"The Fabulous Riverboat" by Philip José Farmer (1918-2009)

 

Publisher: Berkley Medallion

Copyright: 1971

ISBN: None listed

"The Fabulous Riverboat" is the second novel in the Riverworld series, which is set sometime in the far future when all people who ever lived on earth are resurrected along the banks of an enormous river. No one knows why they were resurrected, or by whom but some are determined to find out.

This novel has it has as its primary character Samuel Langhorne Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) who is determined to get to the headwaters of the river, and to do so decides to build a paddle-wheel riverboat.

Some of the other characters you'll meet are the Viking chief Erik Bloodaxe, Lothar Von Richthofen (brother to the Red Baron), Prince John Lackland (brother to Richard the Lion Hearted), Odysseus, and Herman Goering also makes another appearance.

I my opinion this novel wasn't quite as good as "To Your Scattered Bodies Go", which I reviewed 2 weeks ago. This is primarily because the time span is in the order of a number of years, but should be many decades. The main reason I come to this conclusion is because they were using technology that would not have been known, or even thought of during the time of Clements. It is true this is explained somewhat by the fact that other more modern engineers assisted him, but it still did seem a little too much of a stretch. The techniques used to build the riverboat also seemed to advanced, to be able to be performed with essentially very rudimentary tools and techniques. I'm sure there are many who will disagree with this, but that's why I said it was my opinion.

In addition to this the characters themselves didn't seem to be quite as well-developed as they were in the first book. This may be because a lot more people have read Clements' books as opposed to those of Burton and therefore have a context to frame his character, but I still feel it would've been nice to see more character development. On the other hand there was some good interaction between Clements and some of his neighbouring peoples with regards to discussions about race, and how Clements portrayed this in his novels.

Race relations do play a large part in the latter part of this novel, so a reader should be prepared for some rather strong language, if that is a concern.

Even with these draw backs, I did enjoy the book as it has been many years since I first read it.

"Dynamic Characters: How to Create personalities that keep readers captivated" by Nancy Kress

 

Publisher: Writer's Digest Books
Copyright:1998
ISBN:0898798159

Nancy Kress is an award-winning author and colonist for writers digest magazine. In this book she looks at a number of different topics that all relate to characterization, how the characters influence the plotting, and the story's world view.

The book itself is separated into three major sections the first is creating strong and believable characters: the externals, the second is creating strong and believable characters: the internals, and third she goes into a discussion of how character and plot interact and influence each other, and how they work within the story's worldview.

Each of the sections is separated into a few sub-sections. For example in the first she talks about things such as what's in a name, the role of setting in creating a character, dialogue and how to enhance characters through it, how to make dialogue read naturally, amongst others.

In the second part she deals with such things as using a character's attitudes, their dreams and news casts to enhance the character. She also looks at how to make the bad guys better, Creating an unsympathetic protagonists, etc.

The third section has sub-sections such as starting in various places within a story and still establishing a plot, point-of-view, secondary characters and their influences on plot construction, basing stories on real events, and much more.

I found this to be an extremely well written book, that is very informative and gives excellent advice and examples. The vast majority of the examples are chosen from very well known books, which therefore gives the aspiring writer even more information to ground their characters on.

Well worth the read, but also good advice for practising authors.

"To Your Scattered Bodies Go" by Philip José Farmer (1918-2009)

 

Publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons

Copyright: 1971

ISBN: 0425028097

The Hugo award winning novel"To Your Scattered Bodies Go" is the first book in Farmer's very popular River World series. In which every person who has ever lived on earth is resurrected from the dead and finds themselves naked on the banks of as immense river. There is no explanation as to why they are there, or what they are supposed to do.

The primary character in this novel is a Sir Richard Francis Burton. For those who don't know, Burton was a real person, and is the translator of One Thousand and One Nights (also known as the Tales of the Arabian Nights), he's the co-founder of the Royal Anthropological Society in Britain, the discoverer of Lake Tanganyika, and accomplished many other exploits during his life. Even with all these credits to his name he was an extremely controversial figure who was not well liked by many in the world, especially many religious leaders.

Burton is somewhat unique in the story, as he was one of very few characters that woke up prior to arrival on the shores of the river, and therefore was aware that other beings were manipulating them. Some of the other characters he meets are Alice Hargraves Little, Herman Goering both of whom play rather significant roles in Burton's quest to find out what is really going on.

This is a very entertaining read, and I would recommend it to anybody who likes essentially classic science fiction, although some have classified this more in the fantasy genre.

"The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World" by Steve Brusatte

 

Publisher: William Morrow

Copyright: 2018

ISBN: 9780062490421

It has taken me a little while to get around to reading this book due to a bit of a backlog I’ve had to work through, that and working for a living tends to chew up a few hours in the day - mind you the latter isn’t much of an excuse as I work in Palaeontology all day long. But in any case the wait was well worth it as this book was a fascinating read.

Dr. Brusatte takes the reader on a journey from the Permian Period some 252 million years ago right up to the time of the Late Cretaceous and the extinction of the dinosaurs due to a rather pesky comet/meteor that hit the earth in the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago. Even though this extinction event was hotly debated by many for a number of years it is now accepted that this is what brought the Cretaceous and the reign of the dinosaurs to an end - with exception of the birds that is, yes birds are descended from dinosaurs. For a good read on this check out “T-Rex and the Crater of Doom” by Walter Alvarez which I reviewed back on November 23, 2020.

The book starts by introducing the reader the world of Permian Period and explains the dawn of the dinosaurs, how they became more dominant, the effects of continent drift on their distribution. It then moves on through the next couple of chapters to discuss the tyrant dinosaurs, and of course many peoples' favourite bad boy T. rex.

There is an excellent discussion on how dinosaurs likely took flight, and in each section there is a good discussion of the dominant species, and how they lived. The final chapter deals with the end of the dinosaurs, and how they died out.

This book was extremely informative, and would make a wonderful introduction to anybody who is interested in dinosaurs, it is an easy read that would be suitable for readers from the higher elementary school grades (after all everybody knows an elementary student who knows all the dinosaurs, right?) right though to seniors. I believe it would also make a great introductory text for first year university as this is the type of book that most students would actually read, as opposed to some of the textbooks typically assigned.

Highly recommended.