Customer Reviews

The Furies

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

 

 

1st book by Keith Roberts - even he can't stand it he said in a 1990's interview. But it has got some thinking behind it - not just giant insects attempting to take over the world. But advanced non-corporal intelligences that made a teeny mistake when they arrived at Earth and choose the wrong form....Essential if your a collector.

I read this book more or less by accident when it was originally published. Unfortunately the book belonged to someone else so I couldn't keep it.

I've tried many times to find the book since that time, always being told that it wasn't available or out of print. Now, thanks to the internet I managed to get a copy through Amazon and reading it again after all these years I remembered exactly why I spent that amount of time trying to find it!

This is an excellent sci fi book which keeps the reader on the edge of their seat with enough action to last a lifetime mixed in with plenty of human qualities.

This was a rip roarin yarn all right enough. No, all the science doesn't make sense but who cares? It's a lot of fun and the hero is a decent enough chap. It has the flavor of what was written half a century ago: decent guy tells a good story.

On the internet there are always debates about how could mankind be taken out? Most agree that it would take two major disasters to bring us down. Because of our machines, our science, our intelligence we could not be taken out by a war or a super-germ...but if two things, two great events happened on top of one another...yes, maybe we would be taken down a few pegs.

Well before the internet, well before any of these debates, was The Furies by Keith Roberts. Giant wasps appear about the same time we do something really stupid - nuclear tests crack the Earth's crust like an egg shell. The landscape was changed, cities destroyed and new oceans formed where there were none.

Now that mankind is down there comes the kick in the side - the wasps attacks!

Where did they come form and why are they here? You see, they seem to be able to think also. And unlike man they don't really need machines - or do they?

This is one of the best novels about alien invasion/apocalypse. It is written by an Englishman and is enlivened with English slang. The writing is damned good. Better than Heinlein. It might be compared to The Day of the Triffids (20th Century Rediscoveries), The Chrysalids (New York Review Books Classics), orEarth Abides.

I still have the original paperback version of this book. The pages are yellowed and the binding is falling apart. Good story, characters you can care about and a villain scary enough to worry about

If you shivered at H.G. Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS and quaked at John Wyndham's DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, and if you can't resist those 1950s B movies about giant ants and tarantulas and critters, then you'll love THE FURIES.

Just prior to the publication of my SF-Horror novel, Vespa, in August 2007, I learned that my book wasn't the only serious science fiction novel exploring what it'd be like if giant wasps emerged to take on mankind. The late Keith Roberts, an accomplished novelist in the genre, had already posed the scenario about four decades earlier in his novel The Furies, which I read in the fall of 2007.

Oh well. ... So much for Vespa being the first of its kind, but I take solace in the fact that my wasps are parasitic, and Roberts' are not. That his narrative voice reminds me -- affectionately -- of H.G. Wells' in The War of the Worlds, while mine is more like Crichton's in Jurassic Park. I just so loved Roberts' The Furies, and if he were alive today, I'd tell him that ... even though I read somewhere that he wasn't too proud of the book. And if Roberts were alive today, I'd also send him a copy of Vespa, with a note saying, "Great minds think alike." Wink. (See www.deanlombardo.com for more information about Vespa the novel.)