Customer Reviews

Doc Savage His Apocalyptic Life

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

whether a long time fan or if you've only recently discovered the Man of Bronze, this is a must have. While Farmer does take some liberties with (supposed) origins and fates of characters, neo- and longtime fans will find this book invaluable.

Doc Savage is one of those enduring pulp icons who will always have a cult following no matter how many years pass since his heyday. The creation of writer Lester Dent, Doc Savage was a combination private eye/crusading scientist/super hero who, with the help of his loyal assistant, managed to defeat some of the most evil threats that mankind has ever had to face. Certainly a bit corny but always a great deal of fun, the Doc Savage tales were always amongst the best of their type and, as the world continues to get more and more complicated, there's something wonderfully reassuring about entering into Doc Savage's world and discovering that evil can always be defeated by one bronze skinned genius. For this reason, Doc Savage continues to maintain a loyal fan base into the present day. One of these fans was the late science fiction writer Phillip Jose Farmer (creator of the Riverworld series and several other underground classics). Farmer wrote Doc Savage, His Apocalyptic Life as an obvious labor of love. While he goes out of his way to try to accurately document the mythos of Doc Savage (though some critics are correct when they point out that he sometimes draws conclusions that are far more Farmer than Dent), Farmer does so with a welcomed tone of uptmost (if still bemused) seriousness. Treating this book as not just a long fan letter but instead as an actual biography of an actual man, Farmer affords Doc Savage fans a dignity that others who have attempted to write about classic pulp icons haven't.

The book to a certain extent acts as a sequel to Farmer's better known (but, to me, of lesser quality) Tarzan Alive. As in the Tarzan book, Farmer concludes with lengthy and imaginative geneaology in which he manages (with not too many excessive liberties taken with their established canons) to show that every pulp hero was in some way related. Along with Tarzan, Doc Savage is soon to be related to Bulldog Drummond, James Bond, Nero Wolfe, The Scarlet Pimpernil, Prof. Challenger, the Shadow, and just about anyone else you could think of. No, its not meant to be taken seriously but, like the original Doc Savage stories themselves, its still a lot of fun.

I first read Doc Savage's adventures in the 60s, as did many others. I found the books to be of varying quality, and that they were very dated. They might have been good for kids of the 1930s, but by the 60s, there was much more sophisticated fare available. However, there is something about Doc and his crew. That "something" is the fact that anybody can see their favorite superhero in there...somewhere. Superman, Batman, Hercules, Bruce Lee, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, even Mr. Spock. They are all there. Farmer does a wonderful job relating literary characters to one another and linking their superheroness to radiation exposure experienced by an ancestor. This book follows Doc's life and attempts to thread the adventures togther, biography fashion, with illuminations here and there. It is a wild adventure, and one to be savored. Read "Tarzan Alive", sort of a companion volume, for Tarzan's "genealogy". I, for one, would love to see Doc Savage given a more adult treatment by a good writer. Farmer attempts this here, and in "Lord of the Trees" and "The Mad Goblin", but falls short, for reasons that should be clear to anybody that has read those books. Anyway, I only gave this four stars because one should be a Doc Savage fan to really get the meat out of it. It is a good, fun read.

There is a wealth of knowledge here for the Doc Savage fan. This is on top of another fabulous excursion by Farmer into creative mythography. the Wold Newton family tree is expanded herein, as well.

This book is the biography of a fictional pulp hero of the 30's and 40's, and farmer has a lot of fun with the concept. He brings into the book references to almost every heroic character of the first half of the century from tarzan to now obscure figures like g-8 to the shadow. But focuses on doc savage and his team of helpers. It' a glimpse into a bygone era of pulp magazines and movie serials in which your parents and grandparents grew up.

Hubby loves the book!
He is an anachronism.
Love all the old stuff and is enjoying reading this!
GR8 Seller, Fast Shipping, Good Book!

While one can quibble with Farmer relating Doc to every fictional character known to man, this book is a loving look at the character, his incredible 181 adventures and the Missouri author who wrote the bulk of his exploits. A pity it's not available in a more economical version for the general publ;ic -- you just have to decide if you to spend a little more for the original DOubleday edition or a little less for the Bantam reprint. Whichever you choose, a good addition to the shelf of any fan of the pulp heroes of the 1930's.

This book is an incredible piece of work. The author read all 181 of the Doc Savage novels before writing this one. This book contains information about Doc's skyscraper, the Hidalgo Trading Company, the Fabulous Five, and more.

As a guy that's interested in Doc Savage, I thought this book would have been great. I think the idea of writing a definitive biography for a fictional adventure hero is great, and could be used for other legends like Superman, Batman, James Bond, etc.

However, I got this and read most of it through great effort and found it all to be dull as dishwater. Instead of telling a linear story about Savage's life as if his adventures were events in a man's life, this books breaks up various aspects of Doc's life and speculates on them. A chapter for Monk, a chapter for Ham, a chapter devoted to examining the 86th floor.

What's most odd is that the writer has chosen to treat Doc as an actual person and his pulp adventures as fictional accounts, even going so far as to say that Doc Clark Savage JR. isn't his real name. This is a bizarre and odd conceit for the writer to ask, and I'm not really sure what the point of it is. If it's to make up for inconsistancy within the pulp yarns, it's taking things a bit too far. Jose should have just picked the most prevalent of things mentioned thoughout the pulps and stuck to those as canon.

There are some interesting moments, but you have to dig through boring paragraph after boring paragraph to get to them.

Ultimately, if you're looking for a writer to act as if Doc Savage was a different person in real life and act as if the stories were ficitonalized accounts of actual events, and then speculate on what's "real" and what isn't, then this is for you. If you're looking for something less nonsensical and masturbatory, I'd stick to some of the pulps to try out Doc. Nostalgia Ventures has begun republishing them. Fortress of Solitude/Devil Genghis is a good place to start.