Tim's Reviews > Venus on the Half-Shell

I always try to think of some positive spin for the books I read, even ones I don't like. My positive spin? This cover truly captures that pulp paperback feel:



Sadly I don't have that cover, so there is nothing redeeming about my copy of the book.

Are you proud of yourself Farmer? I hope you are, because at least then we can say someone took some small measure of joy from this miserable experience, because it sure as hell wasn't me. What's that? It was supposed to be a joke?

I get the goddamn joke Farmer. It just isn’t funny.

So for those of you who are unfamiliar, here's the joke. Kilgore Trout was a character in several Kurt Vonnegut novels. He was supposed to be a hack sci-fi author who only got published in dirty magazines and the occasional paperback. He was a terrible author who just so happened to make the occasional brilliant philosophical point. Enter Philip Jose Farmer who essentially said "I could be Kilgore Trout!" He managed to convince Vonnegut to allow him to publish under the pen-name Trout and write one of the books mentioned in Vonnget's fiction. The result? God awful.

Now it's hard to fully fault the novel as it was intentionally written to be bad. That's a fine joke that could work as a short story. Something like 20 pages could be amusing. At 200+ pages though, it's painful. Also, Farmer is no Trout. Sure he wrote a bad book, but all attempts at philosophy are just as laughably bad as the rest of the book until after a point it ceases to be funny and only succeeds in gaining a groan.

Here is a brief outline of the book: Simon goes to a planet looking for answers to his questions. Natives of said planet have no answers. Insert detail description of the aliens' sex lives...possibly with Simon involved. Wacky misunderstanding. Run away. Repeat until we finally finish and you're graced with the one clever line in the entire book.

Yep, there's one clever scene and its the end of the damn book. The rest is filled with jokes like the following:

"Simon arrived in his ark at the same place where Noah was supposed to have landed. This was a coincidence that only happened in a bad novel..."

Look, Douglas Adams could have made that joke work. So could Terry Pratchett. You know why? Because they were funny. A joke like that would be have an amusing meta quality. Here... here it's not funny because it's just a reminder of the torment Farmer is inflicting upon us. Yes, we are reading a terrible book, you don't have to remind us. The prose is doing that for you.

1 star wailing in pain until its death out of 5.