Customer Reviews

The Red Tape War

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

 

 

Three science fiction masters each take turns trying to write the other two into a hole. An epic space opera revolving around a bewildered human, several various and assorted aliens, and a buxom space cowgirl named Marshmallow are pawns, riding the edge of one cliffhanger after another as Chalker, Resnick and Effinger move them about an absurd verbal chessboard.

A truly unique concept in novelization, and completely unconcerned with conventional storytelling, this is one of the funniest (and strangest) books to be written by an American in recent memory.

This book is a terrific collaborative work. Effinger, Chalker, Resnick take turns writing chapters, each more imaginatively absurd than the last. Hilarious!

This novel was terrible and I didn't find it funny at all. Instead, it is a constant parade of deus ex machina devices used by alternating authors until the plot was totally ground into the dust, and I hated the main character.

Don't buy this, don't even read it!

For a good story read anything else by Chalker, who is better than Resnick (though Resnick is still decent but more gritty).

This is a truly enjoyable book - as long as you're not looking for serious science fiction, but rather the result of drunken sci-fi speculation. It has the authors parodying each other's common modus operandi (such as Resnick making fun of Chalker's occasional explorations into body-swapping), tales - probably true - of their infighting, all interwoven into a story so delightfully full of plot holes and MacGuffins that you soon learn to stop worrying and have fun with the next crazy alien to come onto the scene and mess everything up.

If you're into metahumor, this book was well ahead of its time.

They should have known better. I figure if three authors want to write a book in turns while getting pissed and trying to screw each other by writing the next into a corner, sure. They're big boys, right? Just don't go around and RELEASE the damn thing. Oy. This is bad. Painfully bad. If I'd paid for it instead of being given it by a friend, I would have probably been angry instead of just dissapointed.

In "The Red Tape War", authors Jack L. Chalker, Mike Resnick, and George Alec Effinger have written a novel round-robin style, each taking turns to write a chapter. They start with a story idea and have at it; it quickly turned into a battle of who could end a chapter as absurdly as possible, leaving the next author a task to pick up where it leaves off.

Sounds fun.

For the first few chapters, it was.

But...it soon becomes a little tedious. In the end, this is a silly novel that should never have been released in hardcover (how I originally bought it as a big Chalker fan).

If you still care to know more, this is a novel set 6,700 years in the future and humanity is at the center of a Galactic Arm wide federation of 73 species and 1,786 worlds. Sound like a bureaucratic nightmare? That is the premise of the book. How absurd can a bureaucracy that large get? That was the point of the book.

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A Guide to my Book Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.

This is the only book by Jack Chalker that I could not finish-it was that terrible! Of course, he wrote it with 2 other authors, so maybe THEY were terrible. Every chapter is written by a different one of the three, and it just gets worse and worse, dumber and dumber. Maybe they'll make a movie of it starring Jim Carrey.