Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 20

Colony Five Mars by Gerald M. Kilby

Colony Five Mars by Gerald M. Kilby

The fifth Colony Mars book sees Mia again trying to find out who committed a murder in the midst of supply shortages that have occurred during a yearlong sandstorm. Civilization on Mars is breaking down because of these supply shortages, and in the midst of Mia’s investigations she discovers that the currently most influential corporation on Mars has been syphoning off critical supplies from earth to make the crisis greater. She discovers this with Gizmo who presumably records everything, but her superiors simply tell her that she can’t make such accusations without evidence. I don’t know about you, but I think the eye witness account of a high ranking security person and what I assume has to be tons of photographic evidence taken by the droid should certainly be enough evidence to drop some police on the site of the stolen goods but no, all the people running Mars continue to refuse to use their brains in case that would get in the way of a tense story.

 

And that’s what’s bothered me the most about this book. Once again, Kilby had a good story to tell, but he didn’t seem to be able to handle what I would call “believable” responses from people in power. To preserve his murder investigations, he made everyone else an idiot. But I think the real story to be told was the power moves that would come from exposure. He does get to those power moves eventually, but they should have happened earlier and changed the nature of the story.

 

Hide by Kiersten White

Hide by Kiersten White

I put this book on my “to read” list long enough ago that I had forgotten what it was about by the time I started reading it. Therefore, I thought this was a book about a genuine reality show that was either bad from the start or going to go that way. When the supernatural elements started to come into play, I was totally surprised and not happy about it. I felt like I had sat through a very long build up and this wasn’t what I wanted, but the creepiness of the basic plot—a pact with the devil that has to be renewed with blood every few years—slowly won me over.

 

The best character in the whole book is the villain Linda who thinks she’s earned her demonically given success because of her efforts to keep the pact alive by killing distant family members. Watching her argue that she’s Christian while protecting her pact with Satan was amusing. Her twisted character was the best drawn one in the book. Many of the other characters were likeable and a couple fairly sympathetic, but no one was as interesting at the villain.

 

I’ll also point out that the ending surprised me. I’m not certain what I would have done if I had found myself in these circumstances, but I don’t think I would have thought of doing what the players do in the end.

 

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

This is generally considered to be one of Agatha Christie’s ten best novels. It’s a story in which you wait nearly half the book for the murder to happen, all the while meeting a cast of people with little things to hide. When the crime is finally committed, the pace steps up a bit as everyone’s favorite Belgian detective begins to sort out the various aspects of the case. Without giving anything away, I think it’s fair to say that this is a mystery about assumptions. Make the wrong assumptions and you have no chance of solving the case.

 

I may be biased in favor of this mystery because I figured out who the culprit was well in advance of Poirot explaining the case. I didn’t get all of the details on how the crime was committed, but I still feel pretty good about my success. Poirot’s final recap of how the crime was committed and who was responsible was Christie at her best. I also appreciated that she recognized that Poirot’s reconstruction would have never satisfied a jury beyond a reasonable doubt—and then accounted for that problem in the resolution of the story.

 

If Death Ever Slept by Rex Stout

If Death Ever Slept by Rex Stout

This novel is a little slow to get started as is often the case when Nero Wolfe accepts a non-murder case. Archie gets sent to pose as a secretary and live with a millionaire’s family to gather information that incriminates the man’s daughter-in-law as the person leaking his secrets to business rivals. Now, aside from the fact that Wolfe doesn’t usually accept cases where there is a predetermined solution, it just wasn’t all that interesting. There are a lot of chapters of Archie getting to know the millionaire’s family before we have our first hint at the typical Wolfe crime—murder.

 

After that, things begin to improve a little, but it’s really not until well after the second murder that I began to feel like we were genuinely in a Nero Wolfe mystery. Strangely enough, that feeling came only shortly before Wolfe returned his client’s money and left the case. Overall, while I really liked the ending, I thought this was perhaps the weakest of the Nero Wolfe mysteries I’ve read so far.

 

The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The publisher of Tarzan of the Apes rejected the sequel novel, much to Burroughs’ disappointment. He wanted significant changes, basically throwing out the first half of the novel and creating a tale in which Tarzan goes completely savage once again. You can also imagine him writing the words that Burroughs never put in any of his books: “Me Tarzan, you Jane.”

 

Fortunately, Burroughs remained true to his own vision and gave us a story of a man in terrible pain, trying to move on with his life. But he’s still Tarzan, unable to stand by while wrong is done to others, which brings him into conflict with the excellent villain, Nikolas Rokoff. Rokoff is one of the persons who does harm to everyone he believes to be weaker than him (in other worlds, potentially the whole world) and then is enraged any time his schemes are frustrated. Tarzan frustrates him continually throughout the book inspiring multiple attempts by Rokoff to do him harm. But because Tarzan is trying to live as a civilized man, he does not simply kill the villain as he might of if he had met him in the jungle before first meeting Jane Porter.

 

Jane is the second key player in the novel. She has missed her chance to be Tarzan’s wife and is trying to figure out a way not to marry Tarzan’s cousin whom she is engaged to. The cousin is one of the few people in the book who knows that it is Tarzan, and not himself, who is the legitimate Lord Greystoke, and we watch throughout the novel as he struggles to find the courage to take care of Jane in very difficult circumstances.

 

This is a novel that juxtaposes civilization with the jungle and finds both savage, but civilization more duplicitous. Note that it is Tarzan, the savage, who is the most honorable man in the story and Rokoff, the scion of civilization, who is the most dishonorable.

 

The plot is filled with action from beginning to end, but much of the tension comes from friends of Tarzan, including Jane, encouraging him to restrain himself and not kill those who had just tried to kill him. Once again, the savage proves himself more civilized than the civilized man.

 

This is a great sequel, fully as enjoyable as the first book, and will leave the reader excited for the next one.

 

Dreamer of Dune by Brian Herbert

Dreamer of Dune by Brian Herbert

Sometimes I think it’s a mistake to read a biography of an author you really like because sometimes it happens that the man behind the fantastic stories is not a very nice person. That’s what I discovered when I read this biography of one of my favorite science fiction writers, Frank Herbert. The book has all the wonderful details regarding how and when Herbert’s great novels and stories came out and how success affected him and his family. If it were just that, I would have loved everything in it. Unfortunately, it also tells us a lot about the dark side of Frank Herbert. He spent a considerable amount of effort hiding from his ex-wife so she couldn’t collect child support payments from him. He was an overly strong (the word abusive comes to mind) disciplinarian of his children. He was an obsessively reckless driver routinely terrifying and risking the lives of his passengers. (In fact, the famous jump the bridge scene in The Santaroga Barrier appears to have been based on his decision to do exactly that with his wife and friend in his vehicle). He got friend Jack Vance to co-sign a car loan and then purposely didn’t make the payments so he could focus his money on other bills—stiffing Vance for years until he finally made enough to pay him back. In short, Frank Herbert wasn’t a nice man, even though apparently he had a gift for making people like him. And I find that sad, not that it changes how I feel about his stories.

 

As a biography, this is a pretty fine endeavor, but Brian Herbert also spends more than a small portion of it talking about his own life and his own writing career. To a certain extent, this is fine as he is Frank Herbert’s son and it shows his father’s influence, but often it seemed gratuitous to me. On the other hand, Brian Herbert is pretty honest with his own feelings toward his dad and how they changed for the better after he became an adult. Perhaps the nicest part of the biography is the picture he paints of his mother, Frank’s second wife, and a loving and dedicated spouse. If you enjoy Frank Herbert’s books, you’ll probably want to read this tribute, but be aware, Herbert is a complex man with a dark side.

 

The Last Alchemist by Warren Murphy

Destroyer 64 The Last Alchemist by Warren Murphy

This novel starts out well. An extremely rich man goes to murderous lengths to uncover the secret of alchemy—turning lead into gold—something that requires him to steal a lot of uranium. This understandably attracts the attention of CURE and puts Remo and Chiun on the rich man’s trail. The rich man then sets an assassin on Remo and Chiun’s trail which offers Murphy the opportunity to really show how capable and flat out frightening his two heroes are.

 

The novel loses steam toward the end but has a very nice ending when Chiun finds out just who the villain of the story is. Overall, this is a credible Destroyer novel.

 

Infestation by William Meikle

Infestation by William Meikle

An elite military group looking for Russian spies finds a totally unexpected invasion of crab-like creatures coming up from the deep crust of the earth. The action is nonstop from start to finish, with plenty of credible mistakes made as the soldiers try to keep themselves from becoming the monsters’ next meal. There’s not a lot of character development here, just shoot-them-up action as thousands upon thousands of the little monsters check out the surface world. It’s frankly a lot of fun.

 

Colony Four Mars by Gerald M. Kilby

Colony Four Mars by Gerald M. Kilby

Ten years has passed since the last novel and life on Mars has become much more complicated as a great many people have become colonists. It’s obvious that what might be called the bureaucracy of civilization has not kept paced with the growth in population and both government and corporate agencies are struggling to influence the planet while pretending they aren’t.

 

The heart of this story is a murder mystery which only Jann wants to believe involves a murder. I thought this was the weakest element of the story. Once again, Jann is the only person who seems to be able to imagine that there are evil, conniving, power-hungry people out there and the stakes are obviously high. On the one hand is the continued independence of Mars and on the second hand is a corporation that is about to lose all of its special privileges and doesn’t want to. So naturally, no one on the council is willing to consider that letting one of the power-players conduct a completely independent investigation into an employee’s death that occurred when their rover unaccountably broke down might be at best a conflict of interest. Then they start suggesting without producing any evidence that the corporation is responsible for the mishap because of poor maintenance, but somehow it’s that corporation’s demand for evidence and suggestion that the accusation is meritless and possibly a coverup that is called out for being insulting, provocative, and without merit. It just didn’t make any sense.

 

The best part of the book is the new main character, Mia, who, with the help of the droid, Gizmo, has to find out the truth. It’s a good little mystery, I just wish that better reasons could have been invented to explain why everyone else on the planet is an idiot.

 

A Lot Like Christmas by Connie Willis

A Lot Like Christmas by Connie Willis

I used to read Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine a lot and one of the joys of each December issue was that there was usually a Christmas story by Connie Willis. One in particular stood out to me over the years and when digital books started to become more common, I spent a lot of time searching for it, finally finding it in this wonderful collection of really creative Christmas tales. That one story was ‘Just Like the Ones We Used to Know’ in which just about all of North America gets blanketed in a very heavy snow one Christmas while ‘White Christmas’ in its thousands of variations plays constantly on the radio. Now this could have been a “struggle for survival” sort of story, but that really wouldn’t be very Christmasy. What Willis does is give us a half dozen different looks into how the snow affects people preparing for the holiday and I just love it. It’s worth reading every year—but then, so are the other stories in this collection.