Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 48

March to Other Worlds Day 22 Pandora's Luck by Gilbert M. Stack

March to Other Worlds Day 22 Pandora’s Luck by Gilbert M. Stack

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?

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 22 Pandora???s Luck by Gilbert M. Stack

March to Other Worlds Day 22 Pandora’s Luck by Gilbert M. Stack

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?

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 21 The Garret Files by Glen Cook

March to Other Worlds Day 21 The Garret Files by Glen Cook

As we close out the third week of this year’s March, I’d like to introduce readers to one of the most influential fantasy series of modern times—Glen Cook’s The Garret Files.

 

It seems unfair that Glen Cook should be the master of both the fantasy warfare genre (The Black Company) and the fantasy detective novel (The Garrett Files) but he undeniably is. Of the two genres, I suspect that the fantasy detective series is the most difficult. Not only does he have to have memorable characters whom the readers can love to cheer for (and against), exciting action scenes, magic that enhances the story without overwhelming it, and a believable fantasy back drop, he has to come up with a credible, multi-layered mystery. Cook does this in The Garrett Files by adopting the Nero Wolfe template with his character the Dead Man (four centuries in the grave but not ready to move on yet) playing Wolfe and his hero, Garrett, filling the shoes of Archie Goodwin (drinking beer instead of milk, but otherwise pretty much the same). Add in a growing cast of memorable friends and you have the recipe for outstanding mysteries in a remarkably fresh setting.

 

The first book in the series, Sweet Silver Blues, is one of my favorite Glen Cook books of all times. I’ve read it five or six times in the last three decades. It inspired my best friend to run an awesome D&D game that lasted eight years, and it leads to 13 mostly good sequels and countless copycats. The series is about Garrett, an ex-Marine turned private investigator in the fantasy city of TunFaire. There’s a lot of action, but there’s also a very good mystery and a surprisingly strong chord played on the heartstrings by the end of the book. The characters are memorable and the world is ever more fascinating.

 

This first novel revolves around Garrett being hired to find the woman his old army buddy has left a fortune too. She’s in a realm called the Cantard which has been the focus of generational warfare between the wizards of his kingdom and their enemies. From the very beginning multiple groups of mysterious bad guys are showing too much (often violent) interest in Garrett’s mission and Cook plays these competing plotlines brilliantly to keep the adventure both fast-paced and always interesting. But the reason I keep coming back to this novel is the last five sentences of the second to last chapter—the true end of a brilliant novel. With five short sentences Cook transforms a triumphant ending into one which makes you want to weep.

 

In doing so he gives Garrett a depth worthy of a hundred sequels.

 

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Day 20 Fierce Girls at War by Mike Adams

Day 20 Fierce Girls at War by Mike Adams

Marching to Other Worlds naturally brings military-themed fiction to mind and Mike Adams’ Fierce Girls at War is one of the best military SF series I’ve ever read. It holds its own with top series like David Weber’s Honor Harrington and John Ringo’s Troy Rising. Stylistically, it’s a mix of serious infantry action and behind the behind the scenes know how of a W.E.B. Griffin novel. The result is an often gritty, always fascinating, exploration of earth’s first colony and its run in with a peculiar alien species called the Rift.

 

In addition to the tight military action, politics plays a very important role in this series, but not the traditional high level presidential-style politics. In the Earth of the future, terrorism continues to be a significant problem and much of the anger of the terrorists is focused on the growing interstellar economy. Adams deftly uses this movement not only to establish the foundation of his series, but to add plausible tension at every level of the interstellar enterprise.

 

Another of the strengths of the series is the multiple points of views from which the reader gets to explore Earth’s first interstellar colony. Not only are their multiple POVs in the colony of New Hope, but Adams gets the reader into the nitty-gritty of life on a starship as the great ships transit the vastness of space. There is also usually a couple of chapters in each book grounded in the cast members still located on earth.

 

The cast is the greatest strength of the novel. Adams opens the series by introducing three generations of the O’Brien family. The matriarch, Kelly O’Brien, is in charge of firearms training for the NYC Police Department. Her children are almost preternaturally gifted marksmen, the beneficiaries of a training technique invented by their deceased father. Rick O’Brien and Sergeant Molly Bennett quickly run afoul of the Hassan Gul terrorist organization by killing several of the chief terrorist’s sons and are eventually forced to leave the planet to keep from being assassinated. From this very exciting beginning the whole series unfolds.

 

At New Hope Colony, Rick and Molly carve out a place of influence for themselves in the colonial logistics office while the alien Rift begin taking covert steps to reclaim the planet they feel the humans have stolen from them. The Rift are an advanced, economically focused, alien species with very little experience of war. They do their fighting with primitive mercenaries who are physically durable and are indiscriminate carnivores. Over the early books of the series, the reader watches the colony and an approaching starship begin to pick up hints that something is wrong, but not quite putting the facts together before the invasion begins in earnest.

 

From this moment forward, the series moves into overdrive, as the invasion advances, the colony struggles to respond, and Rick and Molly, together with a group of some fifty high school girls, find themselves marooned in the dangerous back country of New Hope Colony, hundreds of miles from civilization and unable to contact the colonial authorities for help. With their communications satellites rendered inoperative, the colony can’t even communicate with the starships slowly making their way into system. The already high tension continues to ratchet up as the war continues.

 

If you’re looking for a well-thought-out military sf series with plenty of action, you should take a look at Fierce Girls at War.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 19 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

March to Other Worlds Day 19 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

You don’t have to leave the planet to find a great new world to march into. Alexandre Dumas has long been my favorite classical author. He wrote gripping tales of honor, passion, ambition, and justice (often disguised as vengeance). His plots are deep and broad, filled with intrigue, adventure, and humor. And while many of his characters, such as the musketeers of this novel, have become stereotypes of the culture, in this book you will see that they have in reality fully developed personalities. In truth, even though he wrote in the mid-nineteenth century, Alexandre Dumas is very much a modern author and his books are among the greatest works of literature ever written.

 

The Three Musketeers is one of his two most famous tales. In it, young d’Artagnan leaves home to seek his fortune among the musketeers of Louis XIII where he meets the three fascinating men of the title. All are brilliant in their martial skills and each is a tower of gentlemanly virtues. D’Artagnan joins their company and the four men have several adventures while a tale of grave injustice and evil is slowly spun out around them.

 

Dumas gives us high politics, daring intrigue, love and ardor, and of course, dashing adventures. His dialogue is extraordinary, his action scenes tense and exciting, and the depths of his characterizations are amazing. As the plot builds toward its conclusion the threat of tragedy and the quest for ultimate justice combines in a wonderful climax that truly tests the mettle of his heroes.

 

As if all of this is not fantastic enough, The Three Musketeers is a brilliant piece of historical fiction in which real events are woven into the narrative and brilliantly explained by the occurrences of Dumas’ fictional plot.

 

In conclusion, let me point out that movies, plays, television series, cartoons, and comic books have all been developed out of this famous novel. Trust none of them as not a one comes close to rivaling this epic tale. Take the time to read the original.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 18 Semper Fi by W.E.B. Griffin

March to Other Worlds Day 18 Semper Fi by W.E.B. Griffin

The March to Other Worlds usually takes us to strange and exotic locations and cultures—today is no different, it’s just that the strange and exotic culture is the U.S. Marine Corps in the build up to Word War II.

 

Griffin writes a very strange kind of military fiction. For most authors, this genre is all about the battles, but for Griffin it is all about the behind the scenes work that leads to those battles. In Semper Fi we primarily follow Kenneth McCoy, an enlisted Marine stationed in China before the start of World War II. McCoy has the misfortune of being chosen by four Italian soldiers as their target for payback after several Italians got injured in a brawl with U.S. marines. In the purest form of self-defense, McCoy kills two of the Italians with a knife and the marine corps, wanting to appease the angry Italian authorities, plans to court martial him for surviving. It’s obviously not a good look for the marine corps but feels very plausible as events unfold.

 

After getting extricated from his court martial, McCoy falls into intelligence work, and Griffin does a fabulous job of taking this sort of activity out of James-Bond-land and making it highly plausible. At the same time, the reader’s respect for McCoy continues to grow in part because Griffin counterposes him with two inexperienced officers who have neither his brains nor his commonsense.

 

After “Killer McCoy” is forced to shoot a significant number of Chinese bandits to save two of his fellow marines, he gets recalled to the U.S. and put into an officer training program. World War II has begun in Europe but the U.S. is not yet involved. Again, we get to see how the Marine Corps functions as the cast of characters grows and young men try and figure out what it means to be an officer and a gentleman as the country inches towards war.

 

The first novel ends with Pearl Harbor and the initiation of hostilities against the U.S. It’s an exciting page turner even though very little of the book actually depicts scenes of combat. For anyone who would like a behind the scenes look at how the military functioned in World War II, Semper Fi is a great book and The Corps is a great series.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 17 Confessions of D-List Supervillain by Jim Bernheimer

March to Other Worlds Day 17 Confessions of D-List Supervillain by Jim Bernheimer

It’s quite popular these days to focus on the supervillain rather than the superhero, but that may be a little misleading in the case of my choice for Day 17 of the March to Other Worlds. Mechani-Cal is technically a villain, but he was driven to this position by the machinations of a so-called hero and the company that stole all of Cal’s inventions and got him blacklisted from working in his field. As a villain, Mechani-Cal is spectacularly bad, and yet, he just may be the world’s only hope to survive a dastardly plot by the Evil Overlord.

 

The novel starts with a bang and keeps exploding. In the opening pages we learn that Cal may be the last human being in the world still free of the mind control of the “bugs”—conquer the world scheme of the Evil Overlord that got out of control. The first part of the novel focuses on how Cal literally has to save the world—and then, once again, gets screwed by the supposed heroes who think it will not look good if a D-List Villain saves the planet instead of them. It’s exciting and intensely frustrating to watch Cal in action and then get driven back to villainhood by egotistical superheros who don’t actually appear to have any moral compass.

 

Yet Confessions is more than that. It’s also the story of Cal’s rivalry with Ultraweapon—a “hero” who clearly isn’t a good guy. Ultraweapon and his company are the reasons that Cal became a villain—they stole his armor ideas from him and blacklisted him so he couldn’t legitimately start over. And of course, Ultraweapon leads the effort to keep Cal from getting any credit for saving the world. Watching Cal try to rebuild himself and his life as a hero made for a great story—especially when it was the so-called heroes who were often his biggest problem.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 16 Broken Time by Maggy Thomas / Emily Davenport

March to Other Worlds Day 16 Broken Time by Maggy Thomas / Emily Davenport

The best science fiction makes you think. It doesn't force you to do so, it tantalizes and teases your brain into working overtime, making connections within the plot of the book and thinking about the nature of things outside of it. I've read quite a lot of science fiction over the years but nothing quite like Broken Time by Maggy Thomas (pen name of Emily Davenport). On the surface it is the story of a bright young woman in the ultimate welfare state universe. There just aren't a lot of jobs out there except for the very best and brightest of people, and smart as Siggy is, she's just not quite in that category. So she takes a job on a planet far from home as a janitor in an asylum for the criminally insane. There she becomes the pawn of the asylum's director as he uses Siggy to try and draw out some of his notorious inmates, ultimately with disastrous results.

 

If that was all that Broken Time was about, it would have been a thoroughly enjoyable novel. But it's also about an alien race called the Speedies because they appear to experience time at a different rate than humans do. It's also about a bizarre cosmic anomaly in the area of Siggy's home world which has somehow taken a Speedy invasion fleet out of sync with the rest of the universe so that it is still traveling on the warpath more than a century after hostilities were terminated, still struggling to pop back into normal space and obliterate her planet. It's also about a brave young man who disappears in a "time pocket" when Siggy is a child and only she can remember him. And it's about the struggle to communicate with people and cultures that are vastly different from yours. And, well, I could go on for several more paragraphs trying to explain what this book is about. Suffice it to say, that I’ve read it several times and it still intrigues me. I have no doubt that someday soon I’ll reread it again.

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March to Other Worlds Day 15 Fugitive by Gilbert M. Stack

March to Other Worlds Day 15 Fugitive by Gilbert M. Stack

As we enter the third week of the March, I’d like to take a look at one of my own science fiction novels, Fugitive. For me, two of the themes I like best in science fiction literature are the exploration of the unknown and the clash of cultures. Like most authors, I usually have at least a half dozen story nuggets bouncing around in my head and eventually two or three of those nuggets will stick together to form an idea big enough to build a novel around and that’s what happened here. I took a young heroine, Jewel, from an extraordinarily wealthy and politically influential family who has successfully run away from home to avoid an arranged marriage, and put her in the middle of an extraordinary mystery in deep space—one that has the potential to shake the entire galaxy.

 

Now, before I go on about the mystery, I’d like to expand on the idea of the arranged marriage that is the impetus for everything that happens in this story. If you stop to think about it for a few moments, you will recognize that an arranged marriage is a fundamentally frightening concept especially when the intended bride and bridegroom have never even met. Man and woman are expected to bind themselves to each other for life in the most intimate of ways without having even the slightest clue if their personalities are compatible. Now add to the mix that my bride and bridegroom are from two completely opposite cultures—one hedonistic in the extreme and the other extraordinarily spartan—and you have an even more disturbing situation. Throw in horrendous consequences on a galactic scale if the marriage is not forged and you have psyche-breaking pressure being brought to bear on the young couple.

 

That is what Jewel is running from. Raised in an intensely capitalistic and libertine culture in which the elites think only of their own best interests, she is unable to come to grips with the sacrifice being asked of her and runs away—smack into a problem that threatens not only her continued freedom but ultimately peace in the galaxy. All of this might not matter if she were truly a daughter of her culture, but she was raised with this idea foreign to her peers that she has a duty to her family and cartel that requires her to worry about the wellbeing of others. And while the idea wasn’t strong enough to keep her from running away, it continues to influence her actions, a nagging conscience which keeps her from being the completely self-centered daughter of her self-interested parents.

 

The problem I had when I sat down to write Fugitive was that the opening mystery that was intended to set the stage and introduce Jewel kept growing in scope and importance until it became a novel all its own—changing the overarching story into a series in which I could take the time to fully explore the issues that inspired the first book.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 14 The Best of Jerry Pournelle edited by John F. Carr

March to Other Worlds Day 14 The Best of Jerry Pournelle edited by John F. Carr

To close out the second week of the March to Other Worlds I’d like to turn our attention to one of Science Fiction’s greats—Jerry Pournelle who died back in 2017. I first encountered him way back in 1981 when I read a collection of stories called Black Holes which contained a novella by Pournelle titled “He Fell into a Dark Hole.” Something happened to my copy of the book over the years, but I never forgot that story. When e-books started to come out, I started looking for it again and finally came across this The Best of Jerry Pournelle audio book which features the story. It’s not the only good thing in this book, but I’m going to limit myself to talking about three of them today.

 

The Mercenary: Pournelle has a future history in which humanity’s star-spanning empires rise, fall, and rise again. This story takes place during one of the declines and involves a planet that has been given its “freedom” and is going through painful growing pains. The mercenary of the title has been hired to keep things from blowing up and then handicapped to make the job impossible. It’s a great story with a great ending.

 

The Secret of Black Ship Island: Set in Pournelle, Niven, and Barnes’, Legacy of Heriot universe, this novella focuses on the second generation of colonists while they are still kids finding out that the world is still very dangerous. I have some problems with this story. It starts with a death in which people who should know better refuse to admit that the death might be caused by a sea creature rather than a reef—even though there is a witness. This sets us up for more deaths the next year and it just rang a little hollow. Other than that, the action is good and there’s a lot of suspense.

 

And finally, He Fell into a Dark Hole really lived up to my recollections. Knowledge of black holes has been lost in this future as knowledge is suppressed on the excuse that it will keep national governments from creating new weapons of war. As a result, ships are occasionally lost as the gravity of the unknown black hole pulls them out of transit and holds them prisoner.

 

The protagonist of the story is a naval captain whose wife and son were lost on this transit line. When his father-in-law, an important senator, is lost on the same line, a theory is rediscovered that postulates the black hole and a rescue mission of sorts is put together. The mission is successful in reaching the black hole and the survivors have to figure out how to escape again. To complicate matters, the captain’s wife and son are still alive, but his wife has remarried thinking that she and her new husband would be trapped forever in the proximity of the black hole. It’s a great little story, but it would have been even better if Pournelle had slowed down once his hero reaches his family and developed that situation in more detail.

 

In addition to other stories and one of his science columns, there are truly wonderful passages in which authors who knew and worked with Pournelle talk about the man. If you’ve enjoyed any of his many novels, you will enjoy this collection.

 

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