Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 54

Review: Kill Game by Dean Wesley Smith

Kill Game by Dean Wesley Smith

I’ve had the pleasure of reading several Dean Wesley Smith novels over the past twenty or more years. He’s written some SF, some Spiderman, and some Star Trek—always providing a good yarn. But after reading Kill Game, I realized that his true vocation as an author is writing excellent mysteries filled with surprises and interesting characters.

 

Kill Game is gripping from the first pages. The Cold Poker Gang, a group of retired police detectives, picks up cold cases and tries to resolve them. This time they’re looking into the long-ago murder of the husband of one of their members. I don’t want to want to give away any of the wonderful surprises, but every time you turn around in this story, Smith throws you for another loop in this simply wonderful tale.

 

I’m so glad he’s written more of them.

 

Review: The Majestic by Keith C. Blackmore

The Majestic 311 by Keith C. Blackmore

I think this novel had one of the best blurbs promoting it that I have ever read, but I don’t think the novel lived up to its blurb. It wasn’t that the blurb was dishonest, it’s that the book took a large number of turns that felt “out of the spirit” of the blurb to me. The basic plot, as laid out in that blurb, is that in 1903 a 13-car train dubbed The Majestic 311 disappeared while going through a tunnel under the Rockies and 7 years later, train robbers mistakenly scramble onto the 311 when it appears in place of the locomotive they are waiting for. What I expected to follow was a horror mystery regarding how those outlaws come to understand where they were and finally manage to get off the train again. Technically, all of that happens, but in the middle of it are half a dozen excursions to other worlds that frankly quickly became highly tiresome and never seemed to be truly connected to the train. Instead of investigating the train and its mystery, most of the novel focuses on our train robbers exploring (albeit unwillingly) other worlds and that just never caught my attention. The little bits that focused on the Majestic 311 itself were pretty good, but they are truly a very small part of the overall novel.

 

Review: Past Due by Elliot Kay

Past Due by Elliot Kay

Once again, Elliot Kay has come up with a superb threat for his growing cast of heroes to deal with. This time it’s a family of sorcerers who have been running around for 3200 years, dying, getting reincarnated, and then locating each other so that they could awaken the original personality in its new body and continue with their long-frustrated plan to rule everything. The modern world has made them much stronger because they can now actually get to each other wherever they happen to be around the globe.

 

Alex, Rachel, and Loreli are alerted to this danger by the return of the jinn, Zafirah, to whom Alex owes a favor. Zafirah is an interesting character, known as the thief of heaven, she once successfully stole something from a heavenly library, but tends to come out slightly on the side of good. That doesn’t mean she is altruistic in her interest in this sorcerer family—she has her own agenda—but she also truly wants to see them stopped.

 

Once again the supporting heroes get a lot of screen time in this book, especially Onyx, who has a very good storyline. There is a major party in the middle of the book in which tons of bad guys have come together to plot the end of the world and frankly I thought the story dragged quite a bit for much of it, but the secrets revealed here make it worth hanging in there. The fate of the world is on the line, plus we discover the roots of yet another plot for future novels.

 

Perhaps the best thing to come out of this novel in terms of the overall series is the question of what is going on with the majority of the angel leadership. The Dominion of Vancouver chooses not to take action, allegedly because he doesn’t believe Loreli. His angels know that vampires, werewolves, and much much more are in Vancouver but choose to ignore this just as the original Dominion did in Seatle, and others do around the world. It really makes us wonder why so many Dominions are preventing the heavenly host from fighting back against all of the encroaching evil. It looks to me like Kay may be setting the stage for a second rebellion in heaven which I’m sure our heroes will be right in the middle of stopping.

 

Review: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

I was very pleased to learn that Andy Weir had written a new novel that sounded very similar to The Martian. A lone astronaut is out in space trying to save not just himself, but the entire human race. It sounded like a formula with a lot of promise, but it didn’t quite live up to my expectations.

 

First, the good. There are a lot of really interesting challenges that have to be solved much as was the case in The Martian. There’s also a totally unexpected first contact situation and I liked the alien character tremendously. I also think that, even though it annoyed me at times, the back and forth between the “current” problem in space and the chapter-by-chapter revelation of how our hero (Grace) got there worked pretty well, although I really wasn’t happy with this chronological restoration of his memories.

 

Now for the bad. There were lots of parts of this novel that I just had a great deal of difficulty buying into and they start right at the beginning. I have trouble believing that there is any situation in which a scientist who has left his field to teach middle school becomes the principal investigator in an effort to stop an extinction level event. I realize that Weir made Grace a teacher to set up the very last scene in the book, but to my mind it undercut the whole story. Similarly, I just don’t believe that any potential cataclysm would be so great that the United States would turn the keys to their nuclear arsenal over to an unelected civilian without any safeguards. It just isn’t going to happen. I also have some difficulty with the idea that there would only be one Hail Mary and that Grace could ever have been chosen to be on that ship especially when he was totally opposed to going on a suicide mission to save the planet.

 

Add to all of that that the novel was very slow moving for the first two-thirds or so and you can see that it just didn’t quite work for me. It’s better than Artemis but just nowhere near The Martian.

 

 

Review: The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert

The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert has long been interested 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 Santarogan mystery. It’s consumed like a spice and it’s 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.

 

Review: The Swords of Lankhmar by Fritz Lieber

The Swords of Lankhmar by Fritz Lieber

I remember this as being Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’s greatest tale. It’s a full-length novel instead of the typical collection of long short stories and it’s full of action straight through, proving once again that the two heroes are both truly puissant warriors and very very stupid when it comes to women.

 

The plot is one of the best. The rats are taking over Lankhmar and because the Overlord is truly stupid and gullible, it’s going to be up to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser to save the day. The problem? A partially human rat (it’s not really clear that she’s a wererat or anything) is very beautiful, and the two heroes continually take her side even though they know she’s a bad guy who has actually tried to kill them. Evidently, one smile and they are re-hooked. It got a little annoying, but it didn’t actually surprise me that much. Besides, if they had acted intelligently, the whole story would have been over by the end of chapter three.

 

That being said, we do have some great scenes in this novel. The opening chapter is the piece of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser bravado that I remember best of all of their books, and Gray Mouser getting himself shrunk down to rat size is really funny. If you’re going to try this series, this is the book I’d most recommend.

 

Small Victories by Elliot Kay

Small Victories by Elliot Kay

This is a collection of short stories from Elliot Kay’s three fictional universes: Good Intentions, Wandering Monsters, and Poor Man’s War. He starts with several from Good Intentions of which only two interested me—Rough Day and Good Neighbors. The first of the stories shows the limits to what angels can accomplish when trying to deal with the problems in Seatle, and the second involves Alex and Rachel confronting a demon in their apartment building. Both of these stories advanced our understanding of the characters and the second had quite a bit of action in it. The others in this section were mostly excuses to write about sex. I don’t have any problem with sex occurring in a story, but I prefer it to support the story as opposed to “be” the story. I suppose you have to run into this problem occasionally when one of the main characters is a succubus.

 

The next two stories were in the Wandering Monsters universe and each was a shorter example of what those novels were like. The characters are all monsters serving as a sort of adventurer band such as you would find in any Dungeons & Dragons game. The fact that the monsters are the good guys (and they actually are “good” people) puts a bit of a twist on the stories that makes them a little more fun.

 

The final stories occur at different times in the Poor Man’s War universe ranging from during the first book to after the fifth. They were all solid short stories which you don’t have to have read the series to enjoy (as were those in the Wandering Monsters universe). I hope that Kay publishes more collections such as this and that he takes his cue from the last two sections not the first.

 

The Real History of Pirates by Manushag N. Powell

The Real History of Pirates by Manushag N. Powell

This is a fascinating Great Courses text which explores primarily the Golden Age of Pirates in the sixteenth and seventeenth century in the Caribbean. It’s extensive, looking at myth, legend, and the reality as we currently understand it. From there it turns to eastern hemisphere pirates and shows how, like in the west, piracy depends tremendously on the political events happening on the land around it. Finally, and in some ways the most interesting, it offers a far too brief look at piracy today.

 

I enjoyed the book, but came away far from wholly satisfied. When a book called The Real History of Pirates has a blurb discussing Alexander the Great and his encounter with a pirate, I think it’s reasonable to expect the work to make a serious effort to discuss piracy throughout human history, not just in the last few centuries. While Powell does make the occasional reference to Vikings and historical acts of piracy, she doesn’t deal with these events in any serious way, which I think was a tremendous lost opportunity.

 

I also wonder why she would choose to include Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, as a “Pirate Queen”. Yes, she was a powerful ruler in Anglo-Saxon England, but that doesn’t make her a pirate. If we’re going to go down that road, almost any ruler with a fleet would qualify as a “Pirate Monarch” because Powell was quite effective in pointing out that the label “pirate” is often dependent on perspective. Victims often see their antagonists as “pirates” even if the antagonists would not use that term to describe themselves.

 

Longshot by Avery Blake and Johnny Truant

Longshot by Avery Blake and Johnny Truant

I like first contact stories and alien invasions and this one starts out quite promisingly. It’s centered on a group of survivors in a Vegas casino who frankly don’t know what to do with themselves now that the aliens have come and the world is falling apart. Unfortunately, the story never really picks up speed and never really gains that spark of excitement and discovery that makes this subgenre of story so exciting. It should have. There’s a very interesting alien trap, a rendezvous with Area 51, and an ending that certainly veers off into seldom trod territory for invasion stories. Yet it didn’t quite work despite these promising features.

 

The biggest problem the size of the cast. It’s way too big and each of them gets a lot of screen time from their own POV. This might have worked in a longer book where lots of things were happening along the way, but because of the multiple perspectives, the introductory phase of the story lingers much too long and when something finally happens, they spend much too much time worrying about the thing, trying to convince themselves to take a chance and do something to take control of their fate.

 

When they finally decide to do that, their plan doesn’t really makes sense. They walk into a trap that kills some of them in a very bizarre way and they just keep walking into it. Then we get to examine the affect on each of them and it just further slows down a book that is already crawling.

 

The Area 51 portion of the story finally picks up a little speed, but the heroes make strange decisions that leads to an ending that feels like total loss even though it is my impression that it wasn’t supposed to feel that way.

 

I’m left more perplexed then enthralled.

 

Encounter by Hep Aldridge

Encounter by Hep Aldridge

The best part of this book is the first couple of chapters in which the heroes deal with legal challenges that come from finding sunken treasure in an earlier novel. It’s important material presented in an interesting way. First, it tells us that the heroes are unethical, having failed to report the first approximately $2 billion worth of treasure they uncovered. It also shows that they are very smart and technically capable. You like them, even though they are essentially thieves. It was very well done,

 

Things proceed in the expected manner for the next roughly 60% of the novel—there’s plenty of action and interesting problems to overcome. Our heroes are searching for a mythical lost library in the jungles of Ecuador—a library that reportedly contains within it the secret of immortality among other treasures. Two groups (one a team of brutal Vatican mercenaries) are trying to catch our treasure hunters so they can torture the location of the library out of them before murdering them.

 

All of that comes to a close when they find the library a little more than halfway through the book. They defeat those pursuing them and encounter a possibly artificial intelligence left by aliens who have been visiting our planet for tens of thousands of years. At this point the adventure basically ends and we are presented with chapter after chapter of “seemingly too good to be true” wonders being presented to our treasure hunters. Cynic that I can be, I naturally thought that the alien’s efforts to get the team to help it fix its power supply were going to eventually reveal it to be a terrible threat to the planet. But no, that’s not what happens. Everything is sweetness and light for the rest of the novel except for a short ending that resolves the legal problems of the first couple of chapters.

 

Honestly, I can’t understand why Aldridge chose to end the story in this manner, other than he obviously is preparing for a sequel. Adventure stories thrive on conflict, and there frankly isn’t any for almost half the book. I enjoyed the first part, but I was definitely disappointed by the last several chapters.