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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Life at the end of time,
This review is from: The Long Afternoon of Earth (Paperback)
Much of this book is stunning in its scope and originality. We are in the far distant future in the last days of the earth before the sun goes nova. The sun is so much hotter that all animal life has died and plants have taken over the earth making it an incredibly lush green jungle. All animal life has died but one species -- man -- and he is barely hanging on, literally in the branches of the great banyan tree that spans the continent. It's this view of man, not as lord of creation but as the last survivor of the animal kingdom that gives the book its power. That and the image of a green earth that is an incredibly dangerous place. It's a plant eat plant world. We follow the adventures of a boy as he discovers the world and we start to follow the adventures of some other humans that get accidentally taken to the moon by a mile long flying vegetable that is one of the stunningly creative ideas in the story. I gave the novel four stars instead of five because it is too short. With everything that happens you expect a grand ending and instead it feels rushed. The adventures on the moon are cut short and forgotten and the boy's adventures seem abruptly ended with a kind of conventional happy ending. Despite this one great flaw, this is a book well worth reading for it's sheer generosity of imagination. In it's own unique and crazy way, it's a classic.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exactly what the name suggests,
By Jack Purcell (Placitas, NM USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Long Afternoon Of Earth (USA) (Paperback)
This is one of those books to force the mind away from the everyday, the mundane, the what's-happening-today-in-Bongo Bongoland-and-what-are-we-doing-about-it that has our minds squeezed so tight we can't think further than the next daily broadcast of the world news and the next spoon-fed opinion from our favorite demigogue. The planet earth has a future that might, or mightn't include a fragile, two-legged creature who thinks he owns it all. In this book it includes him, but he doesn't own it. The Long Afternoon of Earth is a lesson in perspective, in humility, in one of the many possible futures of mankind when all the wars have been fought and forgotten, when all the nations and political parties have had their sparks of glory and died. It's a world of no heroes, no cowards, no real signifance except the same one mankind faced in his deepest history: survival. There's a touch of wistfulness here, a touch of melancholy. But it's a good lever to pry your mind away from the mess your dog made on the livingroom floor, the mess your favorite politician made on the floor of your big ideas, the mess your nation made on the face of a planet that goes on and on, where human affairs and the centuries are an insignificant spark. Read it.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Earth in her old age,
By Roger J. Buffington (Huntington Beach, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Long Afternoon Of Earth (USA) (Paperback)
"The Long Afternoon of Earth" is about life on Earth an unimaginably long time from now. Man's civilization is long gone, and humans are a minor species struggling for survival in an ecology dominated by highly evolved plants. Some of the science in this novel has been superceded or is simply wrong, but that does not change the fact that this is an imaginative and enjoyable story about the ultimate fate of mankind and the Earth itself. In this novel life is within a foreseeable distance of its end as the sun is becoming unstable. The world is incredibly dangerous for humans who can do little more than survive, if that.
I first read this novel as a small boy, and it stoked my interest in science fiction--an interest that I maintain to this day. A book that can do that has a lot going for it. Recommended. RJB.
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