Book Review: The Game of Fox and Lion

Book Review: 'The Game of Fox and Lion' by Robert R. Chase

3/5 Stars 

‘The Game of Fox and Lion’ (1986; 246 pp) was published by Ballantine and features a nicely done cover illustration by Darrell K. Sweet (the image depicts Benedict, struggling to negotiate the high gravity of the Bestial's home planet, being helped into a motorized chair for easier transit).

Things are not going very well for John Lei Chiang, head of Chiang Biosynthetics and one of the 13 Councilors of the Centauran star system. Duplicitous Council members are plotting to drive him out of business and take over his markets for themselves. Some may even be conspiring to have him assassinated. And to make matters even worse, a race of rebellious human / animal hybrids, the ‘Bestials’, have set up their own civilization in the outer planets of the Centaurus system, and are launching destructive raids on Centauran outposts.

In desperation, Chiang sets off on a quest to find one Paul Renard, last of the ‘multi-neural capacitants’, a man genetically engineered to process information arising from complex systems with superhuman ease and clarity. Sentiment against genetically engineered humans has driven Renard into hiding and his whereabouts are a mystery. But Chiang succeeds in finding Renard on the remote planet Ariel, where Renard has joined a Catholic religious order and taken the name Benedict.

With a nuanced display of power, Chiang coerces Benedict into working for him. Upon arrival back at Centaurus, the other Councilors are less than pleased to learn that Chiang has a potential ‘evil genius’ in his employ. Measures to strip Chiang of his power and wealth are soon set in motion. Can Benedict act in time to save Chiang Biosynthetics ? Can he also act in time to prevent the Bestials from ravaging the entire Centaurus system ? Does Benedict have an covert agenda of his own that guides his actions ?

‘Game’ bases its title on a phrase from Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’, and Benedict behaves in a manner akin to that played by the Catholic Church clergy in providing wisdom about statecraft to sundry princes, kings, and dukes during the time of the Renaissance. This is both the book’s strength and its weakness. The novel’s emphasis on interstellar politics (along with a sub-plot about the moral issues concerning the human nature of genetically engineered people) is related in a deliberate manner, and by the time I reached the book’s half-way point my interest was flagging.

Fortunately, from the half-way point on, ‘Game’ starts to pick up momentum as the story line focuses on a series of engagements between opposing fleets of spaceships. To author Chase’s credit, these battle scenes rival those of ‘Ender’s Game’ in their intensity and excitement, and while Benedict as a formidable strategist, the conflict is never one-sided, and the outcome never assured.

I suspect that readers desiring an expansive narrative with emphasis on frequent military action, as per novels by John Ringo or David Drake, may find ‘Game’ underwhelming. However, readers looking for a more cerebral, character-driven type of space opera will find ‘Game’ rewarding despite its slowly paced first half.

Alice Cooper: The Last Temptation, Part One

Alice Cooper: 'The Last Temptation'
(Marvel Comics, 1994) 

Part One

I was a High School student from 1974 to 1978, and along with 'nickel bags', feathered-back hair parted in the middle, flared polyester slacks,  foldout album covers,  and other gems of the pop culture of the era, there was Alice Cooper.

Alice (the stage name of Vincent Furnier) was regularly featured on the covers of rock magazines like Crawdaddy and Circus, and he would come around the upstate New York region where I lived and give concerts in the medium-sized arenas. Unfortunately, I never got to see Alice in his heyday, but I did see him live when he opened for the Stones in 2006 at their Phoenix stop. Alice put on a good show.

By the early 90s Alice was looking for a new direction, in terms of trying to broaden his audience to include a younger generation, who didn't recognize that Cooper was one of the founding fathers of the burgeoning Goth, grindcore,and death metal scene.

In 1994 Alice decided to use the concept of “a young man’s struggle to see the truth through the distractions of the ‘Sideshow’ of the modern world” as the central artistic approach to a new album titled 'The Last Temptation'. He collaborated with Marvel comics, and star writer Neil Gaiman ('Sandman' ), on a three-issue series also titled 'The Last Temptation'. Part One (released under Marvel's 'Epic' imprint) was released in May 1994.

The story, which takes place in a small town in late October, involves an adolescent boy named Steven whose friends like to tell scary stories as Halloween comes near:

 

The group is surprised to find an alley alongside the Pox Drugstore.....although no one has ever noticed an alley in that location before...

Only Steven is brave enough to take Alice up on an offer to enter the 'Grand Guignol' theatre at the end of the alley:

The Show begins and Steven sees himself portrayed on stage...as a boy lost in the badder part of town. The zombie-like inhabitants of this skid row are here of their own design:

 

After viewing some other creepy performances, Alice tells a shaken Steven the show is over...for tonight. But he's welcome to come back tomorrow night...for the Grand Finale:

While not an overtly gruesome or gory comic (it is aimed at a young adult audience, after all), this first Part of 'Temptation' does succeed in setting up an atmosphere of unease. Alice is portrayed in a rather sinister light, which, of course, is how he prefers it.

I'll be posting excerpts from Part Two and Part Three over the next week, just in time for Halloween.

Book Review: The Brains of Earth

Book Review: 'The Brains of Earth' by Jack Vance

 

3/5 Stars

‘The Brains of Earth’ (1966, 108 pp) is one-half of Ace Double M-141 (‘The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph’ is the other side of the paperback). The cover illustrations are by Jack Gaughan.

Paul Burke, a senior researcher at the think tank ARPA, gets a mysterious parcel which contains a metal disk that is able to levitate via an unknown anti-grav mechanism. When Burke visits the home of the man who sent him the parcel, he encounters an insectile alien named Pttdu Apiptix (!). 

Apiptix knocks Burke unconscious, and transports him via spaceship to the world of Ixax.

Ixax, and its race of Xaxans, has recently emerged from a civil war which has devastated the entire planet.  Pttdu Apiptix reveals to Burke that the conflict has been triggered by the influence of another race of aliens – the Nopal. And Apiptix has given Paul Burke an assignment he can’t refuse: travel to the home world of the Nopal, and destroy them within 30 days. If Burke can’t accomplish this task, then in retaliation, Earth will be destroyed….

By the standards of mid-60s SF, ‘Brains’ is a reasonably well-written novelette. There is not a great deal of action; indeed, most the story is comprised of lengthy sections of dialogue carried out amongst  a trio of characters. Vance is skilled at dialogue (unlike many other SF authors of the mid-60s period), so these sections are not tiresome to read.

There is a typical Vance problem-solving element to the quasi-Lovecraftian narrative, involving apprehension of alternate dimensions, inhabited by malevolent beings who subtly control human affairs. The plot contains enough twists and revelations to make it an interesting story, all the more so considering its relatively short length. Vance aficionados will want to look for this novelette.

Book Review: Ibis

Book Review: 'Ibis' by Linda Steele

 

Gor Fanboy Score 4/5 Stars 

‘Ibis’ (221 pp., September 1985) is DAW book No. 644; the cover art is by J. Chiodo. This apparently is the first and only novel by Linda Steele.

I wasn’t aware until I had purchased this book and started to read it, that it is an SF Romance novel….?! It’s certainly one of the earliest commercially published entries in that genre, which nowadays takes up an ever-increasing proportion of DAW’s releases. I can’t say I’m a mega-fan of the romance genre, but in the spirit of adventure, I decided to persevere and check out ‘Ibis’:

A Federation research vessel has crash-landed on the planet Ibis-2, and only a few hundred of the crew have survived. Ibis -2 is an earth-like planet, with a native population quite similar in appearance  to Homo sapiens. However, the Ibisian society is constructed much like that of social wasps, bees, or ants. There is a Queen, who alone procreates; a number of lubricious younger females, who will replace the Queen should she falter in her duties; a large caste of sterile female workers and warriors; and a caste of male drones, who live in pampered idleness until such time as the Queen seeks their favors. 

After one shot at Knocking Boots, the ephemeral drones die - ! Needless to say, this depressing aspect of drone reproductive biology tends to leave the younger Ibisian woman rather….. fidgety…....

The Ibisians aren’t too pleased with the arrival of the Federation ship, and within the book’s first few pages they launch an attack that destroys the ship and kills a significant proportion of its lightly-armed survivors. The novel’s hero, Padrec Morrissey (who looks something like Pierce Brosnan) escapes the onslaught only to be captured by Anii, one of the queens-in-waiting, and a woman with the physical appearance of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model.

Things get rather bizarre as Padric quickly becomes the hot-to-trot Anii’s Pleasure Slave (!) and is interred in her quarters in the hive-like ‘nom’, wherein the Ibisians make their home. In rapid succession Anii becomes Queen of the nom, and Padrec her favorite 'Love Toy'.

Although there are brief passages of violence and action, much of the narrative centers on the drama between Padrec and his alien girlfriend. There is quite a bit of pouting and angst on the part of Padrec, which in my mind made him an unsympathetic character. But then again, this is a romance novel, and the arrival on Ibis-2 of a pirate spaceship filled with the well-armed, galactic equivalent of the population of Pelican Bay State Prison simply is not going to happen…..

I won't disclose any spoilers, but the novel's denouement hinges around a momentous decision that Padrec must make. A decision either for the benefit of himself, or for the benefit of his crew. A decision that will come with grave consequences, regardless of the outcome….

Since I’m not particularly familiar with romance novels, it would be unfair of me to give this book a traditional score per se. I have, however, given it a ‘Gor Fanboy Rating’. This rating reflects the book’s appeal to that dedicated subset of SF readers who cherish and treasure the Gor novels’ fascination with proud macho men made humble and ‘forced’ (cough-cough) to serve the sick, lust-filled desires of their gorgeous female masters.

While Ibis is rated PG-13, I think that Gor Fanboys will enjoy reading it….particularly the last few pages. Hence, its exemplary Gor Fanboy Rating of 4/5 Stars !

The Elder Gods Part Two

'Elder Gods' from 'Aliens Special', Dark Horse comics, June 1997

Part Two

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Elder Gods Part One

'Elder Gods' from 'Aliens Special', Dark Horse comics, June 1997

Part One 

Since it's getting close to Halloween I thought I'd post a neat little story that skillfully melds a great modern sci-fi horror archetype- the Giger Aliens - with the unique sci-fi themes of H.P. Lovecraft.

In June 1997 Dark Horse published a little  b & w 'Aliens Special' comic. The first story, '45 seconds', is little more than a few brief pages of some sketches linked with a makeshift story. But the second entry in the comic was 'Elder Gods', written by the well-published horror writer Nancy A. Collins, with pencils by Leif Jones, inking by John Stokes, and letters by Clem Roberts.

It's a shame this little story didn't get the full-marketing exposure of appearing in a color version of the Dark Horse 'Aliens' line. It's better than more than a few of the stories Dark Horse churned out at the expense of the franchise in the 90s.

I'll post the second half of the story shortly. Enjoy ! 

 

 

 

 

Book Review: Moonbane

Book Review: 'Moonbane' by Al Sarrantonio

5/5 Stars

This is a cool book !

On a chilly December night, poet Jason Blake and his son Richie are out in the cornfield near his farmhouse watching a spectacular meteor shower. Some of the meteors are unusually large, and seem almost to be ‘guided’ in terms of their descent; several land in the vicinity of Blake’s property. When he and his son investigate, the meteor turns out to be a small, artificial capsule.

As Blake looks on in astonishment, the pyramid-shaped capsule tears open from within to reveal a miniature werewolf (!) When Richie extends a hand to the mini-werewolf, it promptly bites off several of his fingers (!)

As a frightened Blake carries his son back to the house, the other meteors are revealed as capsules containing yet more mini-werewolves. As they stand in the nurturing light of the full moon, the werewolves soon grow to a height of more than six feet, with gaping, fang-filled mouths and sharp talons (!)

The mature werewolves promptly head for Jason Blake’s farmhouse, and it’s clear that interspecies comity is not on their minds…..

It turns out Earth is under attack by a race of alien creatures: the werewolves of mythology. And with each bitten human condemned to become a werewolf himself, soon the entire world is under siege by growing armies of slavering, homicidal beasts.

Jason Blake undertakes a perilous journey through the monster-filled landscape, one goal in mind: make it to Kramer Air Force base, where a band of scientists have a desperate plan to try and stop the invasion with the aid of the space shuttle……

I’ve read several of Sarrantonio’s short stories, such as ‘The Man With Legs’ and ‘Red Eve’, over the decades in anthologies such as DAW’s ‘The Year’s Best Horror Stories’. I’m not that familiar with his novels, which tend to get mixed reviews at amazon.com.

I can say that ‘Moonbane’ (193 pp., Bantam Spectra, 1989, cover art by Jim Burns) is a very good mingling of horror and sf genres. The book features short chapters and a spare, direct prose style that avoids indulging in the angst-filled character introspectives common to ‘monster apocalypse’ novels. There are plenty of suspenseful moments as the narrator struggles to reach safety with every route endangered by packs of relentless werewolves.

The book’s only weakness is the fact that Blake is a poet; this gives author Sarrantonio opportunities to insert stanzas of bad poems into the narrative every now and then. [The wisdom of having a poet as the protagonist of an sf adventure is not entirely clear to me, but by and large Sarrantonio makes it somewhat believable].

In summary, ‘Moonbane’ is a highly original treatment of the werewolf – wolfman theme, and will be enjoyed by both horror and sf fans.

Book Review: 'Detour' by William Wilson

1/5 Stars
 

I first encountered ‘Detour’ in 1975, when, on a sweltering Summer day, I set out from my house on the 30 minute walk to the public library downtown on State Street. On the shelf devoted to paperbacks I saw Detour, with its cover illustration of two hillbillies – one holding a meat cleaver – looking downright unfriendly (the artist is uncredited, but is apparently George Ziel, who did  a lot of paperback cover art in the 60s and 70s). That was all I needed to decide that Detour might be worth a read.

More than 34 years later I again picked up Detour (Berkley, 1975, 154 pp), this time courtesy of amazon.com, where many PorPors can be had for affordable prices.

Woodsend is a tiny, isolated village in heavily forested part of America (probably the Pacific northwest). Things haven’t changed much in Woodsend, indeed, not for decades. The inhabitants tend to have monosyllabic or disyllabic names (‘Sam’, ‘Henny’, ‘Dee-Dah’, ‘Bobby Billy’). There may be some degree of inbreeding taking place among those citizens given to procreation. There is a humble general store and some beat-up trailers and rustic cabins where the populace make their homes. There is a sheriff named ‘Maybe’, who sometimes takes his red 1930 Cadillac police car out for a drive thirty miles to the east, and to the interchange with the freeway that served to bypass Woodsend years ago.

And there the sheriff blocks the freeway with a barrier that directs travelers to the west, and to Woodsend, with a sign that reads ‘freeway closed; detour’. And the residents of Woodsend, when they hear a car approaching, start to get very excited….

At its heart, the storyline of Detour is quite straightforward and perhaps a better basis for a short story than a novelette. Unfortunately, Wilson’s prose suffers from continuous injections of overwrought existential philosophizing. At these times, the narrative shifts to low gear and the writer digresses into some poetic musings about how unfair life is: 

He shut the door and he was outside, he was outside the car and the womb it represented, he closed the door and he was suddenly different, he was new, it was as though everything he was had been locked away in the airtight car, all his anguish and wonderings,  all the absurd machinations of business and passions of family. He was free and he was exquisite. It wasn’t going to last, it was barely a moment or two of beatitude, but enough, probably too much, a single clear glimpse of something that could be a goal, something he could want and seek or learn. The world’s oldest happiness touched him and babied him, it made calm pleasant love to him, it withdrew the bitter poisons in his mind and the fires in his body.

Whew- ! All this Deep Thought from a middle-aged man getting out of the station wagon within which he is taking his family on their vacation.

These chunks of philosophizing belabor almost every single page of the narrative and make ‘Detour’ a real dud of a suspense novel. So much for treasuring some of those strange novels from my teenage years ….

Amazing Adventures No. 22 with Killraven

Killraven: 'Amazing Adventures' No. 22 (January 1974)

‘Amazing Adventures’ No. 22 (January 1974) features Killraven in ‘Washington Nightmare’, scripted by Don McGregor and illustrated by Herb Trimpe.

The story opens with some great action sequences (excerpted below) as a monster rises from the depths of the Potomac and attacks the tugboat bearing Killraven’s party to the ruins of DC. Trimpe provides a fine double-page spread, calling to mind the memorable Silver Age spreads of Jack Kirby:

The fight with the river creature is a fierce one, observed from the shore by a freelance raider named Sabre.

 

 

The issue ends with yet another cliffhanger, as Killraven gets the worst of his encounter with Abraxas, the human squid of the cover  (and  a name undoubtedly inspired by the Santana album of the same name).

The Killraven story in this issue of Amazing Adventures was only 15 pages in length, a telling indication that, by the late fall of 1973, Marvel’s production problems had become critical. The remaining four comic pages of the book are filled out with a story titled "The Man Who Went Too Far!" which, according to the Marvel Wiki entry for this issue, originally appeared in Journey into Unknown Worlds #56 (April 1959).

In Stan Lee’s Soapbox, the Man Himself admits – in his usual corny blather – that things are not well with the company, and a number of ‘secondary character’ titles are being discontinued – ostensibly to give cash-strapped Marvel readers a chance to purchase comics that stress ‘quality over quantity’.

Of course, Lee – ever quick to take credit for characters and stories authored by other Marvel staffers – declines to say who, exactly, was responsible for the state of affairs in which multiple books (including ‘Fantastic Four’ ) were having to include filler material from the company vaults due to over-extended artists and writers.

One of the strangest things about looking through these old comics are the advertisements. I’ve included one for the ‘Record Club of America’.

Far out…!

 

Among the groovy LPs, 8-track cartridges and casette tapes for offer are those by Hurricane Smith, a middle-aged English crooner with a sandpaper voice who had a big hit with ‘Oh Babe, What Would You Say ?’

And there’s also an LP from the Toronto band ‘Edward Bear’, who had a top 40 hit in ’72 – ‘73 with ‘Last Song (I’ll Ever Write for You)'.

And let’s not overlook the soundtrack to the film ‘Godspell’, a single from which, ‘Day by Day’, was in Heavy Rotation on many AM and FM stations throughout ’73 and ’74 !

Book Review: The Tomorrow File

Book Review: 'The Tomorrow File' by Lawrence Sanders

3/5 Stars 
 

Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book ‘Future Shock’, as well as being a bestseller, exerted significant influence on both the intellectual and pop cultures of the US. 

Not surprisingly, many mainstream and SF authors incorporated elements of Toffler’s depiction of the near – future into their work. Lawrence Sanders (1921 – 1998) certainly did so in his 1975 novel ‘The Tomorrow File’; this is the 1976 Berkeley paperback edition.

The book, at 551 pages, is very much a lengthy 70s novel, akin to those produced by James Michener and James Clavell. This is not necessarily a bad thing; unlike many writers nowadays, those authors were quite familiar with the format of the long novel and were reasonably adept at creating and sustaining a prolonged narrative peopled with a large cast of characters.

‘The Tomorrow File’ is set in 1998, by which time the federal government has grown in size and influence to the point where it supervises and regulates practically every aspect of human life. Social concepts regarded with Future Shock-style trepidation in the 70s, such as eugenics, legalized narcotics, and extremely permissive social mores, are taken for granted, as are technological marvels such as supersonic passenger planes, videophones, and synthetic food and drink.

The first-person narrator is Nicholas Bennington Flair, a bureaucrat in the ‘Department of Bliss’ (formerly the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare). Flair is brilliant and ambitious and determined to ruthlessly apply the principles of ‘scientific’ management to the ordering of American society. In this he is ably assisted by his sometime boyfriend and second-in-command, Paul Bumford (wink-wink).

The first 25 pages of the novel are something of a slog as Sanders giddily burdens the reader with a bewildering variety of sci-fi terms, Newspeak, and slang as imagined to be spoken in 1999. Once these terms are familiarized, the storyline can be grasped a little more easily.

Sanders had previously published the techno-heist thriller ‘The Anderson Tapes’ (1970), and the best-selling, 566 pp. detective novel ‘The First Deadly Sin’ (1973). Similarly, ‘File’ is at heart a high-tech detective story in which Nick Flair and his organization work to expose covert power-plays by unscrupulous government personnel.

The novel features plenty of satirical humor, as the narrator relates, in a deliberately deadpan tone of voice, various aspects of 1999 life that readers of 1975 would find outrageous and unsettling. Many of these outrages are extrapolations of the worst excesses of cultural attitudes as laid out in novels such as ‘A Clockwork Orange’; for example, casual sex with both genders is widespread and guilt-free; the best-selling toy in the world is a doll that defecates; enemies of the state are killed not by execution, but by involuntary participation in underground biomedical experiments; and television channels show nothing but pornography (‘The Twenty-Six Best Positions’) to a narcotized audience of viewers.

There are times when the length of ‘The Tomorrow File’ works against it, even though Sanders takes pains to keep the action constantly moving, shuttling in new characters and new challenges for Nick Flair and his team of operatives. However, Sanders tips the ending well before the last chapter, and I suspect the final few sentences of the book will not surprise many readers.

I doubt many contemporary readers, raised on the near-future settings of cyberpunk, will find much that is innovative or stimulating about ‘The Tomorrow File’; in fact, they will probably find the book’s concepts and mordant tone rather dated and obsolete. 

But those older SF fans who grew up during the 70s, and remember the influence of ‘Future Shock’ on that era, may want to give Sanders’s novel a look, if only for nostalgia’s sake.