Dark is the Sun

by Philip José Farmer

An epic adventure by the author of the award-winning Riverworld series.

Fifteen billion years from now, Earth is a dying planet, its skies darkened by the ashes of burned-out galaxies, its molten core long cooled. The sunless planet is nearing the day of final gravitational collapse in the surrounding galaxy. Mutations and evolution have led to a great disparity of life-forms, while civilization has resorted to the primitive.

Young Deyv of the Turtle Tribe knew nothing of his world's history or its fate. He lived only to track down the wretched Yawtl who had stolen his precious Soul Egg. Joined by other victims of the same thief--the feisty Vana and the plant-man Sloosh--the group sets off across a nightmare landscape of monster-haunted jungle and wetland. Their search leads them ultimately to the jeweled wasteland of the Shemibob, an ageless being from another star who knows Earth's end is near and holds the only key to escape.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Dying Earth, Post Apocalyptic, Science Fiction Fantasy, Speculative Fiction

409 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Philip José Farmer was an American author, principally known for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. He was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, but spent much of his life in Peoria, Illinois.

Farmer is best known for his Riverworld series and the earlier World of Tiers series. He is noted for his use of sexual and religious themes in his work, his fascination for and reworking of the lore of legendary pulp heroes, and occasional tongue-in-cheek pseudonymous works written as if by fictional characters.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Billions of years into the future, the universe is in the process of collapsing. Deyv, a member of a primitive tribe, ventures into the wilderness to find a wife. On the way, his soul egg, an object all people wear around their necks that is believed to house their souls, is stolen. He meets up with a girl who's egg was also stolen and a centaur-like plant man and they go on a quest to find the witch who ordered the thefts, only to be sent on a quest of their own upon finding her.

Dark is the Sun is a pretty good adventure story containing a lot of elements I like: crazy creatures, lost technology, and portals to other words. It also raises questions about religion and what it means to have a soul. Although I saw the ending coming, there were a lot of surprises along the way. The Shemibob or Freesh could have easily been one dimensional caricature villains but ended up being well rounded characters.

To sum up, this is a good science fantasy story and should appeal to fans of Philip Jose Farmer's other work, as well as those readers looking for a good adventure story.

Besides, where else are you going to find creatures that resemble boats and mate by shooting at each other with cannon-like organs?

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had high hopes for Philip Jose Farmer. I have heard that his novel To Your Scattered Bodies Go is an all-time classic; so I was expecting something of avant-garde nature when I started this book.

Maybe my expectations were too high. This is fantasy masquerading as Science Fiction. IMO, there is nothing wrong in that, provided the story is enjoyable - I have never felt that to be good, a book has to be highbrow. My problem with the tome in question was that what started out as good fun became boring very fast. Like Brian W. Aldiss's Hothouse, this became an exercise in world building - only longer.

The story is very simple. The sun has burnt out: earth is near the end of its life. Whatever human beings are left are living as tribes (vaguely resembling Native Americans). Deyv (the main protagonist) has to go out into the frightening world to find a wife because he could not find any from his or neighbouring tribes. This is because his soul-egg (a spheroid which the tribespeople hang around their neck, and which is supposed to house their souls) did not match with that of any eligible female. On his travels, Deyv's soul-egg is stolen, and he embarks on a quest to recover it along with Vana, a woman from an alien tribe whose soul-egg also has been stolen. On the way they meet Sloosh, a tree-man who looks like a centaur made of leaves, and who joins their quest. The rest of the story is a journey through an alien landscape peopled by exotic creatures and locales, and an extremely predictable ending.

The exotic creatures are interesting (live ships which fly and boats which mate by firing pellets) and the world is interestingly alien, but soon the excitement begins to fade. Sloosh's never-ending lectures on the growth, decay and eventual predicted destruction of earth starts to sound like boring class-room sessions. It seems that the author has forgotten the dictum of "show, don't tell". Also, the prose is very simplistic (it's almost as though we are reading a synopsis) and the characterisation is almost non-existent. Towards the end, the author goes on an unnecessary killing spree and puts a violent end to many characters through silly mishaps - characters who had survived greater perils till then. It's as though he wanted to wipe the slate clean.

I honestly cannot recommend it to anyone.

[Marcus Gipps · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up from the tables of second-hand books underneath the bridge outside the National Theatre on the South Bank - I'd been queuing for theatre tickets, and had blasted through the final chapters of the Wooding book, so thought I'd pick something up to keep me entertained for a bit longer. I've never read any Farmer before, but a friend had recommended him recently, and I didn't want to buy something that was an orphaned part of a series, so at two quid this seemed like a good buy. Plus I fancied a bit of old fashioned science fiction.

I'm a big fan of the end-of-the-world thing. Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time, Clarke's City and the Stars, that kind of thing, so this was always going to appeal to me. Having said that, I was surprised by how old-fashioned the whole thing felt, even though it was first published in the early eighties. There's a fairly traditional quest thing going on, at least to begin with, not to mention some questionable sexual ethics (although they are, to a certain extent, explained away within the book as part of the degeneration of humanity. Still rankled a bit, though - I suspect that, since my complaining about Veteran, I'm paying more attention...)

That issue aside, however - and it only pops up occasionally, generally there isn't a problem - the book bangs along quite entertainingly. It feels like Farmer has thrown everything into his writing, dropping ideas and characters and settings in whenever he feels like it, and the energy helps to gloss over the repetitions of plot which are a little too prevalent in the first half of the text. There's an annoying tendency for our lead characters to set off on a bit of a quest, get to the end of it, then suddenly have to head off again because someone has stolen the thing they were looking for and run off again. Every journey is interesting, and Farmer gets to show off his (often very impressive) ideas, but it all felt like a pretty flimsy framework for a bunch of entertaining scenes. To be fair, towards the end of the narrative things get a bit more focused, and I certainly found it hard to put the book down, so it can't be all bad. I just had to accept that it's about the journey, not the destination or the characterisation.

I read a nice tatty old paperback, and felt like I was about twelve again, the first week of June. Look like it might be out of print, but I'm sure there are lots of nice tatty secondhand copies out there for you to own as well.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark is the Sun is set so far in the future the universe is starting to collapse in on itself. There is only a rudimentary human civilization left, a handful of hunter/gatherer tribes who are scattered across the land. Other animals have either evolved or been helped to sentience, such as dolphins, plants, and others, and they, like humans, sparsely populate the earth in tribal units.

This is the story of one human male, Deyv, his captured wife from another tribe, Vana, their dog and panther, and a ragtag collection of a plant-man, a sentient rock being, a thief, and some witches and slaves (at once both far weirder and less weird than it sounds) who try to find holes into other universes to escape the destruction of theirs.

The sights they see along the way form the true meat of the book: ancient human structures, meetings with aliens, bizarre and dangerous encounters with all sorts of crazy lifeforms, and still-working human artifacts of great power make this nutty book great fun.

Incredibly fun, wacky, and bizarre. How can you not like a book that has huge living sailboats who have sex by shooting missiles at each other?

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

The time: Fifteen billion years in the future. The place: An earth on its last legs (in a universe on its last legs), inhabited primarily by primitives and weird creatures, littered with the ruins of countless lost civilizations.

Deyv, a tribesman, sets out, with his dog, Jum, and his cat, Aejip (both species having been given some kind of partial intelligence at some point in the distant past; also, both cat & dog are mastiff-sized) to snare, or be snared by, a mate, as is the style at the time. But before he has any luck in that regard, his soul egg is stolen and he finds himself, with cat & dog and other companions (the woman Vana and the plant-centaur-beast Sloosh) chasing after the thief, a journey that will take him through wonders & terrors, all across the single supercontinent and even to parts beyond.

This is one that I read several times back in the day (high school or thereabouts) but which I had not revisited for many years since. I'm glad to report that it held up well, although it's better considered & enjoyed as a picaresque series of incidents.

[Derek · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was very peculiar, and felt like a deliberate contrast to Vance's take on the dying-earth genre. The language is methodically simple, almost painfully so, with dialog stripped of panache, as though mechanically translated. Although a near-picaresque in terms of the journey of the characters and various troubles they encounter and the lack of resolution, so much of it is wandering or deliberation or the incidentals of travel, rather than the surprise of encounter or elaboration into weird societies.

The scale of the setting idea is magnificent--the end times with humanity driven back to tribal society and surrounded by the artifacts of vast technology, including the relocation of the planet itself--but that's not enough to hold my interest when having to wade through uninteresting bickering and travel montage. The story peters out in its last 50 pages.

Farmer's action scenes are compelling and when he has a subject--The fight among floating airships, the Shemibob's palace--he's on his game. But the stuff in between was indeterminable and padded.

[AoC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entries in the Dying Earth genre are sadly nowhere near as numerous as I'd like them to be, but that just makes Dark is the Sun all the more worthwhile. Less of a fantastic melting pot approach where anything goes author instead opted for how such a dying world would look through the eyes of a tribal human. Is it worth checking out, though?

Aforementioned protagonist is Deyv of the Turtle Tribe, and his accompanying troubles of seeking out a mate from another tribe to capture and marry. This would be easier said than done if the entire thing didn't hinge on his Soul Egg, a kind of gem his people always wear around their neck, needing to be perfectly attuned to that of the potential mate. He sets out from his tribe and their ancestral House. Except, disaster strikes - his Soul Egg gets stolen and marks Deyv as a non-human who would effectively be exiled even if he returned home. So begins a quest to track down the thief across deadly jungles and wastelands. Getting over his desperation Deyv is not only joined by his trusty cat and dog companions, but also comes across a likewise Egg-less woman called Vana and even stranger individuals who join them. All having something stolen by seemingly the same thief who wronged our hunter protagonist.

At this point it's well established that I'm a sucker for world building. Which is good news for Dark is the Sun since narrative present is largely split in half between the party's objectives and Sloosh's, half-protein and half-plant centaur-like being, lectures on the state of the world. After all, both Deyv and Vana are tribal people who, as we find out much later on, never even re-invented basic technology like the wheel. Keep in mind this doesn't mean they're stupid, but rather simply not versed in the history of this Earth billions of years into the future and quickly approaching its end. Sloosh and his race's innate plant memory/communication ability has the benefit of peering back in time as long as vegetation was present. This leads to many info dumps and humorous situations as emotional humans grow frustrated with cabbagehead's claims of intellectual superiority. Until he comes across his match and even more information is conveyed, this time with an alien POV.

Let's just say there's a LOT to take in, but Dark is the Sun eschews mystical elements in favor of ancient technology being misunderstood and misappropriated by ignorant people. Almost as a result of this, and despite events taking place after multiple advanced civilizations had collapsed with this latest simply coming too late to ever rise properly, there are numerous instances of reader playing the guessing game with what Deyv is describing as he associates meaning to it. More often than not with a dose of comedy. For example, when Vana hears the explanation of what "totems with three colored eyes blinking in red, yellow and green when you approach" actually are and feels profound embarrassment having prostrated herself before them. Novel does not air on the obtuse side with meanings buried within meanings. It's quite clear cut and readable with only some of its characters being confused by unknown elements. Oddly enough, it was their names for creatures with no real-life analogs that threw me for a loop.

Characters are largely what it says on the tin, but journey they undertake also changes them. Hoozzist and Sloosh serve as non-human fixtures of the group for the longest time which lets Deyv and Vana grow in their own ways past the original prison of the mind their people live in. Saying any more would probably be spoilers, but I like how they all have that edge befitting humans who survive in a deadly world. I had a raised eyebrows moment when Deyv considered it a bit strange that revered elders would be killed in times of famine which would never happen within his Turtle Tribe. On the other hand, killing infants under the same circumstances made perfect sense to him. Seeing him grow and broaden his horizons to eventually becoming a proper man made this a journey worth following.

[Metaphorosis · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars, Metaphorosis Reviews

Summary:

At the twilight of a world, a young man goes in search of mate, but soon loses his soul egg. Without it, he’s no one, and in his search for it, he finds adventure, science, magic, love, and escape from a rapidly collapsing world.

Review:

I’ve read a lot of Philip Jose Farmer in recent months. I’ve liked very little of it. In fact, I’d started to think that my enjoyment of the Riverworld series was an anomaly, and that, to put it bluntly, Farmer was simply not a very good writer.

Dark is the Sun doesn’t entirely confound that view; it’s not a work of any particular genius. But it is head and shoulders above the World of Tiers series, to pick one example. It’s so different that it reads as if it had been written by an entirely different author. Had I picked it up blind, I’d have assumed it to be a lost Piers Anthony novel from the 1970s, or a collaboration with him during that period. It has the same mounting introduction of novelty after novelty, and the same relentless, if somewhat facile, logical application of concepts. The sexism is limited and of its time rather than well past it. In short, it’s like reading a book by a whole different author.

That doesn’t mean this is a good book, but it’s not a bad one. It’s got an interesting world, decent (if into entirely credible) characters, and a challenging quest. There’s not a lot of surprise, but there’s plenty to keep you going. Of the half dozen Farmer books I’ve read recently, this is the only one that had me looking forward (slightly) to the next reading session, rather than looking for any excuse to put it off.

I can’t say this is the Riverworld Farmer I remember and liked, but it’s a lot like the Tarot and Cluster Anthony that I remember and liked. If you’re a fan of those series, you might like this as well.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Antonio Fanelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Carino. Belle descrizioni, ma il tutto è troppo improbabile e ridicolo.
Peccato.
Magari se lo si considera come un divertissement ...

[Kathi · Rating 3 out of 5]

5/10
With its simple prose and episodic style, this book masks some deeper themes about what it is to be human, the difference between human and sentient, and how difficult it can be to change. The use of “foreign” (and untranslated) words was annoying and pointless and the characters, while interesting, never seem to really come alive.
This is the first book I’ve read by Philip José Farmer and I have heard that some of his other books/series are better, so I may give him another chance. Not any time soon, though.

[Tom Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite Farmer. I suppose it's a dying Earth story, but unlike others of this flavor, it lacks real stakes and that sort of existential dread that lives between the lines of most dying Earth works. Most likely this is because this is purely plot driven, with very little in the way of character development. It does feature a colorful party of adventurers (human, animal, plant-person, and literal alien), imaginative world building, and some humorous moments which save it from being a total slog. And it did eventually capture my interest, speeding up around the halfway mark -- which is roughly the 200 page mark. I'm glad to now be familiar with this work, but I doubt I will revisit it.

[Dawie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe i need to read this as a physical one day as I had no odea what the hell was going on most of the time

[David Collins · Rating 3 out of 5]

enjoyable pulpy adventure. the world is impressively fantastic. 3.5 stars

[The Joy of Erudition · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philip José Farmer's Dark Is The Sun is an engaging, albeit uneven, journey through an Earth fifteen billion years in the future. Structurally, the novel feels a bit messy and episodic, suggesting it was not outlined in advance, but rather "discovery-written", as Brandon Sanderson calls it. While the initial plot-driver is the retrieval of the two human characters' stolen soul eggs, this functions less as a standard quest and more as a means of taking the reader through Farmer's imaginative landscape. The narrative only starts to show a recognisable plot structure after the halfway mark, following the confrontation with the witch Feersh.

What immediately sets the tone is the surprisingly extreme brutality. The protagonists — Deyv, Vana, and Sloosh — readily and casually kill other people (men and women) as if it's nothing, whereas in other works the heroes might think twice or at least feel a little bad about killing guards or even common servants, for instance just to avoid raising an alarm. One example is when they attack the airship of the witch Feersh (who ordered the theft of their soul eggs to force them to come after them), even after they are given information that she actually meant them no harm and was just summoning them to send them out on a quest. In this attack, they kill and torture Feersh's servants and children, yet experience no remorse upon learning that information they were given was accurate. Farmer does not critique this behaviour, suggesting it was meant to illustrate a future where survival requires constant violence.

This does cause the characters to be a bit less relatable. Deyv, the focal character, is frequently petulant and selfish (though not to the extent of the gleefully thieving and acerbic Yawtl). We get minimal insight into the characters' internal emotional states, despite the narrative being focused through Deyv's perspective. However, the brief intimate moments shared between Deyv and Vana kept drawing me back in, since I have a weak spot for romance, even as sketchily drawn as it is in Farmer's works.

Sloosh, a kind of centaur-shaped plant-man with advanced knowledge, serves primarily as the mouthpiece for infodumps about the world and the universe in general, delivering extensive, expository monologues that often go uninterrupted for multiple pages. While this technique tends to disrupt pacing, it's a common Farmer device for conveying the alienness of his world beyond that which the focal characters would directly experience through their actions. And I have to say that Farmer at least manages to build more engaging adventures around his infodumps than, for instance, Arthur C. Clarke does.

One thing he doesn't accomplish well is the handling of antagonists like the Yawtl and Feersh: upon their defeat and assimilation into the protagonists' party, they seem to lose much of their distinctive character, motivation, and formidable abilities. This reminds me of characters in the series The Lost Room or Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure, where former adversaries become ineffectual once they're de-fanged, suddenly becoming content to follow the heroes wherever they go. This is a common result of an author's priority of plot advancement over character arcs. As for my own tastes, while I've enjoyed some purely plot-driven works in the past, I've come to expect character development as a necessary element, even in idea-driven fiction.

Perhaps related is how he handles the addition of the Shemibob to the party, who is another "witch-like" character under whom the witch Feersh served as an apprentice. Once their relationship is established and the two are in the party at the same time, there's nothing more shown of the fact that these two have a history together. They don't interact in any way I can recall, and they're more or less interchangeable aside from one having an enmity with the Yawtl and a dwindling number of offspring, and the other being an alien centipede/snake centaur.

Farmer also tends to include a kind of foreshadowing that stands out for the wrong reasons. For instance, Sloosh once delivered a speech about the fact that sapience seems to be accelerating across all terrestrial kingdoms as a desperate evolutionary response to the impending cosmic catastrophe, and he rather pointedly highlighted that he hadn't seen any member of the mineral kingdom joining the ranks of sapient beings. So it was no surprise when they encountered Phemropit, a sapient, radioactive ore-eating stone creature rolling around on tank treads and shooting lasers.

Despite this fifteen billion year evolution giving rise to sapient plants and rocks, though, Deyv's dog and cat seem like ordinary dogs and cats, as unchanged by evolution as their human masters after this extreme length of time. Farmer's conceptual energy was evidently directed towards grand and alien spectacles, not the evolution of the mundane.

Eventually, it becomes clear that the Earth, which we already knew was reaching the end of its existence, would be dying not in a few more generations, but within the immediate timeframe of our protagonists, and the increasing frequency of earthquakes acts as a kind of ticking clock. The plot, therefore, becomes focused on finding a way off of Earth. Fortunately, there are several portals scattered across the planet that may (or may not) lead to other, younger worlds. These portals are stable enough to have remained open for years, if we judge from how long the Shemibob has been experimenting with the one in her fortress, yet as soon as the protagonists show up, some of these portals seem to become unstable — moving or having things crumble around them. This sort of thing made me start to suspect some kind of intelligent, underlying intent, that these things weren't just coincidences, but foreshadowing for a revelation at the end that perhaps their world was artificially constructed by powerful beings, or a simulation, along the lines of some of Farmer's other work, like World of Tiers or Riverworld.

The resolution of Deyv and Vana's romantic subplot was remarkably swift, after only getting a few moments of intimacy and sharing of feelings. One of the things holding them back from acting on their feelings was the fact that they were both missing their soul eggs, which are necessary in their cultures to confirm a suitable match for marriage. But once Shemibob used her alien technology to fashion new soul eggs for them, they were able to confirm that they were perfectly matched. Their subsequent marriage, Vana's pregnancy, and the birth of their child unfolded rapidly within the narrative, certainly not feeling like nine months had elapsed. This reduced the whole romantic subplot to its most basic functional nature, to raise the stakes and push them more toward taking the chance on whatever lay beyond the portals rather than returning to their tribes to live out whatever brief time they had left on the dying Earth. There was a similar event involving a quickly glossed-over pregnancy of a character and its aftermath in Farmer's World of Tiers.

Another thing that had been a barrier to their relationship was Deyv's revulsion at learning of Vana's tribe's custom of ritual cannibalism. But this detail, explicitly noted by Deyv early on, and brought up a few more times when he considered and rejected the possibility of a relationship, is simply dropped from the narrative. There is no hint of him actively overcoming this revulsion, or working through it together with Vana, or deciding that his feelings were too important to deny; it simply ceases to be a factor. This is another example of how internal character conflicts, for Farmer, have little importance compared to external plot drivers.

The novel's aforementioned brutality grew far beyond anything I could have expected as it ramped up to its conclusion. The majority of the party meets violent ends: Feersh's sons and daughters are picked off one by one. The Yawtl drugs and murders Feersh, only to be killed in another earthquake while fleeing. Phemropit runs out of fuel/food, left helpless and unable to escape the Earth's destruction. The young woman Be'nyar, the party's liaison with the only nearby tribe who they hope to bring with them to the new world, is slain by her own tribe for daring to approach the final portal, and her body is fed to their animals. Most surprisingly, Deyv's dog and cat, and even Vana's infant son, are all killed during a desperate attempt to broker peace with that tribe. Only Deyv, Vana, their newborn daughter, Sloosh, and Shemibob survive to pass through the portal. All of them lose their most important possessions in the process (Deyv and Vana's soul eggs, Sloosh and Shemibob's high-tech gadgets).

The final portal leads not to an alien world, nor to a revelation of anything like a simulation, but seemingly back in time to a prehistoric Earth, populated by Neanderthals. This is Farmer's take on the trope of "protagonists become founding ancestors", usually done elsewhere by showing that the time-travelling protagonists were the real Adam and Eve, but here the protagonists and the tribe that followed them became the Cro-Magnons who replaced the Neanderthals. (Sloosh explicitly comments that in the history he knows, Cro-Magnons seemed to "appear suddenly" in the fossil record.)

Despite its structural quirks, narrative inconsistencies, and disregard for character development, Dark Is The Sun excels in its grand scope, touching on the repeated rise and fall of humanity over billions of years, with societies rising to a tech level capable of averting one world-ending cataclysm after another before returning to barbarism. It was a good exploration of a farther future than I've ever seen in SF, unless you count The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

[Campbell Mcaulay · Rating 2 out of 5]

Millions of years in the future and the universe is close to death. Deyv, of The Turtle Tribe, sets out to find a mate but instead discovers the fate of his world and everything he knows.

Hmmm. I remember picking this up many years ago after having been blown away by Farmer's Riverworld series. I don't remember whether I liked it or not, but many years later I was reminded of it for some reason and bought it to read again. It is a bit of a disappointment I must say. The writing is dispassionate, clunky and monotonous, the plot is simplistic, linear and naiive and the characterisation is vestigial to say the least. Imagine getting your 10 year old nephew to transcribe the plot of something like, I dunno, Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia and you have an idea of what Dark Is The Sun is like.

It's not hard to read, but neither is it any fun. Don't bother.

[Michael Asteriou · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love Science Fiction
I love Fantasy.
I love a good mix of both (and more) genres like The Dark Tower by Stephen King
BUT
I hated every page of this abomination of a book. Endless lame dialogs, completely improbable storyline, protagonists without depth, totally unnecessary details on one side, complete lack thereof on the other, ignoring billions of years of evolution, hollow action, weird creatures with weird names and weird behaviour and a very predictable ending made this one of the worst reads in a long time. Sorry Mr. Farmer, this book was definitely not meant for me.

[John McLeod · Rating 4 out of 5]

My third reading, and, thirty-four years after my first reading I can't be anything like objective about this book! Reading this in middle-age it seems more of a compilation of several stories written over several years rather than the single novel it did on my first and second readings. PJF, though, has been a huge influence on me as a reader and, even if this is no longer the genre defining novel it once seemed to me, it's still a book I would recommend to anyone (most especially a young anyone) who wants to have their horizons expanded by a visionary SF author.

[Mark Jacobs · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books of all time. Cool cover. I remember reading this in my dad's library when I was a lad and then searching it out when I was older. The ultimate road trip much like my owne novel "The Yaakmen of Tyrie."

[Joel B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dark is the Sun is a relatively interesting novel that skews toward the Planetary Romance subgenre of SF with the planet in this case being a far future Earth as it nears the end of its life, though there is less a focus on the planet and far more attention given to the unusual really weird cast of characters. Imagine Jack Vance's Big Planet which itself bears elements of the Wizard of Oz crossed with say Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation. The latter of which clearly took inspiration from this book and the former being the much stronger of any of the novels mentioned. It's fun enough and not a bad read if you're into bands of misfits going on an odyssey, but if that's your thing there are other books you might enjoy more.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this is pitched as a story set in the (very!) far future, it reads much more like a fantasy novel and I found that the sf and fantasy elements had an annoying tendency to clash in a manner that kept jarring me out of the story.

As a fantasy novel, Dark is the Sun works pretty well. If the far future background had been dropped, then objects that were magical as far as the narrative is concerned could have been presented as magical and I would have been saved the annoyance that comes every time the author claims that humanity could have survived, unchanged, for 15 billion years.

[Simon D · Rating 2 out of 5]

I came to this as a fan of dying earth fiction (Wolfe, Ashton-Smith, Vance) and have force read through it to rather disappointment. Not an aweful read but there is nothing here of exception. The party of adventurers are not really that interesting, their quest to save the world is not original, and the alien world that was once earth whilst initially interesting cannot sustain the full novel. This is walk around the world adventurer story a kind of dying earth the hobit, but it has no real hook and the prose is workman like at best.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

PJF on acid! The story seemed to be conceived on stream of consciousness foundation. The characters were interesting with the exception of one and the setting was imaginative. The ending was abrupt but welcome.

The plant centaur, Sloosh, became tedious shortly after its introduction. The ‘well, actually’ approach Farmer used to expand the character was off putting.

An interesting observation regarding the difference between sentient and sapience was offered at the end.

Glad I stumbled upon the audio version of this tale.
Be Well, readers.

[Tattooed_mummy · Rating 3 out of 5]

like the curate's egg this was good in parts. tbh it was over long, like several stories crammed into one and it often meandered as though lost in its own plot. It felt as though the author picked up and put down the manuscript over several years, adding to it each time but without refreshing himself on the back story! A very strange and over long read. Not sure I'd recommend it - certainly far short of Philip Jose Farmer's best work.

[Kevin Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think in order to enjoy Farmer you have to take him as he is, which is probably good advice for a lot of sci-fi in his era. (Remember, these people used to be paid by the word.). Do you get wooden, one-dimensional characters with no development? Alternating clunky and purple prose? Lots of crazy stuff that's not explained? All true. But Farmer is also enormously creative, and consistently spins a fun yarn.

[Boris Slocum · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't recall how or when this book came into my hands, but I know I've read it more than once (so it must be good).

No, it definitely isn't Farmer at his best, but it is a compelling story of a small group of people who pull together in a time of absolute crisis. (You might say, it's a time when all the marbles are at risk.) I like Farmer's writing style and zany imagination. If you don't take this too seriously, it is a great way to kill a rainy Sunday.

[Art · Rating 4 out of 5]

Audible has been offering a lot of classic science fiction in their "included" list. I am enjoying catching up on authors I haven't had a chance to read in years. I loved Farmer's Riverworld series and wanted to read more of him. Definitely a fun read. Lots of adventure. Interesting group dynamics. A really interesting future Earth he built here.

[Matt Bergevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Super interesting take on what earth would look like in billions of years. Unfortunately it dragged on a bit and didn’t explore areas I’d hoped for — like the science behind how we survived that long.

[Christopher Garcia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Farmer, one of my faves, but this one just never landed for me. The dialogue, one of the things I love about books like Flesh and The Lovers, feels pretty forced, and ultimately drags me out of the story more than once. Far from his best work, it's still Farmer and that shows at times.

[Ammon Bonham · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was very enjoyable as an audiobook. I liked the steady meter of plot progression that spanned a lifetime while maintaining the perception of a high tempo. Had a classic style that seems anachronistic to sci-fi of that decade, which was a plus.

[Luke Burrage]

I struggled to get into this. I think I tried to start it too soon after another 1970's dying earth novel about someone taking a long journey across a continent.

Abandoned after about 3 hours of a 14 hour audiobook due to just not caring enough.