Encased in stone for millions of years as a result of a failed experiment, atomic scientist Ulysses Singing Bear is liberated from his imprisonment by a bolt of lightning during a battle between two races of bipedal creatures. One group appears to have evolved from cats while the other, raccoons. Ulysses soon learns that humans have long since become extinct and the earth populated by sentient beings evolved from familiar animals of the late 20th century.

As Ulysses acclimates to his new environment, the Wufea come to worship him as a god and ask for his help in defeating the Great Devourer known as Wurutana. To uphold his status as a deity, Ulysses has little choice but to agree and, along with an army of Wufea warriors, treks across the wilderness to do battle with what he understands to be an enormous tree that is spreading across the land. Along the way, he manages to form a truce between the Wufea and their enemy, the Wagarondit. He even recruits Wagarondit warriors to join the offensive.

All the while, they are guided by Ghlikh, a pygmy creature with batwings who offers Ulysses information about the land and peoples ahead of them, including a village of humans who live along the southern coast. In order to reach them, however, Ulysses and his armies must cross Wurutana. Yet, Ulysses senses that Ghlikh is withholding information and possibly leading them into a trap.

Will Ulysses and his troops survive their passage through Wurutana and their encounters with the treacherous denizens within its vast network of tangled branches, vines, trunks, and waterways?

At its core, The Stone God Awakens is a fish out of water adventure much like Farmer’s The Green Odyssey published 13 years earlier, or Jack Vance’s Planet of Adventure series, or even The Time Machine by H.G. Welles. In this case, Farmer adds a few imaginative twists including the evolution of various animal species, an uncommon antagonist, and the development of plant-based science and engineering. The fact that an atomic scientist displays such exceptional prowess in survival, military tactics, and political leadership is, at times, a stretch. Still, The Stone God Awakens is another outstanding tale from one of the giants of the genre. ( )

I love some of Farmer's works. The River World series was amazing. On the other hand he writes some books that are just interestingly odd or in this case uninteresting and odd.

I did not finish this book. Is it possible I would have loved it had I read to the finish? I think not. ( )

Question: What would you do if you were minding your business in 1985 Syracuse, working on a ray to freeze atoms, when something goes horribly wrong and the next thing you know, you're in the middle of a war zone between two primitive alien species? That's exactly the situation Ulysses Singing Bear finds himself in. Add to that, the stone-like petrification caused by the ray has left him as a statue for an untold number of years and the war he wakes up to is over him, the "Stone God" of the two warring tribes.

Of course, this is just the beginning of Singing Bear's problems. He's in a strange world, with strange people who think he's a god, and now there's a prophecy involving his coming battle with ANOTHER god. Good morning, indeed.

What I love about Farmer is that he creates such fascinating worlds. Here, a twentieth century man finds himself surrounded by sentient humanoids that appear to be descended from common cats, raccoons, elephants, and leopards of our day. They have their own language, and there has clearly been some sort of gap in the knowledge obtained by man during his time on the planet... if this IS Earth, which the newly revived Ulysses can't say for sure, though he does suspect as much. Also, from the moment Ulysses is awake, the events take off at a lightning pace. There is very little downtime either for our hero or for the reader because now that the "Stone God" is awake, so many things are set in motion. These events lead to a pretty action-packed climax that makes the book hard to put down. ( )

This book has some wonderfully unusual ideas in it. The premise alone - a scientist being 'turned to stone' and reawakening millions of years later to an Earth completely changed - is full of potential. But unfortunately, I felt that this book did not live up to that potential, and was not strong enough in its other aspects to make up for it.

The characters are completely empty, including the main character, who seems to be a bit of a Mary Sue. I only made it about half-way through the book, yet not once did the main character get something wrong or fail to act cleverly and decisively in a tight situation. He even has some prescient qualities about him, instantly "knowing" that certain characters could not be trusted, which spoilt the reveal for the reader if nothing else. He almost effortlessly brings together two warring species. He is able to pick-up two new languages (spoken by sentient cats) in a matter of weeks. And of course, he is surrounded by a primitive race who regard him as a god, and upon whom he is able to bestow technology from his time, recreating it from scratch like some furry MacGyver.

The ideas are novel, and sometimes authors in this genre can make up for their lack of human insight with their insight into technological or scientific aspects, but I didn't feel that was true in this case. I had just finished off reading Harrison's 'West of Eden', in which the entire psychology culture and language of a dinoasaurian sentient species fit together as a well thought-out harmonious whole, so perhaps it was a hard act to follow. However, I did not feel that there was _anything_ about the non-human sentients in this book that reflected their underlying biology and evolutionary history, except in the most superficial ways. In 'West of Eden', the non-human sentients are utterly alien - as they should be - thinking, organising and behaving in a completely different way to humans with a completely different set of values. If domestic cats ever did evolve into sentient beings, they too would be utterly different to us, yet all they seemed to be in this novel was a bunch primitive humans in fur suits. The treatment of female cat-people was particularly predictable and boring.

Perhaps this book might be fun to read just for the bizarre ideas, if one enjoys back-to-back action, or has a thing for cats. Otherwise there are other better choices for speculative fiction. ( )