© 1970 by Philip Jose Farmer
This is the fourth book of Farmer’s that I’ve read (the others being Dayworld, The Lovers, and the colorfully-titled The Wind Whales of Ishmael). While I’m not an expert on the man’s writings, I’m beginning to detect some patterns.
First, Farmer creates incredibly detailed, rich and alien worlds for us. That word “tapestry” has become a ho-hum cliché, but if it applies anywhere, it applies to Farmer’s worlds. The biodiversity in his novels simply floors me. This is nowhere as total as in this work, The Stone God Awakens, but you’ll find it in the others books I mentioned. Wind Whales takes place on a different planet, if I remember correctly, as does The Lovers. Dayworld takes place on Earth a few decades in the future, but the extreme differences you’ll see are of a sociological rather than biological form.
Second, I find Farmer somewhat inexplicably lacking in developing his human characters. When I invest a couple of hours in one of his engrossing and fantastic worlds, I want to know my characters. I want to empathize with them. I want to care for them. I want to be on the edge of my seat, not because of their predicaments per se, but because I like them enough to want to see them through their predicaments.
Third, as a writer, Farmer never lets up. There are no lags in a PJF novel. There’s usually one action scene after another. It never lets up, which is a good thing, most of the time. Liken it to a movie; sometimes the endless action, the endless assault of stimuli which never lets up, sometimes that’s a good thing. Think The Terminator (good thing) or a Nic Cage car flick (bad thing). It depends on the story, I suppose, the appropriateness of this style. So it’s not necessarily a bad thing; both my unpublished novels strive for this same relentlessness. Stone God and Wind Whales fall into this category, Dayworld less so, and The Lovers was more a psychological sort of thing rather than an action extravaganza.
Now, let’s talk about The Stone God Awakens in more detail.
This is the fourth book of Farmer’s that I’ve read (the others being Dayworld, The Lovers, and the colorfully-titled The Wind Whales of Ishmael). While I’m not an expert on the man’s writings, I’m beginning to detect some patterns.
First, Farmer creates incredibly detailed, rich and alien worlds for us. That word “tapestry” has become a ho-hum cliché, but if it applies anywhere, it applies to Farmer’s worlds. The biodiversity in his novels simply floors me. This is nowhere as total as in this work, The Stone God Awakens, but you’ll find it in the others books I mentioned. Wind Whales takes place on a different planet, if I remember correctly, as does The Lovers. Dayworld takes place on Earth a few decades in the future, but the extreme differences you’ll see are of a sociological rather than biological form.
Second, I find Farmer somewhat inexplicably lacking in developing his human characters. When I invest a couple of hours in one of his engrossing and fantastic worlds, I want to know my characters. I want to empathize with them. I want to care for them. I want to be on the edge of my seat, not because of their predicaments per se, but because I like them enough to want to see them through their predicaments.
Third, as a writer, Farmer never lets up. There are no lags in a PJF novel. There’s usually one action scene after another. It never lets up, which is a good thing, most of the time. Liken it to a movie; sometimes the endless action, the endless assault of stimuli which never lets up, sometimes that’s a good thing. Think The Terminator (good thing) or a Nic Cage car flick (bad thing). It depends on the story, I suppose, the appropriateness of this style. So it’s not necessarily a bad thing; both my unpublished novels strive for this same relentlessness. Stone God and Wind Whales fall into this category, Dayworld less so, and The Lovers was more a psychological sort of thing rather than an action extravaganza.
Now, let’s talk about The Stone God Awakens in more detail.
[minor spoilers to follow ...]
A man finds himself suddenly in the middle of a battle. There’s smoke and fire, bodies with axes and knives throwing themselves at each other. Disoriented, he kills a man in self-defense, but realizes that what he has killed is not a man, but some type of hominid resembling a raccoon in fur coloration and patterning.
This man is the Stone God, and he’s now awake. Oh, and his name struck me for some reason as one of the strangest name of a protagonist in a book I’ve ever read: Ulysses Singing Bear. He’s also a physicist, and his last memory is sitting at his desk in a Syracuse lab in 1985, watching the test of a “matter-freezer.”
Ahhhhh.
Soon Ulysses is worshipped by the feline Wufea as their god-come-to-life. Quickly he determines that he is on Earth millions of years in the future. Mankind has died out somehow (he finds out What Happened later in the novel), and a score of species have evolved from felines, canines, elephants, bats, raccoons, alligators, and more. Most to a primitive level, but a few have developed simple technology.
The best part of the novel takes place in these first few pages as our protagonist is trying to piece together what happened, how it happened, and where he is. Of course, lacking any records or true technology, it’s all guesswork, but educated guesswork.
The novel’s most intriguing image is found here: in his frozen-matter state, all the atoms and molecules (and, presumably, quarks and electrons and strong and weak forces) are completely stopped. In his petrified state he is impervious and indestructible. What, then, could have happened to this Stone God over the millions and millions of years that have passed? How many museums did he stay in? How many worlds was he on? (It turns out he was on the Moon for a spell.) The Earth even could have been destroyed, and he may have spent millennia free-floating in space. After the inevitable Fall of Man, how many primitive cultures before the Wufea worshipped him as a god? (It turns out that these feline creatures somehow found him at the bottom of a lake a couple of centuries before he “awakens.”)
After exploring this world, Ulysses discovers his nemesis: The Tree, a massive, continent-spanning living entity which houses and controls thousands of species in a benevolent dictatorship. The main body of the novel focuses on the mission to discover what the tree is and how it can be destroyed, though, honestly, I was a little confused as to why it necessarily had to be destroyed.
The novel was essentially one long, long story, with no paragraph breaks and no chapters. A little strange for me, because I like little divisions in a novel where I can logically stop and pause and sleep, for example.
Farmer doesn’t tell us much about Ulysses’ backstory other than those few pages in the beginning of the book. We don’t get to know him as a person, either, though this may be because he has no humans to relate to. Though he does form a strange relationship with a female feline. I thought that might go the way of interspecies hook-up, something Farmer has done in the past, but not so; it was an empty thread in the story. And I found it annoying Ulysses’ knowledge of guerrilla warfare. Yeah, I know he was a physicist, but is that an adequate explanation for his knowledge on how to make gunpowder, bombs, firearms, dirigibles, and to master several completely alien languages and even an alien Morse code?
I didn’t know Farmer had died; he passed away in February of 2009 at age 91 (strangely, he died the day I left the hospital after my three-week stay). Although I give the book a B-minus, it was entertaining, and I will continue to seek out more of his novels.
***
N.B. I reviewed The Lovers, here. Dayworld and Wind Whales of Ishmael were both read pre-blog. Just thinking about it now, I would reread Whales but not Dayworld.
Also, I kept thinking of the Alan Dean Foster novel, Midworld, reviewed here, while I read Stone God. That book, too, was an incredibly descriptive journey into a dense biological world, and I highly recommend that if you are into this sort of thing.
This man is the Stone God, and he’s now awake. Oh, and his name struck me for some reason as one of the strangest name of a protagonist in a book I’ve ever read: Ulysses Singing Bear. He’s also a physicist, and his last memory is sitting at his desk in a Syracuse lab in 1985, watching the test of a “matter-freezer.”
Ahhhhh.
Soon Ulysses is worshipped by the feline Wufea as their god-come-to-life. Quickly he determines that he is on Earth millions of years in the future. Mankind has died out somehow (he finds out What Happened later in the novel), and a score of species have evolved from felines, canines, elephants, bats, raccoons, alligators, and more. Most to a primitive level, but a few have developed simple technology.
The best part of the novel takes place in these first few pages as our protagonist is trying to piece together what happened, how it happened, and where he is. Of course, lacking any records or true technology, it’s all guesswork, but educated guesswork.
The novel’s most intriguing image is found here: in his frozen-matter state, all the atoms and molecules (and, presumably, quarks and electrons and strong and weak forces) are completely stopped. In his petrified state he is impervious and indestructible. What, then, could have happened to this Stone God over the millions and millions of years that have passed? How many museums did he stay in? How many worlds was he on? (It turns out he was on the Moon for a spell.) The Earth even could have been destroyed, and he may have spent millennia free-floating in space. After the inevitable Fall of Man, how many primitive cultures before the Wufea worshipped him as a god? (It turns out that these feline creatures somehow found him at the bottom of a lake a couple of centuries before he “awakens.”)
After exploring this world, Ulysses discovers his nemesis: The Tree, a massive, continent-spanning living entity which houses and controls thousands of species in a benevolent dictatorship. The main body of the novel focuses on the mission to discover what the tree is and how it can be destroyed, though, honestly, I was a little confused as to why it necessarily had to be destroyed.
The novel was essentially one long, long story, with no paragraph breaks and no chapters. A little strange for me, because I like little divisions in a novel where I can logically stop and pause and sleep, for example.
Farmer doesn’t tell us much about Ulysses’ backstory other than those few pages in the beginning of the book. We don’t get to know him as a person, either, though this may be because he has no humans to relate to. Though he does form a strange relationship with a female feline. I thought that might go the way of interspecies hook-up, something Farmer has done in the past, but not so; it was an empty thread in the story. And I found it annoying Ulysses’ knowledge of guerrilla warfare. Yeah, I know he was a physicist, but is that an adequate explanation for his knowledge on how to make gunpowder, bombs, firearms, dirigibles, and to master several completely alien languages and even an alien Morse code?
I didn’t know Farmer had died; he passed away in February of 2009 at age 91 (strangely, he died the day I left the hospital after my three-week stay). Although I give the book a B-minus, it was entertaining, and I will continue to seek out more of his novels.
***
N.B. I reviewed The Lovers, here. Dayworld and Wind Whales of Ishmael were both read pre-blog. Just thinking about it now, I would reread Whales but not Dayworld.
Also, I kept thinking of the Alan Dean Foster novel, Midworld, reviewed here, while I read Stone God. That book, too, was an incredibly descriptive journey into a dense biological world, and I highly recommend that if you are into this sort of thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment