AnyBook4Less.com	Find the Best Price on the Web Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Home  |  Store List  |  FAQ  |  Contact Us  |
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money Keyword AuthorISBN

Title: Journey beyond tomorrow by Robert Sheckley ISBN: 0-575-00351-0 Publisher: Gollancz Pub. Date: 1969 Format: Unknown Binding List Price(USD): $314.50

Your Country USA Canada United Kingdom Australia Austria Belgium France Germany Italy Netherlands Switzerland Currency AutoUSD CAD GBP EUR AUD CHF Delivery Only cheapest delivery All delivery options Include Used Books Are you a club member of: Barnes and Noble Books A Million Chapters.Indigo.ca

Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: One of the Great Unsung Satirical Novels
Comment: Published under this [] title JOURNEY BEYOND TOMORROW, its real title is JOURNEY OF JOENES and it is one of the strangest, most brilliant and touching satires ever written. If Jorge Luis Borges and G.K. Chesterton stayed up all night doing coffee and shrooms, this is the book they'd come up with. As Mike Resnick said in his review, the section about the Octagon is so mind-blowing and so full of comic paradox you'll need to take a deep breath and have a cocktail while your cerebellum cools off.

This book takes place after the world has ended. The conceit is that it is a collection of "folk tales" by the only survivors of the human race, Polynesian storytellers. The storytellers, each with separate idiosyncracies, go around the campfire telling the stories that were passed down to them about The Old Times. About how the world came to an end because of a Mythic Innocent named Joenes who accidentally causes the End of the World. In the process, he finds Jesus Christ in the Hollis Home for the Criminally Insane, is hired as a college professor but has no idea what he's teaching, finds that scientists and lawyers now worship superstition with a random number generator as their oracle, that doctors are creating diseases that cannot be cured, that maximum security prisons have more guards than ever because everyone is trying to break *into* prison, and that the world's most advanced computer humiliates Satan and takes over his job inspiring mankind to a new level of cruelty and war.

I can't tell you how much I love Sheckley. His stories are, as Spider Robinson once said, lean, mean and funny. And his best novels, like Journey of Joenes (aka Journey Beyond Tomorrow, ugh what a title!) are profound masterpieces of satire on the level of GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, CATCH 22, JURGEN, THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER or THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY.

Read this, his other ingenious satirical novels DIMENSION OF MIRACLES and MINDSWAP, and his greatest short stories, especially in the collection IS THAT WHAT PEOPLE DO?

Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent satire
Comment: An excellent satire. The first of Sheckley's three brilliant humor novels of the 1960s (the next two being MINDSWAP and the unsurpassed DIMENSION OF MIRACLES). This book is worth the price just for his description of the Octogon, the most confusing government building ever created.