Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 47

The Rubber Band by Rex Stout

The March to Other Worlds may be over for 2022, but that doesn't mean you can't continue to find great books right here. For example:

The Rubber Band by Rex Stout

This is one of my favorite Nero Wolfe novels. It’s a tale of two apparently unconnected mysteries—one a theft and the other a murder that meld into one of the most fascinating cases of Wolfe’s career dating back decades to an attempted lynching in a western mining town and a debt both real and of honor that was incurred in saving the life of the man to be hanged. But how to connect that long ago act of bravery and good will to the theft and the murder? That’s what makes Rex Stout’s mysteries so wonderful—watching clues be dug up and manipulated but never quite knowing how that incredible brain of Nero Wolfe’s is putting all the pieces together.

 

Of course, the best part of all of this is Stout gives a clue right up front that would be very easy to miss. If you catch that clue and hold onto it throughout all the twists and turns to come, you will be able to proudly claim that you knew the murderer from the beginning of the novel—but that doesn’t mean you can prove it. That’s up to Nero Wolfe. But then, it’s the Wolfe show at the end of each book that makes these novels so unique, isn’t it?

 

March to Other Worlds Day 31 Winterhaven by Gilbert M. Stack

March to Other Worlds Day 31 Winterhaven by Gilbert M. Stack

Wow! March has come and gone again with tremendous speed. To close out the month, I’d like to take a look at a fantasy series that has been with me for roughly 35 years, my Winterhaven series.

 

Fantasy novels tend to revolve around a very small cast of characters whose actions move mountains and determine the fate of worlds. The scale tends to be grandiose right from the beginning—destroy the one ring or find the Sword of Shannara. Even if the heroes are men or women of modest birth, the action often depends on the decisions of a few great individuals. I had been wondering for years if there wasn’t a different formula on which to build a fantasy epic. I wanted the grandiose scale, but I wanted to take my time to build up to the world shattering challenges. Phrased a little differently, I always wondered why the entire universe had to be at stake in every Doctor Who episode. So I invented my duchy of Winterhaven with two main goals in mind—craft a tremendously exciting story on a less than global scale and add a touch of realism by showing how great deeds depended on a large cast of people doing their small but pivotal part. In doing so, I hoped to bring to life not a trio of intrepid adventurers but a duchy’s worth of players.

 

So Winterhaven became the tale of a massive political struggle to pull the reins of power away from the lord-constable who rules the city and into the hands of the conniving Lord Maldon. Both men depend upon a host of great and minor lords to maintain themselves, and Maldon appears to have subverted a great many of them to his cause Yet, each man and woman acts in his own perceived interests, and many are just as cunning as Maldon as he leads the duchy into its first major war in a generation.

 

At the same time, and equally important, is the story of a young knight and his brothers and sister trying to make their way in a world that doesn’t quite fit them. The knight is investigating a horrific crime that has the potential to shake the city to its core. The siblings are caught in the center of the political struggle, trying to support their uncle, the lord-constable, while slowly uncovering evidence that the threat facing them is far graver than the political struggle everyone else thinks they’re fighting.

 

What results from these two major plot threads is a standalone novel that launches my Winterhaven series. It’s packed with intrigue, military clashes, betrayals, fell magics, and a few men and women who find themselves on the sharp end making choices that will determine the fate of the entire duchy.

 

I hope you’ll take a look at the book.

 

I’m sure you will enjoy it.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 30 We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor

March to Other Worlds Day 30 We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor

For the second to last day of the March, I’d like to introduce a book that is based on a unique (at least to my experience) idea, which is a wonderful thing to discover in SF or any genre. Bob dies in the twenty-first century just after having arranged to have his body frozen, gambling that medical science in the future will be able to fix whatever killed him. Unfortunately for Bob, the government of the future declares that corpsickles are property with no rights. Bob’s brain has been scanned and transformed into a form of AI that is in competition with other AIs to be in charge of an interstellar space probe. If he loses the competition he will be shut down and his “life”, such as it is, will be over. This was by far the most interesting part of the novel. I loved every page and couldn’t wait to read the next one.

 

After Bob wins the competition and escapes the solar system, the book slowed down a little. It stayed interesting, but not at the breakneck pace of the first portion. Bob clones himself, using 3D printers to make new probes and lots of other equipment. He also has to deal with the problem of competing probes from other nations on earth. And ultimately, he has to deal with the survivors on our home planet after it destroys itself in a nuclear war.

 

This is a great book. No two Bobs share precisely the same personality and it’s fun to watch how each quirky new AI both is and isn’t the Bob we met in chapter one. They have a lot of interesting problems to deal with as well. Overall, the tone of the book is light and sarcastic and it is loads of fun.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 29 The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip

March to Other Worlds Day 29 The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip

When I was in high school, my best friend used to mention what a wonderful book this was, but for some reason I never borrowed it from him to read. I had thoroughly enjoyed The Riddle Master of Hed and its sequels, but inexplicably that didn’t prompt me to read this one. What a mistake that was. I finally rectified the error some 35 years later and it is a masterpiece—a totally beautiful, lusciously written story completely worthy of a spot in the March to Other Worlds.

 

Sybel is the very young master of fantasy beasts—a powerful sorceress who has long been disinterested in the world. That disinterest partially ends when she is asked to raise a child who is a pawn between warring factions in the surrounding kingdom. Her possession of the child drags her into some very nasty affairs which threaten her existence and her beasts.

 

McKillip is one of the few fantasy writers I have ever read that manages to create strong pacifist-leaning characters who deal realistically with the heart-wrenching turmoil of their days. This is a book with unexpected twists and turns, intense love and hatred that lead to heart-wrenching character growth. It was so obviously a labor of love to write and will be a treasure to reread again and again. Take the time to experience this one. You won’t regret it.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 28 War Eagles by Debbie Bishop and Carl Macek

March to Other Worlds Day 28 War Eagles by Debbie Bishop and Carl Macek

As we approach the end of this year’s March, I want to spotlight a truly blockbuster adventure. Back in the late 1930s, the director of King Kong started planning War Eagles as his next block buster film. Then World War II intervened and the project languished for decades. It helps to know this background to fully appreciate this novel. It’s a big cinematic adventure waiting to find the screen. The heroes are larger than life, but more importantly, the images are bigger and more vivid than the mighty King Kong who reinvented the silver screen. And what are those images you may ask? Nazis developing super-science weapons for a sneak attack on America, Viking warriors riding gargantuan eagles in a time-forgotten land of dinosaurs, and of course, those same Vikings fighting Nazis over the skyline of New York City.

 

This book is a heck of a lot of fun. It starts a little bit slow but once the Vikings enter the story it chugs along at a heroic pace. There is a ton of action and colorful confrontations. Narrator William L. Hahn pulls out all the stops adding theatrical sound effects to his wide repertoire of voices which adds a completely appropriate cinematic feel to the entire story. If you’re looking for some genuinely heroic fantasy, you should try War Eagles.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 27 Ex-Heroes by Peter Clines

March to Other Worlds Day 27 Ex-Heroes by Peter Clines

For Day 27 we turn to the darkest world of this year’s march. In comic books, it’s common for heroes to have an alternate earth adventure in which the bad guy has won, or the apocalypse has happened, or zombies have overrun the planet. That’s what we have here in Ex-Heroes, except that this is Clines “real” world. The zombies have come, basically won, and now the few remaining heroes are just trying to help everyone else survive. However, their problems are greatly magnified over the challenges of survivors in shows like The Walking Dead because there are still super villains out there and the zombies haven’t altered their plans to take over the world—they’ve just given them new tools to use to further their dreams of conquest.

 

The story advances both in the “present day” and in occasional chapters that detail how the zombies rose and destroyed civilization. Lots of people die, including my favorite hero. Because it’s a zombie story, it should not be a surprise that many of them return fighting for the other team, so to speak. Overall, I did not find any surprises in this tale be it the origins or the super villain plans and powers, but it is still a very good story. After all, everyone knows what Galactus is going to do and yet there are still many good adventures featuring him.

 

If you want a new twist on the superhero tale, Ex-Heroes offers an interesting mix of genres that provides a fresh setting.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 25 Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein

March to Other Worlds Day 25 Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein

Robert A. Heinlein is one of the absolute greatest figures in the field of science fiction and Double Star is my favorite of all of his works. It’s the story of Lorenzo the Great, a down on his luck actor who gets roped into impersonating John Joseph Bonforte, the best-known politician in the solar system. Bonforte has been kidnapped and as a result is about to miss his adoption into a Martian nest (the first human to be so honored). This would be considered a great impropriety by the Martians and at the very least would drastically set back human-Martian relations.

 

The problem? Lorenzo hates Martians and just about everything that Bonforte and his Expansionist Party stands for. But he sticks to the job because he’s a professional with an exceedingly high opinion of himself, and because as the story continues, he grows to despise the dirty tactics of the men working to destroy Bonforte.

 

Heinlein builds tension not only through the impersonations, but through the behind-the-scenes personality clashes among Bonforte’s staff. What makes this novel amazing is how Heinlein uses Lorenzo’s basic ignorance in regard to politics and his instinctive prejudice against the non-human races to let him gradually impart his own feelings on the importance of universal civil rights. As Lorenzo learns more and more about Bonforte in order to perform what is always supposed to be just one more impersonation, he grows, becoming far less self-centered and truly respectful of the man he’s had to become.

 

The ending scenes of this novel are extraordinary as Heinlein brings our hero to the most important decision of his life—one we can sympathize with and pray we’d have the strength to do as Lorenzo did. It’s no wonder that this book won the Hugo.

 

To a modern audience, this book feels somewhat dated—not just in Heinlein’s imagining of the technology of the future, but in his understanding of the role women could play in his future world. I’m sure that when Heinlein made Bonforte’s female secretary a member of the Grand Assembly he thought that he was demonstrating the capabilities of women, but by modern standards his effort falls flat. Judged by his time, however, it is another example of his remarkable vision. In the end this book stands or falls on his development of the character of Lorenzo, and in my opinion, it not only stands, it jumps towards the heavens.

 

For those who are interested, Double Star was the focus of the Written Gems book group on Goodreads. You can read and join in the conversation here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 26 Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson

March to Other Worlds Day 26 Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson

As we approach the end of the third March to Other Worlds, I like to introduce my second guest reviewer of the event, author and narrator, William L. Hahn. I’ve known Will and enjoyed his work for more than thirty years. He has an immensely creative mind which produced the Harbingers of Hope series (among many others) which I spotlighted on Day 23. Will insists that he doesn’t write books, he merely chronicles them, making me think of the experience in Mirkwood which we discussed on Day 5. Do these fantasy worlds really exist somewhere out in the multiverse? Will will have you believing they do. Here’s his review of one of the great books of fantasy literature, Lord Foul’s Bane, First Chronicle of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson:

 

It’s hard to overestimate the impact this series had on me as a reader, and I know in my soul it set me up to write, almost thirty years after I first read it. In the late 70s and through the 80s, every fantasy title had a big banner headline on the back in italics that said, verbatim, “Best Since Tolkien”. Then in tiny print they added basically “The author’s Uncle Morty”.

But this is the one book that wasn’t lying.

 

Like LoTR it’s epic in scope, with an entire fantasy world threatened by an equally-evil but somehow more present, nearly human antagonist named in the title. Yet what Donaldson created went beyond the originality of new races, marvelous ideas about how magic works, and more. He brought us a human hero like I have never seen.

 

Thomas Covenant is a spectacularly untrustworthy narrator. Starting in our world, he’s been dealt a bad hand (half a hand actually) but he erases any chance that we’ll like him with his uber-cranky behavior. The man is furious, isolated with good reason, afflicted, and maybe worst of all, set in his ways. Drawn into a fantasy world and informed he’s the chosen one, Covenant simply refuses. Focusing only on his own survival, he resists every blandishment, rejects all coincidences between himself and the prophecy… and when he’s cured of his illness, he responds to the miracle by committing a horrible crime.

 

He's a total jerk. The Unbeliever.

 

And STILL you start to root for him. I cannot begin to explain why but it happens, maybe a literary version of Stockholm Syndrome but it’s true magic to read this book.

 

It’s an entire series. It has the long arc that epic fantasy fans crave, it never fails to move and satisfy. I saw elements familiar (city under siege) and new (Giants who sing to make magic). And I needed a dictionary next to me as I read because the man’s vocabulary is fearsome.

 

I could go on, but don’t need to. It’s been closer to forty years now, and still, it’s the Best Since Tolkien. Just read it.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 24 Frontlines by Marko Koos

March to Other Worlds Day 24 Frontlines by Marko Koos

For the 24th day of the March, I offer the gritty sf military series, Frontlines, by Marko Koos. Koos’ has a very pessimistic view of the future of our planet. Most of the population survives on government subsidies with no hope for a decent future. One of the few paths to a better life is the military which can get a person off planet and eventually settle them on a distant colony. In the opening book, Terms of Enlistment, we follow Andrew through this hyper competitive military bootcamp and watch his hopes of escape get smashed as he’s put in the terrestrial army and used for crowd control. It’s all rather bleak with self-serving politicians both in and out of the military.

 

Things are finally starting to look up for Andrew when earth is suddenly confronted with a very hostile alien race that begins smashing earth’s colonies wherever they can be found. Earth is outmatched and we spend several books trying to slow the alien advance and save the planet. The action is always well thought out and highly exciting. While the overall picture is very bleak, there are moments of triumph to celebrate. And Koos never forgets that he’s writing about human beings who suffer from all the trauma they’ve endured to try to save their planet. It’s a very well written series, but not the happiest one.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 23 Harbingers of Hope by William L. Hahn

March to Other Worlds Day 23 Harbingers of Hope by William L. Hahn

I am a big fan of William L. Hahn’s writing. His Shards of Light books are one of my favorite fantasy series of all time. But if you’re looking for depth of world building, character development, and exciting fantasy action, it’s find a better example than Hahn’s Harbingers of Hope. This is a towering work of fiction that reads much better as a complete work than it does in smaller installments. It’s the Tolkienesque story of the Lands of Hope—at peace for millennia—on the cusp of a renewal of their great war with the forces of Despair. The fulcrum upon which this story is built is Solemn Judgement, a fascinating young man of deep convictions whose outsider status permits him to see the weaknesses in the Lands of Hope that its long-term inhabitants are blind to. That blindness is the crack that the forces of Despair intend to exploit to reignite the war and Solemn Judgement is the best “hope” to stop that from happening. Yet Solemn is a flawed hero as well which makes his efforts endlessly fascinating.

 

I read this omnibus because I had encountered Solemn Judgement in Hahn’s Shards of Light series and absolutely loved the enigmatic character. But there are many more intriguing characters in this story—a prince struggling to keep to the path of honor and avoid a senseless war, a band of adventurers seeking their fortune through the extermination of evil, and an intriguing knight whose religious devotions mask a serious problem in the city of Conar. And there are so many problems for the many heroes to tackle—including a lich and a demon seeking to bring their own brands of hell to the world. Add to all of this Hahn’s willingness to kill off characters in Game-of-Thrones-like fashion and you’ll be reading late into the night to learn what happens.

 

Harbingers of Hope is the sort of book that High Fantasy was meant to be—exciting characters engaged in inspiring deeds in a world that is riddled with history and budding with many more stories waiting to be told. You won’t regret reading it!

 

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