Book review: The Other Log of Phileas Fogg by Phillip Jose Farmer

I found The Other Log of Phileas Fogg at the dollar store. It sounded vaguely interesting, so I bought it. It's a retelling of the Jules Verne classic Around the World in 80 Days, and I typically like retellings and Verne novels. Requisite Amazon summary:

In a delicious slice of sci-fi whimsy that sits cleverly alongside Verne's original tale, Phileas Fogg's epic global journey is not the product of a daft wager but, in fact, a covert mission to chase down the elusive Captain Nemo - who is none other than Professor Moriarty.
A secret alien war has raged on Earth for years and is about to culminate in this epic race.
A novel in the Wold Newton universe, in which characters such as Sherlock Holmes, Flash Gordon, Doc Savage, James Bond and Jack the Ripper are all mysteriously connected.

Weird, right? I felt it was pretty reaching. I know I have little creativity or writerly instincts of my own, but it feels weird and sort of lazy to me to take a classic work of literature and just like shoehorn random crap into it to make a book of your own (aka Pride & Prejudice & Zombies), or insist that the author TOTALLY meant something with their work that you know they did not (aka The Jane Austen Rules: A Classic Guide to Modern Love or Planet Narnia). Farmer started to lose me the second he said that Captain Nemo was the same person as Moriarty. Like come on. I like a mashup, but that's a bit much.

The writing style was very dense, and there were a lot of action scenes where it was kind of hard to understand what was going on. I know Farmer was trying to sound Verne-like, but this was even denser than Verne, IMO. There was this communication device that I did not realize was also a transporter (beam me up etc.) until like 2/3rds of the way through the book. At least Aouda turned out to be a great sharpshooter, rather than just a damsel in distress. You also have to have read Around the World in 80 Days immediately before reading this book, or you will be confused as to what's going on. 

Farmer ends the book by slyly pointing out he and Phineas Fogg have the same initials, which segues us into an essay at the end of the book by some other sci fi writer that said a meteor hit a part of England where people like Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty, the Scarlet Pimpernel and Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett (or their relatives) were hanging out in, and that's why they're all amazing and have superpowers or whatever. Oh, and they're all related, including Farmer. What kind of English Meteor Extended Universe?? That's another level, to put the author himself into it. Yikes. 

Cover notes: the airship (?) does not come into the book or have anything to do with it.

Score: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Read in: January 9-10
From: dollar store
Format: paperback
Status: giving away