From: utzoo!decvax!cwruecmp!glassner Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers Title: Roger Zelazny and ReReVenus Article-I.D.: cwruecmp.497 Posted: Sun Feb 20 14:24:41 1983 Received: Mon Feb 21 02:54:02 1983 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Too bad the stories Farmer writes under his own name aren't any better. Farmer is one of my least liked authors. The "climax" of his Riverworld series was particularly bad. I often wonder what would have happened if the Riverworld idea had been handled by someone like Clavell, Pynchon, etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Well, I agree to a point. More specifically, though, the ending to Venus is about the worst ending of any book I have read in recent memory. When I read those final lines I really felt like the writer had just gotten tired of writing the story and stopped - sort of like, "...and then I woke up." Concerning Riverworld, I really like the first book in the series (To Your Scattered Bodies Go), but I really think it got much worse as it went on. The Magic Labyrinth (sp?) also struck me as a cop-out ... I should have guessed both would be written by the same guy. Totally aside from that subject, one of my favourite writers (from whom I have not seen anything in a while) is Roger Zelazny. He has a short story (I think in one of the Alpha anthologies (Bob Silverberg, ed?)) about the future of the Earth in which a robot attempts to really understand its former masters (all the people are dead in a nuclear war) by creating a new person ... very stylish, very clean, and very enjoyable. -Andrew decvax!cwruecmp!glassner