Download On My Way To Paradise Edited By Dave Wolverton Readable In Audio Books

pretty heavy trip, man, Super violent but also soulful, When was the last time you read a scifi novel that started in South america and ended on a distant planet colonized by two warring neoJapanese factions No spoilers, This is a wideranging SF tale that includes human hybrids, space travel, detailed but not dull ! biology and medicine, combat, clash of civilizations, technology etc, It can be read as the adventure of the protagonist and is enjoyable as just that, However, the ideas that are discussed add real depth to the story, Memory, family, loss, good/evil, compassion, violence, societal study, I was shocked that it was published in, His vision of the future is not necessarily accurate to our own time, but it is very convincing nonetheless, It was easily believed.
Convincing vision, an engaging protagonist, important/deep/thoughtful ideas and rousing story combine for an excellent read, Oh, so sad that this has been overlooked by so many people,

It's likely out of print and only available on ebay or your favorite
used bookstore haunts, but if you're a science fiction fan you owe it
to yourself to add this to your mustread list.

I read it aboutyears ago so can't give any more details other than the fact that even looking at the cover at Amazon gives me such a good feeling, remembering how I felt while reading it.

You know that joy of reading, where you can't wait to pick the book up again and be immersed in a good story This has it, My all time favourite book,
Not only a great, wellwritten SciFi novel, and a deviation from the "reluctant hero" trope, but an indepth examination of the human psyche how different societies mould their inhabitants the highs and lows of love and how the human spirit can survive and overcome the most extreme circumstances.


Warning, this book does contain detailed descriptions of violent acts, and a vicious rape This is the first nonRunelords novel of David Farland's that I've read, It is, I believe, his first novel, I am struck by several things,

First, I think Dave's writing style has either changed much over the years, or he writes differently when writing fantasy, I'll have to read another of his science fiction novels to see, Either way, I like his Runelords writing style better, The scenes are more grounded in physical location and description, I really feel like in the Runelords books I have a better sense of the space scenes take place in, I am a little more immersed,

Second, Dave is very interested in probing moral questions in his booksand apparently this has been the case from the beginning, I feel like this tendency adds a punch to his books, something to leave me thinking about it after I've finished it, On My Way to Paradise is no exception, The moral questions explored in the book give it a depth that easily add another star to the book,

Third, the sheer number of cool ideas in this book is just staggering, Dave Farland was doing a lot of really great stuff a dozen years before the ideas hit the mainstream, Just awesome.

I enjoyed On My Way to Paradise, I did feel a little disinterested in the middle, but now that I've finished I see clearly why it was so important and integral to the themes of the book.
The third section kept my attention well,

On the content side, there's a lot of disturbing violence in the book, It's not described in graphic detail, but it was enough to make me wonder at times if I wanted to keep going, How bad was it going to get I suppose, maybe, those are just the realities of war, Or maybe the realities of an evil society, Either way, it tied into the themes, and in the end did not feel gratuitous,

Also on the content side, some rape described generally, not in great detail, Some fbombs. I never felt like any of it was added just for shock value, humor, or sheer entertainment value, It never felt gratuitous.

The alien world created by Dave was absolutely outstanding, wonderinducing, If you like strange places and interesting worlds, this is a book to look into, This may seem to contradict my comment about his fantasy books being more grounded in their scenes, but I don't think it does, In this book we get broad sweeping descriptions of scenery and alien settings, but many scenes pass so quickly from one setting to another without extensive description that I felt like I was floating from place to place.


I read the Kindle eBook, Lots of typos. I don't mind so much, but some people do,

There's a lot of military action in the book, and also a lot of internal dialogue with the main character, I don't mind it. I like it.

In the end, I recommend the book for those who like scifi, military type books, and are interested in heavy moral questions, I haven't read a lot of scifi books, so I can't compare it to any others, really, But my guess is that it's pretty good compared to the stuff out there,
Dave Wolverton/Farland, I will meet you at WIFYR in a few weeks and I will be pleasant to your face if I have to interact with you, However, because I know you won't read this review and no one else will either, I'm not going to shy away from writing my thoughts out online, I've got to get this off my chest and my husband is tired of hearing about it,

Most books have some kind of redeemable value, There are few I can think of that have no redeemable traits, Congratulations, Dave. Your book is one of the elite few to fit this category,

I've tried and still can't think of anything good to say about this book,

The Japanese characters were cookie cutters, even though the Latin Americans got a rich cultural background, If the Japanese had a more diverse, rich background several plotlines in your book wouldn't have worked and that's just lazy, You didn't even try with the Middle Eastern people, just fell back on the trope that they're evil and sneaky,

The women were just men with vaginas, You only seemed to make female characters when you needed someone to be victimized and/or rescued, When men were mad they called the women whores, Really That's all you can come up with You insult the TWO female characters' sexuality when surrounded by male rapists who actually deserve the epithet, Those insults were from the MC who we're supposed to empathize with, not even the "bad" guys, You're the type of author that all the mysogynistic statistics are about: flat female characters, low representation of female vs, male, the women need saved all the time, and it's a book everyone is expected to love,

BTW, in an informal survey of your Goodreads ratings, a higher percentage of your low ratings are from women, I'm not surprised.

The main character, whose name I can't even remember right now notwithstanding having finished this bookminutes ago, spent pages and pages and pages rehashing the same thoughts.
"Am I crazy Why am I being violent I can't even feel anything, I'm not bothered that I'm violent, Okay, I'm bothered that I'm violent, Maybe not. Maybe yes. Oh, look! Alien life forms, Oh, hey, what makes people human anyway"

Now that you've read that last paragraph, you can skip aboutpages of the book,

The rest is violence and raping, Not just any raping though, so many rapes that it starts to feel gratuitous, like the author was writing some kind of sick romance novel, The rapes are described in detail and I think that Dave Wolverton enjoyed writing them, Why else would the same woman be raped so many times I can understand that once might be necessary for the plot or back story, but I've lost count now of how many times the same woman was raped.
Let's not get started on all the nameless others, After the first time, the shock factor

was done, Stop already.

And more about the raping, Seriously, you called rape "invading someone's territory", which is fine on a simplistic level if you've never had any education on the topic, but then you equated it to breaking into someone's house and taking their stuff.
I have a few survivor friends who would have something to say about this and the way you rode the rape wagon long after an intelligent reader would have gotten the point.


As for the violence, I understand that Dave was trying to make a point, but that point came across great in the first few chapters, Again, intelligent readers don't need the repetition, No need to go on for anotherpages about it, waxing rhapsodic about the myriad ways to disembowel a person,

The book ispages, an egocentric waste of paper and ink, Congratulations Dave. You built a scifi world that has weird plants and animals, No one else cares Dave, except where it's important to the plot, Guess what It's almost never important for the plot, Not even the massive planet warming scare did anything of importance for the plot and that was the most promising thing you had in your world that would impact the characters in a meaningful way.


That time the MC took a bath in a stream and wandered away from camp to look for someone, changed his mind, ran into a weird creature, and went back to camp What the heck does that have to do with anything That's not the only thing either.
I could spend hours detailing the wastes of my time, There are at least fifty pages of wandering through the terrain on a hover craft looking for an army that doesn't need to be in the book, For someone like me who fought disgust to read every word in this book, every extraneous word counts,

That brings me to the overall structure of the book, It lacked focus. The MC just wandered from crisis to crisis without building into a cohesive whole, The book could have easily been three unrelated books, Wanted for murder Not any more, he's safe in space, Bad guy on the ship Oops, Not any more.

Dave spends so much time at the beginning on the earth's political structure and situation that it feels like he started a whole new book when it started to be in space.
Great swaths of Earth information didn't need to be there if it was going to be a space book, Then, guess what Dave starts a complete third book for the lastpages, He almost starts another one with ten pages left to go before suddenly deciding to resolve one last crisis and end the book with something that looks suspiciously like Deus ex Machina.
It's disorienting. Why spend so much time detailing the training and every little simulation when only a handful of it actually does anything for the plot structure Did his editor own a red pen Maybe she/he could borrow mine next time.


The plot and all of Angelo's I googled his name, I didn't even want to open the book again to look for it, musings could have been pared down to half the length, I'm used to reading YA where a higher percentage of the details are important and here there was information just for the fun of it, I kept checking the page number on my nook and being shocked, I'd read for so long I couldn't stand it and I'd only read fifteen pages, Multiply that across the span of the whole book,

So, no. I didn't like this book, I rarely give one star reviews and this one would be more like/th of a star, Yes my friend, that means I liked reading The Tiger's Curse more than I liked this book and I never thought I would ever say that about anything, like, ever.
I can at least appreciate that the premise of the Tiger's Curse was interesting and the plot was focused in those books,

What's more, this book stole days of my life, not just a few hours, Days I will never, ever get back, I will do everything I can to keep other people from reading this book or any of Dave's others, .