The Gates of Creation

© 1966 by Philip Jose Farmer



Well, here’s a first: a PJF novel I didn’t care for.

The Gates of Creation is supposed to be a sequel to The Maker of Universes, part two of the epic series known as “The World of Tiers,” though I don’t know if Farmer had this all planned out during its writing. However, it’s a sequel in the most tenuous of ways – in that it only retains Maker’s protagonist. Yeah, the framework of Tiers is kept in place, but we’re introduced to a whole new cast of characters and an entirely different universe.

Which still is fine, with two major exceptions: every single one of the new characters is unappealing, uninteresting, and/or repulsive, and the new universe introduced – which consists of five worlds access through teleportation gates – starts off quite, er, boring. One world rips off the entire raison d’etre for The Wind Whales of Ishmael (yes, yes, I know in terms of chronologic bibliography it’s the other way around; still I found it redundantly yawnful). Another is a world where everything is like coated with WD40 and all the wildlife has suction cup feet.

The plot is one of a straightforward rescue mission, which in itself is not bad, except the unappealing group of characters have to surmount a series of tests. Which you knew they would. There is like a hundred pages to fill, you know. You even knew, without being told, which characters were wearing the red shirts, to reference a meme from the original Star Trek series.

Thankfully it’s a short novel, clocking in at 140 pages (30 pages shy of its predecessor). Halfway to three-quarters through I was thinking about giving it a C or a C-minus, especially after the umpteenth alien animal attack and the incessant middle-school bickering of these rocket scientists.

But then something quite astounding happened.

It got markedly better. Light-years better.

It started with the fourth world … do I spoil or not? Oh, okay. It’s not an island – it’s a living entity! Argh! The rippling land is actually the surface of a continent-sized amoeba! With gaping mouths to swallow you whole! With that in mind, how do you cross the ten miles of what appears to be grassy plains (very hungry grassy plains) to get to those Gates to get to the next world? Hmm?

The novel definitely picked up there. But how to rescue the damsel in distress, and give the bad guy his comeuppance? Oh, that was pure ingenuity of a sort I haven’t read in a while. Quite clever, satisfyingly so. Plus, there was a legitimate twist at the end – legitimate meaning “I didn’t see it coming.” So what turned out to be a reader’s ordeal turned out to be a book I couldn’t put down until midnight last night.

And what looked like was going to draw a C-minus gracefully and gratefully curved upward to a … B-minus.

Still not a big fan of The Gates of Creation, but at least it wasn’t a waste of time. Starting the third book in the Tiers series, A Private Cosmos later today. Looks like a return to the characters and settings of the first novel. Yay!