Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 5

Legionnaire Books are Half Price on Audible

The Legionnaire series is currently half price on Audible. This is a great chance to see what all the fuss about. You can get them either as individual books or as bundles of three:

Marcus Takes Command (bundle 1):

The Fire Islands

The Sea of Grass

The Jeweled Hills

Marcus Goes to War (Bundle 2)

The Battle for Amatista

The Centinela Gambit

Morganita Burning

Marcus Betrayed (Bundle 3)

The Bridges of Morganita

Seneca's Command

Flood of War

The Destroyer 70 The Eleventh Hour by Warren Murphy

The Destroyer 70 The Eleventh Hour by Warren Murphy

This is one of the best Destroyer novels in a long time. A Korean American young man, having listened to legends of Sinanju from his grandfather, decides to try and prove if the legends are true by sneaking into North Korea. There he videotapes the caretaker of Chiun’s property telling him that the Master of Sinanju is working for America. The young man, believing that America is corrupt and the current administration needs to be brought down, decides to bring the information to the Soviets creating a very exciting threat to the secrecy of CURE.

 

In the meantime, Remo is caught in a fire trying to rescue people and the incident awakens Shiva the Destroyer within him. Shiva does not recognize Chiun, which tells Chiun that Remo has been totally possessed. To strengthen Remo against Shiva, Chiun decides to get Remo back to Sinanju believing that immersing his pupil even further in the discipline will fortify him against Shiva. But how to get Remo to do as Chiun wants?

 

Chiun, in the aftermath of the encounter with Shiva, begins to exhibit signs of advanced illness and asks Remo to take him home to Sinanju where he prepares to pass the mantle of reigning master of Sinanju on to Remo. In doing so, both Chiun and Remo make speeches which the Korean American (whom the Soviets sent back to Sinanju) also videotapes. Remo also meets the first villager of Sinanju that he does not despise and begins to fall in love. It appears that there is hope for another generation of masters of Sinanju.

 

While Remo is exploring his new romance, the Soviets bring President Ronald Reagan proof that CURE exists and that Sinanju is working for America. They demand that Reagan shut down CURE and give Sinanju to them and Reagan decides to comply. Smith is given the shutdown order, attempts to destroy all of his computer data (something goes wrong, but he doesn’t know that), and then travels to Sinanju to try and get Chiun to kill Remo (no one thinks that’s going to happen) and then to kill himself.

 

When Chiun learns that Reagan wants his contract transferred to the Soviets, Chiun insists on a formal ceremony and then things really get interesting… I’ve given away a lot of the plot here, but not the crucial stuff. This is a good one!

 

The Hardy Boys 4 The Missing Chums by Franklin W. Dixon

The Hardy Boys 4 The Missing Chums by Franklin W. Dixon

This novel has a very interesting opening because it shows the series’ roots in the Great Depression. It is also a totally unrealistic beginning. Chief Collig, top officer in Bayport’s police force, asks 17-year-old Joe and 18-year-old Frank to investigate a place called Shantytown on the outskirts of Bayport for him. It seems there has been a lot of fights there recently and he wants these two civilian non-police officers to find out what’s going on for him because his police might be recognized. So, a totally absurd premise, but actually also an important window into the respectful relationship the 1960s Hardy Boys rewrites strove to establish between the police and the two boy detectives.

 

Frank and Joe get a slow start on the investigation choosing instead to go boating with their friends where they are almost in a collision with another boat. This boat seemed to aim for them, and they damage their own vessel getting out of his way. After getting a temporary repair, they go to pick up costumes for a masquerade party they are attending that night only to see what appears to be the owner of the shop being strongarmed by rough-looking customers. As if that isn’t enough, they come out of the shop only to witness a bank robbery. They chase the villains through the fog, but they escape by stealing the Hardy boys’ own boat. And then as if enough strange and apparently unconnected bits of trouble haven’t happened already, two of their friends disappear leaving the party later that night.

 

Readers will immediately suspect that all of these problems are somehow connected, but the Hardy brothers are not yet ready to make that intuitive leap. The next day, they find their stolen boat and decide to pursue their investigation of Shantytown even though their friends are missing. The first people they encounter there are the troublemakers from the day before and shortly thereafter they see the driver of the boat that previously caused them so much trouble. So, what exactly is going on? The boys then half-break cover by saying they are looking for two missing friends. Almost immediately they find a piece of a gorilla costume that one of the friends was wearing making me wonder what the men of Shantytown they were questioning must have thought. After all, most down on their luck individuals (such as Frank and Joe were pretending to be) don’t wear expensive gorilla costumes.

 

The investigation continues in this fashion with coincidence doing more to advance the boys’ work than sleuthing did. Then they come up with an absolutely idiotic plan that their father madly agrees to—and unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work out quite the way they expected putting the two boys in great danger and setting up an adrenalin filled ending.

 

This is by far the most poorly thought out of the first four books, but honestly, despite the many problems it was still entertaining. Still, you have to wonder why the Hardy boys’ friends are still permitted to hang out with them after two were kidnapped because they were mistaken for the Hardys and others were put in grave danger (again) helping them on their case.

 

Looking Glass 4 Claws That Catch by John Ringo

Looking Glass 4 Claws That Catch by John Ringo

There is a new commanding officer on The Vorpal Blade who appears to have significant difficulty understanding the difference between a conventional submarine and a starship. It’s an inauspicious beginning to what will be the Blade’s third voyage, and it adds tension to the story as new crewmembers screw with the things that kept the ship alive during the previous two voyages. Some of what is happening is the result of hubris and stupidity, but the biggest part is an inability of these men to understand that the culture of a spaceship is going to be different from that of a submarine because they have very different missions. This problem comes to a particularly infuriating head when the new commanding officer insists on restricting the movements of his female crewmember because submarines don’t have women on them. Again, note that he can’t quite make the leap to starship. He actually considers turning around and returning to earth to dump his female passenger—a woman who saved the entire ship in both of the last two books.

 

It takes a lot of time to reach the main problem of the novel—but it didn’t feel that way as I read. That problem is a bit funky. They encounter an ancient artifact that appears to create light shows out of the atmosphere of four Jovian giants in the system when music is played on the artifact. Naturally, the reader suspects that there is more to this artifact than a giant concert hall, and when a massive Dreen fleet arrives to take over the system, it quickly becomes a race to discover if the humans can decipher the secrets of the artifact before the Dreen crush them all.

 

The Mother Hunt by Rex Stout

The Mother Hunt by Rex Stout

This is one of the most interesting Nero Wolfe adventures. The widow of a prominent author comes to Wolfe to find the mother of a baby which was left at her door. The note suggests her dead husband was the father—an allegation she believes could be credible. But how in a day before genetic testing could the parentage of the child be uncovered? And why is someone willing to kill to stop the identity of the mother from being confirmed?

 

This book intrigued me from moment one and solving it forces Wolfe out of his comfort zone. I do think they made one truly unpardonable mistake in not anticipating the second murder, but that didn’t lessen my enjoyment of the novel.

 

Strange Company by Nick Cole

Strange Company by Nick Cole

This was a strange book. For about the first half of the novel, I was enjoying reading the action about a mercenary company in the far future but had no real sense of an overall plot. That changed with a bang around the midpoint when the Monarchs (secretive, high tech, rulers of all the rest of humanity) took an interest in the mercenaries’ current war and sided with their opponents. However, instead of getting run over by the Monarchs, the company gets hired by one of them to help her seek out an ancient wrecked starship which might well have secrets that could reshape the galaxy.

 

The action comes fast and furious from beginning to end, although I thought that the cannon fodder at the end (thousands of apes) could have been better thought out. If you want a lot of action that doesn’t require a lot of thought, this is a fun novel.

 

After the Plague by Simon Doubleday

After the Plague by Simon Doubleday

This Great Courses work spends about 25% of its length describing the Black Death and the rest looking at parts of Europe afterwards. There’s an effort made to connect the evolution of culture, literature, religion, and the economy to the trauma of the Black Death. Parts are very powerful, such as the exploration of the grief medieval parents felt when they lost a child. (This is especially important because there was a popular—if idiotic—idea in the historiography a hundred years ago that medieval parents couldn’t have loved their children like modern parents do because the high child mortality rates would have made it impossible to function if they had.) Overall, I was pleased with the breadth of Doubleday’s look at medieval society, but I didn’t really feel like he brought anything new to the table.

 

Star Trek: The New Voyages edited by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath

Star Trek: The New Voyages edited by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath

When I was about ten years old, I discovered an amazing thing—Star Trek: The New Voyages—a book of brand new Star Trek stories. This wasn’t the retelling of television episodes, these were brand new never-before-seen adventures. Inside was a short story called Mind Sifter by Shirley S. Maiewski which could reasonably be described as changing my life. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Something about the idea that there could be more new Star Trek stories just caught hold of me and wouldn’t let go. I wanted to be one of the people who got to write new Star Trek tales! So I found a notebook and started creating my own Star Trek—complete with pathetically bad drawings—and I’m still writing today thanks in a large part to the impact this story had on me. So as I’m sure you can imagine it’s with a great amount of trepidation that I’ve picked up this volume four decades later to see if I can still see what first moved me within its pages.

 

Ni Var by Claire Gabriel

The best thing about the first story in the collection is that it is well grounded in the series drawing on The Enemy Within when Kirk was split into good and evil selves. In Ni Var a scientist searches for medical applications based on the accident in the original episode. He wants to help the progeny of interspecies romances cope and he needs Mr. Spock’s help—willingly or not.

 

Intersection Point by Juanita Coulson

This story read just like a TV episode. Caught in an intersection of our universe and another one, the Enterprise is damaged and in danger of destruction. It’s quite well done.

 

The Enchanted Pool by Marcia Ericson

This is perhaps the cleverest story in the series. In many ways it feels like one of the many episodes where in someone falls in love with Spock and runs into his logical monotone, but there’s a twist that makes this one a delight.

 

Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited by Ruth Berman

A laugh out loud adventure where actors William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley find themselves on the real USS Enterprise.

 

The Face on the Barroom Floor by Eleanor Arnason and Ruth Berman

A little shore leave mishap where Kirk has to extricate himself from an embarrassing problem.

 

The Hunting by Doris Beetem

McCoy takes advantage of a chance to get to know everyone’s favorite half-Vulcan better and ends up in danger of losing his life.

 

The Winged Dreamers by Jennifer Guttridge

In a story very similar to the classic episode, Shore Leave, the crew of the enterprise starts to experience their daydreams and nightmares.

 

Mind Sifter by Shirley S. Maiewski

This is the story I most wanted to reread and it mostly held up to my memories. It opens on a mystery, Jim Kirk is in an insane asylum in earth’s past and he doesn’t remember who he is or how he got there. In fact, he acts like an abused and terrorized child which is so unlike Kirk that it makes the story even more intriguing. This one could very easily have been a televised episode. It was really wonderful to reread it again.

 

Sonnet from the Vulcan: Omicron Ceti Three by Shirley Meech

I’m not a great fan of poetry, but this sonnet from Spock to Leila Kalomi from the episode This Side of Paradise worked for me. It’s a short but haunting piece and I remembered the final stanza decades after first reading it. That’s not a bad accomplishment for any author.

 

Overall, this is a fun collection of Star Trek dreams and in showing the public’s hunger for all things Star Trek it undoubtedly did its part to spur not only the publishing of hundreds of other Star Trek tales but seven additional television series, thirteen movies and counting—not to mention inspiring who knows how many people such as myself to write their own stories.

 

Trace 3 When Elephants Forget by Warren Murphy

Trace 3 When Elephants Forget by Warren Murphy

This is an excellent mystery surrounding the murder of the son of a low-level mafia type. To make matters just a little bit odd, the college age son who was murdered was wearing a Richard Nixon mask at the time of his death. Trace has to figure out what the heck happened and do so in New York City which is way too close to New Jersey where his wife and children (“what’s his name and the girl”) live. He’s also saddled with his father who dreams of setting up a detective agency with his son (just so that dad has an excuse to get out of the house and away from Trace’s mother a little while each day).

 

It's an excellent mystery which Trace (with a little help from dad and a lot of help from Chico) unravels in another excellent ending.

 

The Secret of the Old Mill by Franklin W. Dixon

The Secret of the Old Mill by Franklin W. Dixon

In the third of the blue hardback Hardy Boys novels, Dixon ups the stakes with several attempts on the brothers’ lives. In the last book, they were captured and threatened, but in this one, they are knocked unconscious and stuck in their boat in circumstances that were intended to lead to an accident where they would have presumably died. Similarly, their boat is later sabotaged so that a potentially lethal accident would result. This is a serious upping of the tension from anything we saw in the first two novels. It was somewhat troubling that their father accepted these attacks as something detectives needed to expect to happen once in a while.

 

The basic plot revolves around two mysteries. The first, affecting the boys, is a counterfeiting ring which appears to be operating in the Bayport area and which tricks two of their friends into accepting bogus money. The second mystery is a secretive case their father is working on. When the threats begin to come in, it isn’t immediately clear which mystery is inspiring the criminals to warn them off.

 

This is a fast-moving book, but it didn’t grab my attention to the same extent that the previous one did. I felt like at times Frank and Joe were just a little too dense in not picking up on obvious clues that they stumbled upon. They were especially slow to become suspicious of a security guard who lies to them. But overall, it was a pretty standard feeling Hardy Boy adventure.