Dayworld Breakup

Rating:
Summary: Tons of action, few new ideas
Review: Philip Jose Farmer's Dayworld Breakup is the conclusion of a trilogy begun by Dayworld and continued in Dayworld Rebel. In the classic Dayworld, Farmer describes a world where the population problem has been solved by allowing each person to only live one day a week; they spend the rest of the week as stone statues in "stoning booths", using no resources and taking up minimal space. In Dayworld Rebel, Farmer describes an effort to overthrow the Dayworld system. Dayworld Breakup takes up where Rebel left off, with hero Jefferson Caird on the roof of the apartment tower where he has just forced World Councilor Ananda to broadcast the truth to the residents of Dayworld. What follows is a high-speed thrill ride of chase scenes, narrow escapes, shoot-outs, hostage-taking, and wanton destruction as Caird and his trusted female companion Panthea Snick try to outwit the law and take over an underground organization. Unfortunately, the climax, where they chain themselves to the gorgonized body of Dayworld's organizer in the central plaza, is a considerable disappointment. The remaining third of the novel is rather slower, and considerably less interesting. The characters will already be familiar to readers of the Dayworld novels, but they are neither especially engaging nor particularly realistic. This isn't a problem during the slam-bang action sequences, but during the last third of the book, where the story turns psychological (again), it undercuts the reader's ability to care about the hero's condition. There's plenty of technology to interest science fiction readers, but don't expect to learn anything useful from this book. Farmer's pseudo-science is too far out to be of much practical interest. In the last analysis, Farmer's real strength is his imaginative ideas: a million-mile river populated by everyone who ever lived (Riverworld), a repressed man who falls in love with an alien insect (The Lovers), a future where people only live one day out of the week (Dayworld). But brilliant as the original concept behind Dayworld was, Dayworld Breakup has little to offer us in the way of ideas. Readers of the Dayworld series will want to read this book just to see how the story turns out (Dayworld Rebel just sort of stops in mid-stride), and science fiction fans who like plenty of action should be more than satisfied with this book. As for the rest... perhaps someday Farmer will write a series whose conclusion is equal to the promise of its beginning, but this isn't the one.