Rudolph Kohn's Blog, page 3

The Mediocre Spy Thriller Agatha Christie Wrote: Destination Unknown!

I stumbled onto this weird little book when I was in a bit of an Agatha Christie kick. Destination Unknown, which was also published as So Many Steps to Death, is a grandmaster mystery novelist's attempt at a spy thriller. And sadly, though not wholly unexpectedly, it isn't very good.

Imagine Tolkien writing a courtroom drama.

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Against Cynicism: Tolkien v. Herbert

I found an interesting video by a channel called "Jess of the Shire" and I watched one of her videos, "Tolkien's Problem with Dune." The video above is partly my reaction to her video, including a few points where I think her assessment is dead-on, as well as a few points of disagreement. Plus, I add in some of my thoughts about cynicism in science-fiction and futurism, as well.

A Sci-Fi Thriller with Some Cool Ideas! The World of Null-A Review!

This book was recommended by someone who commented on one of my YouTube videos! It's a science fiction novel by A.E. van Vogt, and the version I read was a revised 1970 paperback edition that added a little more background and clarity about the phenomenon he calls "null-A."

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An Inexplicable Classic: Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem

Hoo boy, this one hurts. It was a few years ago. People kept telling me that Solaris by Stanislaw Lem was a real classic of science fiction.

So I picked up a copy, and read it. I didn't really like it much, but it was short and I wasn't really looking too closely. Back on the shelf it went.

Until recently. I picked it up again. I figured, "Hey, I've been reading a bunch and reviewing a bunch and maybe I'll like it more on a second read." I was wrong. Dead wrong.

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A Fascinating Short Story: Tumble, by Lydia Schoch

"Fascinating" really is the right word to describe this deceptively good short story by Lydia Schoch. It's not often that I finish a story, short or long, and immediately go back to the beginning for another helping. Tumble managed to do that, and that by itself is notable.

It works so well because the story's tone is a very smooth, almost imperceptible escalation from banality, to healthy curiosity, to benign but notable strangeness, and onward through a few more levels that I won't spoil. That smoothness was a major factor that got me to go back right after I finished it; I was left wondering whether I had missed a hint or two or a page somewhere.

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Strange Heritage: Thoughts from a Star Trek TOS Bingewatch!

My dad recently came to visit me, and one of the things I bought a while back but never actually went through was a Blu-Ray box set of Star Trek (the original series)! He's a big fan of the show, and so, when we weren't doing something else, we kicked back and watched some old Star Trek together.

We didn't watch the whole series, but my dad picked and chose episodes from the whole original run, starting with the pilot and going all the way through the end of the third season. All in all, we watched about 34 episodes, and then 6 more he watched while I was half-doing something else.

The original Star Trek series is a great example of a half-way point between older sci-fi pulps and modern pop sci-fi that focuses on longer plots and personal drama. It does a bit of both. It's very episodic, but there are a few little story elements that appear repeatedly and actually develop over the course of the show. Spock's character is a good example.

One thing I noticed was a strong degree of repetitiveness in the show (for better or worse). There were quite a few episodes that were pretty simple, along the lines of "monster hunts the crew," with a few of them fairly basic and one or two that were quite good. Lots of supercomputers running civilizations, usually with disastrous consequences. Plenty of plots about someone bad getting into Engineering (they need better locks or something!). Quite a few super-beings playing with the crew. Many ticking clocks where something must be done by some time or else the Enterprise must leave for some other mission. Also, a veritable greenhouse full of different plants that shoot gas, spores, or thorns. The Star Trek jelly lens for shots of women was a frequent guest in the episodes we watched, too.

I was surprised to find that two of the episodes we watched were originally written by Harlan Ellison and Robert Bloch. I actually had to do a double-take and make sure it was the same Bloch who wrote horror pulp stories, but it was!

We watched quite a few of the "meme" episodes: The Man Trap with Kirk's "handsome woman" comment; The Naked Time with fencing shirtless Sulu; Shore Leave, with the Alice in Wonderland references; Arena with the infamous Kirk-Gorn slowfight; The City on the Edge of Forever, in which "Edith Keeler must die;" and The Omega Glory, with the pseudo-Constitution and pseudo-Pledge of Allegiance.

I was a little surprised by what my dad chose to skip, too: We watched exactly zero Klingon episodes, and skipped The Trouble with Tribbles and I, Mudd, too.

Kirk was often a bit of a superman, and it was also funny to see how the Blu-Ray clarity made stunt doubles very obvious.

It was a fun experience, and it was interesting to watch (and in some cases, re-watch) some of these old examples of pop sci-fi from the '60s, that has been so influential for so long. Some people dismiss TOS as a relic of a bygone era, but there's something to be learned from its simplicity and episodic nature, and its long-term popularity. It also made me put a new value on The Next Generation, which I watched much more frequently as a kid, and the contrast between the two of them is something worth considering deeply. It's been a long time since I've seen any TNG, so maybe I'll have to look back at some of that, eventually!

A Satisfying Conclusion... for now! Review of Raymond Feist's Magician: Master

It's going to be impossible to review Magician: Master without spoiling a little bit of Magician: Apprentice, so if you're sensitive to spoilers, you may want to check out my review of the first book, and figure out whether or not you want to read it, and then come back here.

With that warning in place, here we go!

Magician: Master is the second book in Raymond Feist's first four-book Riftwar Saga, and it's even more closely connected to Apprentice than the two that follow (those would be Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon).

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Tense, Realistic Sci-Fi: The Andromeda Strain!

This was a blast from the past... I read a lot of Michael Crichton's works back when I was in high school, but I really haven't read any of his stuff since then... over 20 years!

I recently picked up a copy of The Andromeda Strain and read it again... I can't believe this book came out in 1969! It seems newer than that to me.

The Andromeda Strain is Michael Crichton's tribute to the rise of biology and biologists. He notes how, up until recently (in 1969), physicists and chemists got all the limelight, but that from then on, they would have to compete with the real advances that were going on in the techniques and results used by biologists.

The book is written with a reporter's tone and feels very close to nonfiction at times. It's a bit dull at first, as Crichton sets the stage for the main action of the book, but that problem goes away pretty soon. Once the establishment of the fictional biological quarantine facility is done, Crichton very quickly moves to the main plot, and his writing is slow, tense, and full of atmosphere.

The basic plot of The Andromeda Strain is simple: a space probe intended to bring back samples of any biological matter from upper Earth orbit suddenly fails and falls out of orbit. It lands in a little town in Arizona, and seems to kill everyone nearby. The focus of the book is the efforts of a few brilliant scientists to isolate, investigate, understand, and possibly counter these lethal effects. Is it extraterrestrial or not? How and why is it so lethal?

The book is chock full of very realistic science stuff, mixed with very cleverly fictionalized elements. For instance, the book has a bibliography at the end, but as far as I can tell, the whole thing is faked! It looks very convincing, though. I tried looking up some of the more banal articles in the bibliography and even those don't appear to be real. As a physicist, I found it very funny to be trolled by Crichton.

On the minus side, some of those realistic science elements work against the book. For instance, early in the book, some people investigating the town use a fictionalized chemical called "chlorazine" to kill all the birds nearby and prevent them from spreading the pathogen. Crichton describes "chlorazine" as an "uncoupler," which is a very real thing, actually! Some potentially dangerous diet pills use a mild uncoupler to induce weight loss. However, uncouplers would also kill any remaining survivors in the area, and Crichton somehow misses this!

Another minor plot hole stems from their attempts to grow the pathogens on different media. Based on what we learn at the end, it's highly unlikely that would have worked!

The ending is also incredibly rushed, without enough explanation or falling action after the climax.

However, despite its few notable flaws, The Andromeda Strain is still a gripping and intense look at the difficulties inherent in dealing with complicated, multivariate systems, the assumptions we make about what life must or should "look like," and more questions that real scientists really need to think about. It's a fairly short book, and absolutely worth a read.

And, just as an aside, there was a great moment in the book where one of the scientists told another to complete their scan before making conclusions. It was weirdly similar to another moment in my first novel, Pursuit of the Heliotrope. It was very weird to see, but it was part of both characters' personalities: a preference for thoroughness and thoughtfulness, and avoiding jumping to conclusions.

Anyway, go give The Andromeda Strain a read if you like good realistic sci-fi, especially if you like first contact stories or biological horror. The e-book version is really expensive, so I recommend an old paperback version, if you can get your hands on one.

Pursuit of a Decent Title: Missteps and Fails!

Normally I write an extended post that kind of explains the video so that you can get most of the value out of reading it.

This time, I'm just going to say that my incredulous reading of some of my ideas as I worked on a title for Pursuit of the Heliotrope is something mere writing would be unlikely to capture.

After I finished the book, I spent about two days fumbling over a title (despite all the thinking I had done while writing) and some of the goofy things I came up with are worth hearing about.

You can check out the book here, if you'd like:

on Amazon: https://a.co/d/csZVOO0

or elsewhere: https://books2read.com/u/bWaQQM

Made in the Edits: Lessons from My First Novel, part 3

Sometimes you actually have to finish something before you really understand the process. My first novel was a great example of this principle.

Some background: I wrote what I thought was a detailed outline and character description before I started on the first draft of Pursuit of the Heliotrope. I finished the first draft, and it just barely reached 50,000 words. And, to be honest, by the time I was working on the last third of the book, I was feeling pretty tired of it and definitely wasn't doing my best at that point. And I wasn't even really crunching to finish it! I just found it hard to maintain interest in writing the same thing for such a long period.

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