- ISBN13: 9780765326546
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Milton Firebrass, once Mark Twain’s enemy and now his greatest ally, plans to build a giant airship that can fly to the North Pole of Riverworld. Once there, he hopes to learn the secret of the mysterious tower that dominates the landscape and find the answer to his most urgent question: could the tower contain the Ethicals, the enigmatic beings that created Riverworld?
Meanwhile, Jill Gulbirra is challenged for the job of piloting the airship by none othe… More >>
This is the middle volume of Farmer’s ambitious five-book saga of Riverworld, a fantastic planet reworked by a mysterious super race to be one long river valley along a ten million-mile long river, which snakes around the planet. Into this artificially formed world, all humanity who ever lived is resurrected, given perpetual youth, and provided with all their needs through a mind boggling technology. What they are not given is a clue as to who did this, how, or most importantly, why. This book is the weakest of the series so far.
The action of the story follows several groups who are now racing toward the headwaters of the river hoping to discover the mysteries of their after-life and strange, new world, which are rumored to be found there. In addition to Sir Richard Burton and Sam Clemens, who we have met in previous books, we are introduced to Akhenaten, heretic pharaoh of Egypt, who hopes to discover his one true Sun god at river’s end, and writer Jack London traveling together with film cowboy Tom Mix, all headed toward the same shadowy goal. The bulk of the book, however, focuses on the building of a huge dirigible that can gain in a few days of flight what would take many years of travel on the river. An exciting account of this airship’s mission to river’s end provides the cliff hanging ending of this volume.
Part of the charm of the first two books was their protagonists; Sir Richard Burton in the first, Sam Clemens in the second. In ‘The Dark Design’, the majority of the action is viewed through characters of the author’s creation rather than through historical protagonists, and this does not come off as well. Both Burton and Clemens make brief appearances here, but we don’t see either of them enough.
The book suffers from two other major flaws. First, it is overlong – nearly as long as the first two books put together. Farmer’s writing style is at best competent, and begins to become taxing after 200 pages or so. There are whole chapters here that have no real relationship to the plot and are little more than the author indulging himself. Secondly, there are major plot and character shifts away from what was established in the first two books. These shifts and reversals are awkward, and don’t seem to have been thought out well. At times, the author’s sloppiness makes it hard to suspend disbelief.
The power of the story, and the possibilities of the concept should keep you reading through this poorly edited mess of a book, but if the first two volumes have not thoroughly captured you, you may bog down and never reach river’s end.
Theo Logos
Rating: 3 / 5
The part 3 of the Riverwold series. It’s nowhere near as good as either of the first 2 books of the series were (To Your Scattered Bodies Go & The Fabulous Riverboat).
One of the main faults of the book is that an excessively large number of chapters deal with science fiction writer Peter Jairus Frigate who by chance remarkably resembles the author Philip Jose Farmer.
The main purpose of this character seems to be to serve as something of a mouthpice for Farmer to vent his views on humanity, the nature of people, religion and Riverworld….And all the subtly of a seal clubbing.
This is worsened by the fact that every time the book really starts to get the reader involved it breaks to a chapter or 4 filled with the musings and incessant ramblings of PJF (you decide which) or filling in the backstory of Frigate WHICH GOES NO WHERE!
I dread to think of what this book would have been like BEFORE it was edited.
Rating: 1 / 5
Having read the first two books of this series, I’m now more than halfway through the third. I only rate items as 1 star when I find myself compelled to discard the book during reading. I’ve read other bad reviews and agree with them. Here’s a few items I can add to the list:
1. The author constantly provides both metric and English equivalents when numbers are called for. For example, he mentions the height of a character as “6 feet or 1.8 meters in height.” He does this for distances as well–and does it so frequently that one can only imagine that he had a calculator next to his typewriter. Is he trying to teach us the metric system or revive the English system (depending on your point of view)?
2. The irritations continue with colorless biographical data on the characters from history that serves no useful part to creating interest in those characters. While the trick of using characters from history is an interesting technique to provide some connection between our real lives and fiction, and one that helps us get over the hesitation to jump into something totally alien to our experiences, this technique should have been used less once the story line got developed. The focus should have been on the story line and things that would have engaged our emotional interests.
3. For me, the poor continuity, the pulp infusion of dream sequences, and the waiting for action were but three reasons I decided to come to Amazon.com to look at the reviews of the last two books. I sighed on reading the third book would not be improved on by the last two books….
Rating: 1 / 5
This book differs in a couple of ways from the earlier books in the RIVERWORLD series. Instead of focusing on a single character, this book shifts between several points of view. And as previous reviewers have noted, there are lengthy digressions inside the head of Peter J. Frigate, a thinly-disguised version of the series author. As far as plot goes, some of the characters have come up with a much better way to reach the tower at the end of the River–Instead of retracing the twisty path of the River over every inch of the globe, they will just build a dirigible and fly directly there. To make this possible, Farmer had to retroactively lower the mountains of Riverworld–This is rather lamely explained as an error of perspective. We also discover that there is something seriously wrong amongst the secret masters of Riverworld. It’s apparent their agents among the resurrectees have lost communication with their bosses, and are desperately trying to re-establish it. Also, the spectre of permanent death has returned once more to humanity. Some of the characters seem a bit retro-70s now. Of course, it can be argued that their personalities ARE from the 1970s!
Reading it for the first time in two decades, I enjoyed the book, but it certainly didn’t advance the storyline very much.
Rating: 3 / 5
I just finished reading The Dark Design. What a chore. I kept hoping for something like the first book in the series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, but no luck. It’s like the author lost all control of the story. Several times I lost track of who the characters were and which story line they belonged to. The first book of the series was one of the best I’d ever read and I had such hope for the series. I really wanted to find out why the planet was created and humanity transplanted there, and “who done it”. But, by the end of this book I’m not sure even the author knows and from the reviews I’ve read of the fourth book in the series I don’t have much hope there either. I made it through the second book and the third (barely) but I think I’ll stop there, thank you.
Rating: 1 / 5