On My Way to Paradise

by Dave Wolverton

Book Overview

Won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Special Award for "Best Novel in the English Language."Here is a powerful first novel, at once disturbing and compelling - the chronicle of one man's odyssey of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553276107
• Release Date: November 1989
• Publisher: Spectra
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.1" x 1.2" x 4.2"

Customer Reviews

There Should be A Ten Star Rating For This Book.

Hello:This book is everything the "positive reviews" above say, and more. From the first page, until the last paragraph, to the last three words of that last page, this book will awe, inspire, and haunt you in ways few other books ever will. It is a work of science fiction genuis that has been totally over looked and neglected for far too long. And that is a shame. This book should have won Hugo and Nebula and Campbell. Sadly it did not, as the politics of the day in the Sci Fi community were decidedly "anti-war" in any way when it was on the shelves.It is long past over do for a new printing, (but better cover plz)Like one reviewer above, I found six copies of this book at a book store and I bought them all. And I proceeded to hand em out, along with A.A Attanasios Radix. What a good year for books that was. Paradise and Radix combined could ruin you for other books for years to come. It's impossible to top this kind of quality. But back to this book...You are unlikely to find this books equal on any shelf today. The new Space Opera (my favorite) is sadly laced with affection for the Marxism that never happened (thank god) and the rest is now so PC and Left Wing, as to be nearly unreadable, or at best, as gray and boring as a crowd of people in Soviet Russias old days. (they all wore black or gray)If you read only one Sci Fi book in the next year, make it this one. And keep your copy, for you will need to read again one day. No one reads this book just one time, in their life time. It's simply that damn good.I wish Dave Wolverton would do this kind of book again, and do it well. Someone tell him he should.John H. Myers Jr.

tour de force

I read this novel after reading review by Orson Scott Card praising it highly. It is my favorite sci-fi novel of all time. It is powerfully psychological,clearly influenced by Phillip K Dick, but it is also marvelous for its "hard" technical content, as well as very intellectual in the way the hero examines the moral questions of his world. Plot is also handled very well, with lots of violent action, and images which are simply unforgettable. How can this be a first novel? It is moving on every level and I consider it a masterpiece.

On my way to paradise

This was Dave's first title published other than short stories. It is one of the best pieces of Science Fiction ever written. He has an incredible ability to place the reader in the environment and have the action surround you. His characters are well developed and he places them in situations rich and wonderful. Most writers aim for a story this good to be the peak of their careers. I hope that Dave can write more stories that are somewhere near this good.

The best SF book I ever read and reread and ...

I know this book is long out of print and I agree with other reviewers that it should really be republished. It is simply the best SF book I have ever read. I just read it again for the third time and it is still as good as I remember it to be when it first came out. It is simply very hard to find a good book like this in the genre -- believe me I read SF almost fulltime! Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about other books Wolverton has written since his first book.

Scifi paradise

Angelo Osic, an aging pharmacist in wartorn Panama, is drawn into a complicated political plot when he reaches out in compassion to help an injured woman fleeing shadowy forces. Osic kills a man, and is forced to flee Earth and make a new life among Latino refugee/mercenaries, hired to help a Japanese-derived culture on a distant planet defeat its cultural rival. Trained ruthlessly in war, he struggles to return to his own self image of a man of peace, a healer, and a man of compassion -- even as he sees these things fail and fade.For a scifi lover, this book is a feast for the mind; nay, more than a feast: a smorgasborg. Neural implants, brain transplant, genetic alteration, jacked-in training, bioweapons, AI, space travel, future weapons; you name it. Yet all of these technological developments are worked into the plot smoothly and believably. And most important, they are not the focus of the novel: that focus is the moral development of a man struggling to make sense of what his life has become; struggling to regain moral agency in an immoral world. Yet there are many other interesting ideas on display, as well: culture clash, the nature of reality, what it means to be human, and what the meaning of culture is.Most novels are fire and forget; they do not touch your self in any real way beyond the pleasure of escape. This one will have you thinking about it years after your read it for the nth time.