Customer Reviews

The Flying Sorcerers

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

 

 

I picked this up (or it was loaned to me) because I was tickled by the title. It's a very entertaining story about a technologically advanced traveller's visit to a fairly primitive world, narrated by one of the primitives. It's an hilarious treatment of Clarke's Law in action, and a colossal pun near the end will delight long-time SF readers enormously.

This is definitely a 'G'-rated title in my book.

This is one of the funniest SF books out there. I've got an old tattered copy, and I will order the new edition when it comes out. The book is full of cultural, SF and fandom references. Some might be a little dated (for example, the symbol of the sheep, the horned box, is a reference to a TV with antenna, and how many people have seen one of THOSE lately?), but overall, this book holds up very well.

To answer another reviewer's question would be a spoiler, but anyone who wishes to know who Purple was based on can email me at my nickname at hotmail.

This book is really a great work if you realize what it is, comical sci-fi. And it is not a Niven story but a Gerrold one, if you liked The Trouble With Tribbles episode of Star Trek then this for you.

To dananbethany> It's a pun, As a mauve. Asimov.

Light, fun, SF story that will mean more to SF fans in general and Asimov fans in particular. I highly recommend it. I read it every few years and enjoy it each time. Not really a sorcery book and certainly not fantasy. The story involves a culture that embodies Clarke's statement on magic and technology and how easy it is to assign magical reasons to that which we don't understand.

My paperback copy of this book lists two authors, David Gerrold & Larry Niven. This book is great fun. Imagine the all-powerful earthling with very high-tech tools come to study the backward natives. Now see the story from the natives' viewpoint. Now watch as the natives reduce the earthling to stone-age tools and see if he can survive on his wits alone. Maybe? Maybe not. For Niven fans, a must-read!!

I read this book about 15 years ago and found it nothing but fun. Niven plays with the reader as well as the characters in the book. I have just found this book (out of stock) and await shipment so that I can visit this world again. I gave my first copy away and regret it. Not real science fiction but just loads of fun.

Will someone please figure out how to keep Gerrold's books in print? Especially this one. Easily one of the most entertaining mixed-genre Fantasy/SF novels ever written, it is also one of the hardest to find. It's not exactly like Asprin or Xanth but ... if you go for that, or for cleverly funny Fantasy/SF in general, put this book on your list. Well worth looking for.

i liked the book -- i'm a Niven fan so i'm not sure how i missed this title. i've always enjoyed Niven's light-hearted stories.

however, the Kindle edition was horrible, with pervasive "typesetting" errors. i couldn't get more than a few pages without running into a random word in superscript/subscript, or a whole line in a different font size, or dropped characters or punctuation, and, at least once, an entire paragraph in right-justification. granted these are minor errors, but each mistake hit me like a brick wall, bringing my reading to a dead stop.

whoever translated this to the Kindle simply did a terrible job. =(

I first read this book about 15 years ago, and have been trying to but it for many years now. As a larry Niven fan, I first read it because of his name being on the cover. It is unlike other books by Niven, and not part of his 'known space' series. If you find it, please give it a try! It certainly made me smile.

I love this book - it is funny. I have had the book for at least 10 years but I have yet to figure out - what is Purple's real name? It has something to do with "as a color, shade of purple-gray" and "mauve" but I cannot piece it together. Any help would be appreciated!