Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

Star Wars: Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn

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I’ve never been inclined to pick up books based on movie franchises. The movies have been enough for me, but the Disney Star Wars list of sorry productions provoked me to seek out Star Wars novels. I learned Timothy Zahn’s trilogy was the best set, so I picked up Heir to the Empire, published in 1992.

“Now, for the first time: the authorized continuation of the legendary Star Wars saga . . .” The story picks up five years after Return of the Jedi, with the Rebel

forces trying to put together a new republic. Princess Leia is the leading figure in every diplomatic endeavor, which is increasingly difficult for the soon-to-be-mother of two. Her husband, Han Solo, is also working too much to make the new government as functional as it needs to be. Luke Skywalker has the smallest role of the three, that of friend, security guard, and last living Jedi. What can he do to train Leia and the children when the time comes?

What they don’t know is that an Imperial Grand Admiral has survived. They know the Empire still has loyalist planets, stormtroopers, Star Destroyers and other ships, but they don’t know that a gifted military strategist is rebuilding a fleet. Raids on Republic outposts look like mere harassment, but Grand Admiral Thrawn is working a long-term plan to bring every Republic planet to its knees, if not its grave.

Two things stand out about this novel. First, the characters sound like their movie representation. Some of that is probably fan-service, callbacks to movie dialogue, but it’s thrilling to read good characters in a good story. Second, it’s a solid story—coincidences or contrivances. Everyone has proper motivations, making reasonable decisions, and conflicting with each other naturally. At one point, the heroes get caught up in an Imperial raid, and they naturally conclude they’re being followed, but they aren’t. The bad guys were there for other reasons. No one acts like an idiot. No motivations shift inexplicably. And Luke comes through like a hero.

I’ll let you know how the next one goes when I get to it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘One Fearful Yellow Eye,’ by John D. MacDonald

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On this kind of a Monday I know I’m going to get killed in this line of work. It should interest the statisticians. As I am the only fellow in my line of work, it would give it a rating of 100% mortality. Just as, until we lost an astronaut, travel in orbit was the safest travel man ever devised with 0% mortality for millions upon millions of passenger miles. Safer than wheelchairs.

It’s always cause for celebration for this reader when another Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald shows up on bargain sale. This time it was One Fearful Yellow Eye, notable (in this reader’s opinion) for the quality of its prose.

Years ago, our hero Travis McGee, lanky and languid Florida “salvage specialist,” found a young woman named Glory contemplating suicide on a beach. She’d had an astonishing run of bad luck and tragedy. He took her home, fed her and reassured her and took her to his bed, and eventually she went on with her life. She met an older man, Dr. Fortner Geiss, a prominent Chicago physician, who admitted to her he was dying, but they gave each other a couple good years, in spite of his adult children’s hostility. Now he’s dead, and she’s discovered that his considerable wealth has disappeared. In his last months, he’d converted everything to cash, which is nowhere to be found. The inevitable – but counterintuitive in such a good man – conclusion is that he’d been blackmailed.

So Glory calls on McGee. His deal is to look for things people have had stolen from them, and if he finds it he keeps half. That’s okay with her.

McGee flies to Chicago and agrees to look into the problem. He’s a little out of his element in a Chicago winter, and Dr. Geiss’s son and daughter are no warmer – especially his daughter Heidi, a gorgeous ice queen. It’s not a big surprise when Heidi becomes McGee’s special rehabilitation project.

One Fearful Yellow Eye is not, in my opinion, one of the best McGee novels in terms of plot. I thought the ending strayed a little close to deus ex machina.

But in terms of prose, I’d rate it one of MacDonald’s best. He was soaring as a stylist in those days. Although I’d entirely forgotten the plot here, I found more lines and passages than usual that had stuck in my mind from previous readings:

“Then, bless you, I fed him that speech you made a lifetime ago on Sanibel Island. If there was one sunset every twenty years, how would people react to them? If there were ten seashells in all the world, what would they be worth? If people could make love just once a year, how carefully would they pick their mates?”

The day was like a dirty galvanized bucket clapped down over the city….

I found a parking slot around the corner from Heidi’s place, and as I was going to enter the downstairs foyer, I turned on impulse and looked upward and picked out a big fat drifting flake, stuck my tongue out, and maneuvered under it. Consumer report: The snow is still pretty good. Cold as ever. Melts as fast. And you can’t hardly taste the additives.

Anyway, I got a kick out of One Fearful Yellow Eye. Cautions for sexual situations and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dancing In the Dark,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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Another Toby Peters novel by Stuart M. Kaminsky. Light, seriocomic entertainment. Can’t go wrong with these. In fact, I think I found Dancing In the Dark a little funnier than most of the others.

Hard-luck Hollywood PI Toby Peters has been having a run of unaccustomed good fortune. He actually has a little money in the bank for a change, and his creditors aren’t hounding him. Then he gets hired by Fred Astaire. Astaire’s job poses certain challenges. A woman named Lyla, mistress to gangster “Fingers” Intaglio (who got his nickname because he likes to cut people’s fingers off) demanded he get her dancing lessons from Astaire. Once Astaire agreed, she started pressuring him to go to bed with her, or else she’d denounce him to her knife-happy boyfriend. Toby’s on the case, even if it involves learning to dance – a pastime for which he has zero talent.

Before he knows it, Layla has been murdered, and she’s only the first of a string of victims. Backed up by his cowardly dentist friend and his gigantic ex-wrestler/poet office landlord, Toby does his best to avoid gangsters, solve the murders, and keep Astaire out of the newspapers. Meanwhile, he finds himself in a new relationship with a woman who got away many years ago.

The sexual mores here are not ones I approve of (but what else is new?). And Toby makes a decision to let one suspect off that puzzles me.

On the other hand, at one point he finds himself dancing with Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth. That seems to me to qualify as a good day even if somebody’s shooting at you.

Bottom line – Dancing In the Dark is a fun book, and one of my favorites in a fun series.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction

Rings of Power Have Returned to Assail Us All

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Season two of Rings of Power has begun on Amazon Prime, and I have no plans to watch it. The first season was enough. I didn’t dislike the first season from the start, but it wasn’t a Tolkien story as claimed. It was LOTR fan-fic and not a good one. It wasn’t good enough to give a boat the hope it needs to float, if you know what I mean.

The second season appears to be more of that and worse. Sauron was styled as a returning king to Mordor, but now he’s appealing to the orcs and their father-figure to accept him. The orcs are styled as misunderstood foreigners who just want to live free of tyranny. What?

Army of orcs outside Gondor. "Sire, the orcs are here," someone says. "Well, don't be racist. Let them in."

Erik Kain describes other story points like this: “We need Conflict Between Main Characters, after all, even if it doesn’t really make sense,” and “nothing here is even remotely based on Tolkien’s lore.”

Brett McCracken notes another common complaint. “The series feels bogged down by overwrought dialogue. Sometimes the dialogue is great; often it’s cringey.” Plus, there’s excessive exposition and many opportunities for viewers to ask how a character would have known whatever they just said.

You can get it a feel for Rings of Power season two in this mostly positive IGN review, which according to those who pay attention to IGN is remarkably critical. Don’t those rings look cheap?

And props to Echo Chamberlain for this video recap of the first two episodes that quotes several lines, because you can’t understand the fundamental nonsense of this show without hearing some of these lines. For example, “A rumor is like a songbird; it may sound filling from afar but up close it’s an empty feast.”

Novel Adaptions: Johnathan Boes writes about adapting Tolkien’s work with some remarkable specifics from the Rings of Power showrunners.

Reading into the Text: Ukrainians have long referred to Russian soldiers as orcs and apparently Soviet leaders did too. “Comparisons between Mordor and Russia go back to the Soviet era, when the regime considered Tolkien’s literature politically threatening. The USSR banned Tolkien’s books because they saw the orcs as an analogy for the Soviet people.”

(Photo by Marc Szeglat on Unsplash)

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Before Dawn,’ by John Corwin

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Unless you’ve been in a monastery for a while, it would be pretty hard to read John Corwin’s Dead Before Dawn without thinking of Jack Reacher. Corwin’s hero, Amos Carver, is a former operative for yet another super-secret military black ops unit. But some years back the unit was abolished, with Carver left under a cloud of suspicion. His superior, a woman named Rhodes who’d been his friend, felt particularly betrayed. Carver dropped out of sight to live a beach bum’s life in Florida. Then he got a message from Rhodes, asking him to come quickly to the town of Morganville, Georgia, where she is now chief of police. Like Jack Reacher, he travels light, owning few possessions.

When Carver arrives in Morganville, hiking up the highway from the bus stop, he finds a pink pistol lying in the middle of the roadway. He knows that pistol – it belonged to Rhodes, who would never have mislaid it. Carver does not pick it up. He recognizes a set-up, and immediately goes on defense. The attack that’s supposed to kill him fails, and soon he’s in jail in Morganville, where someone tries to murder him in his cell. Those are just the first of the threats he’ll meet and handle in this town. Strategy was never Carver’s forte. He was a strong-arm guy, good at action. Rhodes was the thinker – but Carver will need to learn to think too before he can unravel a plot that just keeps leading to higher and higher-level conspiracies.

I have no complaints about the writing in Dead Before Dawn. It was professional and tight. The dramatic tension ratcheted up nicely all the way. The characters were adequate. There was even a happy ending of sorts.

My reservations are personal. I didn’t like the scenario of a guy going into fire fights against professionals with no backup except for two women (no doubt a concession to feminism, as if many women were going to read this book). I was also uncomfortable with the vigilante elements – vigilantism always troubles me, though I don’t deny it might be necessary in desperate situations. But I found it odd that a vigilante was called upon here to save (minor spoiler alert!) the rule of law in America.

Still, Dead Before Dawn was a good story, written by a professional. Can’t deny that. Worth the money.

Fiction, Non-fiction

A Bad Star Wars Series Bites the Dust

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We learned this week The Acolyte, a Stars Wars television production, would not get a season two. The Telegraph claimed this shows the world is “bored” of Star Wars, noting fans had turned out for lousy movies in the past despite their later criticism. But there’s a big difference in The Rise of Skywalker (2019) making double its production budget in the US/Canada market and The Acolyte being a show fans refused to watch (if they had Disney+ subscriptions). That difference would be media context.

The Last Jedi (2017) was bad enough of a movie that I didn’t watch The Rise of Skywalker, but plenty of people did. It cost hundreds of thousands more to make and also earned double that in the US/Canada market. Fans hadn’t grown jaded, tired, wary–what’s the right word?–afraid that Disney-owned LucasFilms would deliver a sorry story. They learned to fear through years of disappointment with most of the TV series since. The Mandalorian began well-received, but someone took over season three and tanked it. Fans were hopeful for the 2022 series on Obi-Wan Kenobi and they were disappointed. (Earlier this year, news of the original concept came out and you have to wonder why such a good idea was ruined.) The Book of Boba Fett (2021) was dull. Ahsoka (2023) was poorly written. So it’s easy to understand how interested viewers may have little enthusiasm for The Acolyte before hearing reviews. They wouldn’t find their enthusiasm after hearing it was a such a bad show.

Now, some people are worried the show will be pulled from Disney+ all together.

In other news …

Non-fiction recs: Historian Thomas Kidd has top non-fiction and history books of the twenty-first century. Here’s just one interesting title.

Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England, by Timothy Larsen. “Those who lose their faith (then and now) get the headlines, but Larsen delightfully shows how common it was for English skeptics and freethinkers to come to orthodox Christian faith.”

Poetry: War poetry ‘Some Could, Some Could Not, Shake Off Misery’

Leaf art: Take a minute to browse the images this artist shares of his paper cutting designs applied to leaves. Lito’s (リト) work is incredible.

Authors, Fiction, Reading

Reading report: ‘The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien’

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Theologically (if the term is not too grandiose) I imagine the picture to be less dissonant from what some (including myself) believe to be the truth. But since I have deliberately written a tale, which is built on or out of certain ‘religious’ ideas, but is not an allegory of them (or anything else), and does not mention them overtly, still less preach them, I will not now depart from that mode, and venture on theological disquisition for which I am not fitted. But I might say that if the tale is ‘about’ anything (other than itself), it is not as seems widely supposed about ‘power.’ Power-seeking is only the motive-power that sets events going, and is relatively unimportant, I think. It is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality; and the ‘escapes’: serial longevity, and hoarding memory.

(Letter, Oct. 14, 1958, from J. R. R. Tolkien to Rhona Beare)

I’ll have to admit that I’ve always thought that The Lord of the Rings was about the temptations of Power, but Tolkien himself says, in more than one letter in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (which I continue to read), that the story is about death.

Sauron (if I remember correctly) is a Valar, an incarnate angelic being (fallen in his case). He is not the equivalent of Satan, but of a powerful lesser demon. A creature like he (again, if I understand it right) would ordinarily live till the end of the world. But Sauron, as a repeated rebel, has been “killed” and reborn more than once. He knows, or suspects, that if he’s killed again, he’s not coming back in Middle Earth – and he has no reason for hope where his spirit is going after that. He’s struggling to stay alive, even in the hellscape he’s made for himself in Mordor.

Smeagol has been enslaved by the One Ring, and was given (or suffered) extended life thereby – but the life the Ring imparts is not wholesome. Bilbo, who experiences the same thing, says he feels “stretched.” It’s an addiction too – as the pleasure decreases, the craving grows.

Aragorn, on the other hand, who was granted a very long life through his Numenorean blood, will voluntarily lay down his life before it runs out completely. This is regarded as a noble act (not, I’m confident, comparable in any way with assisted suicide).

The elves regard human death as a gift. It’s a mystery to them, but they envy it in a curious way.

These are matters worth pondering, for a man who, like me, is growing old. I can’t say that my whole Erling Saga is about death, but The Baldur Game certainly is. And I was aware of that before I read these letters.

Authors, Fiction, Reading, Writing

Reading report: ‘The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien’

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J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1920s. Photo public domain.

I’m still working my way through The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. It’s quite a long book (though not nearly as long as the 3 volumes of C. S. Lewis’ letters. But this collection makes no claim to being complete).

In any case, the business takes time. So I hope you’ll forgive my giving the book my “reading report” treatment. I suspect there’s enough interest in Tolkien’s work among our readers to warrant multiple posts.

What may strain your tolerance more is my selection of passages from the letters that I relate to my own writing. I’m keenly aware that, even standing on the shoulders of authors like Tolkien and Lewis, I’m shorter than they are. But as I obsess my way through the final stages of producing The Baldur Game, I snatch at any straw of reassurance I can find – or imagine I find.

Anyway, here’s a nice one, from a September 30, 1955 letter to a reader (friend?) named Hugh Brogan. Brogan had written with a criticism of the archaic prose style Tolkien used in The Two Towers. The professor never actually sent this letter, but dispatched a note instead, saying “it would be too long to debate.” But he kept the letter in his files.

He agrees with Brogan’s rejection of what they called “tushery” – the use of archaic words in literature to give an impression of antiquity – words like “tush,” “forsooth,” and “eftsoons.” Victorian writers liked to toss such morsels into their dialogue, but they’re now considered an affectation.

However, Tolkien insists that he does not employ tushery:

But a real archaic English is far more terse than modern; also many of the things said could not be said in our slack and often frivolous idiom.

I jumped at this, because it relates to my own style (in my Viking books). I actually avoid archaic words, unless I can find no modern equivalent. (I’d love to use the word “leif” as an adjective, meaning “to wish to”, for instance. But I don’t think I ever have, because nobody knows the word anymore.)

I’ve actually chosen to simplify my word choices to achieve an antique effect in these books. The general modern writer’s rule, “Don’t use a Latin word when an Anglo-Saxon word will do,” is taken to an extreme. Rather than use a word derived from Latin or French, I’ll sometimes even invent a compound word (in the German fashion) made out of two simple English ones.

In addition, I make use of my knowledge of Norwegian. Norwegian sentences are often constructed differently from the English. I discovered that when I re-cast a sentence in Norwegian word order, I get an effect that “feels” like Old Norse.

I like to think it works. The most satisfying praise I ever got for my writing was back in the 1990s, when a reader told me he looked up from Erling’s Word and was surprised to find himself in the 20th Century.

Fiction, Reading

Reading report: ‘The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien’

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I picked up the first version of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, getting it a bargain rate that day. You, if you want the book, will probably prefer to get the Revised and expanded edition, which has the further advantage of being cheaper (in the Kindle edition) than the one I’m reading (which, aside from containing fewer letters, features an unfortunate number of typos – “orcs” often comes out as “ores,” for instance.

It is, for me, a somewhat emotional read. Though I am not such a coxcomb as to compare my own work to The Professor’s, I can certainly identify – within my limits – with the agonies he went through getting the whole thing written down and published – a process that took something in the neighborhood of two decades. (He openly admits that he probably wouldn’t have finished it without the encouragement, or even the nagging, of C. S. Lewis.)

His publishing history, at least, is almost as complicated as mine. George Allen & Unwin published The Hobbit. They very much wanted a sequel, but when Tolkien went to work, his story expanded in an alarming way. His correspondence with them, over many years, focused on his frequent excuses why he hadn’t been able to do much work, because of obligations at Oxford. Which was no doubt true, especially during the war years. He was also working on the Silmarillion, and he seems to have come to consider that work the real center of the project, with the Lord of the Rings a more peripheral matter. Allen & Unwin were interested in the “Hobbit sequel,” and happy enough to discuss that, whenever it would be finished at last. When they decided against publishing the Silmarillion, Tolkien clearly took offense. When another publisher (Collins) made noises of interest, Tolkien actually tried to push Allen & Unwin away. He says in one letter to them:

My work has escaped from my control, and I have produced a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody); and it is not really a sequel to The Hobbit, but to The Silmarillion.

But Allen & Unwin didn’t want the Silmarillion (at that point). Then the Collins editor changed his mind, and Tolkien seems to have despaired, having gone from a strong to a weak negotiating position. Eventually Rayner Unwin, his former student, reopened communications, and Tolkien – visibly humbled – agreed at last to let Allen & Unwin publish it without the Silmarillion, and (against his preferences) in three volumes.

The rest is history.

I too know the experience of wrong-footing it with a publisher – without quite so happy an outcome. But I could identify, certainly. One feels so attached to one’s own books that it’s hard to distinguish literary criticism from personal slight. No matter how you try to be objective, it’s hard to keep feelings leashed. The situation is too subjective; there are no landmarks to go by. Especially if you’re slightly unstable – and what author was ever very stable? Publishers must lead frustrating lives and require thick skin, dealing with us. Some of them are rumored to drink, and it’s hard to blame them.

As for my own delayed work The Baldur Game, I’ve got all the notes from my readers now, and am doing (what I hope is) the final read-through. Still waiting for my cover art, which I’m confident will be a masterpiece, and well worth the wait.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Past Transgressions,’ by Dave Sinclair

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A thriller writer’s vocation, when it comes down to it, is simply to write exciting books. All the better if he can write a decent sentence. Any level of wit in the narrative is a definite plus.

So if I wasn’t entirely happy with Dave Sinclair’s Past Transgressions, you can mark it down to personal prejudice on my part. It says nothing about the quality of the work.

Mason Nash, our hero, is a former MI6 assassin who has retired to teach history in a small English town. He believes he has put his past behind him. He’s changed his name and adopted a low profile. He’s even become a Buddhist and sworn off all violence.

But a team of assassins shows up with guns (apparently) to kill him in the pub one evening, and he doesn’t know why. He has no choice but to drop his new life altogether and go on the run. His old habits reassert themselves quickly – and he discovers to his surprise that he’s enjoying it more than he cares to admit.

Past Transgressions soon takes us to South America, to a luxury yacht and to a secret mountain fortress. Nash learns that people from his past are hunting for him for a surprising reason, and he gets drawn into a high-level conspiracy.

As I mentioned above, Past Transgressions is a well-written novel, generally speaking. The prose and dialogue are good, and the characters are well-drawn, and there’s quiet humor here and there.

The plot is somewhat outlandish, in the way of thriller novels, but the action isn’t as over the top you see in many such books, so full marks for restraint there.

My petty personal objections were 1) that I found the hero’s persistent efforts to survive in a bullet-rich environment without killing anybody somewhat annoying. In that world, refusing to kill an attacker is unjust to one’s partners – you could easily get them killed themselves.

2) We have the requisite Girl Boss in the mix here – a gorgeous, deadlier-than-the-male female agent actually named “Eva Destruction.”

3) There’s a veiled political dig at one point, and I think I know where it’s directed. I suppose I should be grateful it wasn’t more explicit.

But mostly I think it was the pacifism that annoyed me. I’m probably prejudiced against Buddhists.

In short, I won’t be reading more books in this series, but I must concede that the author did a good job in terms of his own objectives.