Customer Reviews

The Men in the Jungle

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The story begins centuries in the future where humankind is dispersed throughout the galaxy and war is common. Our protagonist narrowly escapes earth's clutches, carrying nothing but the clothes on his back, his very expensive ship, and a vast fortune in the only currency to have universal utility, drugs.

He ends up on a backward world, where one class of people has enslaved the others, and torture and prostitution is rife. He proceeds to start a civil war, and that's when the book really starts to get interesting. As dark as he is sick and disgusting, Spinrad also manages to do something few writers can, weave together a great story with incredibly realistic characters in an interesting narrative.

Buyers beware, however! This book is incredibly dark. Cannibalism, slavery, prostitution, and murder on a massive and bloody scale are just the beginning. If you enjoy well written sci-fi, then this is your book. Just also know that it is easily the darkest book in the sci-fi, and perhaps any genre, that I have ever come across.

Protaganist travels to a back water planet and finds a world of misery run by an overlord of pain. Really a tale of mans acceptance of degredation as long as the gun isn't pointed his way. That being said the book is fun in a space opera way with the hero trying his best to save the populace from themselves. Good stuff

It has been a long time since I read this book, and the details are fortunately becoming fuzzy. What I do remember is that I felt nauseous for most of the time reading it, as somebody said, you need an iron cast stomach to handle it and my stomach isn't strong enough. I cannot think of anything that would make this book worth reading, it contains all disgusting practices humankind has ever thought of: torture, fights for the audience pleasure, human sacrifice, cannibalism (not even humanity has taken it to the level practiced in this book), genetic selection and women as somewhere below property.

Add to this a protagonist that is looking out for himself to the extent of not only participating in the above mentioned practicies but actually brings in new ideas of how to make torture worse and I couldn't care less about what happens to him. I tried to put the book down and get some sleep, but it didn't work, so I stayed up all night reading with the faint hope that if I got through it to the end it would somehow make sense. Unfortunately it didn't work. A little knowledge can possibly be a bad thing, and I had been reading a popular article of the art of leading a mob, which is the one quality the protagonist had, and it played a large role in the ending. There are two Don'ts in that art. Don't tell the mob to disband quietly and go home. That doesn't work, it's possible to distract them from general looting and destruction by suggesting a specific target (let's storm the Bastille) but any suggestion of stopping is likely to have the mob tearing you to pieces. The other Don't is don't give the members of the mob time to think, it will then stop being a mob and turn into a collection of individuals with all the instincts of preservation in full effect. IOW don't tell the mob to go home and come back tomorrow for what is in reality a suicide. That is what the protagonist is supposed to manage.

All in all, with the violence and dissapointing ending, I felt that this book would be a good candidate for a book burning.