The Transall Saga, by Gary Paulsen

[rachelmanija]

Gary Paulsen wrote one (1) portal fantasy/post-apocalyptic science fiction book. It's not bad and he does play to his strengths by including a lot of survival stuff, but he's so much better at writing similar stuff set in our world that I can see why it was a one-off. The worldbuilding is okay but nowhere near as vivid and evocative as his real-world worldbuilding.

It's correctly called a saga because it has an epic amount of plot and event crammed into 248 words, which is both its strength and weakness. To give you a sense of what reading the book is like, I'll sample chapter 2.

(In chapter 1, Mark, a thirteen-year-old boy who loves nature, is camping alone when he sees a flaming ball of fire and gets sucked into a beam of blue light. The chapter ends with that, on page 5.)

Page 6: Mark wakes up in an alien jungle.

Page 7: Mark is charged by a large hairy animal resembling a buffalo and escapes by climbing a tree.

Page 8: Mark falls into quicksand. Don't panic. You know about this. Remember, you read about it in Hiker magazine.

Page 9: Mark escapes the quicksand.

Page 10: Tubular, scorpionlike insects with antennas and long pincers swarmed over him, biting small chunks out of his skin.

Page 11: The buffalo creature returns to attack him again. For the record, this is where I completely lost it.

The rest of the book continues in basically this vein, as Mark finds other humans, rescues a girl from an attacking Howling Beast, gets clubbed by her tribal chief, gets welcomed to the tribe, gets disillusioned with them and leaves when they wipe out a neighboring village, returns when they get attacked by slavers, gets clubbed and captured as a slave, escapes, returns to help the slavers and their captives when they all get attacked by cannibals, gets welcomed to the slaver tribe, etc! Etc! Etc!

Not Paulsen's best work but he'd have clearly had a very respectable career in pulp action had he taken that route.

Comments

[osprey_archer]

I've never heard of this book! I think on the whole I prefer the Gary Paulsen career we actually got, but the idea of Gary Paulsen, Pulp Action-Adventure Writer, is a fascinating road not traveled.

[minoanmiss]

well that's a relaxing nature hike.

[conuly]

He then goes home and becomes a doctor.

[conuly]

You laugh, but it made quite an impression on a lot of people. I have been hanging out at book finding communities for a long time now, first at LJ and now on reddit, and it's a more popular request than anything else not written by William Sleator.

[sovay]

Mark finds other humans, rescues a girl from an attacking Howling Beast, gets clubbed by her tribal chief, gets welcomed to the tribe, gets disillusioned with them and leaves when they wipe out a neighboring village, returns when they get attacked by slavers, gets clubbed and captured as a slave, escapes, returns to help the slavers and their captives when they all get attacked by cannibals, gets welcomed to the slaver tribe, etc! Etc! Etc!

Does he ever return home, or is it not that kind of portal fantasy/planetary romance?

[rachelmanija]

He returns home and becomes a doctor in the hope of averting the plague.

[rachelmanija]

That does not surprise me, actually.

[conuly]

Which, you know, ironically is gonna kill his future-wife. He doesn't seem to see it that way, but....

(Hey, the plague puts our current pandemic in perspective! Sure we had an insurrection, but at least nobody loosed a couple of nukes!)

[grayswandir]

it has an epic amount of plot and event crammed into 248 words

Hoping this is a typo for "pages," though it sounds like maybe it's equally true either way!

[rachelmanija]

I did mean pages but you're right that both are true.

[grayswandir]

A new drabble-adjacent genre: one epic per 248 words.

[conuly]

To be fair, a lot of the books people search for are just not that great. For a while you couldn't throw a rock without hitting somebody looking for This Place Has No Atmosphere, which is god-awful, and now there's a lot of people trying to find Spell For Chameleon, which is god-awful and misogynistic, and if it's not those it's always Virtual War, which... meh.

[rachelmanija]

This isn't a bad book. I just think he's written better books.

[slightweasel]

I really loved this book when I was younger! I can't remember a single thing about it, but I remember thinking it was awesome. :')

[ejmam]

It's a one-off? I thought my copy had several volumes. Maybe I'm confusing two different books. I'm away from home, and it might not have made it through all the ongoing purges. As you say, it not bad, but Paulsen has written better books.

[lemonsharks]

Well that is a lot