Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 87

March to Other Worlds Day 19: The Garrett Files by Glen Cook

Day 19 The Garrett Files by Glen Cook

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.

 

You can read my reviews of the first few books of the series here: https://www.gilbertstack.com/the-garr...

 

March to Other Worlds Day 18: The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin

Day 18 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin

You don’t have to move anywhere to discover new worlds in The Lathe of Heaven by Ursuala Le Guin who is best known for her Earth Sea Trilogy. The Lathe of Heaven is for a more mature reader dealing with themes like responsibility, hubris, compassion and love.

 

When the novel opens George Orr is an unassuming man with a problem. He’s convinced his dreams can change reality and he’s taking illegal drugs to keep him from hurting people while he sleeps. He’s put under the care of Dr. William Haber whose skepticism quickly disappears as he begins to unethically abuse Orr’s gift through hypnotism and an experimental machine to remake the world into a better place where his own importance is recognized and the big problems—war, racism, overpopulation, etc.—don’t exist anymore. But Orr’s power works through the unconscious mind and Haber never quite gets the results he wants—not that he blames himself. Success is due to his genius. Failure is the fault of the man he’s using his legal hold over to coerce into changing the world.

 

Orr’s effort to get legal help introduces the third and most interesting character to the story. Heather LeLache is a lawyer who becomes interested in Orr’s case and actually sees the world rewritten while she observes his therapy. The shared experience brings Orr and LeLache closer but can their growing friendship—hidden from Haber—survive an ever-rewritten world?

The ending of this novel is a painful one filled with growth and horror, but not without hope. This one will make your head spin.

 

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March to Other Worlds Day 17: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

Day 17 The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

For the 17th Day of March, we’re returning to the moon and one of Robert A. Heinlein’s all-time best novels and his most detailed exploration of his libertarian ideals. The moon is being used as a prison colony for mostly political prisoners from Earth. It’s a one-way sentence because after six months or so on the moon’s surface, physical changes to a human’s body chemistry make it impossible for people to return to earth and live a full and active life. However, three generations later, 90% of the people on the moon are the descendants of deportees—not actual prisoners even though the Lunar Authority continues to treat them that way.

 

The moon holds an important position in the Earth’s economy providing food for the mother planet’s 11 billion people. The market for lunar grain is completely controlled by the Lunar Authority which sets the price it will pay for grain and the lunar ice which provides the water to nurture the plants. In three generations it has never raised those rates even while the cost of production rises rapidly and the prices it charges individual Lunies for power, water, air, food, etc. continues to rise. It provides no genuine services (such as police protection or education) but exerts iron control over the lives of the people of Luna.

 

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a tale of reluctant rebellion forced upon the inhabitants of the moon when they discover that the growing demands of the earth and the Lunar Authority for grain, coupled with the decreasing availability of the resources required to produce that food, have put the colonies into a downward cycle toward food riots and cannibalism. This discovery is made through the calculations of the most interesting character in the novel—Mike, the first (and only) self-aware computer in existence. Mike is the computer of the Lunar Authority, but he has hidden his “awakening” from the Authority because he finds their programmers “stupid”. They are not interested in conversations, but in programming him for routine tasks. The narrator of the story is a computer technician who is a third generation Lunie who has the advantage of being “not stupid”. He likes, Mike. Quickly understands what Mike is and accepts him as a friend, not trying to use him or to “fix” him. When Mike comes to understand the threat the Lunar Authority represents to Mannie (and two other friends) he joins (and in fact leads) the revolution to free Luna.

 

The novel is told from the perspective of Mannie many years after the successful revolution. Mannie was non-political at the start of the book. He has a steep learning curve if he is to save his family and friends so there is a lot of political philosophy in this book as Mannie comes to understand what a revolution requires and what dangers governments represent to the freedom of individuals. There is also a lot of exploration of alternate ways of structuring society (for example, family units) which helps to make the lunar society more vivid. These people may be transplanted earth men and women, but they have become something remarkably distinct from their terrestrial counterparts.

 

The novel is wonderful on multiple levels and well worth reading, but its ending is not truly a happy one.

 

March to Other Worlds Day 16: Tunnel Through Time by Lester Del Rey

Day 16: Tunnel through Time by Lester Del Rey

We’re marching through more portals in Lester Del Rey’s Tunnel through Time. I first read this novel when I found a copy in my grade school library. It’s an adventure story geared toward a younger audience told from the perspective of Bob Miller. Bob’s father has invented a time portal through which his close friend, a paleontologist, travels 80 million years into the past. Unfortunately, the paleontologist doesn’t return when the portal is turned back on sparking a crisis. After a couple of days of checking the equipment and worrying, 17-year-old Bob, and Pete, the teenaged son of the paleontologist, are chosen to go after him and find out what went wrong.

 

Obviously this decision on the part of the scientific team that invented the portal should require a substantial amount of disbelief by the reader, but it’s actually easy to get past as the boys begin their adventure. They find Pete’s father but the portal is damaged when a dinosaur stumbles into it and getting home quickly becomes a major problem. They can’t generate enough power to bring the three travelers back to the present in one jump. They can’t even generate enough power to let them jump together. So we get to visit more than the Cretaceous period. It was exciting when I was ten and it is still exciting now.

 

A final note of caution. Evidently, Lester Del Rey never read Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder even though it was published 14 years before this novel. Bob and his friends shoot and kill everything. They eat dinosaur eggs. They basically take no care to preserve the past at all and Del Rey never tries to deal with that potential problem. Now I personally think that if stepping on a butterfly could change the results of an election eighty million years later, than just breathing the air would have been a problem, but it still seems like Del Rey should have at least addressed the issue by throwing out some theory that the past is robust and can’t be affected by what time travelers are doing. That being said, I remembered these scenes vividly forty years later and especially the fate of the little girl, Gina. That’s saying quite a lot about a novel. This isn’t a great work of literature, but it’s a story that for me has withstood the passage of time.

 

If you're one of the millions who read this story growing up, or if you're thinking about doing it now, why not join the discussion on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

March to Other Worlds day 15: The Elfstones of Shanara by Terry Brooks

Day 15 The Elfstones of Shannara by Terry Brooks

Like so many fantasy novels, there is a lot of marching in the Shannara series, so for the fifteenth day of the month I’ve decided to focus on The Elfstones of Shannara by Terry Brooks in honor of my father-in-law who ultimately sacrificed his life for his country when agent-orange-created-cancer finally killed him eleven years ago today.

 

The sequel to Terry Brooks’ famous Sword of Shannara, Elfstones is all about sacrifice. A mystical tree called the Ellcrys is responsible for holding demons away from the earth. After millennia of guarding the planet, the Ellcrys is dying and as a result all of civilization is threatened by a return of the demonic hordes. The only possible hope is for a young woman named Amberle, the only surviving chosen of the Ellcrys, to bathe a seed from the tree in the bloodfire and then return to her kingdom to replant the tree before the demons over run it. On the one hand we have a classic quest while on the other a powerful military campaign striving to keep the Ellcrys from being destroyed before Amberle can return to start a new one.

 

More than thirty years after first reading this novel, Amberle remains one of my favorite fantasy characters although frankly she does very little by modern standards to make their quest successful. The other principle female character, Eretria, is tougher, more physically courageous, and frankly smarter than the other characters in the novel. But Amberle is the only person who can save the world and when the choice is finally forced upon her she embraces a fate I found worse than death so that millions of people she would never meet could go on living.

 

That’s a pretty powerful story and we haven’t even taken into account the huge military clash which features another of Terry Brooks most memorable characters, Stee Jans, The Iron Man, and his army fighting to give Amberle time to complete her quest to save them. No wonder I’ve remembered it so vividly across the decades.

 

If you have fond memories of Elfstones of Shannara or are thinking about reading it, why not join the conversation at https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

March to Other Worlds Day 14: Redshirts by John Scalzi

Day 14 Redshirts by John Scalzi

Star Trek boldly marched to more new worlds than most series through a combination of television, movies, books, and comics. John Scalzi’s novel, Redshirts, is a laugh-out-loud parody of the original series through the eyes of the…well, redshirts—the expendable cast of extras who mostly die in horrific ways to drive home the point that the latest adventure is terrifyingly dangerous.

 

This novel is incredibly creative—no surprise for anyone familiar with John Scalzi’s writing—as the book focuses in on those all-too-expendable people. You see, they’ve figured out what going on an away mission means to them and they will do anything to keep from coming to the attention of the “stars” of their starship. But it’s not until one of the expendables decides to do something about the terrible situation he and his friends are in that the novel really gets trekking. Can an extra take over the show to stop it from killing off scores of people? That depends on just how well they’ve figured out the bizarre physics of this takeoff of the Star Trek universe.

 

You don’t have to be a Star Trek fan to appreciate Redshirts.

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March to Other Worlds Day 13: The Test of Fire by William L. Hahn

Day 13 The Test of Fire by William L. Hahn

The Test of Fire is probably my favorite book by William L. Hahn. (I love Shards of Light an awful lot too, but The Test of Fire is a genuine standalone novel despite technically being a sequel to Plane of Dreams.) In this novel, Hahn proves that great writers do not need to have their heroes save the planet to construct a gripping tale. What it takes is fascinating, well-developed characters willing to risk everything they have for a cause they believe in. That’s the situation that Querlack finds himself in. He’s a retired adventurer who has invested the loot from his wilder days in a foef—a bit of mostly swampy land that doesn’t appear to have much of a future. A poor investment by any contemporary standard, made more so by Querlack’s determination to better the land for the sake of his peasants, not to milk it for every coin he can extract from it.

 

His neighbor, Sir Cran-Kalrith Pritaelseran, is a hard elf with a rigid sense of honor that basically comes down to the following—everyone exists to better him. He finds his new neighbor offensive and decides to continue a centuries old conflict and attempt to expand his own borders—a strategy he has used successfully on other neighbors. It’s a serious threat, but not the only one Querlack faces as he learns more and more about his new home.

 

This is a great book—made all the better by its primary focus on a relatively small territory. Hahn has always been capable of “painting” the master strokes of epic conflict—demons threatening his Lands of Hope. Now he proves he can be just as effective in small scale adventures and in doing so makes us cherish his characters all the more.

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March to Other Worlds Day 12: Dead Moon by Peter Clines

Day 12 Dead Moon by Peter Clines

Zombies would normally be part of my Occult-tober event, but when they happen on the moon it seems to fit the March to Other Worlds just as well, so I’ve decided to make Peter Clines’ Dead Moon the focus of the twelfth day of this event.

 

In the future, the moon has become a massive cemetery with something like 16 million bodies interned there. A space elevator makes transportation to the moon really cheap and the notion that bodies buried on the moon don’t decompose appeals to a lot of rich people. So several cemeteries have sprouted on the moon and a new profession—caretaker—has developed to take care of the deceased.

 

On top of that, the moon is a tourist attraction with classes of rich students going to the moon instead of Disney World on elaborate field trips, not to mention business ventures, etc. So there are lots of potential victims for the coming zombie horde.

 

Matters begin in a pretty straightforward fashion. A meteor strike results in the undead beginning to rise and—very realistically I thought—no one believes it’s happening. Official reaction is extremely slow and further complicated by the fact that one of the first presumed victims of the zombies is the spoiled son of the company CEO.

 

Then things get really interesting. These zombies are not just mindless brain-seeking corpses. They have a disturbingly high level of cunning. They might even be smart.

 

I don’t want to spoil any of the surprises in the novel, so I’ll just say that the reader (with slightly more information than the characters) understands that there is more going on than the dead rising. Just what that is, however, is not immediately clear—even though Cline gives plenty of clues that I kicked myself for missing earlier in the book. This is a brilliantly plotted novel that also appears to be very well researched. I’m not an expert on the moon or conditions there, but the description of what a person goes through when exposed to the cold vacuum of space was riveting and totally believable. Even if the rest of the book had been terrible (and let’s be clear, it’s awesomely good) that one scene and it’s follow up chapter would have been worth reading the entire novel for.

 

Every time I thought I was approaching the natural end of the book, Clines shook things up and ramped the tension even higher. I’m proud to say I figured out a big chunk of how our heroes were going to deal with the final monstrous problem, but I’m not sure how much credit that should give me because I didn’t figure out that that particular problem was going to need to be solved until Cline hit me over the head with it.

 

I’d like to wrap up by noting that novels can be made or broken based on the skills of their narrators. Fortunately, Ray Porter has the kind of voice and cadence that could make the wandering dead stop and listen to him. He does a phenomenal job and it just makes a great book all the better.

 

If you’re looking for zombies in a new and interesting environment, you should listen to Dead Moon and join the conversation at https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

March to Other Worlds Day 11: Morgaine by C.J. Cherryh

Day 11 Morgaine by C. J. Cherryh

In the Morgaine series, C. J. Cherryh’s heroes literally travel to a new world in each novel, bringing pain and destruction to the inhabitants in their efforts to stop a large catastrophe striking all of human space. Like the Chronicles of Amber, I got the opening trilogy to this series as part of my initial membership in the Science Fiction Book Club. As I recall my mother had to sign off on my joining because of my age and she wasn’t happy about it, but she did it for me. (Thanks, Mom!) I stayed in the SFBC for the next ten or twelve years and bought hundreds of books from them, but those first ones stand out in my memory: A Heinlein Trio, The Chronicles of Amber, Riddle of Stars, and The Book of Morgaine. Each was at least a trilogy because I wanted to get my money’s worth, and oh did I get it. That was the single best dollar I have ever spent in my life!

 

Over the last four decades I’ve read dozens of Cherryh’s books and decided on Gate of Ivrel and its sequels for this event because they fit the theme so well. This is the story of the enigmatic, Morgaine, a cursed woman out of legend, and Vanye, who becomes bonded to her and her mission to save humanity by closing down a series of gates that can transport people through space and time. These gates offer the potential of great power, but they also have the potential to destroy civilizations if someone uses them to tinker with the past. A human civilization sent a company of soldiers through the gates to close them one after the other until there are no more. (So it’s a suicide mission because they will only discover that there are no more when they don’t come out the other side of the last gate.) Morgaine is the last (and possibly not the first generation) of those soldiers and her tale is amazing in no small part because the Gates offer power and the possibility of immortality and many fight her in her efforts to close them down.

 

Cherryh tells Morgaine’s story through the eyes of Vanye, the bravest man in literature who was ever condemned for cowardice. He is the epitome of honor and we watch him be tricked into serving Morgaine whom he loathes and fears as a witch who got ten thousand men killed a century earlier. Over the course of the book he grows to understand just how selfless and heroic his lady truly is. In doing so we watch him navigate a world in which none of his peers (save one) lives up to the ideals that he embodies. Cherryh’s greatest strength as an author has always been her ability to portray new and distinctive cultures in great detail but without exhausting the reader through long and tedious descriptions. Vanye is one of her better tools for accomplishing this. We learn about his people by contrasting his actions and motivations with those of everyone he encounters. I love this series and I bet you will too.

So if you're interested in amazing sf that reads like fantasy, why not drop over to my Facebook page and join in the discussion of Morgaine: https://www.facebook.com/GilbertStack...

 

March to Other Worlds Day 10: City of Smoke and Mirrors by Nick Piers

Day 10 City of Smoke and Mirrors by Nick Piers

Where Marion Harmon has created the most realistic super hero world I’ve yet encountered, Nick Piers has created a detective super hero series that is an extraordinary tribute to both Raymond Chandler and Batman. Not that Dilbert Pinkerton, mutated armadillo raised in a lab, is anything like Batman, but he is a hardboiled detective who could easily swap one liners with Sam Spade or Hammett’s Continental Op. Now add to that Piers’ beautiful gift for words—description and dialogue alike—perfect pacing and fascinating plot and you’ve got the makings of a great mystery. But it’s the super-powered cast that puts this book into the March-worthy category. And just think, when you finish City of Smoke and Mirrors you get to top it off with The Dame Was a Tad Polish.

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