Customer Reviews

The Unreasoning Mask (Overlook Sf&F Classics)

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I've read all of Philip José Farmer's books, and of his stand alone sf novels, this is one of his best. Apparently I'm not alone in thinking this. Interzone editor David Pringle included The Unreasoning Mask in his book, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, and sf author Ian Watson called it "a masterpiece, Farmer's finest."

This novel might be viewed as a thinking person's version of Star Trek's "The Doomsday Machine" or "The Immunity Syndrome"; but it's really much more than that, with its metaphysical themes and implications, as well as its well-conceived world building of alien cultures and psychological examination of human motivations.

Captain Ramstan commands a rare alaraf drive starship which allows it to jump instantaneously to distant regions of space. Just as Ramstan sets off an interstellar incident by stealing the god-idol of an alien world (called the glyfa), he is alerted that one of the alaraf ships has disappeared, a victim of a world-killer called a "bolg." What is the mysterious connection between the glyfa and the bolg, and why does Ramstan begin to have waking visions of a mystical being from his long extinguished Muslim faith? Ramstan, chased by the aliens who worship the stolen god, races across the pluriverse to find the answers.

The Unreasoning Mask is a gripping, captivatingly disturbing book. Even at his most fantastic, Farmer manages to entrance with a compelling degree of realism, in particular as regards his portrayal of human nature, which in his fiction seems to carry at least as much bad as it does good. Don't miss this darkly riveting sf adventure.

While exploring in a galaxy-jumping spaceship, Captain Ramstan stumbles upon a planet-wide catastrophe and is dragged into the middle of a metaphysical, multi-sided, ambigious battle to save the universe. At its best, The Unreasoning Mask is an ingenious and epic reconceptualization of the universe--but too often, small and relatively mundane aspects intrude on this grand concept. Those aspects are well-intended and not entirely out of place: Ramstan's point of view narration isn't always convincing, but his characterization is strong--and while he's often unlikeable, his moral journey is always compelling. If it weren't so dramatically outstaged, his world, too, could provide a compelling story; as it is, the human figures, alien planets, and other traditional sci-fi elements build a local stage for the universal apocalypse. The problem is that these aspects run too long, and worldbuilding, politicking, and a few anonymous characters and throwaway relationships begin to crowd out the best of the book--and so that best is left underexplored. Worse still, when the book does finally get down to business its plot grows circuitous. This is supposed to avoid repedition and sustain tension, but the effect is cheap--it belongs in an adventure novel where the emphasis is on action, not a book as meaningful and thoughtful as this one aims be.

These issues do weaken the book, but they don't entirely obfuscate its strengths. The Unreasoning Mask is always readable, even when it strays away from its true point; the moral ambiguity of the protagonist and the other powers at play do much to sustain its intrigue and forward momentum. And even if it comes late and gets crowded out, Farmer's concept of the universe is fascinating. Describing it would spoil the book; suffice it to say that it's an idea I haven't seen before, and while it wobbles a bit in its attempt to achieve metaphysical meaning (sometimes because there are too many larger-than-life concepts competing for limited space, and always because they're insufficiently explored), it remains satisfyingly large: this is grand concept which, at its best, manages to be both convincing and inconceivable. I appreciate the opportunity to encounter it, and enjoyed and recommend The Unreasoning Mask largely on that basis. But while I admire the book that this has the potential to be, and enjoy many parts of what it is, the fact that Farmer fails to push his novel to its limits is disappointing. Aiming for those limits would have been a risk and challenge--but reaching them would have been incredible. Instead, The Unreasoning Mask is only intriguing, irritating, and occasionally ingenious--which is okay, but not much more.

I read this book a while ago and am anxious to reread it soon. Expecially concerning the dawn of the 21st century, where strange things might - or might not - happen ( ;-), this book places you in the set of mind of someone who discoveres that the world is much more complex and unbelievable than one had thought possible before. A book that has a magical fascination - IMHO - that draws you into the story. Enjoy it! :-)

In this sci-fi/fantasy adventure Ramstan is captain of the al-Buraq, one of the few starships fitted for instantaneous travel through space, when he impulsively risks everything to steal the glyph, an egg-shaped artifact that is worshipped by an alien civilization. Fleeing from the religious indignation of the aliens, and following the hints he receives from the glyph, Ramstan hops from planet to planet until he encounters the bolg, a terrifying engine of destruction with world-breaking power. With the help of the immortal beings known as the Vwoordha, Ramstan resolves to take a stand against the bolg before it destroys the Earth.

Unfortunately, Ramstan is not a particularly likable character, nor even a very convincing one, and his actions are often controlled by non-human (and even non-living) forces, which does little to make him sympathetic. The myriad Islamic references, although perhaps considered suitably exotic at the time, may even grate upon the sensibilities of some Western readers in our post-9-11 world. And the story certainly takes its time getting started, although it does pick up eventually. There's almost none of the swords-and-shields, hand-to-hand combat that Farmer is so good at; most of the conflict is space chases and puppet manipulation. There's certainly no shortage of imagination here, and fans of far-out cosmic speculation should be intrigued by the concluding chapters, but ultimately this book is more successful as fantasy than science fiction.

The best that can be said for this book is that there are a lot of interesting ideas in it. Or, rather, there are gestures toward a lot of interesting ideas; there is absolutely no follow-through. One gets the sense of an author with attention deficit disorder: He sat down to his typewriter every day and wrote down the great new idea he had, but never got back to doing anything with the previous day's ideas.

The result is an incoherent book, in which the plot developments seem to just happen, the characters--such as there are any; we really get to know only one--are never developed, and there are several glaring holes in the world-building that are never addressed. By the end, I simply didn't care what happened. I'm not opposed to science fiction that focuses on the ideas at the expense of extensive character development, but for that to work you actually have to, well, focus on the ideas.

This book aims to conceive a new cosmology. That's interesting. Unfortunately, this laudatory ambition is thoroughly and completely undermined by the story--which is that of an unsympathetic, unbelievable protagonist who unhesitatingly follows arbitrary plot shifts through various universes while engaging in clumsy misogyny and trippy thoughts ("Whoa, dude...") and basically just making himself at home in a land of abandoned, unfinished plots and very bad writing.

My, oh my.

When someone says, "I stopped reading science fiction because it had no heart"---this is what they mean.

I've read quite a bit of science fiction, and was rather surprised at how disappointing this book was. While the central premise of the book is potentially intriguing, the way the reader learns of it is certainly less than elegant (I won't say what it is so as to not spoil the experience if you dare to read the book yourself). The main character of the book (a starship captain) isn't someone you can bond with, or even care about most of the time, except to wonder how someone so dysfunctional could wind up being in command of an elite ship. The author seemed to have wanted to cover a LOT of territory in a fairly short book, and the result is a book where the plot is disjointed, character development is lacking, and most of the core themes of the book are revealed in essay-like sections, just to get them out there.

Having an interesting idea for a science fiction story is an important start, and 50 years ago that was probably enough to get a book published (keep in mind this book was published in 1981). However, I've come to expect good sci-fi authors to develop the story, have some interesting characters, and draw the reader into the book. You should too.

In the 70s Farmer published a novel as "Kilgore Trout," taking his pseudonym from the beloved science-fiction writer who appears in several Kurt Vonnegut novels. The Trout character is notorious for combining fantastic ideas with an almost pathological inability to write them into compelling stories (and for publishing almost exclusively in pornographic magazines).

After reading "The Unreasoning Mask," I find the irony too rich; it's a book over-flowing with promising ideas, but hampered by grating prose, inconsistent and impatient plotting, and weirdly chauvinistic attitudes. If you pick this up you'll find yourself saying "it can't really be this bad - I must be missing something." You're not. It is.