Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 49

March to Other Worlds Day 13 Hot Money by Dick Francis

March to Other Worlds Day 13 Hot Money by Dick Francis

As we move toward the end of the second week of the March to Other Worlds, I’d like to do something that I’ve never done in this space before—spotlight a set of books placed firmly in the modern world, but inhabiting a space that many of us know very little about. The author of these books is Dick Francis a former champion jockey turned news reporter turned bestselling novelist. Francis sets all of his novels somewhere in the world of horse racing and it makes them utterly fascinating. Most of the books involve jockeys, but you also can get into horse transport, sales, banking, veterinarians, and more—just something attached to some aspect of the racing industry. Hot Money was the first Dick Francis novel I ever read and luckily for me it is one of his best. It's the sort of book you will come back to many times over the years and it inspired me to go out and read just about every other novel Francis wrote.

 

This novel is enjoyable on multiple levels. There is a great mystery here. Malcolm Pembroke is the mega wealthy patriarch of a dysfunctional family that includes the children from five marriages, three ex-wives and a bunch of grandchildren. Wife number five was murdered in the middle of divorce proceedings. The police suspect Malcolm, but now that someone is also trying to kill him, they will have to reconsider.

 

The hero of the story is Malcolm's son, Ian, an amateur jockey and the product of his second marriage. Ian is about the only family member who is not obsessed with getting his hands on his father's fortune. At the start of the story, he is estranged from his father because of his opposition to Malcolm's fifth marriage. Strangely enough, Ian's willingness to stay away and "risk" his inheritance makes him the only person Malcolm feels he can trust when it appears someone is trying to send him to an early grave.

 

This brings us to the second thoroughly enjoyable aspect of the story—Malcolm's children are all a bit crazy and it is tremendous fun, and ultimately quite heartwarming, to follow Ian as he attempts to get to know them well enough to figure out who is trying to murder Malcolm. He gets to know their troubles and their strengths and makes it possible for the reader to really value them.

 

Finally, it wouldn't be a Dick Francis novel if we didn't learn more about the world of racing. I find this utterly fascinating. If you stick with Francis through his other novels, you will find yourself with a fairly complete grasp of the English racing scene picked up painlessly by exploring his mysteries.

 

If you haven't tried Dick Francis before, Hot Money is the book to start with. If you've read the author and are wondering which book to read next, this one is it. And if you read it years ago, isn't it time you picked up and enjoyed it again?

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 12 The Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs

March to Other Worlds Day 12 The Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs

For the first time in the March to Other Worlds, I would like to introduce a guest reviewer. Chris L. Adams is a jack of all trades in the creative spheres (and probably in everything else). He writes fiction, serious research articles, and poetry. He paints phenomenally moving scenes (one of which he used as the cover of his book The Hunter and the Sorcerer which was spotlighted on Day 8 of the March) and extraordinary maps (see my Legionnaire and Winterhaven series). He plays the guitar (and I suspect writes songs although he hasn’t shared any with me yet). And, as you are about to discover if you read the next paragraphs, writes exceptional reviews of the books that move him. Here’s what he has to say about the Edgar Rice Burroughs classic, The Moon Maid.

 

This novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs is close to my heart, not only because it has long been a favorite, but because, as a young college student my home burned and, being a book collector, I lost a lifelong collection. The next morning, I found a burned scrap of a book cover lying in the snow, a paperback with an incredible Frank Frazetta cover. And I still have that scrap that I found back in 1990. Now, this story might not be “a tale as old as time” but this year it does turn one-hundred years old (the author began writing it in June 1922) so to post about it in Gilbert M. Stack's event this year is completely apropos. I’m talking about The Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

 

So, how would you like to read a “timeless” story set in a world vastly different from the Earth (I’ll explain why I say “timeless” in just a sec)? A classic which is the opening act to a three-part yarn (i.e., a trilogy) about a family line called Julian where the men can recall prior incarnations and—since time has no meaning and all time coexists—their future incarnations as well? I’m talking about a story of a man’s love for an incredibly beautiful maiden who is captured by man-eating Vagas—the centaur-like creatures of the moon. I'm talking about a world filled with races of men hounded nearly to extinction by another race whom Burroughs based on the Communists of Russia whose form of government, after the 1917 revolution, he didn't particularly care for.

 

The Moon Maid is the story of Julian 5th and is related to us by Julian 3rd as told to the personage of Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Ed enjoyed inserting himself into his own stories, acting as though his characters’ adventures occurred in real life with him becoming the purveyor of their chronicles). But, we shall see that this novel is not only a wonderfully-creative, off-world romance (ERB loved romance and nearly all of his stories involve a love story, with his most famous couple undoubtedly being the time-incorruptible Tarzan of the Apes and Jane Porter) for this tale is very much the tale of the mutual hatred and dislike of Julian 5th and an unscrupulous, incalculably brilliant fellow officer whom fate repeatedly tosses in the path of Julian, with Julian constantly and effortlessly winning the laurels for which this man so greatly strives, whereat he is driven to a more and more deeply seated hatred for the one he sees as his unfairly rewarded competitor—Julian 5th!

 

But . . . the moon? Yes, by George. ERB imagined in these tales that the moon was hollow, that the craters (which the inhabitants call hoos) are great holes, like the holes in Swiss cheese, that penetrate a crust several hundred miles thick, at which point we are in (not Pellucidar) but a hollow sphere—the moon’s interior! Here the crew of our vessel encounters many strange adventures. It is simply a fantastic story that I love, although I will admit that I have always liked The Moon Men, the tale of Julian 9th, is just a trifle better.

 

My recommendation in reading The Moon Maid and its two sequels, The Moon Men and The Red Hawk, would be to find a copy of The Moon Maid: Complete and Restored (Bison Frontiers of Imagination, 2002) or The Expanded Moon Maid (Lulu Editions, 2014). These editions restore some 18k words of text excised when these novels were initially published in hardback, missing text that was never restored until the Limited Edition of The Moon Maid (pictured) by B. H. Wood did so in 2000.

You can see the cover images Chris refers to in his review here: https://www.gilbertstack.com/march-to...

 

March to Other Worlds Day 11 Live Free or Die by John Ringo

March to Other Worlds Day 11 Live Free or Die by John Ringo

For Day 11 of the March to Other Worlds, I turn to the work of one of my favorite sf authors, John Ringo. Live Free or Die is a first contact story which sets the stage for both an exciting sf military series, and also for one in which the clash of cultures—a science fiction theme I find absolutely fascinating—becomes increasingly important as the series progresses.

 

Live Free or Die begins with an explanation for how aliens encounter and take over earth really without any particular difficulty, leading into what becomes known as the Maple Syrup War. It’s this initial war—fought over the one unique substance on earth that aliens actually want—which sold me on the series. But as the book progresses, it quickly becomes much more than that.

 

The central figure of the first book is an overachiever named Tyler Vernon. Before the aliens, Tyler was a science fiction writer with a movie deal. After the aliens, he’s working 5 minimum wage jobs and is still not able to make his child support payments. Then through entrepreneurial genius he discovers that one of the races of aliens find maple syrup intoxicating and he uses his knowledge as a springboard for a daring plan which he hopes will lead to driving a hostile group of aliens (the Horvath) who currently claim to own the earth out of the solar system.

 

Much of the early maneuvering is between Vernon and the U.S. government which tries to seize the maple syrup to give it to the Horvath so they won’t bomb U.S. cities, but Vernon brilliantly outmaneuvers everyone, then goes on to use the maple syrup profits (he’s being paid in galactic currency) to begin creating a mining laser out of solar mirrors and figuring out how to get the Horvath out of our skies. He thinks big and watching him bring his ideas into fruition makes for riveting reading.

 

It's really an intensely creative novel that only gets better as the series progresses.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 10 The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert

March to Other Worlds Day 10 The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert

For Day 10 of the March I want to turn our attention to one of my favorite science fiction writers of all time—Frank Herbert. Among his many passions as an author, he’s long beenknown for his interest in expanded consciousness and collective or hive minds, themes that show up at least in part in many of his novels (Dune, Destination Void, The Dosadi Experiment, Helstrom’s Hive, The Green Brain, etc.) and is of central interest in The Santaroga Barrier.

 

The setup for the story is handled quite efficiently in the first pages. Major retail and marketing firms are frustrated by their inability to penetrate the Santaroga Valley for their consumer goods. Almost everything used in the valley is produced there (there are exceptions like gasoline, but there is only one gas station in town, and it is run by a Santarogan). The retailers want in to Santaroga and they’ve hired psychologist Gilbert Dasein to do a market study on the valley to help them solve their problem. There is only one major problem. The last two people they’ve sent to do the same project have died from what appear to be genuine accidents—and yet Dasein and the reader are immediately left to wonder if something more sinister might be involved. Dasein has one major advantage over his predecessors that is undoubtedly the reason he was chosen for this task. His college girlfriend, Jenny, whom he asked to marry him, left him at the end of her studies and returned to her home in Santaroga. Dasein has a potential “in” that the marketers and retailers want to take advantage of.

 

Things are weird from the moment Dasein arrives. Outsiders passing through the beautiful valley on the federal highway do not feel comfortable there when stopping at its restaurants or lone hotel. Dasein gets a different response. He is almost immediately recognized as Jenny’s young man from school (despite the fact that he’s never been there) and sort of half welcomed and half not. While Dasein struggles with himself to keep an objective view of his surroundings, it is instantly obvious to the reader that he can’t. This valley is the reason Jenny refused to marry him. She wanted them to return to her home (a place she left for without him every weekend of their schooling) and he was too proud to simply give in to her wishes without a “reasonable” explanation of why they couldn’t set up their practice somewhere else. Now he has a chance to understand the mysterious hold her home has on her.

 

Then the accidents begin to happen. Gas leaks into his bedroom and nearly kills him. A dangerous fall caused by tripping on a turned-up carpet almost causes him to plummet to his death. Accidents? As more and more such incidents pile up, it’s really hard to believe that they aren’t part of a conspiracy to do Dasein harm, and yet, they honestly appear to have been accidents and sometimes Santarogans save him from the peril.

 

Where many people would have simply given up the job and left, Dasein doesn’t for two reasons. First, he is incredibly proud and stubborn. Second, there’s Jenny, the woman he’s in love with and who honestly appears to be in love with him. Yet Jenny is part of the Santaroga mystery, working in the mysterious co-op which seems to be at the center of the valley’s difference. Yet it’s Jenny’s friend who rescues Dasein when he breaks into the co-op and gets over-exposed to the mysterious Jaspers.

 

Jaspers (and it’s never quite clear just what it is) is the true heart of the Santaroga mystery. It’s consumed like a spice and its addictive and mind expanding. But it also becomes increasingly clear that it is something much more. It links Santarogans together at least on a subconscious level and when Dasein discovers what’s happening with the Santarogan children (and that many become brain damaged by the Jaspers) the town turns on him in a truly frightening way.

 

Jenny understands on some level what is happening, but no one else in the valley seems to be able to consciously credit that they are creating accidents to kill Dasein. It’s the most exciting part of the novel. Jenny has begged Dasein to leave because she loves him, he refuses, and weird things start happening and people start dying in situations clearly directed at Dasein. The reader grows to understand that the valley—jaspers—is protecting itself. The question is, will Dasein be killed, escape, or ensnared into becoming one of the Santarogans? It’s important to keep in mind that in many of his books Herbert isn’t interested in a conventional victory. You simply can’t predict how this novel is going to end.

 

Frank Herbert once said that he wanted half the country to think that Santaroga sounded wonderful and half to find it highly disturbing. At times, as a reader, I felt both ways, so I’d say he succeeded.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 9 Critical Failures by Robert Bevan

March to Other Worlds Day 9 Critical Failures by Robert Bevan

For Day 9 of the March, I’d like to turn to the LitRPG subgenre. LitRPG stands for Literary Role Playing Game and it seems to have developed after gamers started writing a bit too exactly about their games. Now let’s face it, a lot of literature out there has been inspired by role playing games. My own short stories in the Miss Pandora Parson series and my fantasy series, Winterhaven, both had inspiration from role playing experiences. The big difference between LitRPGs and those sorts of books is that LitRPGs usually have either people actually playing the game or include the dice roles or computer RPG calculations as part of the narrative.

 

In Critical Failures, we start with a group of friends playing Creatures and Caverns with a guy they’ve just met—Mordred the Cavern Master. Mordred is a super geek who can’t deal with the constant joking and ribbing of this group of friends. (To be fair, they are totally irritating, but Mordred still seriously overreacts.) Unfortunately for the friends (actually, that may be unfair, I have played with people who would have loved for this to happen to them), Mordred has a set of magic dice which he uses to send the players into the gaming world for real. So on the most basic level, this story is typical of the genre—players become their characters. But there are some significant differences that made this one of the most enjoyable LitRPGs I’ve ever read.

 

First, the real-world bad guy continues to be a factor even after he dumps them into his world. He still has the powers of a Dungeon Master (well, technically a Cavern Master, but you know what I mean) and he’s set on making life miserable for those who annoyed him—but really only for those who annoyed him. There’s a first-time player who was civil and trying to keep the peace who he actually helps on occasion, which makes Mordred more complicated than a simple bad guy.

 

Second, even after getting transported into the game world, most of the players can’t stop fooling around and teasing each other. At times this seems crazy, but it really makes the whole book a lot of fun and strangely more realistic. On one level they just can’t take what’s happened to them seriously. Add in that two of the players have chosen races that normally hate each other which causes interesting problems with the NPCs and that Mordred has some problems to deal with in the real world when one of the player’s sister and her boyfriend show up looking for her brother and this just isn’t your typical LitRPG. Finally, the ending was a complete surprise to me. It’s just wonderfully done giving me a lot of hope for the next novel.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 8 The Hunter and the Sorcerer by Chris L. Adams

March to Other Worlds Day 8 The Hunter and the Sorcerer by Chris L. Adams

As we enter the second week of the March, I’m excited to turn to the work of Chris L. Adams who takes his love of grand adventure stories and pours it into a short novel that plays homage to the old masters while producing a thoroughly modern tale.

 

Bru the Hunter’s whole life is falling apart. Gla, the worthless fire-feeder, has just tricked the tribe into thinking he killed Tysk, the mighty tiger, and now Bru’s love Oona is to be married to Gla. To make matters worse, when Bru objects, the tribe turns on him. Outcast, Bru doesn’t think things could possibly get worse, but he is about to discover just how wrong a hunter can be.

 

Kidnapped by an alien creature from an extraordinarily advanced society, Bru will be tortured into becoming something radically different than he began—an extraordinarily intelligent well-educated man. And that is where this story truly begins for to return to his people and the woman he loves, Bru is going to have to go head to head with the galaxy’s most advanced civilization. They haven’t got a chance!

 

I found a lot more in this novel than the simple adventure story I thought I was reading. So brace yourself! While there’s plenty of adventure, you’ll also find heaping helpings of culture clash, hypocrisy and prejudice, and ultimately you’ll be forced to think about what it means to be human.

 

I’d also like to point out that the multi-talented Adams painted the cover to this novel himself—but did the idea for the novel come first or the painting? With someone as creative as Adams, even he might not know the answer.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 7: Wearing the Cape by Marion Harmon

March to Other Worlds Day 7: Wearing the Cape by Marion Harmon

For Day 7 of the March to Other Worlds, we are returning to the superhero genre, but where Alexander C. Kane was looking for laughs, Marion Harmon is much more serious in his approach. He thinks through the reaction of government, society, pop culture and so much more to the sudden existence of super powered beings and always gives us a remarkable tale.

 

I’m spotlighting book 3, Young Sentinels, today because it really showcases so much of what Harmon does well starting with the ultra-powerful super villain threat. The book opens with the Green Man—a super-powered eco-terrorist with the ability to make plant life grow and spread at remarkable speed. So new trees essentially “charge” across the parks, break up roads, grab and kill anyone in their paths, wreck property, overturn cars and basically try and turn Chicago into a forest. Stopping the growth across a front more than a mile wide and rescuing all the people involved would tax the abilities of the Justice League or the Avengers and it’s a great challenge for Harmon’s Sentinels. But it’s not the only difficulty they face in this story.

 

The Wreckers, a new group of super villains, has come to Chicago where they are targeting for execution known members of the Paladins—an anti-supers extremist group. The Wreckers powers are top-notch and dangerous and they’re not afraid of causing a lot of collateral damage in their attacks. To make matters worse, there appears to be a connection between the Wreckers and the mysterious mass murderer called the Ascendant, further complicating the Sentinels’ problems.

 

While all of this is happening, Blackstone decides to increase the fire power of the main team by recruiting a group of trainee heroes to be led by Astra. Technically, these new heroes-in-training will be blocked from most combat operations, but in the insanity that has become Chicago that is often impossible. With the city in constant danger the Sentinels are going to need all the help they can get to win this face off.

 

Enriching all the action is the growing cast of very strong characters and intriguing personal relationships that are Harmon’s bread and butter. One of the young Sentinels is a Merlin-type super who believes she is Ozma of Oz. Grendel is a shape changer who gained his powers the day he lost his family in the Ascendant’s first mass homicide. Megaton’s family has deserted him because they’re afraid of his new superpowers. These backdrops create intriguing problems for Astra to deal with that can’t be simply punched and kicked into submission. But that sort of depth is par for the course with Harmon. If you’re looking for some four color action in your reading, Wearing the Cape is the best superhero series on the market.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 6 Sphere by Michael Crichton

March to Other Worlds Day 6 Sphere by Michael Crichton

As we near the end of the sixth day of the March, let’s turn our attention to the ocean depths of our planet and Michael Chrichton’s fascinating novel, Sphere. Norman is a psychologist who thinks he’s being brought to a crash site by the FAA to help survivors only to learn that he is actually being involved in a possible first contact situation. Early in Norman’s career, he accepted a top-secret government grant to explore first contact scenarios. He hadn’t taken the idea seriously when he wrote the report, but now he is suddenly face-to-face with the probability that aliens exist and have come to earth.

 

To complicate things, the alien spacecraft they have discovered is 1000 feet under the surface of the Pacific Ocean in the middle of nowhere. As a result, the contact team—four civilians with military support—will be operating under even more tension than a first contact would normally impose. Crichton builds the tension excellently through each section of the novel until the team finally gets to the space craft they’ve come to explore. In addition to the external issues, there are growing personal conflicts within the team and trust issues with the military who are clearly not fully sharing their knowledge with the civilians. Finally, a storm moves in on the surface that forces the navy to retreat from the area totally isolating those beneath the surface.

 

Things really start jumping when the team discovers that the space craft appears to have been built in the future by the United States, but also contains an apparently alien artifact—the sphere of the title of the novel. One of the civilians, mathematician Harry, succeeds in entering the sphere, but can’t remember what he found there. Then strange things start happening. Sea life—at first benign—starts to appear outside the underwater habitat—squid, shrimp, jellyfish. And then the first of the crew dies horribly.

 

While everyone is reeling from this loss, the crew is contacted by video monitor with a code that appears to come from an alien intelligence. When they break the code, they find a childlike curious entity that gets angry when they want to stop talking to converse among themselves. Shortly thereafter, a giant squid attacks the habitat and more members of the crew die. Tension among the survivors keeps ramping higher. The habitat is fragile and is becoming unusable after multiple squid attacks.

 

When only three of the civilians remain alive, Norman figures out that all of the unusual events (alien contact, squids, etc.) occurred after Harry entered the sphere. He hypothesizes that the sphere gave Harry the ability to manifest material objects—basically anything he can think of. Norman further theorizes that Harry’s subconscious has caused the attacks by the squid and the contact with the alien. Harry is a danger to them. So he shares this theory with Beth (last remaining civilian scientist besides Norman and Harry) and they attack Harry, drug him and decide to keep him unconscious until they are rescued.

 

This appears to be the end of the book except that there is roughly 20% of the pages left. Manifestations continue to happen and Beth (who has been acting increasingly paranoid throughout the novel) tries to convince Norman that he also entered the sphere and that he needs to let her drug him so that he is not a danger to anyone. When he refuses, she grows enraged and tries to kill him, leading Norman to find evidence that Beth also entered the sphere. In self defense, Norman enters the sphere himself and now all three individuals have the power to manifest anything they can imagine.

 

This sets up a climatic ending in which Beth and Norman have to go toe to toe against each other with the superpowers they have gained. Unfortunately, Chrichton didn’t really think through the implications of their new powers and so the ending has some major flaws in it, but the journey to get here still makes this book an incredible read. And the last sentence, however, goes a long way to redeeming the entire storyline.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 5 Mirkwood by Steve Hillard narrated by William L. Hahn

March to Other Worlds Day 5 Mirkwood by Steve Hillard narrated by William L. Hahn

Now that we have found our stride in the March to Other Worlds, I want to offer you an adventure that feels like it could have come from the pen of J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s called, Mirkwood, written by Steve Hillard with a fantastic audio addition narrated by William L. Hahn. The novel is based upon the idea that Middle Earth exists and that Tolkien had access to several manuscripts which became his published works. In addition, he had several more manuscripts that he did not publish, and the dark lord wants one of them (maybe all) destroyed as part of his “come back” strategy. He is trying to wipe out a tale of resistance to him by destroying a young hobbit woman who has a peculiar opportunity to frustrate him.

 

Yet that is only a small part of this book, because most of the action doesn’t happen in Middle Earth, it happens here, in our world with flashbacks to J.R.R. Tolkien’s past and his decision to pass on these manuscripts. It’s a mystery story in which the young heiress to these manuscripts is trying to find out what they are and what happened to her grandfather who was their caretaker for so long. Oh, and she’s also trying to survive an assassin from Middle Earth who has come to kill her and destroy those precious manuscripts.

 

This is a tale of beauty and sophisticated layering of plot. Like the original Lord of the Rings which inspired it, I don’t think you can glean every depth of this novel in a single perusal so be prepared to enjoy it more than once.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 4 To the Center of the Earth by Greig Beck

March to Other Worlds Day 4 To the Center of the Earth by Greig Beck

For the fourth day of the March, I’d like to turn deep into our planet with Greig Beck’s fascinating To the Center of the Earth. Beck has a knack for reinterpreting classic tales and making them modern and fresh with twists in discovery that make them uniquely his own. In this volume, he gives the reader a second look at Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, where two teams of cavers separately seeking to win a prize by going lower than any cavers have gone before sneak into a closed off cave system in Russia. One of the teams, however, has a much more ambitious plan than the other. They have uncovered evidence—some of it going back 500 years—that this cave system is actually an entrance to a hollow earth and as a result, as they descend deeper and deeper, both teams get a heck of a lot more than they bargained for.

 

In classic Beck style, the author spices things up by thinking quite carefully about how the ecology of a hollow earth would diverge from that of the rest of the planet. So we do not encounter dinosaurs but something far more unexpected and frightening. Also, unlike Verne, Beck has never been afraid to kill off his cast so once again the novel quickly moves into territory in which the question is who, if anyone, will survive the horrors he has created for his readers.

 

Yet the novel is not completely about the danger. Some of the elements are simply fascinating—even delightful—to think about. For example, there are tubes shooting deep into the earth in which gravity fluctuates. This permits the cavers to actually descend meaningful distances into the planet—one of many surprises which makes this adventure a wonderfully unique experience.

 

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