I have mixed feeling about this Farmer novel. There are sections of the book which are absolutely 5 stars. Farmer was one of the good authors from the Golden Age of SF. His River World series is amazing. Other of his works are so strange and creepy they didn't make good stories. Some of his choices in this book were fantastic to the point of annoyance and the book was 25% to long. If you accept this story as written it is a good yarn. If you like Edgar Rice Burroughs you may like this book. ( )

The Centaur-like figure in the Illustration is a plant-man, and the world is 15,000,000,000 years older. The planet's running down and the members of the quest team are engaged in a revenge journey. Entertaining. ( )

Dark is the Sun follows Deyv, a young man on an Earth of several billion years from now, as he proceeds through three quests. At first, he sets out to find a mate. This quest quickly becomes a quest to hunt down a thief who steals his soul egg, a person’s most precious material possession. In the process, he synchs up with an Archkerri, a creature genetically engineered by the humans of many generations past, who tells him that the world will soon end, fried by the clustered stars in Earth’s vicinity. (The novel was written when the Big Crunch hypothesis seemed to be better supported by the data than has been the case lately.) This leads to a third quest, an attempt to flee to another planet or another universe, in which the human race can abide. In the course of his quests, Deyv meets a witch, an alien, a crafty creature of free and easy moral principles who is a distant descendant of foxes, and many other exotic creatures. He and his companions also encounter many artifacts which have survived from earlier, more technologically advanced generations of humans, e.g., rubber roads (traffic lights still working), indestructible buildings, the soul egg trees, which are creations of earlier humans’ biotechnology, and more. Given all this, the setting itself becomes one of the most interesting elements of the novel. ( )

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