- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Gollancz; New edition edition (6 Jun 1991)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0575050047
- ISBN-13: 978-0575050044
- Product Dimensions: 17.4 x 11 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 902,998 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Bill, the galactic hero, is sent on a suicide mission to a planet from which no one has ever returned. En-route, he must cope with the likes of Captain Dirk of the starship Gumption. Harry Harrison's previous books include "Bill, the Galactic Hero", while Robert Sheckley's include "Mindswap".
About the Author
Harry Harrison (1925 -) Harry Harrison was born Henry Maxwell Dempsey in Connecticut, in 1925. He is the author of a number of much-loved series including the Stainless Steel Rat and Bill the Galactic Hero sequences and the Deathworld Trilogy. He is known as a passionate advocate of Esperanto, the most popular of the constructed international languages, which appears in many of his novels. He has been publishing novels for over half a century and is perhaps best known for his seminal novel of overpopulation, Make Room! Make Room!, which was adapted into the cult film Soylent Green. Harry Harrison lives in the Republic of Ireland. Robert Sheckley (1928-2005) was a Hugo and Nebula-nominated American SF author.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
IT wasn't long before another book in the Bill, the Galactic Hero series appeared - Bill, the Galactic Hero ... On the Planet of Bottled Brains - this time written jointly by Harry Harrison and Robert Sheckley. Yet another military base on yet another miserable planet: here we find Bill having just unveiled yet another new foot. But that's the least of his worries when he is unwillingly volunteered for a suicide mission to Tsuris, the Mystery Planet (a kind of Bermuda Triangle in space). Crash landing on Tsuris, Bill soon meets up with the Tsurians: a race of disembodied intelligences, some housed in robot bodies or the appropriated bodies of other life forms, but most lying dormant in bottles awaiting re-birth. Bill suddenly finds himself, or rather his body, very much in demand. Oh dear! So what went wrong? How much of this book did Harrison himself actually write? The story is, at best, confusing, at worst, incomprehensible - I kept wondering if the pages were in the right order in my copy; the plot (what plot?) is full of holes; there are loose ends that are simply not tied up (How did Bill actually regain his physical body? What happened to his original body?) and continuity is poor (Chingers are described as being Earth's deadliest enemies; Bill claims that he always thought Captain Dirk was a famous hero but he had never heard of him before Chapter 4). Attempts are made to parody characters from Star Wars (Ham Duo and Chewgumma) and Star Trek (Captain Dirk and Mister Splock), but these characters are either badly researched or badly written as they bear little resemblance to the film/TV characters they are parodying.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4 reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Pointless, But Maybe That's the Point
3 May 2004
Format:Mass Market Paperback
This, the third installment of Bill the Galactic Hero, is by far the most pointless (or least pointed, depending on your point of view) yet. Among the disparate sci-fi references are Star Trek: TOS, Han Solo & Chewbacca, time travel, cyberpunk, and likely several others. Any one or two of these could be utilized in a first-rate parody - but that book would be a distant cousin several times removed from this book. What we have here, instead, is a hodge-podge of tangential references that momentarily amuse (if that) but come nowhere near providing a satisfying story. If you're a fan of the printed word you might like this book, because that's really all it amounts to: words printed on paper with the usual punctuation thrown in to form sentences. There's a vestigial plot, an intrusive narrative structure, faux profanity, alleged sex, and such low-grade humor that the puns in Book 2 seem like Mamet in retrospect - all of which I'm sure appeal to some audience out there, I just don't think I'm a part of it anymore.
Most of my frustration with the book is that plot points are raised, but never go anywhere. For instance, we are presented at one point with the Alterna-Crew of the USS Enterprise (cleverly renamed here the Gumption) from the "Mirror, Mirror" TV episode. We encounter them once, and they're referred to a couple more times, but nothing actually happens with them beyond getting Bill from plot point 1 to plot point 1.1 - and we really could have gone from point 0.9 to 1.2 and never noticed anything amiss. Likewise, we're told that the Alien Historian is trying to alter the past to create a future without war - and that he's succeeding; but we never encounter a single instance of an altered timeline as we travel from cover to cover. If these were isolated instances Harrison and Sheckley might be forgiven, but nothing of consequence ever takes place in the book and large sections could be removed without affecting the story on either side of it.
If you have a few hours to kill and are given the choice between reading this book or taking up self-dentistry, check to see if you'll get any anesthetic first. You won't want to read this book without it.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Read the first, Bill the Galactic Hero; skip this one
29 Jan 2003
Format:Paperback
I read the first one about 6 months ago. A all-round good time, one mishap after another, the first book you wanted to see want would happen next, BUT this one! Jumps from one story line to another, with unbelievable plots, I know that it is Science Fiction but the authors could at lest try to make it believable. I felt it was three or even four books that were not related to each other, I would not recommend this one at all. I will try one more of the series, but if the next one is just as bad no more.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Good no-brainer
4 May 2001
Format:Paperback
This is a good book for when you want to read something that has a plot and characters and all that literary stuff, but you don't want to have to actually think.
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