Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 12
March 27, 2023
March to Other Worlds Day 27 The Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon
March to Other Worlds Day 27 The Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon
For Day 27, I want to bring you back to the middle of the twentieth century and the first series I ever read. I was six years old and we got the first book, The Tower Treasure, as part of a deal on the back of a cereal box. When I finished it, my father (probably unintentionally) confirmed me as a reader forever by asking me to tell him the entire plot at the breakfast table. I ended up reading all of the blue hardbacks over the next four years and I’m fond of the Hardy Boys series to this day.
Set in the 1960s, Frank and Joe Hardy are brothers, eighteen and seventeen respectively, and are what we might call good American boys—popular with their classmates and wholesome and decent. Their father is a famous detective, and they are desperate to follow in his footsteps, constantly getting themselves and their friends into trouble.
The Tower Treasure may be the first book in the series, but it’s far from the best. So, for the March to Other Worlds, I’ve decided to review The Mystery of Cabin Island. This was my favorite book in the series as a child probably because the Hardy Boys and their friends are never faced with a situation that seemed utterly farfetched for a bunch of high school kids to handle.
The basic plot of the novel is that, as a reward for recovering a wealthy man’s car during the sixth book in the series, the brothers are offered the opportunity to stay at a remote cabin during Christmas break. The cabin is on a small island in the bay that gives their hometown its name, Bayport. Access to the cabin is over the ice, which means walking or using ice boats (which I found very cool both as a child and as an adult). The owner of the cabin also asks the brothers to keep their eyes out for his fifteen-year-old grandson who has run away from boarding school and he hopes might be on the island.
From moment one, things get a little tense. The first time the brothers and their friends travel to the island they find a belligerent man who orders them off the property. Uncertain what to do, the brothers retreat until they learn that this man has no right to be there. In fact, he’s trying to buy the island but the owner refuses to sell.
To add realistic tension to the story, two boys who dropped out from the brothers’ school start harassing them. At first it seems as if they are just being bullies, but it quickly becomes apparent that they have some connection to the belligerent man. Notice—no guns or over the top threats. These are realistic problems that anyone reading could imagine himself facing.
The weather gets worse and the brothers and their friends are forced to deal not only with the elements but with strange sounds and evidence that other unknown people are on the small island. There are also a series of incidents that make them feel unsafe, but don’t deter them from staying on the island and trying to find out what’s going on. The answer to that is the possibility that the secret to the location of some valuable medals which were stolen from the man who owns the cabin, might exist on Cabin Island.
The more realistic tone of the book combined with good pacing and interesting problems made this novel a pleasure to read as both a child and an adult. Perhaps that’s the reason that the Hardys are still popular today. They show up in television series, comic books, and at least four series of books. It may not technically be a fantasy world, but as a child I used to dream about solving mysteries beside Frank and Joe and when someone started bashing in mailboxes on our street, my friends and I got out the Hardy Boys Detective Handbook to help us gather evidence and try and solve the crime.
https://www.amazon.com/Hardy-Boys-08-...
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March 26, 2023
March to Other Worlds Day 26 The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
March to Other Worlds Day 26 The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
As we get close to the end of our fourth week of the March, I want to introduce the most difficult book in this year’s event. It’s called The Eyre Affair and I’m fairly certain I didn’t understand everything I was supposed to in this novel. And yet, I really loved it! On the surface, this is an alternate history style sf novel which is an English professor’s wet dream and the stuff of nightmares for the poor student forced to take the class as a basic requirement of graduation. Put simply, this is an earth in which everyone on the planet is apparently obsessed with literature. People name their children after great (and minor authors). Everyone seems to belong to societies that obsess about individual books or authors and the academic controversies which surround them. They even get into brawls over whose work or theory is better.
It's also a more traditional alternate history narrative, although I couldn’t figure out the point of departure from our world. England and Russia are still fighting the Crimean War well over a century after it began. A mammoth corporation (called Goliath) has taken over the country and rules from just barely behind the scenes. There are 27 special ops bureaus—the purpose of which is often not public knowledge. They deal with such things as literary violations (like the theft of a rare manuscript) and vampires, werewolves, terrorism, and just about everything else you can imagine. Oh, and there is time travel and potentially catastrophic time events.
The plot of the novel involves a wonderfully evil villain (Acheron Hades) with a range of not-well-understood, seemingly supernatural powers. He knows when someone speaks his name. He seems essentially immune to bullets. He can’t be tracked by conventional technology. He has the ability to mentally dominate weak-minded (read ordinary) people. And he’s really, really, wicked.
Our heroine, Thursday Next, is the only person who has seen him and is still around. She’s a lowly Literary Tec, Special Ops level 27, but she gets pulled into an attempt to catch Hades with tragic consequences. Naturally, she doesn’t give up. And when Hades discovers that Thursday’s uncle has invented a portal that lets people go into books or take the characters out of them, all of literature is endangered as the world’s most wicked man suddenly finds himself able to commit crimes on fiction’s most loved characters.
This is a truly fascinating book. It is not a fast read, even though it’s really not all that long. There is just so very much happening all the time within its pages that you can’t force yourself to read quickly because you know that in doing so you will miss the subtle connections that bring these pages to life.
https://www.amazon.com/Eyre-Affair-Th...
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March 25, 2023
Science Fiction and Fantasy Panel
On Tuesday night at 6pm Eastern Time, I will be participating in a panel entitled: Science Fiction and Fantasy: Genre and Community hosted by the English Department of Fordham University. In addition to myself, the panel will host authors like Jane Lindskold and Paul Levinson and many others. If you're interested, you can register here:
March to Other Worlds Day 25 Bite Me by Marion G. Harmon
March to Other Worlds Day 25 Bite Me by Marion G. Harmon
As we continue with the fourth week of the March to Other Worlds, I offer a unique book in the superhero genre by Marion G. Harmon whose work has appeared in the March to Other Worlds 2020 and 2022. Harmon is best known for his Wearing the Cape series—one of the best superhero worlds on the market today. Bite Me is a spinoff novel from Harmon’s main storyline. It follows the exploits of Jacky Bouchard, aka Artemis, as she travels to New Orleans to help police identify vampires preying on underaged people. Jacky is the victim of a supervillain who transformed into a vampire after the Event. He was one of the very rare vampire transformations that was powerful enough to make his own vampire progeny. Jacky was the result—victim of a really bad stalker. This is important background information because almost all of the other vampires in New Orleans became vampires like other people become superheroes and supervillains—as a result of their strong desires and a crisis situation. Jacky doesn’t like playing Goth girl and Anne Rice afficionado. What she enjoys is being a covert intelligence specialist, and she learns in the course of this novel that she has a lot more to learn about her chosen profession.
One of the things I like best about Harmon novels is his ability to create credible superhuman “cultures” for want of a better word. In most of the U.S. breakthroughs follow the superhero template. In other places, like Japan, other cultural phenomena influence the transformations. In New Orleans, there is a strong tendency for a supernatural flair to influence the breakthroughs—vampires, witches, werewolves, voodoo queens, etc. It gives the city a flavor very different than the Chicago Harmon has introduced in his other books.
The plot of Bite Me very quickly becomes complicated by the introduction of the possibility that someone has the ability to create new vampires. If this is like Jacky’s stalker, it is conceivably the beginning of an apocalyptic event as vampires sire vampires who can sire more vampires, spreading across the country and eventually the world. So, the stakes are high as Jacky investigates. The action is also quite strong, but again, different in tone from what we see in the Wearing the Cape novels. If you are interested in seeing what vampires would be like in a superhero universe, this is the book for you.
https://www.amazon.com/Bite-Me-Easy-N...
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March 24, 2023
March to Other Worlds Day 24 The Valley of Despair by Chris L. Adams
March to Other Worlds Day 24 The Valley of Despair by Chris L. Adams
Chris L. Adams has a talent for writing books that feel like they were crafted by some of the masters writing in the first half of the twentieth century, but read like they were written today. The result are novels that feel like lost works by people like Edgar Rice Burroughs. That’s who I think of when I read The Valley of Despair, which was recently reissued as a fabulous audiobook narrated by William L. Hahn.
Adams starts with a bang. His hero, German WWI pilot Erik von Mendelsohn, has crashed in the jungle and is trying to survive a group of apes that have taken the wrong kind of interest in him. Desperate to escape, he reaches the edge of the jungle near a high cliff face and the apes who are in hot pursuit…refuse to follow him past the tree line. It’s a simple idea very subtly conveyed in the story, but it set all the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. These totally aggressive and fearsome animals won’t follow our hero as he attempts to climb the cliff face to get away from them. It’s difficult not to ask yourself—what are the apes afraid of? What the heck is Erik getting himself into? And the tension just keeps ratcheting higher from this point forward.
Erik is a well thought out character—he’s smart, a bit impulsive, and a little too curious for his own good. The supporting cast is equally interesting. I don’t want to give away the plot, but the people Erik finds and gets into trouble with are equally brave and capable—and the problem they have to confront is better thought out than a lot of “lost world” adventure-style stories I’ve encountered. In short, if you want a fast-paced well-developed adventure story with great characters, you should give Valley of Despair a try.
Now that you’ve decided to give The Valley of Despair a try, you should really consider listening to it in audio format. It’s a short book, so it’s very inexpensive, but a good narrator (and Will Hahn is one of the best) and a few sound effects go the extra mile to really bring this book to life.
Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Valley-Despair...
Audible: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Valley...
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March 23, 2023
March to Other Worlds Day 23 The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
March to Other Worlds Day 23 The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
On Day 2 of the March this year, we took a look at Godzilla vs. Kong—the two classic large scale monsters who practically invented the concept of the kaiju. Today we’re going to look at a truly wonderful novel by John Scalzi that plays around with the kaiju idea. I think I should start by stating that while I really liked this book, I almost didn’t get past the first chapter. It just rubbed me wrong. If I had gotten the book out of the library, I probably would have stopped right there, but as I had put out good money on an author that I like a lot, I decided to persevere. By the end of the second chapter, things were getting better. By the end of the third, I was hooked and looking for every spare moment to finish the book.
The plot essentially runs like this. In the heart of the COVID pandemic with the unemployment rate sky high, Jamie gets recruited to work in a super-secret project despite not appearing to have any real qualifications or knowing what the job entails. He is then taken to an alternate earth where kaiju dominate the food chain. And he ultimately saves the day when lots of things go wrong.
Scalzi spends quite a bit of time on the sort of pseudo-science that only a lover of Godzilla movies could come up with. It’s technically “world building” but let’s face it, only someone who really cares about how a kaiju lives, mates, evolves, etc. is going to read this novel anyway, so all the geeky stuff is just wonderful. And it’s brought forth pretty seamlessly through Scalzi’s storytelling.
The plot was fun, but I think it is really experiencing the kaiju that makes this book work—and watching a bunch of geeky scientists study them like they were any other form of exotic wildlife. If I had one complaint, it’s that I never could get an image in my head about what the main kaiju of the story look like. I’m also not certain if there are tons of different kinds (Mothra, Rodan, etc.) in Scalzi’s world. I’m guessing there are, because that means there is a lot of room for a sequel.
https://www.amazon.com/Kaiju-Preserva...
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March 22, 2023
March to Other Worlds Day 22 Critical Failures 3 by Robert Bevan
March to Other Worlds Day 22 Critical Failures 3 by Robert Bevan
As we start the fourth week of the March to Other Worlds, I’d like to take a few moments to discuss the influence of fantasy role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons on the field of fantasy literature. There is no denying that, for good or ill, (and it has been for both good and ill) these games have had a major impact on the genre. Long before the LitRPGs (Literary Role Playing Games) in which authors actually show the dice rolls in their stories began appearing on the digital shelves, authors were writing about cross over experiences in which real world people became their characters and traveled to (often referred to as getting stuck in) their make believe realms to have their adventures for real. (Anyone remember Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame?) I actually wrote an unpublished twist on this idea myself some thirty-five years ago. If you’ve played the games, it’s hard not to dream along these lines of thought.
Robert Bevan is the latest in a long line of authors to play with this idea. I first highlighted his Critical Failures series in the March to Other Worlds 2022. What makes him stand out to me is both his fantastic sense of humor, and his recognition that most of us who play these sort of games are not by temperament best suited to actually living these adventures. In book 3, Bevan turns the whole crossover idea on its head by having his players successfully cross back—with unexpected and hilarious results. You see, they don’t become themselves again—they’re still their characters—hobbit, half orc, elf, etc.—in the “real” world. When you add to this situation that the cast weren’t the most competent individuals to start out with, seeing them try to deal with this new problem while tracking down Mordred, the Cavern Master, who put them in this situation will have you bust your gut laughing.
That being said, I’m not so certain I would have been in a hurry to get back my old body. (Not trying to say I don’t like my life, but think this through with me.) As Caverns and Creatures characters in this world, they all have special powers and abilities that no ordinary human has. Some of them actually have magical powers. Yes, being in the wrong body could cause some inconvenience, but I’m certain on a personal level they could work that out. But being able to do the things our characters can do in the “real” world would be very cool and potentially profitable. But I suppose having his characters happy being their characters would have taken away a good storyline so the reader just has to accept that this is what they want.
I think I should wind up this review by alluding to the best part of the novel. In the last book, Bevan introduced the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the fantasy world—four middle school kids who are thrilled that Mordred transported them to the fantasy world where they glory in racking up levels and gaining more and more power with little concern for what happens if they lose a battle and die. For the entire novel, the reader watches Mordred boost these kids even higher in levels so they can put an end to the problems he is having with our cast of heroes once and for all. I would just like to say, that I don’t think Bevan could have handled the final encounter any better. It’s brilliantly thought out, and like the rest of the book, absolutely hilarious.
https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Failu...
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March 21, 2023
March to Other Worlds Day 21 The Book of Tales by William L. Hahn
March to Other Worlds Day 21 The Book of Tales by William L. Hahn
On a fundamental level, the March to Other Worlds is about the ability of an author to build credible worlds. That’s why I find this next pick so fascinating. William L. Hahn has written roughly a dozen books in his Lands of Hope—a fascinating fantasy realm in which the ethos of hope and despair contest with each other through the actions of legendary heroes of each ethos and modern day adventurers who carry on the struggle. After publishing several frankly astoundingly good novels, Hahn came out with his Book of Tales to show that he takes his world building a lot further than most writers do.
How else do you explain his decision to include a book of children’s stories that actually exist in his world—the sort of tales that parents tell their children at bedtime or by the hearthside. It’s a clever and very creative idea. Many of the stories read like Aesop’s Fables or Just So stories and deal with the animal world. Others are the sorts of stories people tell about the heroes of the past to teach moral lessons—sort of like George Washington and the cherry tree, or Abraham Lincoln and his penny. All of them are entertaining.
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Tales-Wil...
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March 20, 2023
March to Other Worlds Day 20 Pandora???s Luck by Gilbert M. Stack
March to Other Worlds Day 20 Pandora’s Luck by Gilbert M. Stack
As we end the third week of this year’s March, I’d like to take us back to the Old West. Pandora’s Luck is the first story I sold professionally, bought by Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and published in the July/August 2006 issue. As you can imagine, the sale made me deliriously happy and strongly encouraged me to keep writing. Truth to tell, I hadn’t been thinking of AHMM when I wrote the story—I hadn’t been thinking of any publisher. Instead, I had this pleasant image in my mind that I laid out in the first scene—a well-dressed, proper young woman in the old west, walking into a tavern where no proper young woman had any business being, and a keg of beer simultaneously springing a leak and spurting foamy liquid all over the floor.
Miss Parson was the idea of a friend of mine, an enigmatic young woman slightly out of place in the old west because she makes her living playing cards. It’s a very difficult life for a woman on her own and she has a serious problem that has thrown her world out of whack and ultimately endangers her independence.
To tell the story, I invented bare knuckle boxer Corey “Rock Quarry” Callaghan—a young man travelling from town-to-town prize fighting for small purses, with his best friend and trainer, Patrick Sullivan. The three characters are brought together by William Steed a professional gambler and fight fixer who believes the only fair game is one he’s rigged so that only he can win. I’m sure you can imagine how that might be a problem for those who play against him.
What results is a fun story in which my three heroes attempt to extricate themselves from a very bad situation. But will Pandora’s Luck be enough to save the day?
https://www.amazon.com/Pandoras-Luck-...
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March 19, 2023
March to Other Worlds Day 19 Warmage by Terry Mancour
March to Other Worlds Day 19 Warmage by Terry Mancour
Two years ago in the March to Other Worlds 2021, I spotlighted the novel Spellmonger by Terry Mancour. Now I’d like to bring to your attention the second book in the series, Warmage, wherein Minalan returns to try and rally a defense against the massive goblin invasion which began in the first book. He has two major deficits working against him in accomplishing this task. The first is that he was not born to a noble family and the second is that he is a mage, precluded by the bans from receiving a title and with it the right to lead armies. Now, because of the structure of the novel with every second chapter taking place in the past, the reader knows from chapter one that Minalan will overcome these problems and lead a small army into the field against the goblins. That does not make the challenge of getting the support he needs any less exciting as Mancour proves he can write very credible and interesting political storylines.
Yet the heart of the book remains the goblin invasion with more than a quarter million of the creatures, plus trolls and doubtless other things, determined to wipe humanity off the face of the planet. This is a serious threat made much more so by the goblins’ dead god—also introduced in the last book—whose rage is what is driving the creatures.
For those of you who don’t like politics as much as I do, the battle scenes in this novel are frequent and superbly written. To add to the considerable tension, Mancour makes it quite clear that everything that Minalan is doing is intended merely to stymie the first wave of the invasion. This is going to be a very long, very drawn-out war. And of course, many of the problems are Minalan’s fellow humans, who are all kinds of treacherous. And I’d like to also point out that while Minalan thinks that he and his mages are the only ones with access to witch stones, the censors have been collecting these magic-amplifying weapons from the mages they have brought down for centuries and our hero had better be preparing a defense against them when they decide to more vehemently protest his efforts to eliminate the bans.
I really enjoyed this book, but I feel the need to point out that like the first one, this is an impressively thick tome. I listened to it audio and it’s more than 28 hours long. Fortunately, the superb narrator, John Lee, speaks very clearly and I could push the text speed up considerably, but it’s still a long book so carve out some time when you decide to read it because it’s exciting enough that you’re going to want to find out what’s going to happen as fast as you can.
https://www.amazon.com/Warmage-Book-S...
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