Customer Reviews

Phule's Errand (Phule's Company)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I loved the early Phule books but this volume is just plain bad. The oh so familiar characters seem to wander through the pages. Greatly disappointed and I so wanted to read the further adventures of Phule's company. Maybe this is one of those series that should have just stopped at a trilogy.

I completely agree with the other reviews of this book. At one time, Aspirin was capable of turning out good books, but the writing style for the last few in this and the Myth series has really gone down hill when the writing was turned over to other authors.

This book is the worst of the lot - the plot is ridiculous and completely contrived. The characters are now indistinguishable from each other, and have lost the facets that made them interesting in the first two books.

Dont waste your money or your time with anything that Robert Aspirin has written lately

Keep in mind, Asprin has been, due in part to some medical problems, writing some of his series with partners who (as I understand it) approached >him< requesting to move the stories along . . . and from what I understand, this is also the case with Peter J. Heck's involvement with the Phule series.

While I admit there has been a huge change within the books, I wouldn't consider it fair to judge all of Asprin's works, or even Heck's, by this series.

Here is the latest in the Asprin's _Phule's Company_ series, co-authored with Peter Heck again. Sadly, the shark has been jumped and there looks to be no turning back. In this adventure with the Space Legion's misfit Omega Mob, we get Captain Jester playing catch me if you can in an attempt to find his butler Beeker who has taken an unsuspected and short-notice vacation. Phule chases Beeker from planet to planet, always just missing him. Meanwhile, another catch-me-if-you-can is being run by Sushi and Do-Wop as they try to chase down Jester while he's chasing Beeker. Yeah that's about how good this installment is. Meanwhile meanwhile... back at planet Zenobia, General Blitzkreig makes an unannounced visit to Omega Mob in the hopes of catching Captain Jester (whom Blitzy dislikes immensely) in a bad situation so as to punish and court marshal him.

Yup, definitely a lack of the magic and comedy of the original books. Tuskanini used to be a bigger character, now he's merely mentioned once in this book while less entertaining characters like Sushi and Do-Wop are moved to the front. I will still probably buy the next Phule book but this is a bad one to judge the rest of the series with.

I am a huge fan of Asprin. I think the frist few Phule were inspired. I am very sad at how bad this book was. It was what I call a walking story. The characters go here, they go there and nothing really happens. The quest was not compelling and I would have loved it if the authors actually did soemthing with the western planet and the three types of indians. The other subplot, involving golf, was equally underdeveloped and uninteresting. I'm not giving up on Asprin, but I may wait and read the reviews next time.

Buying this book was a Fool's Errand. This book IS the worst in the series. I could hardly finish it. I loved the series when it started. The writing was smart and crisp, the characters had personalities. Now the books are poorly written, the foul language detracts even more from the substandard plot, and the characters are hardly recognizable. Heck is able to write other books but his grasp of this material is sorely lacking. If Asprin is unable to write the stories himself then someone with a better grasp of the characters than Heck should take over and try to salvage this once interesting series.

This will be the last book from this series I read. Ever since Asprin passed along the writing to the other author this series has went down the toilet. The characters changed personalities, the plots became trivial and it has become a terrible pain to read the disaster that was once a great series. Don't waste your money on this one.

Being a fan of Asprin's Myth series and the previous books in the Phule series, I was so excited when I spotted this book on the shelf! HOWEVER! If you were expecting to read about new clever ways the characters got themselves out of trouble and saved the day - you are hereby warned. RECYCLING is what this book is about. Recycling solutions to previous problems to address new ones. No original problem-solving here.

The rest of the book is filled with the authors trying to stretch their imaginations and come up with cool, weird new worlds for the characters to briefly stay in, and clever new puns. Didn't work.

Overall, a disappointing offering.

Reviews for this book have been, generally, abysmal. The question is why they are so bad... in other words, where did a good author like Robert Asprin go so wrong.

It's easy enough to blame his co-author, Peter Heck, for the failure, and that may be accurate, but without knowing who came up with the ideas and who did the writing, we can't really be sure that we're putting the blame on the right party. At any rate, placing blame isn't the objective.

[SPOILER ALERT: Continuing reading will provide spoilers about the plot of this book. Do not read further if you want to discover why this book gets poor ratings on your own.]

Phule's Errand details Willard Phule's chase across multiple planets to contact his butler, Beeker, before dire consequences befall Phule. The basic premise is ludicrous, but sometimes that is what makes Asprin's writing so much fun. In this case, it doesn't. Why not?

The primary reason is that Asprin and Heck seem to have come up with some generally humorous situations, but failed to actually use them effectively. One stage in Phule's journey takes him to an "Old West" planet where they weren't sure which sort of Injuns to use for authenticity, so they brought in Indians from North America, Jamaica, and India. This mish-mash of cultures could be an amusing premise... except that they don't do anything with it. Moments after meeting representatives from each 'Injun' group, the characters are rushed off to another planet accomplishing nothing. The entire planet is merely a device to fill pages without advancing the plot and providing no interesting character interactions. This page filling technique is repeated as the planet hopping chase progresses. It amounts to a poor "wouldn't it be funny if..." joke without a punch line.

The second failure is in the resolution. The authors bring in a tertiary character to save the day. Our nominal heroes stumble around, get in trouble, and are saved by a character who appears in less than a dozen pages. This sort of "cavalry arrives" ending provides a wrap up but no plot. It actually serves to drive the main characters deeper into the mire by making them increasingly ineffectual.

The third (but related) failure is that one or both of the authors don't really care about the main characters. While most of the characters from the early Phule books are mentioned in passing, most of the time is spent with new two-dimensional characters. Our original cast no longer exercises any creativity and what action there is is given to new characters who, while being increasingly alien, lack any well defined personality.

Advice for authors: If you want to write continuing books in a series, write about the characters who have made that series popular. If you want to write about some other characters, write a different series or a stand-alone novel.

The serries has begun to loose its flavor that dragged me into the world that Asprin created.

Overall the plots now seems a bit contrived and forced upon the reader more than in the past books.

I still believe the series could be saved perhaps slowing down the output a bit and going back to its roots is in order.

Overall I didnt find the book quite as good as the ones in the past but still worth a 3.