Cirsova Four, Part Four

With the release of the fifth issue of Cirsova looming on the horizon, I'd really better start moving on these story reviews.  My reading backlog isn't getting any smaller!

Lost Men

P. Alexander really doesn't care for your genre distinctions, and just to prove it (again), he follows a weird fantasy epic up with a curious retelling of the story of Peter Pan and Captain Hook.  Eugene L. Morgulis plays with the notion of a grown-up Peter Pan in a way that makes the film Hook look even worse by comparison than it does on its own.  This story is one of those curious cases of deconstruction done in a loving manner that takes nothing away from the original.  It is as much an homage as it is a deconstruction, and that's a neat trick.  This whimsical version of the classic might be one of my favorites from this issue.

...Where There Is No Sanctuary

Superficially, the plot of this story shares much with the earlier Cirsova tale, A Suit of Haidrah Skin.  Both feature a villainous wizard-astronaut(?) in a high tower-rocket(?) that needs to die to end his reign of terror.  Where Rob Lang went with a weird tales vibe and a far-flung, perhaps post-apocalyptic setting, here Howie K. Bentley uses a dark-age setting and feel to give it a much more mythic feel.  There are a couple of other parallels that are best left as an exercise for the reader, the better not to spoil any surprises.  The real take away here - the one well worth remembering - is that these two themes on the "assault the wizard's tower" plot demonstrate there are countless ways to tell the same story.  The real question is not whether a writer has re-used an old plot, but whether or not he has infused new life into that old plot, and this issue of Cirsova features two such instances. 

Dust of Truth

Joyce Frohn takes a 'barbarians raid the civilized lands to secure plunder' tale, rolls in a romantic angle that gives the plundering a more personal motivation, sprinkles it with a bit of first-use-of-gunpowder spice, then botches the story with a completely pointless gender swap.  The women in this tale act like men, and the men act like women.  That sort of swap can work, if there's a reason for it, and this story offers none.  Note that the complaint here isn't that 'girls can't be heroes'; this is the fifth such story in Cirsova, but it's the first instance of female protagonists that felt forced.  It's also the first in which the men act like cowering simps or stupid degenerates, and the first in which that message was delivered with all the subtlety of a hammer to the face.  It's a shame, really, the story itself had a lot of potential, but the awkward gender swap and expectation of an explanation for this world's role-reversals pulls the reader's attention away from the narrative.

Down to Sheol: A Review

I’m glad I read Down to Sheol, even though it is well outside of my normal bailiwick.  This book contains no ogres, princesses, zap guns, hyperspace malfunctions, or hungry gods lurking in lava filled arctic caves.  Instead, it’s a modern day noir set amid the small stakes of rural south Texas county politics.  Add to that, I’m a PG guy who tries to avoid R rated media, and Down to Sheol is a brutally explicit book filled with explicitly loathsome villains.  The camera never looks away from them as they engage in their various depredations. 

Right off the top, let me just state that I bought this book after reading a few articles that the author, M. T. White, had posted on Return of Kings.  Those articles provided independent confirmation for the Pulp Revolution’s push for masculine narratives that reflect real people and real relationships is not an outlier.  In fact, the Pulp Revolution is not unique.  There are a wealth of people coming around to the need for actual heroic protagonists.  For whatever reason, there is a growing market for stories featuring black and white morality coupled with men driven to do the right thing no matter the cost, and who win against all odds.  M. T. White is an author who came to that conclusion outside of the Pulp Magazine framework, and I wanted to read Down to Sheol to get a sense of the parallel development of these ideas inside the modern day thriller world of self-publishing.  If my initial scouting foray is any indication, masculine writing is in the nascent stages of making a real comeback.

M. T. White writes with a ruthless minimalism that results in a gripping read.  This story of small town politics might read like a small stakes version of the Dallas TV show, but White’s characters leap off the page and his plot races ahead at breakneck speed.  This is the closest thing to a modern day noir story written with the plain-writ style of a Dashiell Hammett or Mickey Spillane that I’ve read in a long time.
 

I could have done without the explicit sexual content.  As mentioned above, my preference is for scenes where that sort of chicanery occurs off-screen.  A few hints and suggestions suffice; my imagination can fill in the details.  That’s a personal preference, and if you have a stronger stomach for that sort of writing, don’t let my warning hold you back.  That said, none of these scenes felt gratuitous.  They each provide an all-too-clear look into the dark souls of the novel’s antagonists.  These scenes revealed their true character and helped establish the stakes and give the reader concrete reasons to sneer and feel disgust whenever the villains were on screen.  The brutal honesty with which White presents these villains is as transparently manipulative as it is forgivably effective.

I have an easier time reading explicit violence, but found myself wincing at times.  White's writing isn't just graphic, its gripping.  He writes fight scenes in such a way that you almost feel each blow land yourself.  It's powerful stuff, and it gives his fight scenes a weight and suspense that you don't read very often.  The stakes in each scene are very real, and even if you think the right man will win, the action goes so fast and so visceral that you always have that little shred of doubt whether the hero really will make it out alive.  

The villains are balanced out by protagonists who are both fully fleshed out, completely sympathetic, and good-hearted down to their core.  The female lead starts off in a very compromising situation, and watching her slowly extricate herself from the clutches of evil is gratifying.  The hero of the piece has his flaws, but they are understandable – it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.  He is the strong, plain-spun, quiet and capable type of hero that’s hard not to root for.  He also has a wisdom beyond his years that give him that competent underdog status that again, makes your heart go out to him.  As if that wasn’t enough, White presents him as a natural romantic leading man.  He doesn’t white knight – his first meeting with the female lead, he basically shuts her out…which of course makes her all the more intrigued by him.  It’s refreshing to read a masculine lead who knows how to handle a woman like that.  It’s a rarity these days.

This is a good read.  Due to its explicit nature, it wasn’t a particularly a fun read for a square like me.  Even so, White’s writing pulled me in.  The man knows how to craft a good story with great characters.  If you need a break from the aliens and dragons, then you should give him a shot.  If he keeps writing like this, he’s going to be one of those self-publishing authors who succeeds based on his own talent and hard work, not due to his friends in the publishing world.

Torchship - The Best of the 80s

Reading Torchship* brought me back to those halcyon days of the 1980s hen network television spent a full decade taking advantage of the reduced costs of special effects to churn out a steady stream of episodic ensemble genre shows that were as creative in their central conceit as they were clumsy in their execution. Much to my chagrin, the advances in special effects and willingness to spend money on genre fiction was not matched by a willingness to spend money on quality writing, and most of these shows died a quick death.

Torchship might have been one of those shows that fed and dashed my hopes. It has all of the elements. It has an interstellar cargo ship bouncing around a large setting. It has a generally stable crew of six, each with their own secrets and fully-fleshed out personalities. It has adventure, action, mystery, romance, and politics, all in equal measure. If only it was poorly written, it would have hit every note of those 1980 shows. Alas, Karl Gallagher drops the ball by writing in a clear and unobtrusive style that lets the characters and action speak for themselves.

Karl Gallagher’s novel about a tramp steamer in space – the science is decidedly on the “hard” end of the spectrum – actually encompasses a number of shorter stories tied together by the slow reveal of the pilot, Michigan “Mitchie” Smith’s, narrative thread. Her background and actions are a sort of sub-plot to the novel, but given the lack of a single over-riding plot it isn’t fair to call it a sub-plot. It’s really more of a narrative hook to tie the novel together and keep the reader’s interest. In that regard, it works. It’s done so deftly and skillfully that until the first interlude between stories, you don’t realize there’s more to the pilot than it seems.

Later, you realize that most of what you know about the pilot comes straight from her mouth, and that she hasn’t been telling the entire truth through most of the book. That’s a neat spin on the “unreliable narrator” concept which serves to hold the reader’s interest as well.

You should detect a pattern here. Karl Gallagher’s writes with a deceptively clear and transparent ease that belies the inner workings of Torchship. This book is like the proverbial duck placidly swimming across a pond, and with all sorts of furious activity churning the water beneath the surface. The surface workings are entertaining enough. Stories of a blue-collar shipping crew rescuing an heiress passenger from potential kidnappers, trapped on a deserted planet trying to hunt a professional hunter, hunting buried treasure, and ferrying a small horde of refugees to safety, all have a charm all their own. And every one would have been right at home on 1980s genre television.

As I mentioned, the book contains a number of short stories, but as they are presented in chronological order and the results of one adventure flow naturally into the next, it doesn’t feel like a collection of short stories so much as it feels like a travelogue through a fully realized sci-fi setting, and it’s a setting well worth exploring. The key incident in this future’s history is the end of humanity’s golden age when the AIs that made such golden times possible betrayed humanity and launched a pogrom that nearly wiped humans from existence. That underlying event gives the setting both a bit of a dark-age feel, and a post-apocalyptic feel, and the omnipresent feel of a massive extinction level event that could strike at any time. It’s a big sandbox, and Gallagher manages to explore enough to feel satisfying, but not so much that it starts to feel small.

All that aside, Gallagher really won me over with a minor scene midway through the novel. Any book that includes a scene where a man tells a woman to, “Go make me a sandwich,” and her response is a cheerful, “Okay!” earns bonus points on my scorecard. As an added bonus, the open endedness of the setting presented should provide a solid RPG background for anyone looking for a Travelleresque setting complete with big threats, easily understandable history, and enough room in the sandbox for any sort of adventure your players want.

You might not have been explicitly looking for a hard sci-fi blue collar ensemble novel that explores a fully realized future setting, but if that’s something that tickles your fancy, you can’t do any better than Torchship.

* I actually sprung for the audiobook add-on.  It was two bucks, and read by Laura Gallagher who did a fine job.  My only complaint is that her pronunciation of the word tourist, which gets used a lot, sounded more like "turrist", and I had visions of Charles Barkley's mother reading the story every time.  That's on me - don't let my foibles scare you off.  It's eminently listenable.

Schrodinger's Gat: A Review

Schrodinger’s Gat is a tight little novel that weaves a modern sci-fi thriller by tying age old philosophy debates to modern quantum physics.

The basic plot is that of a suicidal author saved from the fires of hell by a beautiful young girl. She distracts him just as he’s about to step in front of a train, and then leads him into a two-man conspiracy to prevent tragedies across the San Francisco Bay Area. She and the mad doctor for whom she works have built a machine that taps into quantum-theory to predict future tragedies, and race to stop as many as they can. The universe has other ideas, and before long the author gets swept up into a thriller story rooted in (as far as I know) accurate quantum physics, with a dash of metaphysics thrown in for good measure.

All of those fun intellectual exercises play a role in this story – the observer effect, Schrodinger’s Cat, paradoxes – and most of the background ideas should be familiar to long term fans of time-travel stories, science fiction, and popular accounts of esoteric branches of quantum physics. The theories and experiments are presented in this book a very accessible manner for those coming to these ideas for the first time, and woven into the plot in a way that won’t bore old hands already familiar with the idea.

Rob Kroese, pronounced KROO-zee it turns out, keeps the characters and the reader in suspense as the characters grapple with notions of free will, predestination, and meeting one’s fate on the road he takes to avoid it. Couple that with some gunplay, vehicle chase scenes, and knuckle biting escapes, and you’ve got yourself a tight little novel that might make your head hurt, if you think about it too hard.

One of the main characters in the book is named Heller, and that name triggered memories of Catch-22, a fitting comparison for this novel. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t, and in the end, you can never really be sure whether you really had a choice in the matter to begin with. The final confrontation is as epic as the ideas in the book, and while the end doesn’t leave the reader with a solid answer as to what, exactly, just happened…neither does philosophy or quantum physics. Which is just fine with this reader - a book like this is far more about the journey than the destination. And it does leave little doubt in one's mind about the appropriateness of the title of the book.

You expect some cleverness from a book with a title like Schrodinger’s Gat, but Rob Kroese races way past clever and doesn’t stop until he hits downright brainy.

The Invisible City, By Brian K. Lowe

This is my kind of throwback. 

Brian K. Lowe is one of those authors that Cirsova introduced to me.  His story, Hoskin's War, in the second issue featured a grossly under-utilized setting for fantasy - the American frontier in the days of the American War of Independence.  It took a nudge and a Christmas sale, but I've finally confirmed that Brian's long form work is as good as his short form work.

The story kicks off with that wonderful trope of a WWI soldier stumbling into a far flung world so very much unlike his own.  Through grit, wariness, cleverness, and a bit of luck, he survives his first few days in this alien place and goes on to fight for love, honor, and freedom.

Brian's writing style is great.  This book is told in the first person, and he never forgets to describe the advanced tech thrown at the hero in a way that a 1920's young officer would.  Clee, the hero, references Wells and Verne, indicating some familiarity with science-fiction that give him a leg up when it comes to dealing with the fantastic.  The prose is solid.  It has an brutal musicality to it that just works.  Check it:

How ironic, then, that such was my own goal, to track Farren down wherever he might run and wrest from him that which I  desired with my heart, and which he desired with only the basest animal emotions: Hana Wen. Whence he would fly, I knew not, but the answer would likely be found in the midst of his fellows. With that end in mind, I marched boldly into the aliens' headquarters, planning to elicit advice from the Library. Hardly had I stopped before the elevator than two Nuum pulled up even with me, seized me by the arms, and whisked me away.

That's some great stuff, right there.  Feels almost Zelznian, you dig?  It's plain spoken, yet it also has a rolling rhythm to it you don't often find these days. Here's another way you can tell that this guy writes with a #PulpRevolution aesthetic - he isn't afraid to stick Christian words into the mouth of a character born and raised in an early-twentieth century Christendom:

Someday, when the final horn sounds and the multitudes of Mankind gather around the Lord's throne for judgment, He will rise up to His full magnificent height, and He will point His majestic finger, and He will say: "Behold the irony of Man, that I should grant him reason, and he should squander it." And He will be pointing at me.

Used to be passages like this were hen's teeth.  They used to be refreshing to read, but I've been reading a lot of Wright these days, so that sort of reference is no longer just a nice change of pace.  Over the course of 2016, this sort of thing has become damn near a requirement for me.

The one downside is that the middle act seems to meander a bit. It doesn't really.  It turns out the meandering about is important for the resolution of the book, but until you see how it pays off, it does seem like something of a wandering travelogue of the new world the hero finds himself in.  Stick with it, it's worth it.

When people talk about #RegressHarder, this is exactly what they are talking about.  Everything from the basic plot, to the inclusion of an honest to gosh hero, a bit of genuine romance handled with a deft touch, and even the narrator's voice, it all harkens back to earlier days of science-fiction.  And yet, Brian K. Lowe doesn't just write a 1950's work of fiction, he writes a modern day story using all the best bits of the 1950s style.  The voice, the romance, the heroism, and the unbridled sense of optimism all make reading The Invisible City a joy.

The Yanthus Prime Job

It looks like this blog may just be turning into a book review blog.  Things are pretty crazy right now what with the audio book recording, trying to finish "Five Dragons" before the end of the year - a long shot, to be honest - cranking away on a couple of sooper seekrit projects that will be revealed in the new year or forever hidden...oh, and family and overtime in the salt mines. 

Those are all excuses.  To be honest, in the last few months I've just been thrilled to discover great writer after great writer.  Reading Cirsova, and finding a couple of great social nodes on Twitter, have introduced me to a number of great writers.  It's an embarrassment of riches.  Combine that with technology that allows me to sneak in a chapter or two at lunch or in quiet moments at work, and it's almost embarrassing how much reading I've been able to accomplish over the last few month.

Eventually things change, as they are wont to do, and you may find things in these spaces other than reviews.  You know, things like politics, film, writing, wargaming...I do miss wargaming...and philosophy.  But for now, it's books, Books, BOOKS!
 

 Why, lookee here!  It's another book.  Not just another book, but another @RobKroese book.  Remember when I said, "[Starship Grifter is] just not my cuppa joe."?

Yeah...about that.

The Yanthus Prime Job is a novella for a dollar.  It's short.  It's fun.  It's protagonist has the standard, "one last job" motivation, but we all know that for characters like this, there's always another job waiting just around the corner.  A writer's gotta eat, after all.

This title is set in the same universe as Starship Grifters, and it features the same sorts of characters - grifters, conmen, and thieves.  The protagonist of this work is a bartender trying to go straight after a career working for the Ursa Minor Mafia*.  Deep in debt, she hatches a plot to steal a valuable thing and use the proceeds to buy her way out of debt to the mafia and escape Yanthus Prime for parts unknown. 

The story is half standard heist, half science-fiction.  The heist is easily recognizable from movies ranging from the 1940s to today - break into a secure museum and steal a valuable macGuffin - but includes several clever science-fiction nods.  Her (sort of?) low tech solution to defeat the standard high-tech security measures is the sort of plan that could only work in science-fiction or fantasy.  Otherwise, most of her gear (grapple guns, chameleon suits, and plasma glass cutters, for example) is the standard thief kit.  Aside from the key plot-point used to defeat the security cameras, the break-in and escape could be plunked into any setting.  That's actually a compliment.  Rather than succumb to the temptation to make everything whiz-bang gee-whillickers new SF you've never seen before, Kroese wisely stops while the stopping is good.  The hook is all you need.

If you've watched a lot of heist movies, you'll see a few of the double and triple crosses coming a mile away, but there are enough surprises left in Kroese's pockets to make it worth reading through to the end.


  *  Get it?  Ursa Minor Mafia?  Ursa means "bear".  It's the Russians.  Kroese has a gift for nomenclature that is downright Futuramaian.  I mean, the man has a book out called Shrodingers Gat, for crying out loud.  How can you not love that?

 

The Lost Castle

You might think you're done with sprawling multi-volume works of fiction, but if you're the sort to read 30+ books per year - and since you're reading this blog it's a safe bet you are - then you know full well you can run but not escape falling into a one now and then.

Nick Cole's The Wyrd Series, is the latest honey trap to snare me, and the latest title in the series, The Lost Castle, is also my latest dip into post-apocalypse fiction.  As is usual with Nick Cole, the action moves, the characters intrigue, and the prose bounces back and forth between gritty and dreamy.  If you're a fan of good PA tales, you need to add this one to your queue.

I'm actually not going to review the series does for readers here.  Rather, I'm going to talk about what the book does for writers.  Nick is a smart guy and a great writer, and he does a few things with this series that aren't obvious.

The first thing to understand is that the Wyrd series isn't really an epic start to finish tale.  It's a framing device for different kinds of stories.  We've seen this in television shows such as Doctor Who, X-Files, or Lost.  All of these franchises are specifically set up to tell different stories from week to week.  This week may be a gangster story, the next a closed dining room Victorian murder mystery, and the next a mad scientist unleashing a monster of the week story.  There may be a an overarching story line within each, but the set-up is such that the writers can play around with different kinds of stories within the setting.

So it is with Cole's version of the apocalypse.  Without spoiling any details that you can't learn from the back blurbs, this isn't An apocalypse, it's All The apocalypses.  So what starts as a zombie story morphs into a robots-victorious story.  What starts as the story of a drunkards redemption segues into an autistic child's glimpse into the last days of humanity.  The latest book bounces around a bit, (we continue to follow two other character's story lines,) but it is primarily a 1970's Lovecraftian spy thriller. 

The other thing for readers to note when reading this book is how Cole plays with tenses.  It took me some time to notice how he did this, but it's really quite simple.  The primary narrative is written in the past tense, but Cole uses present tense writing for the flashback scenes, which lends them an airy, dream-like quality that reinforces the narrative in some subtle and powerful ways.  There's more to the magic of his prose than that, but it's an obvious and effective tactic that every writer should add to their quiver.

The last thing to point out is that Cole's creativity consists largely of taking a lot of old ideas and throwing them into a single pot and stirring them up to create a new kind of tale that is both complex and approachable.  He doesn't need to reinvent zombies.  We know.  He doesn't need to reinvent terminator bots.  We know.  He doesn't need to invent dark suited devils orchestrating the end of the world. We know.  But by writing the old stories in surprisingly new ways, and tying them together in ways we haven't seen before, he gives us a whole new kind of fiction that is both familiar and refreshingly new.

Maybe we readers can get a lot of enjoyment from the Wyrd series, but we writers can learn a lot from it.

Dipping a Toe in the #NewPulp Waters

You may have noticed that I talk a big game.  Well, over on twitter, Barry Reese called me out. 

When I opined in 140 characters or less that the New Pulp writers trade on the term pulp by slapping on the chrome while the Pulp Revolution focusses on the horsepower under the engine Reese wanted to know what New Pulp stories I was talking about, because he could name check two authors that he considered to be the best of the New Pulp writers working today.

Challenge accepted!

Within minutes I had bought a copy of Four Bullets for Dillon, by Derrick Ferguson.

Just to be clear, the conversation was civil, and even if Mr. Reese and I have different tastes, he’s a good guy that I’d gladly sit down  with and talk books for hours.  We’re going to bypass the subject of which modern pulp writers soured me on ‘pulp’ as a term any more indicative of quality than ‘punk’.  Instead, we're going to look at a pair of modern action stories from Derrick Ferguson.

This review was difficult to write.  Reviews in the one star and five star range are easy.  These middle-of-the-road reviews of works that show so much potential but just miss the mark mean that I can’t just rant or rave, but have to really analyze and understand where the problems lie.  And Four Bullets for Dillon has a few problems.  It’s not a bad work, but it's go issues.

The first story in the book, Dillon and the Bad-Ass Belt Buckle, features the eponymous hero and his sidekick Eli rescuing an Oscar winning actress from the jungles of Cambodia.  It starts with the duo having already rescued the actress from the clutches of the kidnappers and – wait, what?  Go back, Derrick, that sounds like a great story.  How did they get her out?  The dynamic duo mention lots of bullets and action…can I read that?  Perhaps that is another story in the Dillon-verse, but if so, the reader is given no indication – even editorially – of that. 

For my money, in cinema res serves as the gold standard for opening up action heavy stories. In any media.  This story opens at least twenty minutes after the cinema is done res-ing.  Which forces an early-story pause in the already limited action to provide the reader with an awkward information dump.  “Here’s what you missed out on,” paired with a blunt recitation of the damsel in distress’s resume, and a dry explanation that our hero is a soldier of fortune hired by outside agents to save her.  The whole opening section of this purported action story chooses exposition over action.

Compare that to my own ‘rescuing the damsel’ story.  In Bring Back Our Girls, the action starts just as the hero is on the cusp of breaking into the compound of the bad guys.  The first line of the story features the hero slitting the throat of one of the sentries.  The backstory leading up to that point is only slowly introduced over the first half of the story.  Thatset-up is wedged into the spaces between action, with only the goal, save kidnapped girls from vaguely Boko Haram-esque terrorists, mentioned in the first few parargraphs.  And that was crammed in just to ensure that the reader knew where their sympathies should lie – that the guy they just saw commit murder was the good guy killing a modern day slaver.

Speaking of opening, the introduction to Derrick features him climbing out from under the shot-up getaway Jeep and beating it with a wrench, frustrated that he cannot repair it.  He explicitly says if it was a horse, he’d shoot it.  Even granting that as the hyperbole it clearly is, following the “show, don’t tell” pattern, Ferguson shows us the hero is a petulant man-child for whom violence isn’t a last resort, but a means of expressing himself.  That doesn’t sound very heroic.  You might get away with that scene if Dillon has already been established as a hero in other ways, or if this was the last of a dozen bad breaks, but it’s a strange choice for setting up reader expectations.

Then you have the damsel in distress.  She is a fierce and independent successful modern woman who doesn’t need no man…except when it comes to being rescued.  Even that can be forgiven.  A high value hero needs a high value damsel, and although this seems to be the only kind of woman we see in media these days, they exist, they add drama, and my weariness of the trope amounts to mere personal preference.  What cannot be forgiven is that for all that we are told how great she is, we are shown a rather stupid woman.  Stupid or unbelievable.  Neither is flattering.

Let me explain.  The trio leaves their broken Jeep and sets out through the jungle on foot.  They come upon a new asphalt road and follow it to a small bandit settlement surrounded by log walls topped by sharp wire and broken glass.  With little choice, they decide to enter the settlement.  This provides an excuse for an important character moment.  The hero must explain to the damsel, Jenise, that this is serious.  There is danger here.  If she doesn’t listen to him, she could get badly hurt.  She resists at first, not understanding that she is out of her element, and that his words are not patronizing, but are driven by legitimate concern.  Did you notice what just happened there?  Having been kidnapped by a gang of violent men seeking to ransom her back to her benefactors, and rescued by a pair of violent men in a manner we are reliably informed was most violent, she doesn’t understand how high the stakes are at this moment. 

I can’t stress how damaging this is to the narrative of the story.  We’ve been told how smart and fierce she is.  Now we’re being told that getting kidnapped, shot at, and stranded in a jungle miles from civilization wasn’t enough evidence for her to understand.  We are expected to believe in a contradiction.  That sucks all the wind out of the sails.

Finally, about a third of the way into the story we have some real tension as Jenise is essentially kidnapped by the leader of the bandit camp.  We have a threat and some tension and we're starting to get invested when...it turns out Jenise has seduced the bandit leader and is going to be fine without the hero after all.  So the ensuing action is driven entirely by Dillon's ego with a touch of greed and envy on his part for a minor MacGuffin.  That's it.  There are no outside stakes involved at all.  It's just action for the sake of pew-pew-pew. 

I’m going to stop here.  These are all problems, and they get repeated throughout the book.  Rather than list them off in great detail, let’s look at the positives for a bit.

But before we do, I’m going to throw in one last complaint.  The book has for stories… and no Table of Contents.  That’s an editorial comment, but a valid complaint.  Self-publishers, you’ve got to do the little things to make your reader’s lives easier.  If you don’t take care of the little things, readers have no reason to think you’ll take care of the big ones.

I'm done, seriously this time.  Back to the positives.

Ferguson's descriptions are great, and his writing just plain works.  His prose is solid without un-necessary touches or flash.  Some of his descriptions are tight from a word count, but really fire the imagination in ways that I found impressive.

Ferguson's action is ferocious.  The man knows how to write fast and fun action scenes.  He knows how to ratchet up the physical tension.  He knows how to pace the action with those all-important breaks to catch your breath, and he throws in enough twists and turns to keep the reader just off-kilter enough that they can't possibly guess what's around the next bend.  Dillon's skills at swinging away from bad guys Tarzan-style was a nice nod to the old pulps and much appreciated by this reader.

The twists in the plot are well executed.  The good guy and bad guy are forced to work together, and the way that happens is...if not believable, at least understandable.  This is a pulp story we're talking about here.

Ferguson himself is fearless in the settings of his stories.  He pays just enough attention to the real world to keep them grounded, but doesn't let overly complex rationales interfere with a good story.  The lost bandit camp city in the heart of Cambodia was a brilliant setting.  It's preposterous and over the top from a real world standpoint, but that shouldn't stop an action writer from using it anyway. It's just the sort of setting that you should expect - nay, demand! - in a pulp story.  That goes double for the characters who are without exception distinct and personable.  Even the bit players are provided with enough character to draw the reader in.

In the final analysis, I can't recommend this book.  Ferguson's writing is solid, his descriptions great, but it's all surface detail.  There's no depth to this work.  There's nothing to hook the reader into the protagonist except for the protagonist himself.  Everything he does is for him, and we don't have any real reason to care what happens to him outside of the fact that he is the central character in the story.  Dillon could have walked away from any of these stories at multiple moments with no affect on anyone in the world but himself.  An arrogant narcissist can make for a fine protagonist, but the pulps that excite me don't just have protagonists - they have heroes.

You might like this book.  You might like empty action, and you don't need actual heroics done by a hero.  In which case, go crazy.  Enjoy.  Who am I to judge your tastes.  I just need more that that.  I need a reason to root for the good guy other than that he is really handsome and cool.  I need him to struggle and take risks and sacrifice himself for others.  I need him to fight for something bigger than himself, and Four Bullets for Dillon just doesn't meet that need.

Reading these stories just confirmed my complaint about so much of the new pulp fiction on the market today.  There's a lot of flash and chrome, but there's no heart and soul to it.

 

Grown Up Book Report: Starship Grifters

Most of what you'll find reviewed here at Seagull Rising are works that really blow my skirt up or that really grind my gears.  Starship Grifters, by Rob Kroese, is neither.  Instead, it's a very funny book with, that is really well written, and just isn't for me. 

The basic plot of the story follows the adventures of Rex Nihilo as he desperately tries to rid himself of a massive debt.  (The details of how he assumed that debt are left vague here for the purposes of saving potential readers the fun of discovery.)  Rex is a narcissistic, back stabbing, lying, no-good, dirty, double dealing swindler, but like all the best grifters he has a fearless arrogance and under-dog appeal that soften him up.  To make him an easier character to swallow, he is the best of a lot of bad actors - the people he swindles and who swindle him right back are so much worse that you can't help but root for Rex.

The book is narrated by his faux-femme robot sidekick, Sasha.  Sasha is a one of a kind, almost-sentient robot prevented from achieving true sentience by forced reboots every time she gets too clever.  This gives Kroese an excuse to deliberately set-up mysteries that Sasha just barely solves - only to blank her mind and deny readers the resolution until events can unfold for themselves.  It's one weird trick that that is as effective and funny as it is transparent. 

The leads in this book remind me of a gender-swapped Bender and Fry, of Futurama infamy.  You've got a lovable rogue - this time a human - and a dim-witted assistant - this time a female robot.  It's a classic pairing, and for good reason.  Making the straight man a largely emotionless robot results in a lot of very dry wit being tossed around right alongside some humdinger one liners like these:

• The name of the evil imperial government is the Malarchy.
• It takes a massive, well-funded bureaucracy to solve problems caused by a massive, well-funded bureaucracy
• The Strong Misanthropic Principle, which asserts that the universe exists in order to screw with us.

Then there's the Douglas Adams-esque rationalization for faster-than-light travel:

It was actually well known by the twentieth century that Euclidean geometry is arbitrary, being only one possible way of describing the relations of objects in space.  There are a theoretically infinite number of other geometries that all employ their own set of rules.  The trick is to find a geometry in which the distance you want to traverse is significantly shorter than in Euclidean geometry.  Essentially you reverse-engineer a an entirely new set of geometric rules based on the trip you want to take, and then employ those rules for only as long as the trip lasts.

This is literally called rationalizing a hypergeometric course.  Talk about hanging a lampshade on something.

So far I've name checked two of the best humor sci-fi franchises around, and you can throw the Stainless Steel Rat onto that pile.  This is a book can stand shoulder to shoulder with any of those franchises.  It is that funny and well written.

Here's where this review gets a little trickier to write.  Although everything I've said up to this point has been glowing, and while I'll certainly add Kroese to my stable of authors to look for, this isn't a book that appeals to me these days.

I'm just not a big fan of stories about con-jobs and heists.  At this point in my life, I've consumed enough moral ambiguity and anti-heroism.  My tastes run towards moral reinforcement and true heroism.  Rex Nihilo is just a grafter looking out for number one, and that leaves me cold.  Bear in mind, I finished this book on the strength of Kroese's humor and writing, but as pretty as its chrome sparkles it just doesn't have much under the hood. 

To understand where it fails, let's take a look at how well it meets Misha Burnett's Five Pillars of Pulp:

1. Action Oriented Storytelling:  Starship Grifters passes this with flying colors.  Those flying colors are typically those of lazer blasts, but it also features space chases and fistfights as well. 
2. Protagonists with a clear moral compass:  Pure fail.  Rex's moral compass always points straight towards himself.  His sidekick, Sasha, does what she can to help him, but is constrained by her programming.
3. An element of romance in the classical sense of decisive action:  None worth mentioning.
4. As well as the modern sense of interpersonal passion:  This one is a mixed bag. Rex is passionate about money and his own skin, but see number 2.  We'll score a half-point for the passion, but no more because the passion is not in service to anything greater than Rex himself.
5. An unapologetic view of violence as the proper tool for overcoming evil:  Rex, like all good grifters, believes violence is a tool best used on his behalf by others.

That's 1.5 out of 5 pillars.  That's a C level effort on the Pulp-O-Meter.  This is not to say that Starshp Grifters is a bad book.  It's a lot of fun, and those who enjoy madcap hijinks featuring as many as five separate groups bounce around the galaxy in a constant effort to outlie, out-cheat, and out-swindle each other would be hard pressed to find a book that does it better than Starship Grifters.

That's just not my cuppa joe.

And really, that may be the highest compliment one could pay an author:  I liked this book, even though it's not the sort of book I typically enjoy.

More on Manly Wade Wellman

Apparently I spoke too soon on the whole, "Who Fears the Devil" thing.  Having finished the book, it's far more than just a string of creepy Appalachian monster tales. 

For one thing, the book builds as it rolls along.  Every few tales John Silverstrings gets a little more detail added to his description.  When he confronts later supernatural creatures, he uses knowledge learned from earlier confrontations.  John as a character gets a little deeper and a little deeper with each story.

Note the word 'confronts' in the previous paragraph.  This isn't a monster hunter book.  Sometimes John fights monsters - he literally punches them in the jaw.  Sometimes he watches while the monsters deliver some much needed justice to a well deserving scoundrel.  And sometimes John even redeems the monsters.  In at least one case he fixes the monster by fixing the monster up with a wife.  You wouldn't see that in today's pink-slime sf/f.

I use the term 'monsters' loosely.  Some of these supernatural creatures are true monsters, some are lost wayfarers reminiscent of Lovecraft's Elder Things, and some are humans corrupted by power.  The classic evil witches and sorcerers in this book are all different from each other and feature some fairly Lovecraft-esque degeneracy, but they are all monstrous in their own way.

The best part of this book, though?  It's a very uplifting book.

Numerous passages proclaim that the night cannot stand against the day, and even though it is never quoted, the reader is frequently reminded of the passage in the Bible that the gates of hell cannot prevail.  Going into the book, I had thought John's silver string guitar would be the magic +5 weapon that solves everything, but more often than not it was a non-entity.  Sure, the silver helps.  Sure, the songs of hope and light can drive back the darkness.  But most often, it was John's simple goodness that guided him down the right path and allowed him to withstand the hurricanes of evil power.

During this haunting season, its nice to be reminded that the monsters have their own fears.  Even the devil himself flees before the light.  It's great sustenance for the soul in a time when Hollywood is falling all over itself to tell the world that all is darkness and life in meaningless and sometimes monsters kill regular people for no reason and there's nothing - nothing! - you can do but accept the cold harsh truth of existence and the futility of trying to do right by others.  It's hard to imagine a book like this being made by the bleak people of Hollywood.  It's just too darn hopeful.

Even in cases where Hollywood allows for some victory, it must always be transitory.  Witness the long dénouement of the current monster movie golden child - Stranger Things.  Yes, the monster is defeated, but only at great cost.  And!  It planted worm babies in Will's stomach with it's throat-dong, so it's got that going for it.  Seriously, did nobody else notice that this program showed an alien raping a ten year old boy's face and impregnating the kid in the process?  Fun for the whole family!

Getting back to Manly Wade Wellman...

And the romance!  There's actually a lot of romance in this book.  A touch of it with John in fine episodic television style, but mainly the romance is between the people John encounters and aids.  It's all very chaste and very suggested.  Not suggestive, just suggested.  It isn't overtly in your face, but tasteful and pleasant and...well, romantic.  It stands in stark comparison to what passes for romance in the few Magic Girl books I've read.

Really, it's hard to know where to end this post.  There's so much right with this book that I wish I could remember who recommended it.  I'd really like to thank them for several hours of fun reading, and a bunch of supernatural tales that didn't leave me wanting to take a shower to rid myself of the clinging stink of evil.

Who Fears the Devil

Caught up in too much work, too much writing, too much pulp revolutioning, too much wargaming, and too much fathering, what's a man to do?

Combine them as much as possible.  I wargame with my teen son and tween daughter.  (If you stretch the definition a bit, I even wargame with my three year old.)  I read Cirsova to my four year old, and now thanks to a G+ recommendation, I read Manly Wade Wellman to my four year old, too.  It's October, so it's time for a little creepy story telling. Also, these tales are a part of our cultural heritage - at least while we still have our own culture, anyway - and after reading the Hobbit several times over to each of the older kids, it's time to expand our horizons beyond the Tolkien.

Silver John is a wandering troubadour of the Appalachian country, and Manly Wade brings you the stories of his encounters with the monsters of Americana.  Most of these stories were published in the old pulp magazine Planet Stories, and so they may be available for free somewhere on the internet, but it was worth the three dollar price point to save the hassle of finding them, collecting them, and wrestling them onto my ancient cell phone.  (Late 2014 is Babylonian-style ancient in cell phone years.  I'm using a museum piece.)

These are some fun little stories.  The monsters of each story are not like the standard humanoid theme and variation that you see in most modern fantasy, nor are they simple European Grimm's tales moved over to the New World.  Of course, you do see Appalachian style witches, but for the most part these are unique critters vaguely described and organically grown out of the rocky Appalachian soil.  Wellman has a gift for character descriptions that provide detailed characterizations and set the stage for the story to follow, and the downhome style of speech used by the first person narrator is note perfect for the stories he tells.

If you love short fiction, and are in the mood for some atmospheric and moody Creepshow style monster tales, this is well worth a shot.

Three Body Problem

Luke Daniels read Three Body Problem to me during my daily commute, and he is an excellent narrator.  I'd have taken physical notes on his performance if I wasn't busy driving, texting, and eating, all at the same time.  (I kid.)  As it was, I did take a lot of mental notes on ways to improve my own performances.

The title itself is one of the few Puppy-related works available for download from my local public library - I use Overdrive to pick and save titles - so it's only natural that it wound up in my queue.

This is a very strange book.  It's one of those books that nobody ever talks about, they just tell you it's great and that you should read it.  You won't understand why until you read it yourself, and then you'll be one of us.

There are a few things that I can say about it that won't ruin anything.  It starts with a young girl watching her father murdered by the Red Guards during Mao's Great Leap Forward.  My son listened to the first two chapters with me, and I was grateful for a chance to show him how socialism and communism really operate.  It took longer to get through the first few chapters because we paused the audio to review how China got to the point that mobs of college students could violently assault their college professors with no repercussions.  He got half-way through the observation that such a thing could never happen here before he remembered such things already happen here. 

That may have been the most chilling part of the book for him.  Even more so than the slow burn reveal of the main antagonist of the book.  He also was surprised that a science-fiction novel would spend so much time talking about the past, and it was only later - much later - that it became clear how the opening third of the book drives the action for the remainder of the book.

Cixin Liu has a gift for making likable characters that are irredeemably evil and good characters who are hard to like.  Sorting out which is which is half the mystery of the book.  A few of the mysteries are easy to solve right out of the gate, but even those are fun to watch unfold.

The last two chapters get really weird.  Like, end of 2001: A Space Odyssey: The Motion Picture weird.  The shift is gradual enough that you don't notice until things have already gone completely trippy, and soon enough the narrative circles back around to explain the import of the weirdness.

The book, the narrative, and the characters, are all so complicated, it's hard to know who to root for through most of it.  That kills a lot of the emotional punch that the book otherwise have had, and it's only Cixin's gift for characters and mystery that kept me plugging through to the cliff-hanger ending.

Although not the best book published in 2015, it certainly stands head and shoulders above some other Hugo Award winning novels I've read over the years.  It's well worth a read (or a listen), and the less you know about it going in, the better your experience will be.

Space Pirates Are In My Wheelhouse

It turns out spending time on social media poking around the fringes of modern publishing has blown up my reading queue.  I haven't had this much great stuff rain down on me since Matt moved to town my sophomore year of high school and brought his father's full basement of sf/f with him.  Forget the local library, his dad's collection would have kept me busy for a lifetime if college hadn't gotten in the way.  As a result of this recent embarrassment of riches, you're probably going to see a few short story reviews thrown on the blog as short filler, as it looks like the bulk of my long fiction reading will be dedicated to the Puppy of the Month Book Club.  Filler like this post.

 

The Fourth Fleet, by Russell Newquist, is a short science-fiction story that appears in the collection, Make Death Proud to Take Us.  I had hoped to review this entire collection of short stories as a whole, but it's been a few weeks now, and it's better to get one short review out while the reading is still fresh in my mind. 

 

Full disclosure:  Russell is a good guy.  Well...his online persona strikes me as a good guy, and that's the only way I've ever encountered him.  In fact, I bought this book because I like what he brings to the schoolyard bull session.  This review might be colored by the fact that I like him and want to see him do well.  Whether that makes this more of an impartial review or more of a naked shill is up to you.

 

With all that pre-amble out of the way, let's get to the good stuff, and The Fourth Fleet definitely ranks among the good stuff.

 

The Fourth Fleet is exactly the sort of throwback adventure story that churns my butter.  It starts out the tale of three brothers clinging to life and scrambling to return to civilization after having been intercepted by a fleet of space pirates, having had their cargo of planetary gas and all their food stolen, and then left for dead.  The blue collar guys are hampered by real world physics and the need to account for things like mass v. thrust, planetary orbits, and other real-world technical challenges.  Somehow, they manage to cobble together a solution, and limp back towards the inner planets of the solar system, and with them they bring information critical to stopping the recent plague of space piracy.

 

Somehow, the pirate fleet in question has developed a revolutionary method of transport that allows them to pretty much ignore the physics of space travel.  Every time the space cops get a lock on the raiders and set an intercept course, they arrive at the calculated rendezvous only to have the buccaneers actually show up on the far side of sol raiding yet another fleet of colony ships or gas miners.  Solving the mystery of how the pirates manage to defy the laws of physics as currently understood places this story in the hardest of hard sci-fi, and actually drives the action as well.

 

This is one of those stories that is just long enough.  It gets in, tells its story, and gets out.  A less skilled writer, or one with a contract to fill, could have inflated the story here to fill out a smallish paperback, but that would have required numerous subplots and threads, pointless politicking, and a lot of wasted time.  This is exactly the sort of story that fits well within the short story dynamic, and it is nice to see that people are still doing just that. 

 

For my part, this story came about at just the right time.  One of the audio-books I have in post-production right now is a collection of short stories edited by Tom Kratman and Vox Day, Riding the Red Horse. That collection contains a short non-fiction piece you may remember called, The Hot Equations, by Ken Burnside, in which he explains the realities of thermodynamics, demonstrates how hard sci-fi should operate within those realities, and then suggests ways that they can be used to drive conflict.  It's as much a polemic against the ubiquity of soft sci-fi as it is a challenge to writers to step up to the hard sci-fi plate and do better.

 

Reading The Fourth Fleet provides a clinic on how a writer can step up to that plate and hit a solid home run.  If this post doesn't have enough asides for you yet, check out Russell's own blog where he confirms that I didn't luck into some grand connection - he admits to writing this story as a direct response to that challenge.  At the end of his post, he states:

I leave it to the readers to decide if the story honors the science of “The Hot Equations” – or if it’s any good.

 This reader decided that it does, and it is.

Ten Gentle Opportunities, by Jeff Duntemann

Last Friday's post was essentially a call to arms for readers who enjoy the counter-culture movement within science fiction and fantasy to take a few risks and try novels by newer authors.  It is young, this backlash against modern identitarian...stories?  (It's hard to use the term 'stories' when so often they are little more than characters bouncing off each other and pining for surcease from the crushing ennui of a life unfilled thanks entirely to factors and ideologies completely outside the protagonist's control and oh my God why am I reading this somebody lock up my shotgun before I stick it in my mouth.)  And that youth is both blessing and curse.

These new(ish) writers, backtracking to pre-1980 works and charting their own destinations, are taking readers to new shores.  That sense that anything goes, provides readers with an inherent sense of adventure and discovery that you just won't find in fiction written to adhere to the publishing houses' established and approved literary paths of today.  The downside of living through this rebirth in adventure and exploration is that most of the guys writing the good stuff have a very limited back catalog.  Many of these authors have grown out of the crop of readers tired of the prevailing zeitgeist spitting on their hands, rolling up their sleeves, and hoisting the black flag by writing their own damn stories, thank you very much. 

Jeff Duntemann is one such author.  Sort of.  He has been writing for decades.  His first published science fiction work was way back in 1974.  He has written reams of non-fiction books about computer programming and technical articles and other things, and a fair few sci-fi short stories as well.  If you check Amazon, you'll find just six titles, two of which are short story collections.  That's not a whole lot of books, and given his major focus on non-fiction, it's understandable that you may not have heard of him.  At least one of Those titles fits right in with the nascent counter-counter-culture.

Enter Ten Gentle Opportunities.

I read this book cold.  I knew nothing about it save what could be gleaned from the cover.

Imagine my surprise when the book opens with a wizard-slash-conman, Stypek, fleeing a powerful sorcerer through the streets of a fantasy city.  Stypek had used magic of a mundane nature - a deck of marked playing cards - to cheat his pursuer out of a powerful artifact and winds up fleeing the much more powerful sorcerer by opening a portal to another dimension. 

Incidentally, that powerful artifact has ten charges that work as a kind of doomsday timer counting down to the final climax.  It's a neat trick that ramps up the tension in the book in a novel way.

After Stypek is dragged through the portal to another dimension, the book shifts gears to a modern day story that weaves together the tale of a computer programmer and his ex-wife with the tale of a small group of proto-AI programs.  So abrupt was the shift that it left me wondering if this was actually a book of short stories.  Old Stypek doesn't drop into the 'real universe' until several chapters have passed.

Once Stypek reappears, things get complicated.  I may have missed an important plot point somewhere in here - that or Duntemann plays his cards a little too close to his chest.  Something goes very wrong with the programming at the world's first fully automated copy machine factory, and all three of our protagonist groups, wizard, programming couple, and AIs, fight to unravel the mystery of what went wrong, and then fight to stop the force behind what went wrong.

In a lot of ways, this book reminds me of Nick Cole's wonderful Ctrl-Alt-Revolt.  An AI goes berserk and the only way to stop it is to break into its compound and fight through an army of robots while simultaneously beating the thing inside the digital universe.  Where Ctrl-Alt-Delete uses the narrative short cut of placing the software fight inside an MMORPG, Ten Gentle Opportunities effortlessly slides back and forth between a more Sims style narrative and evocative descriptions of pure program-on-program battles where code itself is both weapon, shield, and battleground. 

This book differs from Ctrl-Alt-Revolt in that the ultimate bad guy is something of a mystery.  It's never entirely clear exactly what the stakes are in the fight, and the human characters aren't quite likable enough to carry the load.  For my money, the AI characters are much more likable than their human counterparts, and it was the question of their fate that kept me turning pages.  That might be a function of my own limited intellect.  Clever readers may solve the mystery long before this reviewer did; in which case clever readers will draw even more enjoyment out of Ten Gentle Opportunities. 

This is a book that could only have been written by an experience programmer.  Duntemann seamlessly presents a long string of puzzles, mysteries, and complications within both meat space and virtual space within the book, and his explanations of the programming problems are excellent.  They never feel like an information dump or lecture, instead they are seamlessly woven into the story in ways that drive the narrative rather than stall it out while we learn the basics of programming and debugging.

Even more impressive is the way Mr. Duntemann ties together wizardry and programming in a way that allows Stypek to work as a natural born hacker despite having grown up in a world where progress followed the mystic path rather than the physics track.  The two work in parallel, even as they never really cross paths.  Two sentences cannot do this world-building exercise justice - suffice it to say that Duntemann has a firm grasp of how the rules in both universes work, how they tie together, and how to relay these things to the reader in an unobtrusive way.  It's clever, original, and well done.

Ten Gentle Opportunities represents the best that science-fiction and fantasy have to offer.  It blends the two genres in a clever and original way.  It presents near future tech that is plausible, delightful, and a little scare.  Best of all, it provides a exuberant and unapologetic adventure that incorporates action, violence, romance, and robots in ways that are both exciting, fun to read, and even a little bit educational.

Grown Up Book Report: Killer's Payoff, by Ed McBain

The last twenty years of publishing has really done a number on the second hand book market.  As a kid, you couldn't swing a dead cat in a used bookstore without hitting some high quality writing.  Near as I can tell, the early Heinlein novels and Conan collections and Burroughsian planetary romance novels with the odd 70s psychedelic covers or Frazetta covers, have all been shoved off the shelves by the flood of carbon-copy modern day magic girl and low magic grimdark fantasy novels.  In my moments of optimism I pray those works have all been snatched up and sit in places of honor in the basements of discerning readers.  The corollary would be that the things on the shelves of the used bookstore sit there because no one wants to keep garbage sitting around their house.

Nonetheless, hope springs eternal, and the last trip down into the book mine saw me emerge with a rough jewel in the form of Ed McBain’s Killer’s Payoff.  It was only after reading this novel that I discovered McBain is the man behind the 1954 book and following film, Blackboard Jungle.

Sidenote: As a child of the 1990s, the name McBain will forever conjure up the following:

With a cover that titillating, and a publishing date of 1958, this book fits perfectly into my irregular toe-dipping into pre-1970s writing that aren’t sci-fi and fantasy.  Sci-fi and fantasy has always been my first love, but enough other bloggers are re-discovering genre fiction.  Somebody should really look into the more down to earth blue collar material.  I’m somebody!  So let’s get to it.

Before cracking the cover, let’s recall that today’s view of yesterday’s work is one of the victors looking down upon the vanquished with scorn.  Is this a well-earned reputation, or have we been listening to the same sorts of fools who think modern art is an improvement upon the Realist movement?  This book might not answer the question by itself, but it might just add to my growing collection of data that modern writing has degenerated from, rather than improved upon, the writing of my forefathers.

We’re still not ready to crack the cover, because we need to talk about the cover.  That cover serves as a warning that this book contains graphic and explicit content of a distinctly carnal nature.  This isn’t wholesome fare for the whole family, but mature material suitable only for those with a taste for the seedy.  You might not want to read this on the bus where it will surely draw judgmental raised eyebrows from the matrons and young mothers sitting nearby.  The cover screams that this is a book about sex, and it is, but only to a 1950s extent.

The actual plot of the book is that of two detectives, Cotton Haws and Steve Carella, investigating the murder of a notorious blackmailer.  That blackmailer, Sy Kramer, was soaking three different parties for cash, a high society lady who was paying to hush up a series of photos for a low society magazine, a soda pop magnate, or one of a trio of men who shared a hunting trip with the victim some months back. 

This is just one of a long running series of novels featuring the 87^th Precinct of the fictional, but really it’s New York City, burrough of Isola.  And long running this series was; the last of them was published in 2005, just a year before the author’s death.  That’s a pretty good run that speaks well of the man’s writing.  But does it hold up?

The book works as a mystery, with various blind leads, tense interrogations, and two or three quick action sequences.  With the exception of the murder victim, who the investigation slowly reveals deserved a good killing, all of the people in the book are drawn as sympathetic and three-dimensional.  At least until the big reveal at which point the murderer, bent on escaping justice, is revealed to be as venal as his victim.

The actual salacious content of the book is limited to a one extra-marital affair, a pre-marital hookup, and two or three references to titillating photos that would be considered tame by today’s standards.  On that score, the cover fails to deliver.  These days I’m the one judging at the matrons and young mothers on the bus unabashedly reading lit-porn.  My cover might suggest a lot more, but all this book does is suggest – we Chuck Tingle fans all know how graphic those ‘romance’ novels get.   

My how the times have changed.

Speaking of changing times, as a window to homicide investigations in the 1950s, Killer’s Payoff  is a fascinating look at how information was gathered before the dawn of the information age.  Without recourse to Google or databases of any kind, it’s fascinating to see the increased import of questioning suspects and witnesses and even those who merely knew the suspect takes.  The attention to detail required by the police in this novel, and the clever ways they deduce events that transpired months previous, clues that sometimes literally hang by a thread, answers questions that we towering intellects of The Current Year wouldn’t even think to ask.

The writing is tight, the pace deliberate, the characters believable, and the setting itself well realized.  The police procedural is not my first choice for fiction, but this book held my interest despite that.  Killer’s Payoff may not be award-worthy or likely to spark a new renaissance of literature if only more people would give it a chance.  I wouldn’t recommend rushing straight out to Amazon and buying a copy of this “must read lost gem”.  On the other hand, McBain is a solid writer, and it’s easy to see why he was so popular in his own time.

In conclusion, Killer’s Payoff absolutely serves as another example of high quality work produced for the masses in the 1950s that far too many people today write off as old and boring.  It’s as good as any of the police procedurals I’ve read that were written in the last ten years, at least.  As a light piece of mystery and escapism, it works well.  Better yet, it reminds me that sometimes a little regression can be a good thing.

Post-script:  For sci-fi fans, McBain wrote the cover story of the August 1952 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly, under the pseudonym S. A. Lombino.  My conclusion that McBain is still worth a read can be applied to sci-fi as well as crime fiction.

 

Modern Sci-Fi, Why Do I Even Bother?

Overdrive is the poor man’s Audible.  It’s a cell phone program that allows you to check out books from your local public library.  You can even listen to audio books which you can download from Project Gutenberg’s Audio Books section or through the local library branch.   

The books available on Project Gutenberg are all public domain works, which include a wealth of riches for those of us spelunking in the mines of the Burroughsian, Howardian, and E.E. Doc Smithian pulps.  The quality of the human read audio recordings ranges from great to fine.  (The robot read stories aren't worth your time.)  The list of available works is short, but well worth a look for any fan of audiobooks. 

The local library branch on the other hand…

My local branch has 350 audiobooks available in the sci-fi category, most of which consist of teen books in the vein of the Hunger Games or worse, Hugo Award winner aspirants – and I mean that in the most pejorative sense possible.  Just about anything not written for angsty teens is written for fans of either gimmicky pseudo-intellectual posturing or Oprah-style relationship drama dressed up in a silver spandex suit and parading around the bridge of a planet busting spacecraft. 

There are bright spots.  A smattering of Burroughs’ titles are on the list, but these are generally books that sit, well worn, on my shelf.  My most recent listen, Out of Time’s Abyss is a fun little romp if not quite up to Burroughs’ finest.  Aside from the few diamonds in the rough, for the most part it’s the same dreary literary chaff one finds on the shelves of the big box book stores.

What can man do in the face of such tedium?

How about taking a deep breath, opening up your mind, and giving some recent work a shot?  A collection of short stories called The New Space Opera presents an excellent opportunity to dip one’s toe into the relatively current state of fantasy and sci-fi.  After all, if you never experience what the current market has to offer, how can you complain about it?  And so it was with some trepidation that I gave some modern sci-fi a listen.


Some of us just never learn.

The book opens with an introduction by the editor, Gardner Dozois, which discusses the origins and evolution of ‘space opera’.  It starts out great, name checking some undeservedly obscure authors like A.E. Van Vogt, E. E. Doc Smith, and Jack Vance, and even admits that science fiction as a whole abandoned its rollicking good fun and aspirational value in the 1960s in favor of chasing the approval of social engineers and ivory tower literary critics.  Unfortunately, he presents this change as a good thing, and barrels straight on into the standard self-congratulatory praise of modern sci-fi as a clear cut improvement over its predecessors.  He even goes so far as to mention that disgusting pervert Samuel R. Delaney in a positive light.  That’s a deal breaker right there, but with traffic snarled and the essay over, we can get to the stories themselves.

Photoshopped for more accurate portrayal.

Before we do, let’s dispense with the need for a concrete definition of ‘space opera’ that clearly demarcates it from other genres.  We all know what it requires, big dang spaceships, multiple planets, adventure, romance, and colorful characters, and it should all operate on a grand scale.  This is opera, but in space.  It’s right there in the name.  It should be a little bombastic, a little over the top, and evoke big feelings in the reader.  These are general rules, of course, and there’s room on the margins to quibble.  The point here is that my disappointment from the stories in this collection stems from their quality as stories, and how space operatic they feel, rather than whether or not they meet specific criteria for ‘space opera’.

First in the docket, Saving Tiamaat, by Gwyneth Jones, is one long lament by an assassin working as an odd combination diplomat and security officer for a space UN.  It’s written in the heavy gimmicky style favored by the right people these days.  I couldn’t finish this story because it was far more concerned with the main protagonist’s gloominess and clever prose that only ever hints at what the hell is going on than it was with establishing any sort of conflict or stakes or reason for the reader to care about any of this. The full story is available online for free, right here, if you want to verify for yourself.  Strike one.

Second up, Verthandi is Rising, by Ian McDonald, also left me bored.  It starts out with an intergalactic war fought over millennia by soldiers grappling with time dilation, but the meat of the conflict is just set dressing for the real tale.  That story features two members of a three person crew searching for the third member of their triad.  That third member went awol in order to allow the galactic empire’s defeated enemy to flee through a wormhole to a parallel universe, in order to spare them from genocide. 

Let me borrow a quote from Travel by Thought, “At first blush, the tone and style of “Verthandi’s Ring” take some getting used to, primarily because McDonald aims for the atmosphere and cadence of poetry.”   He definitely succeeds in an atmosphere of cadence and poetry.  His prose is definitely lyrical.  Shame it takes such an effort to penetrate his prose to determine what the heck is going on in the story.  Again, from Travel by Thought, “Verthandi’s Ring is one of those stories that needs a second reading. That is when the pieces fall more securely into place, the narrative becomes clearer, and its artistry unfolds like a flower opening up to the morning sunlight.” He says that as though impenetrable prose is a good thing.  It’s not.  I did understand it the first time, but the effort to do so killed the fun of it.  The whole story left my with an irritated feeling of, why didn’t you just say so?

Again, this is a writer more enamored of literary tricks and poetic license than he is with presenting a story.  The MFA students and professors might lap this up while on the clock, but there’s nothing appealing about it for casual readers looking for an enjoyable slice of entertainment.  Strike two.

Finally, Hatch, by Robert Reed, in which the author plays games with flashbacks and dribbles out information so slowly reading the story is like eating an onion, you slowly peel back the layers and consume them one at a time, always hoping this is the last one and knowing that in the end all you’ll be left with is a bad taste in your mouth.  The backdrop to this boring tale is a planet-sized generation ship whose engines were knocked out of commission during a long war against a sentient space-blob.

Let me say that again.  This is a story about a planet-sized generation ship.  It’s engines were knocked out. During a war.  With a sentient space-blob.  Robert Reed made that boring. 

Now that is quite the literary accomplishment.

Let me give you one example of how Robert Reed stuffs great ideas into the background in order to focus on tedious relationship drama.  The main protagonist and best friend meet in a vaguely described location.  It sounds pretty epic, some form of massive cliff overhanging a cloud of space-blob remnants that contain the rare earth metals and ooze-encrusted machinery that allows the small refugee settlement that survived the Space-Blob War to survive, or on the cusp of a city-sized dead thruster?  It’s not entirely clear, but it sounds like it might be awesome.  Reed glosses over it to get to the important thing – the friendship of a young man and his mentor.  That mentor, we learn after reading two full conversations with him, is actually an ancient trilobite-like alien.  Reed doesn’t just bury that lede, he forces it to drive itself out into the desert, dig its own grave, and then shoot itself in the head.   And that’s just one example out of many.  Strike three.

With that third strike, The New Space Opera lost its place on my hard drive.  All three stories are clearly written for critics, and not for readers.  Ironic, given that this reader has nothing to offer but criticism.  The top priority for these three stories is signaling to other writers that they possess a supreme command of the English language – that they have mastered the use of tone, metaphor, mood, and prose.  Unfortunately for the reader (or listener as the case may be), all three put the story and the reader’s enjoyment near the bottom of the list.

Bear in mind, this is not to say that these stories am too smart for me simple brain.  Quite the contrary, these stories are far too clever for their own good.  They fall all over themselves engaging in high-brow literary signaling that they forget the point of the exercise – to tell an evocative story.  They are like the guy who successfully signals his wealth by buying a high maintenance and flashy sports car that he can’t drive in the rain.  Yeah, everyone knows he’s rich, but he can’t go anywhere – he forgot that the whole point of a car is to get you from one place to another, in much the same way that the authors of these stories forgot that the point of a story is to tell a story.

You know who could tell a hell of a story?  H. Beam Piper.  That man could tell a story.  Think I’ll go download a few short stories of his.