Review: Of Godlike Power

Hello all, it is I, your friendly local Warrior. I have had a pretty fantastic weekend. I spent it down in the deep south with my lovely fiance and my friends. It's nice to get out of Northern Virginia sometimes. Any way, this weeks book is "Of Godlike Power." I found this book a while back in a big pile of free books that my university's library had thrown out. I thought the cover was pretty funny and it was pretty short so I figured that even if it was bad I wouldn't waste too much time reading it. The flip side of that coin is that if it was really good I would have an awesome book and a pretty cool story of how I found it. Well how did it fare? I'll tell you, in what I hope will become my standard format.

Of Godlike Power: by Mack Reynolds

The Cover:

The cover of this book has several things that I think make it an excellent candidate for my blog. It has futuristic spacecraft, flames, and what appears to be a 1000 foot tall Charles Manson. He seems to be standing in front of the wreckage of an old suspension bridge and he is raising his fist defiantly in the air. This cover has another great hallmark of ridiculous sci fi and fantasy covers (one that was unfortunately absent from Tuf Voyaging) the tag line. Tag lines are supposed to make you want to read a book and as such they really should be pretty sensational. This books tag line certainly is: "His unearthly power could destroy the world-- was there no one to stop him?" Thats a pretty effective tag line if you ask me. What is this power he has, how can it destroy the world, who is he, and how will he be stopped? The cover is pretty good, but how does the content stand up too it?

The Content:

Of Godlike Power is a pretty unique story, I had never read anything like it. And thats not necessarily a good or bad thing. The main character of the story Ed Wonder is so uninteresting and plain that I actually forgot his name and had to look it up before writing this review. The basic premise of the book is that Ed is the host of a TV show where he interviews experts of paranormal subjects. Ed himself is a skeptic but tries to keep an open mind. Eventually Ed is asked to go to a circus tent where a local cult is having a revival and interview the cult leader. The cult leader supposedly has some kind of power that allows him to manipulate people and preform miracles. Ed suspects this is just a case of mass hypnosis but decides to interview the cult leader, named Tubber, anyway. What follows are a series of increasingly unexplainable events that eventually lead Ed and the reader to realize that Tubber does in fact have some mysterious power. Actually by the end of the book Tubber seems pretty much all powerful, capable of preforming miracles on the global scale (such as destroying every peace of recorded music on earth).

The tag line of the novel is misleading though because in the end of the novel nobody really stops Tubber. The ending of the novel is actually pretty anti climatic. In my reviews I will try not to reveal the endings of books, but I will say that the ending of this one did take my be surprise a little bit because of how little actually happened. Basically the book just ended.

Was it a good or a bad book? Well I certainly enjoyed reading it. especially the chapters where Ed Wonder talks to his two friends, one a skeptic and one a believer. those chapters where definately the high points of the novel for me. but all in all I would say that the book had as many misses as it had hits. If i rated things with five stars I would give this book three stars. It wasn't good, it wasn't bad, and worst of all, it was nowhere near as ridiculous as its cover would have you believe.

That does it for this weeks review.

Next Week's Title:
The Devil Wives of Li Fong!