Customer Reviews

Survival World

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Survival World by Frank Belknap Long

In the near future, the Earth is stricken by famine, due to pollution, radiation from nuclear plants, and other factors. One man, scientist and adventurer (his hobbies include hunting barracuda and shark with a spear) Dan Blakemore, has not given up hope that the ecology can be saved. With much labor he has grown one of the last fields of wheat in the world on the coast of New England. Suddenly, another genius scientist appears in a time machine; he has just come back from the future. After the characters stand around on the beach talking for 50 pages they get into the time machine, and in the far future Dan Blakemore gets bitten by a snake and then lays around on a cot delirious for a while. There is also a psychic who uses his powers against the scientists. The pacing of the story is terrible, and the plot itself is lacking in tension or interest and peters out without much of a climax.

Long's prose is quite poor; there are many long and superfluous similes and the dialogue is labored and sounds like nothing anybody would say with a straight face. On page 108 we get "Her eyes were so wet they looked like tiny lakes vertically suspended on opposite sides of her nose." There is a lot of verbiage that does nothing to further the plot; the scientists talk at length about snake venom, for example. There are embarrassing spelling errors, like "loose" for "lose," "muscles" for "mussels," "yeild" for "yield."

This thing is a disaster, and should be avoided. I have the 1971 Magnum paperback, with the cover that tries to convince you this is an action adventure novel with sword-wielding brigands. If only.