Customer Reviews

Outrageous Fortune

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

 

 

Yes, he might be cabable of more if he wasn't a Douglas Adams want-to-be. What makes it worse is that, he may have the fantastic worlds part down (the talking elevators and trendy bar) but the plot and the character development lack the imagination of a true atrist. Also, expletives should be used in moderation and for emphasis, not as the bulk of the story. Doesn't Scott have a vocabulary? Douglas Adams is rolling over in his grave. My advise, read the original, toss this drivel. Find your own voice Mr. Scott, I'm sorry I spent the $12.00.

Wow, this book was a drain on my intelligence. What a waste of money. He tries to write like Monty PythonThe Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus; All the Words Volume One without understanding the jokes. You read through the whole painful, unexplained book, hoping to find out some great truth or humerous ending, only to find out that the joke is on you. Its like getting the needle of novacain... it hurts, but you know it is going to lead to better things. Only with this book, they jab you with the needle, refuse to actuate the plunger, leave the syringe hanging from your mouth, and send you out the door without fixing the cavity. And the door is on the 15th floor and the elevator is broken. Yep, painful reading, this book.
With some of the characters and some of the thoughts, this book could have gone somewhere. Although, in retrospect, most of the humerous parts of the book have been stolen from other humor writers. The 4 biker horsemen from Pratchett and Gaimen's 'Good Omens'Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (Discworld), the confused elevator and funky bar from 'Hitchhiker's Guide'The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story (Deluxe Edition), and I am sure many other interesting themes were hijacked in an effort to make the book humerous.
Seriously folks, don't buy. If the author starts working on his own stuff and writes a book to be funny, rather than to sound like people who are funny, he might go somewhere. But don't buy anything from him until you hear better reviews. I want my $9.50 back.

There is a fine line between Outrageous and Ridiculous. Unfortunately, the author crossed it too many times. From a literary standpoint, he completely missed what he was going for.

This doesn't stop it from being entertaining and a good read, if one ignores the fact that it is, at times, annoying and irritating. Who the hell drinks Long Island Ice Teas and goes surfing constantly? Is this how Brits see us Americans? The entire concept for Inconvenient the Bar just annoyed me. It was an amusing idea that the author did not realize that he took too far.

This book was alright. It was funny and amusing, yet irritating. The ending was fair to poor and left a lot of holes. I walked away thinking that it was completely implausible. Good scifi is interesting because it could possibly happen in the future. Bad scifi leaves you saying, "Yeah right."

I guess my answer to this book is - "yeah right."

any book where the f-word is the first word certainly has my attention. but it wasn't long before it got painfully boring, and it felt like a chore to read. i think this is the first book i ever started and didn't bother to finish. i stopped about half-way through. you could cut out a significant chunk of this book and you wouldn't change a thing. the book slows to a crawl as johnny x tries to recompose himself after his really bad day, and the reader is left wondering what happened to the four horsemen (who, though they seem to be some crazy combination between the three stooges and a swat team, have completely lost track of johnny and seem loathe to catch up with him).
i wish i had more to comment on, but there just isn't enough substance to this book. oh, and the author's constant use of similes (in almost every other sentence) is quite irritating. it might have done well as a short story, but as a novel it just doesn't cut it.

Tim Scott's novel caught my attention in the bookstore with an interesting premise, well-written first page and funny blurb. And that's about all it has going for it, honestly. Scott occasionally has a real zinger of a line, but not enough to make you do more than crack a quick smile before delving back into the rambling drone of the main character's shallow and self-centered thought process. The whole book is basically a poorly-strung-together mash-up of scenes interspersed with absolutely pointless and idiotic flashbacks to times spent with a friend prior to his death. I'm assuming the book manages to limp to an end with some sort of 'timeless message' (as it seems to be steering itself that way from page 100 on), but I never bothered to find out, having given up 75 pages shy of the end. Save yourself the time and the money, and skip this book.

The most devised, trite and vapid novel I have thrown in the recycle bin in a long,long, time. Michael Marshall should be ashamed of himself. And Scott should stay with furniture.

We've all had bad days, but I think Jonny X's rivals any Monday I've ever experienced. It starts out with the dream architect discovering that some gang of thugs has stolen his home. Then, he's latched onto by a limpet encyclopedia saleswoman. We're talking bound books here, which have been relegated to the museums in this new future time.

And that's just the beginning. Encounters get more bizarre and hilarious til the last few pages of the book. The oh-so-plausible explanation lands this frothy piece of humor with a solid thud that stopped me laughing and left me going back to the funny parts for some relief.

If you need a good laugh, "Outrageous Fortune" is definitely worth a read. It's not for you if you object to language; however, the language generally is strongest at the beginning of the book and IMHO, very appropriately used. It's also not for you if you don't 'get' the British sense of humor. Still, I think Scott has a lot of potential and I will definitely be looking for his next book.

"Outrageous Fortune" is a work of absurdist science fiction comedy, in the hallowed tradition of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. It's a hard genre to pull off. There is a fine line between successful bizarre comedy and painfully lame silliness, and it takes a deft hand to make it work. I'm happy to report that Scott succeeds, at least 90% of the time.

The story is set in the not too distant future. The narrator, Jonny X67, is having a Very Bad Day. His house has been stolen, he is being chased for unknown reasons by the self-styled Four Bikers of the Apocalypse, as well as being stalked by a very persistent Encyclopedia saleswoman. If it sounds confusing, well, it's supposed to be; that's where the funny comes from. A bewildered Jonny sets off on a mapcap race through a deranged urban landscape, trying to determine, between trips to the bar, what the heck is really going on.

I especially enjoyed Jonny's trip to the Zone Traffic Police headquarters. His struggles with the monolithic, inhuman, yet basically inept bureaucracy is like a scene from the movie "Brazil;" it is both absurd and frightening at the same time.

The book is flat-out funny; I giggled and snorted throughout. Scott is a clever writer with a light, wry touch. Though reminiscent of Douglas Adams, Scott has a style of his own. Sure, there are joke-telling elevators and a hangout called The Most Inconvenient Bar in the World. But Scott is less heavy-handed than Adams, and can at times be poignant and even moving. And the opening line is a classic.

The only real disappointment was the ending. Having bought into the ridiculousness of Scott's world for 300 pages, we suddenly find out it all has a neat, rational explanation. It was contrived, I thought, and something of a cop-out.

So, subtracting a star for the ending, we're still left with a 4-star read filled with originality and wit. Enjoy!

I hope author Tim Scott tries again. Most of this book is a wonderfully bizarre adventure story filled with humorous satiric touches, but unfortunately Scott has a MESSAGE, and it's pretty lame. Something about being yourself and having good friends. Yawn. After touring a fascinating world that includes joke-telling elevators, phones that are just a little too passionate about their work, and a bar that is so trendy you can't expect to be served for at least 45 minutes even when you are the only customer in the place, the reader is led into a very unsatisfactory dead end and the book dissolves into some incoherent, but passionate, moral preaching. There is also a sub-plot concerning the memory of a dead friend that interrupts the momentum of the story and serves no important purpose.

There is enough in this book to lead me to believe that Scott is capable of better. I'm curious about one thing, though: if this story is set in Santa Cruz California, how come most of the characters are British?

How can a book with "Don't you hate it when this happens? 1-800-AARRGHH" on the cover turn out so horribly dull and uninteresting? Outrageous Fortune opens with thieves stealing the main character's house and includes a motorcycle gang called The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and an utterly unflagging encyclopedia saleswoman. It sounded zany and random and fun and clever and witty. It was certainly random - as for the rest of the adjectives, not so much. For all of its weirdness, it felt oddly formulaic (hard to explain, since the story was pretty out there, but true nonetheless) and I really had to slog through to get to the end - which I did, because I kept believing it had to get better. It didn't.