the story it contains. There’s not enough exploration of the literally split personality thing to make it enjoyable, there’s barely any hologram action which is the best part of Quantum Leap in my opinion, and the only real tension (if you don’t count Al’s worrying over how to get back to Sam) occurs in the last couple chapters, which is a letdown. Like I said, overall it was fine nonetheless, but hopefully I remember how mostly neutral I felt about this before I convince myself to buy a fifth book in the series.
And as it turns out, this book too was… okay. As I said, Sam leaps into two people—identical twins—and his soul is split in half, the age-old trope of two sides of one’s personality becoming two people (think starfish Rachel from ANIMORPHS… you *have* read ANIMORPHS, haven’t you?). So we’ve got “good” Sam and “bad” Sam, or at least altruistic versus self-interested. They spend almost the entirety of the book separate from one another; it’s only toward the very end that there’s any Sam-on-Sam action. Also, this is another book where there’s some fuckup with the Project preventing Al from hologramming in to help Sam. Of the four books I own, Al existed as he does in the show in only one of them. In the others he either can’t find Sam until the last minute and must spend the majority of his time in 1999 or else he leaped as well so that nobody is a hologram for the book. Lame. I hate this. Just let Al be a hologram.
Mostly it’s just scenes of the two Sams living their lives, or the lives of the brothers they’ve leapt into I mean, without much of a goal in mind. Ward (“bad” Sam) does spend some time trying to repair his marriage but that’s about it. Then it zips through scenes of Al frustrated with Ziggy in the future for not being able to center him on Sam. I kind of despised Ziggy’s “I’m not religious, I’m just spiritual!” bullshit when she claims she’s being prevented from being fixed by a higher power—not necessarily God, maybe just Nature or something!
But I will say that the discussions about how Sam’s actions change the timeline and how that affects Al as the only person who remembers the previous timelines were kind of affecting (and reminded me of Blake Crouch’s RECURSION to some degree). There’s even a moment where the timeline changes mid-scene, where Al begins a conversation talking to Tina but ends it talking to Gushie. I thought this was extremely cool. Unless that was just an editing error and I’m giving the book too much credit, which is possible. After all, even though Sam leapt into Ward Ralston, the book *frequently* misspells his name as “Wade”. So I wouldn’t put it past the book to just have forgotten who was involved in the scene with Al, rather than it being intentional. Still, Al’s questioning whether anything really matters in a world where everything could be different tomorrow is surprisingly poignant.
There’s also a beat where “bad” Sam resents leaping and says he plans to keep Ward’s life. He’s tired of leaping in and fixing people’s problems; let somebody else leap into him and fix *his* problems for once! That got me thinking: Sam leaping into *himself* is a pretty neat idea. I don’t mean himself as a child, as the series did, but himself as an adult. I thought that might have been a better series wrap, even. Instead of a weird surreal episode where Sam talks to a bartender who is also God, he should have leapt back into his own body, but like three days before he sent himself back in time. The actual finale ends with a matter-of-fact caption that Sam never returned home which I know many saw as depressing but I believe the idea is that he *wanted* to continue his journey. In my imagined finale, he has to change something in his life from just before he stepped into the quantum accelerator but then *has to choose whether to do it again*, now knowing that he is going to get lost in time. Make it come full circle. Hell, suggest he’s caught in a time loop for all I care: just make it so that he, on-screen, *chooses* to do it again, with full knowledge of what he’s doing. THAT would have been powerful.
Anyway, all that has nothing to do with the book except it is an idea the book spurred. On the topic of DOUBLE OR NOTHING, ultimately the cover is more exciting than the story it contains. There’s not enough exploration of the literally split personality thing to make it enjoyable, there’s barely any hologram action which is the best part of Quantum Leap in my opinion, and the only real tension (if you don’t count Al’s worrying over how to get back to Sam) occurs in the last couple chapters, which is a letdown. Like I said, overall it was fine nonetheless, but hopefully I remember how mostly neutral I felt about this before I convince myself to buy a fifth book in the series.
July 13, 2020
Having read the first eight of these books now, it was refreshing to have something a bit different happen. With Sam being two different people provided twice the intrigue as he had to find out about both lives and was unaware of the other version of himself. Both Sams also spend most of the time without any guidance from Al as the project is having issues of its own. I liked how both the Sams had their own portion of his character and that they developed differing attitudes to their current leap without Al's input. The ending was very satisfactory too. This was one of the better books of the series. It was just a shame that whoever edited this particular edition didn't do a very good job of it; it was full of silly spelling mistakes and incorrect suffixes.
December 20, 2010
Not as good as some of the Quantum Leap books I have read, but adds a new twist to what is possible in the QL Universe. If you are a QL fan and can find the book (it has been out of print for about 10 years) worth a read.
July 23, 2015
This book was a little confusing and didn't seem to be as likely as some of the other books in the series. Sam leaping into two people at the same time? I didn't really feel this concept like I have some of the others, so I've marked it down because of that.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews