The Lavalite World

 

By Philip Jose Farmer

Book 5 of the World of Tiers series

Five people have become stranded on the topsy-turvy Lavalite world. The main feature of it is its instability, with the landscape prone to shift quite suddenly. 

Kickaha and his partner, Anana; Urthona and his hired thug Angus McKay, a man from Earth; and Red Orc are the five people stranded on this strangely active planet. Anana, Urthona and Red Orc are all Lords, seemingly immortal humans with advanced scientific knowledge and extremely inflated opinions of their own superiority. But at least Anana has climbed down of her high horse due to her loving connection with Kickaha, who is also from Earth. 

How these five ended up stranded is not detailed. But life is harsh on the Lavalite world and the locals are primitive and dangerous. All five of the main characters end up being split up and held captive by the local tribal folks. 

Urthona, who designed and populated the Lavalite world with his custom animal and plant creations and who installed the human tribes on it too, has a mobile castle there that slowly travels around the world. If any of them can get to his castle, they maybe able to find a way off the world. Anana also has a device that can open gateways to other worlds, but it is necessary to find the gateways first. Urthona and Red Orc both want the device but Anana is hanging on to it as a way to control Urthona and Red Orc. 

Kickaha got separated from the others during a sudden flood and manages to make a connection with a different tribe. Anana ends up with a different group of savages. Urthona and McKay get captured together and Red Orc gets taken by a different group, who treat him very harshly. All five of the stranded people have one goal, to escape their various captors and find the a gate off the planet, and failing that, find Urthona's moving castle. 

It would really help to have read the first four books in the series. Besides that, though, it just wasn't that interesting. We first get to read about Kickaha's time with the tribals that captured him in the most detail. Then Anana's ordeal. But Urthona's and McKay's are not gone into in much detail and Red Orc's just in passing. All we really find out about his captivity is that he was beaten and abused, even more than the other four. 

However, I just felt like a stranger at a party where I knew no one. I never really connected to any of the characters, not even to the two heroes, Kickaha and Anana. And I got bored with reading about their struggles with the tribal peoples and began skipping those parts. Ditto their struggles with the mobile terrain. In the last part of the story, Anana and Kickaha build hang gliders and hot air balloons and we are told in detail how they do so. Descriptions of that process were about as interesting as reading a math problem. 

Down in the Black Gang

By Philip Jose Farmer

A collection of science fiction stories.
1. Down in the Black Gang: ETs use human emotion to power the universe but one of their fixers gets fed up with manipulating humans and flees.
2. The Shadow of Space: An experimental space ship finds itself in unspace due to sabotage and can't figure out how to get back home or if home even exists anymore.
3. A Bowl Bigger than Earth: Morfiks finds himself sliding into a new world in a new body. But the new body is sexless and hairless and the new world is filled with people who look and sound exactly like him. Individuality is forbidden and any infractions result in everyone being punished.
4. Riverworld: Tom Mix, old timey cowboy movie star, finds himself reincarnated on Riverworld along with the rest of humanity. Riverworld is a massive, possibly artificial world featuring a single central river valley surrounded by impassible mountains. Tom falls in with a woman who knew Moses and with a man who doesn't want to admit that he is Jesus Christ and just as human as everyone else.
5. A Few Miles:  A novice monk is ordered by the head of his order to take passage on a space ship to another planet, Wildenwooly. But he has to figure how to get out of the city where the monastery is located and out to the city limits where the spaceport is all on his own with any help or money. He has many adventures, including helping a man with a broken oven, fighting off a gang of union thugs, falling in with a couple of dangerous teens, getting attacked by an alien animal and having his clothing stolen.
I think this was the author's attempt at a humorous story.
6. Prometheus: The monk from the story, A Few Miles, goes to the planet of the alien animal that attacked him in that story. At first dismissed as merely talented mimics, rather like parrots, it soon becomes apparent that these beings, called horowitzes (named for the man who discovered their planet), are capable of learning what the monk teaches them. Soon, they are speaking and understanding the monk's language, learning to make fire and cook their food. Learning agriculture and making tools of flint and weapons for hunting and defense. But questions arise about what happens after death and the monk must decide if he will give them religion or let them develop their own philosophy.
7. The Blasphemers: The sphinx people have developed quickly and have even made a faster-than-light drive for their space ships. They explore the galaxy, looking for planets to colonize. They ruthlessly suppress the beings of any planet who they deem to be vulnerable. But then they discover our planet and the big sphinx statue in Egypt and it blows their minds.
8. How Deep the Groove: A scientist invents a mind-reading machine and discovers a disturbing truth about humankind that drives him insane.

This was an OK read. I'm not really a fan of short stories and I wasn't particularly impressed or entertained by this collection.

Dark Is the Sun

By Philip José Farmer

Deyv, a young savage, is going out into the world to find a woman and make her his wife. That is if their soul eggs are compatible. The soul egg is a large crystalline stone that all people wear. Anyone without one is an outcast, considered no longer human. So Deyv becomes suicidally depressed when his soul egg is stolen one night while he was sleeping. Somehow, with the help of his two intelligent companion animals, a dog and large cat, he pulls himself together and he and the animals set off to track down the thief. Things start to look up when he encounters a beautiful young woman who is on the same quest he is, tracking down the same thief who also stole her soul egg. They are soon joined on the quest by a third victim of the thief but this victim is not human. It is a huge plant man, very old and wise, who can sense the trail of the thief even in places where the two animals cannot.
The setting is an Earth in its last days, some 15 billion years in the future. The universe is coming to an end and all will be destroyed before much longer. As the unlikely trio continues on their quest, it becomes clear that finding their soul eggs is the least of their worries, that the end of time is at hand. But with the help of an old witch woman and of a half snake, half woman-like being from another planet, perhaps a few can be saved if only they can find a doorway into a younger, thriving world.

This was a classic science fiction adventure with encounters with monsters, strange people, peculiar beings and threats to be face and conquered. I really enjoyed the story right up to end, when the author starts killing off some of my favorite characters. Sometimes, when reading a story, it seems as it gets towards the end that the author gets bored with it and wraps it up rather abruptly. Just kind of wham, bam, you're dead, you're out, it's over. This book felt like that at the end. But up to the very end, I enjoyed the book quite a bit, it was exciting and full of weird, wild stuff. Overall, I'd say it was a good read.

A Girl Named Disaster

By Nancy Farmer

Nhamo is a Shona girl living in a traditional village in Mozambique. Her mother died when Nhamo was very young and she doesn't really remember her much. Her father was young fool from Zimbabwe who went back there and was never heard from again. Nhamo lives with her maternal grandmother and her two aunts and some cousins. Her aunts, it seems, were jealous of her mother, who got to go to away to school and learn to read and write, while they had to stay home. Even though Nhamo's mother has been dead for many years, they still feel envious and take it out on Nhamo, making her days one long round of chores and work. But her granny loves her very much, which helps make up for her feelings of loneliness.
It turns out that the reason Nhamo's father disappeared is because he killed a man in Mozambique and fled back to Zimbabwe. The relatives of the murdered man still want to be compensated for the man's death but Nhamo's family doesn't have the wherewithal to pay the blood debt. So it is decided that Nhamo will marry into the dead man's family, this despite the fact that the man she is to marry is very much older than her and has three wives already. And that Nhamo's status in this group will be that of virtual slave and her early death from abuse or murder by the jealous older wives is pretty much assured.
So, urged on by her dying granny, Nhamo steals a row boat and sets off up the river to Zimbabwe to find her daddy. Even though she is only about 11 or 12 years old, she is very capable and manages pretty good until one night when she ties the boat to some reeds and falls asleep only to wake up the next day to discover that the boat became unmoored and has drifted all the way back past her village and beyond it into a huge man-made lake. This lake is so big its like being on the ocean. Nhamo can't even see the shore. Still she manages to row to an island and thus she gradually makes her way through the huge lake, island hopping and living off the land. She has a hard time of it with encounters with wild animals and gets stung by a scorpion and almost starves to death. Still she plugs on because to give up means death.

This is one of those books intended for teenage readers that is also suited for adults. It isn't preachy and boring or predictable, like so much teen lit, especially teen lit for girls. Life in her village is so different from the modern world; they have no electricity, no water except what they get from the river and virtually no education, especially for girls, who are not considered worth educating. Everywhere they look, the world is filled with spirits, good, bad and indifferent and care has to be taken not to offend these very touchy spirits. Nhamo and her granny are both born story tellers and the book is full of these little, often amusing folk tales. Nhamo's journey is riveting and exciting and she is a very sympathetic heroine. I really enjoyed this story a lot.