Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 51

The Heaven Makers by Frank Herbert

The Heaven Makers by Frank Herbert

This is a book for everyone who feels like we are not really in control of our lives. In it, Herbert posits that a group of immortal aliens, struggling against the ever-present weight of boredom, have been secretly manipulating events on earth for thousands of years in order to provide entertainment dramas for their race. These aliens are responsible for humans becoming civilized, developing religion, fighting with each other on both a grand and personal scale, and basically everything else that has ever happened on our planet. One of the major storylines of the story involves an investigator coming from the alien government to learn why the owner of this planet (and the creator of these most famous entertainment spectacles) is still interested in this planet after thousands of years. The answer to that is the great mystery of the novel.

 

The second plot is more personal. It focuses on a psychologist (Herbert loves to have psychologists as main characters) whose ex-girlfriend’s father has just murdered her mother with a saber. This psychologist has just suffered an accident involving radiation which damaged his eyes. The unique eyeglasses that correct his damaged vision also permit him to see through the cloaking devices of the aliens and notice them. The psychologist attempts to find out how and why the aliens are playing with people’s emotions and causing so much damage.

 

It's a very enjoyable story, but the first storyline involving the alien investigator really doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The aliens have been watching stories about humans for many thousands of years and can’t wait for the next ones to come out. Why then is it surprising that the creator of these stories is also still interested thousands of years later? Yet, without that investigation, the whole novel falls apart, so you have to look past that and just enjoy the ride.

 

Miss Frost Ices the Imp by Kristin Painter

Miss Frost Ices the Imp by Kristin Painter

Miss Frost returns for her second adventure in what proved to be a more light-hearted mystery, but one that still showed the darker underside of Nocturne Falls. The plot is extremely straightforward. Having moved to Nocturne Falls, Miss Frost visits an estate sale to help her furnish her apartment and purchases a decorative box that wasn’t supposed to be for sale. The box is knocked over in her apartment releasing an imp—a chaotic and mischievous spirit which begins wreaking playful but annoying havoc on the town that threatens to reveal their supernatural secrets. (For example, it’s hard to explain how the fire engine truck got on top of the fire station.)

 

In trying to figure out how to get the imp back in the box, Miss Frost is forced to learn about the woman who previously owned the box—a human who ran a business in magical artifacts and who doesn’t appear to have had a good deed in mind when she acquired the imp.

 

All in all, this is another fun book in the Nocturne Falls setting. Jane Frost continues to positively remind me of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum. She’s far more competent than Stephanie, but she’s gathering a group of zany collaborating friends and she has the same sort of man problems. The one thing that surprised me most about the novel was the reappearance of Frost’s ex-best friend, Lark. It makes me wonder if Ms. Painter is planning a future novel around the treacherous pal. I guess I’ll have to keep reading to find out.

 

The Cabinet of Curiosities by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

The Cabinet of Curiosities by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Preston and Child continue exploring their fascination with museums in The Cabinet of Curiosities—an old-fashioned name for a museum. Instead of the museum beast, this time they are after “the surgeon”—a serial killer copying the crimes of a nineteenth century murderer. To catch him, everyone’s favorite FBI Special Agent, investigates both the original murderer and the current crime spree, bringing into the investigation archaeologist Nora Kelly, who I believe appears in many future tales.

 

Preston and Child succeed in making two fascinating crimes to investigate and in forcing the reader to try and figure out how the two sets of murders can be more closely connected than a simple copycat. Once we learn that the original killer was trying to find the secret to eternal life, the possibilities ramp up considerably. After all, these are the writers who gave us the museum beast, they clearly wouldn’t be afraid of a little science fiction in this third novel.

 

The best part of the book, however, isn’t the excellent pair of mysteries, it’s the glimpse into the fascinating character of Pendergast as we try to figure out why he’s really so interested in the original nineteenth century crimes. He was a good detective before. Now he becomes a fascinating mystery all in himself as we try and piece together what his connection to these murders actually is.

 

Miss Frost Solves a Cold Case by Kristen Painter

Miss Frost Solves a Cold Case by Kristen Painter

Kristen Painter uses her Nocturne Falls setting for the first in a series of mysteries, rather than the straight romances that have enjoyed the setting to this point. The tone of these books reminded me a lot of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series—first person narrative, snappy chatter, and a love triangle with lots of heat but, at least for now, no consummation. The result is a very fun book with a solid mystery grounded in the supernatural denizens of Nocturne Falls.

 

The town (Nocturne Falls) is a community in which hundreds or possibly even thousands of supernatural folk live year round, fitting in in part because the town is a tourist trap that celebrates Halloween 365 days a year, providing lots of cover for its supernatural denizens. Most of those supernaturals seem to be very nice, but this series is going to offer the opportunity to see the other side (the more common side in other urban fantasies) of the coin.

 

Jayne Frost is the daughter of Jack Frost (the Winter King) and the niece of Santa Clause, so she’s a pretty hefty supernatural winter elf herself. But the royalty hasn’t gone to her head and she makes a charming protagonist as she is off on her own encountering vampires and werewolves and her old boyfriend, Cooper, a summer elf with a surfer dude’s body and attitude.

 

A lot of the fun in this first novel is simply discovering with Jayne her place in this supernatural society. One of Santa’s toyshops is losing elves right and left and Jayne is tasked with figuring out why. It takes a while, even after she learns that it is almost certainly something bad happening to the elves (why else would they leave all of their belongings behind when they go?) for Jayne to really get serious about her investigation, but that urgency is lost in figuring out how one of Santa’s toyshops works and why winter elves need so many sweets to keep them going through the day. (Note to Ms. Painter, Dr. Pepper is a wonderful soda, but if Jayne is really looking for sweet calories, she should become a Mountain Dew aficionado. Not only is it the sweetest soda out there, it comes in lots of flavors.)

 

The actual reason for the disappearances turns creepy fast, and Painter handles this transition with consummate skill, switching back to her more lighthearted tone before the book can truly be transformed by the ugliness Jayne uncovers. All in all, this was a great novel with a totally satisfying ending.

 

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

It’s almost impossible to think about the epic 2001: A Space Odyssey without hearing in your mind the opening music of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and reading it will have that music bouncing around in your head again for days after. I read this book the first time forty years ago and always liked it better than the movie. My reread reinforces that impression. This is an extraordinary first contact novel that stands out today as much for its optimism about that contact as for the incredible mystery that the aliens and the monolith represent.

 

And yet, the strongest part of the novel remains the confrontation with HAL aboard the Discovery. HAL manages to be both an eerie and terrifying opponent and, in the final moments before he’s shut down, an incredibly sympathetic one. As his memory chips are pulled and he regresses, it’s hard not to feel sorry for him and, of course, Clarke makes it clear that his actions were not ultimately HAL’s fault.

 

If you’ve never read 2001, you should. If you have read it, it’s a great novel to rediscover. I hope it won’t take me forty years to do so again.

 

Destroyer 48 Profit Motive by Warren Murphy

Destroyer 48 Profit Motive by Warren Murphy

This is the longest Destroyer novel in the series thus far and one of the worst. Someone has invented a bacteria that eats oil. It sounds great when you’re talking about oil spills, but the villain is planning to seed it in the oil wells of the world to destroy them, then step into the void this creates with a monopoly on an incredibly expensive (and damaging to human health) synthetic fuel.

 

The plot holds potential, but Murphy utterly fails in enacting it. The story is just plain boring and it goes on and on and on (remember, longest Destroy novel in the series thus far). In fact there are only two slightly redeeming characteristics to this tale. First, Remo and Chiun get put at odds over an ancient Sinanju contract. This could have made things great, but unfortunately this plot twist falls as flat as the rest of the novel.

 

The second point of interest is that this is the first appearance of recurring Destroyer villain, Friend. Friend is an autonomous computer program written for the sole purpose of making a profit. In later books, Friend makes a great villain, but unfortunately not here.

 

The Other Log of Phileas Fogg by Philip Jose Farmer

The Other Log of Phileas Fogg by Philip Jose Farmer

This is a novel of tremendous scope and imagination, building upon the foundation of Jules Verne’s famous Around the World in Eighty Days and expanding upon it to include Captain Nemo, Sherlock Holmes nemesis, James Moriarty, the famous ghost ship, Mary Celeste, and so very much more.

 

Farmer begins by informing the reader that two alien races have been vying for supremacy on earth for millennia, jockeying for power by adopting/recruiting humans to their side and using them as weapons against each other. Phileas Fogg is one such adoptee and his famous journey was not actually motivated by a bet, but by his desire to stop Captain Nemo from overthrowing the British Empire through the use of advanced alien technology.

 

As one would expect from Farmer, the story is expansive and the plotting intricate. It’s a pleasure to watch him bring characters from other works into the novel, just as it is a delight to see him hint that he, himself, is actually Phileas Fogg, still kicking around roughly a century after the events in the book take place. Unfortunately, Farmer chose to mimic the prose of Verne in his novel and it greatly slows down the reading. I understand why he did it, but it made a novel that should have been a simple delight into a more difficult academic exercise.

 

The Rise and Fall of the British Empire by Patrick N. Allitt

The Rise and Fall of the British Empire by Patrick N. Allitt

It’s hard to study the world history of the past few centuries without encountering the British Empire which was so encompassing that the British could proudly proclaim that the sun never set upon it. This Great Courses series attempts to look at the empire in its totality, which it does by bouncing around the globe in different time periods and observing how different pieces of the empire were obtained, evolved, and eventually left again. So the study is interesting, but for me, I never felt like it was adequately pulled everything together. Rarely did I feel as if I was reading about one empire. Instead, we were always looking at various pieces of it.

 

I also would have liked to have had a longer exploration of the comparisons of the British Empire to others around the world—Russia/Soviet, China, Aztec, Rome, Carthage, the list goes on and on. I also would have enjoyed a much more thorough look at the impacts—positive and negative—the empire had on the regions it ruled and the globe. Allitt makes a stab at this, but I would have preferred much more detail. Finally, I would have liked substantially more detail on why the empire was viewed as necessary in Britain and how they held onto it (from a domestic/political perspective) for so long.

 

Overall, a good course that left me wanting much more on the topic.

 

Reliquary by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Reliquary by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

The sequel to Relic starts with a very tense scene in which two decaying skeletons are accidentally discovered in some of the filthiest water in New York City. One of the skeletons is that of a mega-rich socialite. The other is the key to unravelling Preston and Child’s second Pendergast mystery. Like the first book, this one is quite the ride mixing science, mystery, and over-the-top thrills to create a worthy sequel to their phenomenal first book.

 

Most of the surviving cast of the first novel returns for the sequel including the reporter—riding high after his bestselling book about the museum murders of the original novel—two of the scientists—wheelchair-bound Frock and new PhD Margo Green—police Lieutenant D’Acosta and of course, Pendergast. Once again, they are dragged into the mystery and forced to fight a politicized bureaucracy which is far less interested in solving the mystery than it is in making the problem of multiple murders in Manhattan go away. Of course, part of their disinterest comes from the fact that the vast majority of the victims are homeless men and women living in the hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath New York City.

 

Those tunnels are really what makes this book so interesting. Preston and Child put a lot of effort into developing the reality of an undercity in the mind of the readers and it pays off tremendously as a significant portion of the book is spent in either near or total darkness in these unmapped areas of Manhattan. It’s also where the creatures reminiscent of the museum monster of the first book have made their lair. Getting rid of those creatures and making certain that there can’t be anymore is ultimately the main plot of the book. It will be interesting to see if our heroes actually succeeded, or if this continues to be the main problem in the next novel.

 

 

Trekonomics by Manu Saadia

Trekonomics by Manu Saadia

Star Trek has spawned a large number of books about how the series impacts the world around it starting with All I Need to Know I Learned from Watching Star Trek. There are books on the philosophy of Star Trek, the science of Star Trek, and even parenting tips from Star Trek, but none of those were quite as interesting as this book that looks into the economics of the Star Trek universe. As a certain Vulcan first officer might say, it is “fascinating”.

 

Most people who have watched the series have probably speculated on what it means to have replicators that can create just about everything. Saadia gets into the nuts and bolts of what a lack of scarcity means to society and the people who live in it. What would a world be like without the incentive to seek profit? What are the implications of robots/androids that can do all the work? Why is there even a Star Fleet in such a universe? It’s a quite enjoyable exploration that has the bonus of illustrating its points with wonderfully nostalgic returns to the plots and scenes of many episodes throughout all the series and movies.