Re-read: The Vang: The Battlemaster

Re-read: 'The Vang: The Battlemaster' by Christopher Rowley

5 / 5 Stars

 

Back in April of 2014 I posted my review of the third and final volume in the 'Vang' trilogy by Christopher Rowley: 'The Vang: The Battlemaster.' It was a title I bestowed with a 5 Star Rating.

This installment of the trilogy is set 2,000 years after the events of the second volume, 'The Vang: The Military Form.' 'Battlemaster' is set on the planet Wexel, an 'infamous eco-disaster' world beset with entropy.

 

Much as with third-world nations on Earth, on Wexel, there is widespread political violence between the ruling government and an assortment of 'liberation' fronts. This has triggered severe economic disruptions, with large sectors of the planet in disarray:

 

    The ATV moved out. Chang stared out at the terminal buildings as they went past. The paint was dull; there was a broken window on the ground floor.

 

    A rusting truck was set up on blocks in a cargo bay. They passed through an unmanned gatepost and turned onto a four-lane approach highway. Various ramps joined the road as it curved down to meet a six-lane highway. 

 

    The roads were in terrible shape, truly terrible, with potholes like craters, and broken railings, rusted and torn, projecting up like daggers in places.

 

    The highway was flanked by endless billboards.....there were many that amounted to enormous written demands for the execution of this or that specific person. These demands were written in stark headline black, charging so-and-so with subversion of the State of Potash-Do and demanding the death penalty on behalf of the Committee for the Preservation of Society. 

 

    Some of the other billboards featured enormous skulls, with a conspicuous bullet hole through the forehead. Beneath this was a slogan: "Get them first and they can't get you !"

 

    Soap, video, beer, and skulls with bullet holes. Chang winced.

 

Beyond the reach of the central government, in the outlands, aristocrats rule as independent lordlings. One such lordling is the malevolent Count Karvur, the despot of a bedraggled rural estate. Prospecting on the Count's lands has uncovered something very interesting: in a strata estimated to be nearly 80 million years old is the cocoon of an alien organism. 

 

The County orders the cocoon excavated, and assigns it to the care of university researcher Caroline Reese. Reese is alarmed by her molecular analysis of the life form, and urges caution. But Count Karvur badly needs money to fund his libertine lifestyle, and he sees the cocoon and its contents as a path to riches. But as the Count is about to find out, the alien inside the cocoon is none other than the most lethal form of the Vang.........

 

'Battlemaster' has as its heroine the dogged Colonel Luisa Chang. Author Rowley makes the military officials, bureaucrats, and politicians of the Wexel elite as much the villains of the novel as the Vang, for machinations of the ruling class constantly raise obstacles to Chang's increasingly desperate efforts to contain the spread of the Vang. 

'Battlemaster' doesn't shy from grue and gore, as the Vang converts one hapless Wexelian after another into its increasingly deadly militias.

 

Author Rowley never tips his hand as to whether Luisa Chang or the Battlemaster will in the end prevail, thus maintaining suspense until the last two pages of the novel. 

 

After the re-read I see no reason to change my initial review's Five Star Rating, a conclusion I also reached this past Spring with my re-read of the initial volume in the Vang trilogy, 'Starhammer.' These are among the best sci-fi novels of the 1980s and well are worth acquiring. 

The Carpenters: Space Encounters

The Carpenters: Space Encounters

ABC TV, May 17, 1978 

After the release of their very successful song 'Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft' in the Fall of 1977, the Carpenters continued to mine the sci-fi craze of the late 1970s by participating in a May, 1978 special on ABC TV. Titled The Carpenters: Space Encounters, it was a melange of Carpenter's hits, lip-synced, and accompanied by footage of dancers in 'sci-fi' costumes. Several 70s celebrities: comedian Charlie Callas, actor and emcee John Davidson, and Suzanne Somers (from Three's Company), come aboard for additional corny antics.

 

The entire 50-minute show can be seen here. 

Anyone under the age of 30 who tries to watch the show likely will come away distressed from the cheesiness (can anyone watch Davidson and Callas converse in 'alien' language and not be unscathed ?), but if you're a Baby Boomer, well.........hopefully all the drugs you've done in the past will make Space Encounters digestible. And I will say that Somers looks pretty fetching in her 'Space Girl' outfits........ 

 

It doesn't get more 70s, than Space Encounters...........!

Book Review: Midnight City

Book Review: 'Midnight City' by Robert Tine

 3 / 5 Stars

 

'Midnight City' (284 pp.) was published by Signet in December, 1987. The cover artist is uncredited. During the 1980s and 1990s author Tine (1954 - 2022) wrote novels for various franchises ('The Outrider'), and novelizations of feature films ('Universal Soldier,' 'Forever Young,' 'Demolition Man').

 

'Midnight' is set in New York City, circa 2030. The Big Apple is more hectic and more crowded than ever, operating on a 24-hour cycle to accommodate all the activities and commerce unfolding in its five boroughs. Skyways 90 feet high struggle to handle all the traffic. Pimps, muggers, rapists, thieves, and murderers are as plentiful as in our own day, and the city police department has created a new unit, the 'Rovers,' to handle the most pressing and politically charged crime cases. The Rovers aren't particularly well liked by the regular police force, being seen as elitist meddlers.

 

As the novel opens a beat cop is murdered in gruesome fashion. Such a crime must forcibly be addressed, and NYPD headquarters orders Herman Symankowicz, the senior Rover commander, to apprehend the killer. Symankowicz assembles a team of three Rovers: Jake Sullivan, Jerry Walker, and Vic Borelli, to investigate the murder.

 

Lead character Sullivan is your traditional world-weary cop, but he's also very bright, very savvy about the way things work on the alleys and streets of the city, and very dedicated to his job. He's not not overly surprised when the investigation reveals the deceased police had a number of 'excessive use of force' complaints. Thus, there is no shortage of perps who might be seeking payback.

 

As the novel progresses things get worse, rather than better, and the political pressure to solve the crime only increases. But Jake Sullivan has an idea about how to use the technology at the disposal of the NYPD, to learn some things that the Department wants kept secret..... 

 

'Midnight City' is first and foremost a police procedural. Author Tine deploys the standard-issue hardboiled prose, and although he thankfully avoids stuffing similes and metaphors into the narrative, he does have a skill with acidic, laugh-out-loud wordplay: 

 

They found Gerry Geronimo backstage at the Erotiko. He was a grimy little man and, given his lack of personal hygiene, was quite at home in the nasty-smelling lighting booth of the club. He was sitting back in his rickety chair, his feet on the control board, drinking a half-liter can of Budweiser and reading a copy of Twat magazine. 

He looked out directly onto the little stage of the theater where a woman dressed in a dog collar - only a dog collar - as being led around by a black guy who had her leash in his bony hand. He dragged her over to one of the elderly patrons and she took a fifty-dollar bill and commenced giving the guy a blow job.

 

The denouement relies on a rather contrived plot development involving an elderly mafioso, but the reveal of the murderer was a genuine surprise; author Tine keeps the reader guessing til the ending page, which is in the novel's favor.

 

'Midnight' is not a melding of cyberpunk and noir in the manner of other titles from the late 80s and early 90s, like Richard Paul Russo's 'Carlucci' novels, or George Alec Effinger's 'Marid Audran' novels. The novel's sci-fi content is mild; a GPS system, as envisaged in 1987, plays a key role in the investigative process, and an NYPD hovercraft comes in handy when seeking perps among the shadier venues of the city. 

 

Readers who like police procedurals may want to give 'Midnight City' a look, but it's probably not going to appeal very much to those interested in early cyberpunk.

National Lampoon January 1979

National Lampoon

January, 1979

January, 1979, and atop the Top 40 singles chart is 'Le Freak,' by Chic. Disco (represented here not just by Chic, but by the Village People and Rod Stewart) was doing well as the year began, but by the summer's end, it would begin to go into decline.

The latest issue of the National Lampoon is out, and while the company is riding high on the blockbuster success of National Lampoon's Animal House........

......the page count is quite a bit reduced from the glory days of the advertising of the early- and mid-70s. 

 

Although, we do get notice of Elton John's latest album, A Single Man. The single from the LP, 'Part Time Love,' is a nice little pop song.

And let's not forget the 1978 remake of the 1956 sci-fi film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.....

This is a good issue of the Lampoon, with some solid content; all revolving around the theme of 'depression.' The short story in this issue, 'Life in the Big City Goes On,' by Gerald Sussman, is about a hapless New Yorker named Gregory K, whose life is even worse than that of the protagonist of the M. John Harrison story 'Running Down,' in terms of Affliction by Entropy. 'Life in the Big city' mixes dark humor with the late 70s cityscape in a very effective way.
 

The comic book parody in this issue takes aim at the venerable Classics Illustrated imprint with a tale of alcoholism and despair.

Knowing their readership likes a little female nudity, the editorial staff have a 'centerfold' of sorts:

Comics veteran Russ Heath gets in on the action with a half-page comic, written by Lampoon editor P. J. O'Rourke, titled 'Naked Girls Telling Old Jokes.'

The 'Foto Funnies' eschew their usual female nudity for some comic observations about funerals, and the use of the commode.

 

Lampoon stalwart Shary Flenniken contributes both an installment of 'Trots and Bonnie,' and 'A Friend in Need,' a color comic about malaise and anomie in the Big City.

 

One of the more unsettling pieces in this January issue is a contribution from Arthur Suydam, who at the time was emerging as one of the more innovative and gifted contributors to the Lampoon's sister publication Heavy Metal. Also written by O'Rourke, thanks to Suydam's unique art style 'Women' provides a creepy, even disturbing, look at gender relations. Is it relevant to our time and age, nearly fifty years later ? Perhaps..........!!

And that's what you got for your $1.50, folks, long ago and far away in that opening month of 1979.......

Book Review: Snow Crash

Book Review: 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson

2 / 5 Stars

'Snow Crash' first was issued in hardback in 1992; this mass market paperback edition (470 pp.) was released in May, 1993 and features cover art by Bruce Jensen.

The novel is set in the early 2000s, and the lead character is a slacker in his thirties named Hiro Protagonist. Hiro is a sometime hacker, pizza deliveryman, and stringer for the Central Intelligence Corporation (successor agency to the CIA). In the novel's first chapter we are introduced to secondary character 'Y.T,' a 15 year-old girl who works as a courier, riding a super-sophisticated skateboard that gains momentum from temporarily attaching to cars and trucks via a 'smart' harpoon.

The plot of 'Snow Crash' is rather simple; a telecom magnate named L. Bob Rife is attempting to take control of the world, and one means of doing this involves loosing a virus, the eponymous Snow Crash, on the global hacker community. Snow Crash delivers a sort of digital lobotomy when viewed by unsuspecting hackers. 

When not grinding for low wages, Hiro spends most of his time in an online world called the Metaverse, where he is a personality of some stature. The novel oscillates between events in the 'real' world, and those taking place in the Metaverse. Regardless of locale, Hiro and Y.T. are obliged to ally themselves with all manner of quirky personalities in their efforts to thwart the machinations of L. Bob Rife, and purge Snow Crash from the hacker infastructure.

At nearly 500 pages in length, and with dense prose, 'Snow Crash' can't really be synopsized in a concise manner. It is sufficient to say that author Stephenson uses the novel as a platform to launch into all manner of discourses and digressions, with many of these having little relevance with the main plot. 

For example, he devotes more than 10 pages to describing the numbing office routine that Y. T.'s mother, a federal employee, must follow in her job as a programmer. Four of these 10 pages deal with a memorandum from management about the requirement for employees to furnish toilet paper for the office bathrooms. It's a case of satiric overkill, and could have been excised, along with probably another 100 pages of extraneous exposition, without damaging the novel........ 

The final 150-odd pages of 'Snow Crash' do pick up momentum, as Hiro and Y.T. endure all sorts of perils in their final confrontation with L. Bob Rife aboard his 'fifth world,' a massive armada of dilapidated ships and boats constituting an artificial island in the Pacific. But frequent plot contrivances leech the impact from these climactic sequences. To give an example, at one point, someone falls out of a speeding helicopter, and thus faces certain injury and perhaps death. But - ! Their coverall just happens to have a quasi-miraculous, built-in airbag system that cushions their fall at the moment of impact ! So, what could have been a moment of suspense, is cancelled out by a plot gimmick.

I finished 'Snow Crash' thinking that its more engaging sequences were too few and too far between to reward me for the effort I had to put into reading the novel in the first place. As a first-gen cyberpunk novel it's too unfocused and too messy to stand alongside (say) Gibson's 'Bridge' trilogy, Sterling's 'Heavy Weather,' and Effinger's 'Budayeen' trilogy. 

Only Stephenson fans, and those with a degree of patience, are advised to sit down with 'Snow Crash.' 

A Trio by Louis Trimble

Louis Trimble (1917 - 1988) was an American author of more than 70 books, most of these paperbacks in the western and detective / crime genres. In the early 1970s he had three novels published by the nascent DAW Books: 'The Wandering Variables,' 'The Bodelan Way,' and 'The City Machine.'

 

All three are short (they more are novelettes than novels) and likely I'll read all three before the winter ends. 

Book Review: Mondo Macabro

January is Trash Cinema Month at the PorPor Books Blog

Book Review: 'Mondo Macabro' by Pete Tombs

 

'Mondo Macabro' (192 pp.) first was published as a trade paperback in the UK in October, 1997. A U.S. trade paperback edition (below) was released in December 1998. There also is a Kindle edition available.

'Mondo' is one of two volumes on trash / exploitation / cult cinema authored by Tombs, the other being the immortal 'Immoral Tales.' 

 

'Mondo' is affiliated with the 'Mondo Macabro' website, founded by Tombs and Andy Starke, that sells exotic DVDs. 

One thing that stands out: 'Mondo' is not easy on the eyes of the elderly, with a font that must be 4 point at its largest. I needed reading glasses for this book. That's how life is, when you're an old fart........

While 'Immoral Tales' focused on European trash cinema, with an emphasis on horror films, 'Mondo' takes a look at cinema in other continents and hemispheres. So in the pages of 'Mondo' you'll read about films made in South America, South Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific. And while some of the profiled films are horror, there also is coverage of melodramas, comedies, softcore porn, and science fiction.

As with 'Immoral,' Tombs understands he is writing for a 90% male audience, so the pages of 'Mondo' heavily are salted with black-and-white stills designed to appeal to the that demographic.

The films of Japan and Hong Kong get the most plentiful treatment, with three chapters each.

Contributor Giovanni Scognamilla assists Tombs with an overview of strange films from Turkey, while Diego Curubeto contributes a chapter on Argentine cinema, and Mexico is handled by David Wilt. These contributors, and Pete Tombs, recognize that they're writing for trash film fans, not academics, so the book's prose is straightforward and devoid of pretense.

At the time of its publication, 'Mondo' offered insights into films that otherwise were difficult to view. In the ensuing 29 years the internet has corrected this barrier, and now it's possible to see many of the films via YouTube or other portals. For me, this meant that some of the book's contents turn out, with the passage of time, to be a bit underwhelming. This is true of the chapter that Tombs devotes to Brazilian director and actor Jose Mojica Marins, aka 'Coffin Joe,' aka 'Zé do Caixão.' Seeing Marins's films at YouTube reveals that they are low, low budget enterprises, static and talky, and (in my opinion, at least) don't live up to the accolades that Tombs gives them in 'Mondo.' 

And, I can’t say I was all that excited about the chapter on Bollywood films, but if you want to go in that direction, well, ‘Mondo Macabro’ has you covered. 

 

As is the case with 'Immoral Tales,' 'Mondo Macabro' features a color insert of stills and movie posters drawn from the profiled countries.

 

I’ll close with the common question: who will want a copy of ‘Mondo Macabro’ ? If you’re a dedicated fan of trash and exploitation cinema, then having a copy of the trade paperback (asking prices for which start at $30 on eBay) may be warranted. But all others likely can get by with the Kindle edition, which at $3 (last time I checked) is much more affordable. 

 

(A lengthy video review of 'Mondo Macabro' is available here) 

Robocop Vs The Terminator

Robocop Vs The Terminator

by Frank Miller (story) and Walter Simonson (art)

Dark Horse Comics, 1992

One of the best comic book series of the 1990s was the four-issue series 'Robocop Vs The Terminator,' published by Dark Horse Comics, from September 1992 to December 1992. I remember collecting these comics when they first were published, and hanging on to them for more than 30 years now.

At that time Dark Horse owned the licensing rights to both franchises, and while much of those early 1990s iterations of both the Terminator and Robocop titles were mediocre, with 'Robocop Vs The Terminator,' the company produced an exceptional series.

 

 

It helped that Dark Horse editor Randy Stradley (or maybe it was publisher Mike Richardson ?) recruited Frank Miller to write the series. Miller had participated in writing the script for the Robocop 2 film, and understood the nature of both franchises. With 'Robocop Vs The Terminator' he avoided making the plot too complicated, and came up with an energetic storyline that delivered action and mayhem, while avoiding contrivance. 

And Miller being Miller, there are notes of sarcastic humor throughout the series:

Walter Simonson, at that time one of the foremost artists in comics, undoubtedly had more work than he could handle in terms of his assignments for various publishers, but his pencils for Robocop Vs. Terminator display care and imagination and really bring Miller's conceptions to fruition. Lots of that early 1990s flavor for superheroes and big guns, explosions, and set-piece battles. Lots of violent deaths, too ! Even little kids and the blind are not spared death at the hands of the robots !

 

 

I won't disclose any spoilers, save to say that the initial issues of the series tread familiar ground, with Terminators dispatched via time machine to Detroit, there to shape the future by selected intervention in the timeline. Of course, a resistance fighter (in this case, a young woman named Flo, sporting a bowl-cut hairdo) from the future also travels back in time to try and thwart the Terminators.

 

It turns out that for the 'Terminator future' to be realized, a cyborg policeman named Alex Murphy, aka Robocop, must merge with Skynet and precipitate Judgment Day and the triumph of the machines.

In the latter issues of the series, Miller takes things in a 'cosmic' direction, outside the normal boundaries of either franchise, and I've not seen such an imaginative treatment of the franchises since 'Robocop Vs The Terminator.'

As 1990s comics, 'Robocop Vs The Terminator' had to have some gimmicks, and in this case, it's cardboard cutouts stapled into the midsection of each issue:

Unfortunately, here in 2025, getting copies of 'Robocop Vs The Terminator' is not easy. The individual issues still are available, but are a bit pricey ($12+ each). 

 

  

In 1992 Dark Horse issued a trade paperback, copies of which are quite rare. In 2014 Dark Horse reissued the series as a hardcover edition, but being out of print for over a decade now, that hardcover has exorbitant asking prices ($121 on up for copies in 'acceptable' or 'good' condition, with one speculator at amazon asking $274 for a 'good' condition copy).
 

If you want to get your hands on 'Robocop Vs The Terminator,' your best approach is to try and get the four individual issues. Either that, or hope that at some point in the future Dark Horse decides to make a second printing of the 2014 compilation.......