Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding work, a must read!
Review: I've read alot of sci-fi, and this is one of the best works I've run across, ever. Reading the naysayers reviews leaves me shaking my head--what kind of garbage do they enjoy? I was able to identify with the main character, even as he changed identities many times over, for survival. He perservered, and did what was necessary to survive, yet maintained his humanity and compassion throughout his lifelong ordeal, as well as his very human need to find the truth. You meet his character at age eleven, and follow his life through age forty-seven plus. If you keep in mind the town he orginated in, his travels were amazing. Many are disappointed by the ending, but if you think hard about it, it was exceptional, to bust-up the "hydraulic empire" without the selfish act of revealing himself for mere reconcilliation and self-gratification. As for the lack of technology some are unhappy with, that was the point, for crying out loud, comparing one end of the road to the other, and wondering how that came to be light years from Earth! This book is a must read for science fiction fans, and actually a good introduction if you're new to the genre. It has some parallels to Philip Farmer's "To Your Scattered Bodies Go," and dare I say this is better? It's my first Larry Niven, and I can't wait to devour the rest of his works.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Nothing happens in this book, except that the main character wanders around haplessly learning that there are other cities nearby that do things differently from his own home town. The few interesting, or exciting parts of this book ended too quickly and the main character's misery of hunger and servitude was boring and lasted far too long. I lost track of how many times the main character was deliriously hungry, tired, or "speckles-shy". I got tired of reading about how he stumbled into a village, or prison camp, gets married, or laid, then gets sold, or chased out of town.
Rating:
Summary: Not up to par for Niven
Review: I have read and liked many Niven novels. This one was a clunker. Either I wasn't paying enough attention (not usually a problem) or there were major jumps in logic being made with no explanation. It's like the characters would make intuitive leaps but I didn't have enough information to leap with them. Very frustrating. And even so, I drudged on to the end of the novel in hope of some higher explanation for everything. No such luck. Feels to me like Niven was just trying to get this one out on deadline and had given up half way there.
Rating:
Summary: How can people not like this?
Review: This is one of Larry Niven's best novels, if not THE best.
Humanity is colonising an alien world, but they seem unlike your 'normal' humans, lack of adventure, no questions, don't rock the boat. Jemmy is of a different mold and wants to explore - how he does it and what he meets on the road are the stuff of the old-style Niven.
Well-described, thoughtfully worked-out, this book had me gripped.The book begs for a sequel - please, Larry!
Rating: 
Summary: Below Par from Larry Niven
Review: Larry Niven usually tells a great story. Destiny's Road started out with so much promise, but half way through the story you got the feeling that the writer just wanted to get it over with. The ending held no real surprises and was rather trite has the "truth" of the road is told.
Rating: 
Summary: A solid effort from Niven
Review: Niven builds a lot of mystery into Destiny, the unusually well-realized and believable world where this epic is set, and decoding its secrets kept me turning the pages of this long and sometimes oddly-plotted book. Some sections of the episodic narrative introduce too many characters too quickly, and Niven's often cryptic dialogue can be hard to follow. But the hero is appealing (even if it's a little silly the way women keep throwing themselves at him, sometimes in groups of two or even six (!)) and the architecture of the story -- and the world itself -- stays impressive.
Rating:
Summary: Read TV guide, you'll be more entertained
Review: I read Lucifers Hammer a few years back and thought it was a great book. My aunt read Destiny's Road and loaned me the book. Now I wish she hadn't. I have a endless list of books on my reading list, and I should have picked one of those instead of wasting my time on this. The book just started out of nowhere, with no good explanations for anything, skipped years and years, and read like a computer manual. You don't get a feel for any of the characters and by the end you just want them all to disappear. Just because it's a sci-fi book doesn't me it has to be purposelly confusing and pointless. Lucifers Hammer was the first Larry Niven book I read, and Destiny's Road will probably be the last.
Rating: 
Summary: Too long, or not long enough.
Review: That is the only problem I found with this novel. While the science is decent, the tightly knit structure of the story starts to loosen as the book progresses. Niven's remarks about the story being overdue hint that perhaps not as much time and care were spent on the latter parts of the story, as the episodes jump ahead through time without much binding. I would have welcomed a longer book, in which these gaps were filled in. On the other hand, it would have been okay to end the story earlier, at any one of several stopping points, with a clear intent for a sequel. Then the author could have spent more time exploring Jemmy's circumstances and decision-making on the various turns his life takes in the latter half of the book that got short shrift. One last bit of quibbling. The computer at the hospital was almost a duex ex machina, allowing all the lose ends to be tied up. Overall, an interesting story (other reviews and the editor's notes tell the basic plot, so I won't repeat it here) that could have been a little fatter, like Destiny life itself.
Rating:
Summary: Keeps your interest from start to finish!
Review: The main character and his journey of historic and personal discovery was so interesting that it kept my interest all through the book. Jemmy Bloocher lives in Spiraltown on the planet Destiny. As the forgotten colony's remnants of technology decays their knowledge and history fade into legend and their isolation creates a rural society cut off from the rest of the world except for a twice yearly caravan that arrives down the long peninsula's road. Catastrophic events propel Jemmy from this isolated haven to his reluctant quest for the answers to where the road ends and his own survival. I really enjoyed this book and wish for a sequel. I can't give it 5 stars because it seemed to leave out many details about the geography of the planet and details about the spaceships and what they were doing. A sequel would help there. Since it's Jemmy's story and told from his perspective it was easy to ignore these flaws. It's a very interesting story and it's easy to feel for the main character who is really just an average guy trying to survive and find happiness.
Rating:
Summary: Evidence of how SF can put ideas ahead of good writing
Review: I skimmed through half of this book. Why shouldn't I? Niven obviously did when he wrote "Destiny's Road." Although the maturing of the SF genre has empowered editors to cull most of the worst writing from the field, this book is prime evidence that SF editors still allow known writers to get away with lazy writing, weak characterization and illogical plotting. Niven has never had any real sense of human interaction-- he's always written with the sensitivity of a 16-year-old boy,-- but he's always had great ideas worth reading about if you like Science Fiction. Here, he does his best to make it unreadable with a disjointed story that feels like he cut and pasted together unrelated stories and tried to make them fit. Really, just a plain bad story. The basic idea is brilliant: in brief, the power dynamic of a distant colony comes from the fact that only some colonists have access to potassium on a largely potassium-free world, and without it, other colonists will die. He calls the food additive 'speckles' and it becomes a powerful trade item between the haves and have-nots. The first and last chapters alone might have made a simple, brilliant short story. But it's a book with 350 pages of junk inbetween. Honestly, as you'd expect with Niven, a lot of his descriptions of alien flora and fauna are very engaging indeed; but over 430 pages, this ends up just being details in an irritating story that is scrapped together, and even worse, the story isn't believable. The plot has no momentum of its own, and in the end whole chapters and passages do nothing except delay the end of the book until Niven could meet the word count demanded in his contract with TOR books. If there was any actual character development in what is allegedly a coming-of-age story, or if the story twists were interesting, it would make sense. But there's not. Niven says in his author's note that the book was "four years overdue;" no kidding--- the book reads like he sat down to finish it with the same attitude the rest of us have when we sit down to do our taxes.
|
