Customer Reviews

Maker Of Universes (World of Tiers, Bk. 1)

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"The Maker of Universes" begins Philip Jose Farmer's "The World of Tiers" series of novels. "The World of Tiers" features a host of alternate universes, all "next door" to Earth and accessed through hidden gates, created and ruled by a decadent and technologically advanced race of Lords. This first novel opens with the Earthman Robert Wolff summoned to one of these parallel universes, to discover his Lordly heritage and to set right the evils of his world. Later installments introduce the human hero Kickaha and other members of Wolff's family. These books are fantasy yarns in the spirit of Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars adventures, and Farmer's Machiavellian family of Lords prefigures Corwin and relatives in Roger Zelazny's Amber chronicles. By comparison with these two siblings, "The World of Tiers" is certainly the runt of the litter. Farmer never fails to choose the trite cliche when confronted with a plot decision. The third novel in the series features the Lord Anana falling in love with the human Kickaha, overcome by his masculine charm, despite her "murderous" nature and previous disdain for lowly humans. No convincing argument for this transformation is presented, and it is clearly intended as a sop for Farmer's predominantly male audience. Similar teenage male pulp fiction conventions crowd the plot, never reworked artfully, and the action drags almost unbearably after several hundred pages. The story also suffers from an odd disjointedness; the characters in the novel periodically become possessed of vast knowledge concerning newly encountered races and cities, unbeknownst to the reader. A paragraph will suddenly contain a multitude of unintroduced terms and names with which the protagonist is intimately familiar, despite his complete ignorance of the landscape in the previous paragraph.

Readers who enjoy this style of fiction might derive a few afternoons of enjoyment from Farmer's "The World of Tiers." I'd much rather rejoin John Carter and the lovely Dejah Thoris on Barsoom, or travel with Corwin and Random through Shadow.