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A donkey and a zebra grow tired of hearing about Gone to Be Snakes Now
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I know everyone is sick of hearing about
Gone to Be Snakes Now, the novel by Neal Bell that I was plowing through in a
previous post. So why am I posting about it again? For one very simple reason: it
blew my mind with its unrelenting disregard for plot, character, consistency, and anything approaching a coherent world view. Heck, it didn't even have a coherent timeline! Folks, a book this weirdly, spastically, one might even say aggressively, incoherent deserves an audience. This was not your garden variety bad novel. This is a forgotten gem of awfulness amid the ruble of sci-fi philosophizing.
It did leave me with some questions though:
* Was the fire that burned down the gigantic pickle barrel supposed to be allegorical, or merely tragic?
* Where did all the chickens come from?
* Where did the man dressed as a giant bird get his supply of strontium 90 water? And aren't there quicker ways of killing someone than giving them bone cancer? I mean, if your goal is to eat them that evening?
* What killed all the snakes? Did they come back to life in order to terrorize the community theater company, or were those different snakes?
* And while we're on the subject of snakes, wasn't it a bit heavy-handed to call the mutant snake woman Eve?
I could go one. I could write an entire post about the shear inanity of the fact that many of the characters lived in giant gas pumps. But I won't. I will, however, leave you with this image, because I can't sum up this book without resorting to Lolcats. The Frog Bag Blog: appreciating terrible science fiction so you don't have to. You're welcome!
