Thursday 28 May 2009

"Inside Outside" by Philip José Farmer

Hot on the heels of finishing the "Riverworld" series by Philip José Farmer, I decided to go through one of his shorter works, "Inside Outside". I got a strange sense of déja vu reading this. Farmer paints a world in which people are resurrected after death, and in which they can't die. They are watched by advanced beings, whose goal is to help them reach enlightenment. This should sound really familiar to anyone who has read the Riverworld series.

"Inside Outside" was published a few years before "To Your Scattered Bodies Go", and to me seems like a beta version or a sketch for the later work. This isn't to say that it's a bad book. It's just good in a less epic way.

I would recommend this if you like Philip José Farmer and the Riverworld series, or if you just want a good old-fashioned simple sci-fi novel with a couple of mildly amusing twists.

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