Krishna
This is a book that intends to be both a humour book as well as a science fiction book but it fails miserably on both counts in my opinion.
The story is about Prince Teppic, who is the son of the current King Teppicymon XXVII of Djelibeiby, a remote desert kingdom. He is off to graduate as an Assassin in a far away Academy, when the King kicks the bucket and he has to assume the throne. Against his and the late King’s better judgment, they try to build the biggest Pyramid ever, not realizing that they were tearing the very fabric of time. (‘Wait… what?’ you say? It gets weirder. Please standby)
The story involves the all knowing minister Dios, who is really the power behind the throne, his assistant Koomi, Ptaclusp who is the builder of Pyramids and his sons Ptaclusp IIa and Ptaclusp IIb (Yes, really).
The science fiction part fails because the country looks and feels very much like Egypt, except that it is populated fully by Englishmen, thinking and talking and behaving like the English (that they are), but worshipping animist Gods with all kinds of animal heads and body parts (like the ancient Egyptians but in a much more skewed way). The humour part fails only because exactly two or three ideas do the rounds for ever, being repeated ad nauseum… For instance, a camel called You Bastard (No, I am not kidding) is, like all camels really are (according to the author), a genius in maths. So you get endless variations of it thinking of bivariant equations and stuff like that when it appears to be peacefully chewing the cud… You get the idea. It is funny the first time, sure. But after the twenty fourth time, you want to scream ‘I want a different idea! Please write something else funny“. And the endless repetitions of how, due to the time variation, people get cloned and appear four in a row (don’t ask) gets to be very irritating as well.
This is the start of a Trilogy called The Gods Trilogy, but I guess I will not be reading the other two, as I am not exactly waiting with bated breath to find out what happens next.
In defense of the author, it may be just that I don’t get his kind of humour.
Please save your time and give this one a miss, if your taste in humour is anything similar to mine.
Let us say a 1/10
— Krishna