Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

The Man-Kzin Wars X: The Wunder War, by Hal Colebatch

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The fact that I haven’t read the previous books in this series (created by Larry Niven) probably disqualifies me from making intelligent comments on Man-Kzin Wars X: The Wunder War, but I picked it up because Hal Colebatch is an e-mail friend, and a wise and perceptive writer over at the American Spectator (also a lawyer and sometime government functionary in Australia).

Full disclosure: I did not get my copy for free as a reviewer. I sprung for it out of my own money.

The premise of the Man-Kzin Wars series, as I understand it, begins with the assumption that space-traveling cultures are generally peaceful cultures. Warfare is too much of a scientific and economic drain for warlike civilizations to get far in interstellar exploration and commerce.

However, there is an exception—the Kzin, a race of tiger-like (but larger and stronger) bipeds who sweep across the galaxy like Romans on the march, conquering and enslaving (often devouring) peaceful civilizations as they go. When they first approach a human colony, the paradisaical planet called Wunderland, it looks like more of the same. The humans there have put warfare so far behind them that the study of it is next to illegal, and curious scholars are at a loss to understand the functions of weapons, or what military ranks indicate. Continue reading The Man-Kzin Wars X: The Wunder War, by Hal Colebatch →

Fiction

Attention All Shoppers: Avoid the Dreadful Horror in Aisle 6

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I hope your holiday shopping has not been as traumatic as this one recorded by Loren Eaton. And if it has, I hope the military or store owners picked up all of your bill–that’s the least they could do.

Fiction

Save Us from the Critics

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A.N. Wilson says he can tell Sherlock Holmes was a homosexual drug-addict, even if Conan Doyle didn’t know it. Can we agree that fictional characters are not as constant as live people? So an author might reimagine his character in a way different than originally written, making arguments that “this guy was really . . . ” irrelevant. (via Book Trib)

Fiction, Reviews

The Guns of Two-Space, by Dave Grossman and Bob Hudson

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The Guns of Two-Space (available here, either as an e-book or a print-on-demand) is the sequel to The Two-Space War, by Dave Grossman and Leo Frankowski, which I recently reviewed). Alas, Lt. Col. Grossman lost his friend in science fiction publishing when Jim Baen of Baen Books died, and this volume (written with a different co-author and privately published), although excellent in many ways, does suffer for want of a professional editor.

The Two-Space War told how Lt. Thomas Melville assumed command of his ship’s crew on the death of his captain, and captured an enemy ship which he named the Fang. Through inspired leadership and flexibility in adopting new weapons and strategies, he managed to thwart (or at least delay) an attempt by the evil Guldur Empire to conquer planets friendly to earth and humans. Acclaimed as a hero and a savior by alien governments, Melville was less appreciated by the appeasement-minded Westerness (human) government, and at the end of the book was dispatched to patrol and deliver mail between the most distant colony planets. Continue reading The Guns of Two-Space, by Dave Grossman and Bob Hudson →

Fiction, Reviews

Your Heart Belongs to Me, by Dean Koontz

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Some people might not care for this book (the Amazon reviews support that contention), because it’s different from Dean Koontz’ other work. But if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed that Koontz frequently changes genres, and mixes and matches genres within a story. He doesn’t like to do the same thing twice (with the exception of the Odd Thomas and Frankenstein books, which just prove that he refuses to be predictable even in his unpredictability). With Your Heart Belongs to Me he has (in my opinion), not only broken new genre ground, but produced his best writing to date.

This book sings. Again and again, I paused in my reading just to savor how beautifully the author had expressed himself. The usual pattern for a popular writer, as far as I’ve observed, is to start out really good, with a book he’s probably labored over for years, and then to become increasingly sloppy, as his publisher’s demands for several books a year force him to churn stuff out and send it away in the rough. But Koontz is an infinitely better writer today than he was when he started, and the best of his recent work reaches (I think) the level of literary fiction. That’s certainly true of Your Heart Belongs to Me.

The blurb on the back told me that this was the story of Ryan Perry, an internet social networking billionaire who’s had a heart transplant and starts getting threatening messages from someone telling him, “You’re heart belongs to me.”

But in fact, Koontz takes more than half of the book to set that situation up. We see Ryan as a rich, healthy, happy young man who lives the American dream. He has an enormous house, surfs whenever he wants to, and is dating a gorgeous young woman. Then he starts experiencing physical symptoms which turn out to indicate, not a heart attack, but a congenital cardiac enlargement condition. He begins to be suspicious (the condition might have been caused by poisoning). He employs a security company to investigate various people who might want him dead. On a whim, he takes his business from the cardiologist he’s been seeing, and switches to a more famous, more expensive specialist. And along the way he has occasional visions—or hallucinations—that seem to be communicating a message. But it’s a message he can’t understand.

Finally his name comes up on the international transplant waiting list he’s on, and he gets his surgery. His recovery is good. But his girlfriend breaks up with him. (She says he knows why, but he can’t figure it out.) Then the messages start appearing—a bag of candy hearts, all with the same message, left on his pillow in a room that ought to be locked and secure. A heart-shaped pendant left on his pillow. A sudden knife attack, accompanied by a whispered threat.

It isn’t until he’s kidnapped and threatened with death that Ryan begins to acknowledge the things he’s been purposely overlooking, and to understand the meaning of the warnings he’s had. “It’s all about the subtext,” his girlfriend, a writer, once told him.

The ending is different from that of any Koontz novel I recall. But it was a good ending, entirely satisfying in its way.

I recommend Your Heart Belongs to Me highly. You’ll find yourself searching your own heart.

Fiction, Reviews

Stuart M. Kaminsky: Toby Peters books: An appreciation

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Last night I noted, belatedly, the passing of author Stuart M. Kaminsky last month. Purely by happenstance, I was reading several of his Toby Peters mysteries at the time, and was already planning to post about them.

The hero of the series, Toby Peters, is a shabby, distinctly down-market private eye working in Los Angeles in the late ’30s and the ’40s. Despite the fact that he can’t afford any better office than a closet in a dentist’s office, lives in a seedy boarding house overseen by a batty landlady, drives a tiny old Crosley automobile, and can never find a clean shirt to wear, he continually takes cases involving prominent personalities, especially movie stars.

It has occurred to me that Kaminsky was having a joke on us, and that the real secret of Toby Peters is that he was delusional.

But when I look past that bit of spontaneous deconstruction, I find the Peters mysteries simply a lot of fun. Peters is no Philip Marlowe. Although he can handle himself in a fight (he used to box and his face shows it), he injured his back doing bodyguard work for Mickey Rooney a while ago, and has to sleep on a mattress on the floor. He doesn’t drink at all, and his favorite food is cold cereal. He has an ex-wife whom he loves, but she won’t go out with him because he’s immature. He has a brother who’s a cop, and who generally seems to hate him (he gave him his first broken nose), but who usually comes through for him in a pinch. When he needs help with his cases, he can sometimes hire an old cop or security guard, but most of the time he ends up enlisting his friends—Gunther, his next-door neighbor, who is a three-foot-tall Swiss translator, Sheldon, the fat and unhygienic dentist from whom he rents his office, and Jeremy, the retired wrestler and poet who owns the office building. The result often resembles a Keystone Kops chase more than the elegant “payoff” in a William Powell movie.

The books I’ve read in this spree were Down for the Count (concerning Joe Louis), Think Fast, Mr. Peters (concerning Peter Lorre, a splendid opportunity for some Sam Spade dialogue), Buried Caesars (Gen. Douglas MacArthur) and Tomorrow is Another Day (Clark Gable).

They were fast reads. They didn’t offend me (though there’s a little rough language and implied sex). They were often very funny, and always well-written.

Recommended.

Fiction

The Soul of Frankenstein

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Frankenstein's Castle. Photo by Yvo Geis

Burg Frankenstein in Darmstadt, Germany

This professor was very unlike his colleague. He appeared about fifty years of age, but with an aspect expressive of the greatest benevolence; a few grey hairs covered his temples, but those at the back of his head were nearly black. His person was short, but remarkably erect; and his voice the sweetest I had ever heard. . . .

“The ancient teachers of this science,” said he, “promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”

Such were the professor’s words–rather let me say such the words of fate, enounced to destroy me. As he went on, I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being: chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein–more, far more, will I achieve: treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Fiction, Religion

A couple of things

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Came across this in my reading today, and thought it was good:

I dreamt. Jeremy tells me that we all dream every night but we don’t remember our dreams. The trick to remembering is to wake up during a dream. Poets, he said, are particularly good at waking up during or immediately after a dream. Something lets them know some good stuff that they might be able to use has been going on. Jeremy’s current favorite poet was Byron. I read a few Byron poems. The guy had nightmares. I preferred the book of William Blake poems Jeremy had given me, though I didn’t understand most of them. I just liked the way they sounded and it was the only poetry book I’d ever seen with drawings in it.

(Stuart M. Kaminsky in Think Fast, Mr. Peters, p. 90)

I’m still not sure this story is authentic, but if true, it’s just delightful. Apparently Larry David did an episode on his Curb Your Enthusiasm HBO series about urinating on a picture of Jesus. Hilarity ensues as those stupid Christians react in their simple-minded, provincial way.

However, now the Council on American-Islamic Relations has sent a letter to HBO, expressing their offense at an insult to someone they revere as a great prophet.

What a dilemma for a citizen of Hollywood—“Do I apologize, and please Christians (which is unthinkable), or do I insult Islam (also unthinkable)? How can this have happened? I’m so sensitive!”

That sound you hear is me chortling. Chortling evilly. In a simple-minded, provincial way.

Fiction, Reviews

The Two-Space War, by Dave Grossman and Leo Frankowski

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Not a flawless book, The Two-Space War has the definite feel of the debut of a series still finding its sea-legs.

Nevertheless, it’s a voyage worth completing, and I enjoyed it increasingly as I went on.

The set-up is kind of complicated, which slows down the action at the start. This is a standard problem in stories set in unfamiliar worlds, but I thought the authors did as good a job as anyone in weaving the info dumps into the narrative.

The premise is that humans have learned to travel to distant galaxies, by traveling through “Two-Space,” the second dimension. The trade-off is that all but the simplest early Industrial Revolution technology rapidly deteriorates in Two-Space. So the ships by which people travel there have to be wooden ships, similar to those of the Napoleonic era, with interesting differences.

As the story opens, Lt. Thomas Melville and a landing party are stranded on a distant planet, battling thirst and suicidal, ape-like monsters. They await rescue by their mother ship. They were recently attacked by a ship of the evil Guldur Empire, and their captain’s death has left him acting commander.

Through skill and military discipline, he manages to save his landing party from the apes. Shortly thereafter they are picked up by their mother ship, only to learn that the ship (their ships are sentient) is dying, and that the Guldur are coming in fast.

Lt. Melville determines not to take refuge on the primitive planet, but to employ a bold strategy against the Guldur ship. So begins a story that steadily builds in dramatic tension, and draws the reader both through suspense and with interesting, likeable, growing characters.

In some ways I found the world-building a little self-indulgent, by my personal reckoning. The universe Lt. Melville and his crew explore is notable for planets containing elves and planets containing dwarfs, and so (in this narrative) J.R.R. Tolkien is considered an actual prophet. His books are venerated as if they were Scripture. There are also numerous references to the “classic” writers of the 20th Century—such as Heinlein, Weber and Pratchitt. In this version of the future, Science Fiction is considered the highest literary form. Elements of Tolkien, Patrick O’Brien, and (perhaps) Kenneth Roberts rub together in this universe, not always seamlessly (in my opinion), but in the end the authors make it work.

I’m not sure what to say about religious matters (the future seems to be vaguely Christian, in a syncretist sort of way), or the issue of women in combat, which is addressed so eccentrically that it’s hard to draw a conclusion what the authors think.

But the real heart of this book is the battle scenes. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (full disclosure: he sent me a free review copy) is a retired officer of the Army Rangers, a former professor of Psychology at West Point, and a recognized authority on the physiological and psychological effects of combat on human beings. His descriptions of the experience of battle are as authentic as any you’ll ever come across, and they in themselves make The Two-Space War a moving and unforgettable read. I’m serious about this. The combat scenes are worth the price of the book all by themselves.

Once I got acclimated I was riveted. I recommend the book highly, and hope there’s a sequel.