Review: The Other Log of Phileas Fogg

The Other Log of Phileas Fogg by Philip José Farmer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Folks, have you ever finished a book that you enjoyed thoroughly and then thought to yourself, "I'd like to read that again, but not written as well?" No? Me neither, I must admit.

Alright, it's possible that I've finished a book and thought, "could have had more aliens in it."

Well, that is what we have here. It's not a bad story in concept, Farmer retells Phileas Fogg's famous journey but imagines aliens are involved. Unfortunately, the result isn't very impressive. It comes across to me like the sort of writing exercise we might have had at school, not the kind of thing you'd publish and charge readers good money for.

Farmer's prose doesn't come close to matching Verne's, I don't think any effort was made in that regard and I personally found that rather dissatisfying. A lot of the charm of the original journey was in the delightful language employed to tell the story.

The aliens are shoehorned into the log with reckless abandon. There's not much subtle at all about the butchery performed to make the new idea fit the old story. Coded messages in the Whist cards, ok fine, but it seems like this works anywhere in the world at any time and it just doesn't make sense to me.

I didn't pay close enough attention in the end to follow all of the details, but there are two alien species fighting in the shadows on Earth for the eventual control of the humans. They use "distorters" to teleport about the place and one side is trying to stop the other from obtaining one of those. Why they need to send Fogg around the world to do this was explained but isn't clear to me.

Sometimes Fogg is described as having to feign ignorance in order to maintain the image of a British gentleman but practically everyone he meets in the original log is here given some new role to fit the idea of the hidden narrative.

This is probably an unfair review. Seems a little harsher than my usual criticisms and really it's just a bit of harmless fun. Luckily, this story didn't follow every single leg of the journey and so didn't balloon out into a lengthy tome.

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