A great read, definitely a classic. Not sure that I really bought the main character's rapid self-transformation from clueless idiot into Batman, but it was still a non-stop flurry of ideas. The last couple of chapters are fairly mind-bending and kind of blur past, but this is certainly worth any science fiction fan's time. ( )

fantastic, didn't feel like it was written in the 1950s at all. ( )

It’s fortunate my Kindle is water resistant, because this book bored me to tears. The books that bore me are some of the hardest for me to write reviews for, because nothing engaged me enough to evoke any strong opinions.

The story starts off with a world-building dump which goes on for quite a while before we ever meet the main character. The main character is Gully Foyle, an unmotivated guy who plods along through life doing nothing spectacular. Until he almost dies, and somebody who could have rescued him chooses not to. Then he suddenly exercises his brain, figures out all sorts of technical things he had no knowledge of in order to save himself, then goes on a mad quest for revenge. Along the way, he ropes in various cardboard women and makes them miserable.

Gully was horrible. I dislike unmotivated characters, and I dislike characters motivated purely by revenge, and I hate the trope where (major spoiler) instalove conquers all. Gully falls in love with the girl responsible for not rescuing him, a girl he barely knows, and suddenly has a complete change of heart about everything. Blech.

The world-building was kind of interesting, if impossible to suspend one’s disbelief on. Mankind discovers by accident that they can “jaunte”, which is to instantaneously transport themselves to other locations using the power of their mind and their will. All they have to do is want it badly enough, and know the physical path between their current location and their destination. Which of course begs the question, how did the earliest humans not discover jaunting by accident, especially considering it was so easily taught to most of humanity after it was discovered and therefore didn’t take much skill to learn? You’d think the first person to think, “Oh no, I’m being chased by a tiger, I sure wish I was safely back in my cave!” would have discovered jaunting a lot sooner. It did amuse me though, because I’ve had an infrequent but recurring dream for, I don’t know, as long as I can remember, in which I was able to do something very similar to jaunting. It wasn’t something I’d ever given much thought to, I’d just think to myself, “oh, I had that weird dream again” and then forget about it. So it was kind of funny to suddenly read about it in a book. It made me wonder if the author had been inspired by similar dreams and/or if this is a more common thing to dream about than I would have thought. I’m pretty confident I’ve never had any exposure to this story before now.

There were a few interesting twists toward the end, but I was too numb to really appreciate them by then. I think there are a lot of tangible issues in this book that one could complain about, and probably plenty of things to praise as well, but in my case I was simply too bored to care. ( )

terribly bombastic and cartoonish, fit only for the 1930s or 14 yo boys.
Not 1/5 because it has a lot of good ideas, but the writing, characters, story and twists are all badly written, as for a cartoon magazine, not a novel, and fail to exploit those ideas properly. ( )

I read this book because it came highly recommended, though I don't see all the fuss. The story is ok, the pacing is good and breakneck, and it smells of inventiveness. But I didn't care for any of the characters, and the teleport/jaunte thing is too much of a stretch and not well thought out. It seems dated in some parts while thoroughly modern at others.

It is a good read, but it's a lightweight one. I read it as a palate cleanser between The Book of the New Sun and the Culture series, which I'm just now starting to read, so I didn't expect anything engrossing, but still, I thought it would be better. ( )