Most helpful customer reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
deep, intelligent, often amusing but impertinent satire, April 3 2004
His father Carb a notorious malcontent was forced to leave planet earth a few years ago before the Gov and his goons made an example of him. He left behind his wife and son Frek to live in a bio-tweaked house tree in the correct village of Middleville where technology insures everything is done according to ecological righteousness. Though still a preteen, Frek got the message of what happens to those who challenge the authority of Gov.By 3003, twelve year old Frek remains cautious until a miniscule alien vessel lands underneath his bed. The Anvil space ship insists that Frek was their destination as he must save the world with an elixir to repair the biome. Gov declares the son a chip off the old block of the father, an enemy combatant. Meanwhile Anvil has marketing plans for Frek and other humans. Frek accompanied by his canine Wow is on the run from the law while on a quest across the universe when all he wants is to become a teenager. FREK AND THE ELIXIR is a deep, intelligent, often amusing but always impertinent satire ridiculing many of today's "truths" by extrapolating these so called universals accompanied by technological advances a millennium into the future. The story line uses action but ironically provides an outrageous look at a disturbingly closed-fortressed culture in which differences are outlawed as all must support the Gov. Besides Frek being a terrific hero as he grows up rather quickly (aliens and the government will do that), the cast adds depth and the technology is sardonically as off the wall as this wild futuristic tale makes 1984 look freedom loving. Harriet Klausner
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The Golden Age of Science Fiction is Twelve., April 1 2004
I think it was David Hartwell who said that "The Golden Age of science fiction is twelve." Twelve is the age when you first read that book (Asimov's "Foundation"? Clarke's "Childhood's End?" Frank Herbert's "Dune?") that blows open your mind, and makes you look at a brand new world (this one.)
Rudy Rucker's new novel is the third attempt in the last couple of years by a major science fiction author to recapture the primal excitement of that moment by embracing and radically re-inventing familiar ideas and sub-genres. John Clute's "Appleseed" is a dense, trippy, phantasmagoric riff on the 1920's and 30's space adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs and E. E. Doc Smith; Gene Wolfe's "The Knight" is a crystalline post-modern distillation of Mervyn Peake and J. R. R. Tolkien. Now, in early 2004, comes Frek with his elixir--a brash, sardonic, endlessly inventive take on the 1950's counter-culture socio-political adventure-romps like Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination" and Pohl's and Kornbluth's "The Space Merchants."
In 2666 multinational corporation Nu-Bio-Com releases a virus that kills off the reproductive capacity of every single organism on earth, except those that it had bio-engineered. In other words, it now holds the copyright on the entire biome.
In 3003, Frek, a twelve-year old kid (coincidence?--I think not) goes on a galaxy, no, universe-spanning, adventure to fix their mistake.
His adventure has everything you could possibly want from a book like this and then some. Plus, like every great science fiction novel, "Frek and the Elixir" is really about the present--about the power of corporations, about media and entertainment, about bioengineering, about quantum mechanics, about your wife or girlfriend, your next-door neighbor, and your boss, and about you, at age twelve, and now (do you really think you have changed?)
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