The Other Log of Phileas Fogg by Philip Jose Farmer
This is a novel of tremendous scope and imagination, building upon the foundation of Jules Verne’s famous Around the World in Eighty Days and expanding upon it to include Captain Nemo, Sherlock Holmes nemesis, James Moriarty, the famous ghost ship, Mary Celeste, and so very much more.
Farmer begins by informing the reader that two alien races have been vying for supremacy on earth for millennia, jockeying for power by adopting/recruiting humans to their side and using them as weapons against each other. Phileas Fogg is one such adoptee and his famous journey was not actually motivated by a bet, but by his desire to stop Captain Nemo from overthrowing the British Empire through the use of advanced alien technology.
As one would expect from Farmer, the story is expansive and the plotting intricate. It’s a pleasure to watch him bring characters from other works into the novel, just as it is a delight to see him hint that he, himself, is actually Phileas Fogg, still kicking around roughly a century after the events in the book take place. Unfortunately, Farmer chose to mimic the prose of Verne in his novel and it greatly slows down the reading. I understand why he did it, but it made a novel that should have been a simple delight into a more difficult academic exercise.
Published on February 05, 2022 05:40