Badge of Infamy by Lester Del Rey

Most people, when asked, probably could not name a book written by Lester Del Rey. A very small number of people (who happened to be following the science fiction literature world at the time) might remember that he worked as an editor for John W. Campbell. What most people remember about Lester Del Rey, possibly without even knowing it, is that, in 1977 he founded Del Rey Publishing, an imprint of Ballantine.

Lester Del Rey was working as an editor at the time when a manuscript for a new fantasy novel (something largely unheard of at the time) by Terry Brooks came across his desk. The marketing groups told him it was unpublishable so Del Rey, along with his wife, founded Del Rey Publishing and published Terry Brook’s first book, the Sword of Shannara. Thus started the fantasy genre as we know it today. Terry Brook’s book hit the New York Times bestseller list and nearly every book he’s written since then has followed suit. Shortly after that Del Rey picked up such authors as Stephen R. Donaldson, Piers Anthony and David Eddings and the rest, as they say, is history.

Thus ended the mostly unsuccessful writing career of Lester Del Rey. Lester Del Rey was never popular as a writer but many of his authors freely claim that their ideas stemmed from things that Lester Del Rey suggested to them.

He had the potential, when he was younger to be one of the most prolific authors in science fiction. If only he had been more successful at selling his novels and stories.

There is an anecdote by David Gerrold in his book, Worlds of Wonder. He mentions that Lester Del Rey was frequently frustrated with how long it took his authors to finish their manuscripts. He explains that Lester Del Rey would go home from working on the magazine all day, sit down at his typewriter and come in the next morning with a completed manuscript for a novel.

Books back then were not nearly as long as they are now but even if the book was only fifty thousand words that’s still more than ten times what most full time writers can manage in a day.

Because of this anecdote I sort of felt leery of such a writer. Can anybody who writes that fast be any good? Could it be well done?

Well, his books have all long since passed out of print and are even difficult to find in used book stores – they were never very available in any case. Some of his books have even fallen into the public domain and still I avoided them.

Finally I came across Badge of Infamy and, lacking any inspiration or drive to read anything else at the moment, I decided to give it a try. After all, if its horrible then I don’t ever have to think about his books again.

Imagine my shock when the first chapter ended with me breathless and unable to put the book away. This was possibly the most intense book I’ve read in a long time.

Badge of Infamy is about Doctor Daniel Feldman in the year 2100. Dr. Feldman performed an emergency surgery on a friend who accidently shot himself – an emergency surgery against the doctrines of the Medical Lobby. In punishment he was labeled a pariah and forbidden to ever practice medicine again. His wife, Chris Ryan, leaves him and he is shunned by all of his associates. Living on the streets he watches a man from the Space Lobby die and takes the man’s ID card, using it to get work aboard a ship bound for Mars.

He is discovered and the other spacers beat him senseless and leave him to die in the cold, thin air of Mars.

He is saved when a representative of the Villages invites him to go be their country doctor. They live too far away from any Medical Lobby hospitals and they can’t get anybody who is still on good terms with the Lobby to break rules that might mean a death sentence.

Figuring he is dead anyway he agrees. While treating their patients he discovers a new disease, one that has lain dormant on Mars for over a million years. One that has an incubation period of fourteen years. One that the Medical Lobby has missed completely because of their strict ban on all medical research. A disease that at least eighty percent of the human race will die from.

Frantic to find a cure for a disease immune to all Earth medicines he delves into research that he knows nothing about, having no training. Meanwhile his ex-wife, the new head of the Medical Lobby on Mars hunts him with singular purpose, intent on bringing him to justice.

Doc Feldman is not treated nicely in this book. He is hunted at every turn by his ex-wife, who left him for saving a friend. He is hated and beaten and betrayed and sold out time and time again. Just when things seem hopeless they get worse.

I couldn’t leave this book alone. When I wasn’t reading this book I was thinking about it. The intensity of emotion surprised me for a book written in the seventies. I have no idea if this book was written in a single night but it was an incredible experience.

The rise of the Lobbies in government feels eerily prophetic of where we are headed today with socialized health care and government controlled medical services. So much so that I actually looked up the publishing date to make sure it wasn’t a new book. (I know, Lester Del Rey is dead. It can’t be knew, but it was seriously clairvoyant.)

I will definitely be seeking out more of Lester Del Rey.

On a side note there is some debate as to what Lester Del Rey’s name really is. He often told people that his real name was Ramon Felipe Alvarez-del Rey or even Ramon Felipe San Juan Mario Silvio Enrico Smith Heartcourt-Brace Sierra y Alvarez del Rey y de los Uerdes. I suspect that last was a joke. His sister said his real name was Leonard Knapp.

(9/10)

Space Vikings by H. Beam Piper

H. Beam Piper did not write a lot of books. Little Fuzzy was the height of his short career that ended abruptly when he shot himself.

I’ve read several of his books, when I can find them, and I’ve enjoyed all of them. Some more than others. They all have a certain kind of 1940’s feel to them.

There are a lot of men, very heroic men, who also know a lot of things and have a lot skills. Piper believed in the very capable man. There are usually women, though not many of them. They are always side characters.

Space Vikings takes place after the fall of the great Terran Federation that left whole planets without fissionables or iron or other essential metals and materials. Many of these planets reverted to barbarism in truth and many reverted to much the same level as our current technology. Those worlds that were able to maintain their technological level refer to any world without nuclear weapons and contragravity as uncivilized.

On a group of worlds called The Sword Worlds named after legendary swords (Gram, Excalibur, Durandal) a feudal society develops that also happens to be ‘civilised’.

Lucas Trask of Traskan is a young Baron preparing for his wedding to Elaine, daughter of Duke Angus of Wardshaven. As they are leaving the wedding to get into their vehicle a jealous suitor, Andray Dunnan, does a drive by and shoots them all killing Elaine and severely wounding Trask.

Dunnan then steals the new ship that Duke Angus spent his fortune building and flees into space. When Trask recovers he gives up his barony and all his lands in exchange for another ship to pursue Dunnan.

The problem is that space is immense and it takes so long for news to travel through space that by the time Trask hears about Dunnan being in a place the news is already months old.

In order to facilitate his search Trask conquers a planet of ‘uncivilized’ barbarians in the hunter-gatherer stage and sets up base as a “Space Viking,” raiding other uncivilized planets and building a fleet so that he can have more people helping him search.

This book is a revenge story, plain and simple. Trask is not concerned with any of the consequences that might arise from his singleminded pursuit of Dunnan. He frequently has conversations with his dead wife, thinking that she wants him to pursue Dunnan.

Nothing gets in his way either, when faced with raiding ‘civilized’ worlds in order to get some information he doesn’t hesitate to pound the planet with nuclear weapons until they submit to his demands.

H. Beam Piper uses this book to offer some interesting discussions on governments. Trask and an associate from the democratic world of Marduk debate at length the virtues of each of their governments. Trask sees no reason, being a baron, to change their feudal lifestyle. He claims that if the people are not cared for by the royalty then they will rise up against their lord until they get what they want. This seems to him to be the best way to do thing. Conversely he is appalled that the democratic Mardukans allow their people to vote for their political leaders. He is even more appalled that the Mardukan police force is unwilling to open fire on a civilian mob to quell a riot. On the sword worlds the mob would be mowed down, indiscriminately.

The strange thing about this whole debate, as misguided as Trask appears to most modern readers, is that he turns out to be right. The Mardukan democracy is overthrown in a political coup almost exactly mirroring Hitlers rise in Germany, proving that ‘soft’ governments fail eventually.

What Trask fails to notice is that his own Sword Worlds have been under one form of civil war or another basically since they were founded.

Dunnan is insane and devious. It’s arguable whether Trask is firing on all cylinders as well.

Space Vikings is an interesting commentary on governmental styles, basically proving that no government is perfect. As Thomas Jefferson pointed out, as soon as people learn that they can vote themselves money, democracy will fail.

Fallible human beings must be governed, however, and democracy is the best choice we have. The will of the people usually skews towards intelligent decisions that are better for everybody.

Trask is not concerned with the morals of raiding less technologically advanced worlds for money and neither is H. Beam Piper. He treats it as though it is just what happens, and, given the universe these people live in he’s probably right.

Perhaps the most unfortunate thing about this book is that the cover looks like it belongs on a Masters of the Universe comic book.

I enjoyed Space Vikings. It lacked the intensity of Little Fuzzy, one of the best science fiction books ever written and possibly one of the best courtroom dramas. It lacked the pacing of The Cosmic Computer and Oomphel in the Sky. However, saying that it was one of H. Beam Piper’s weaker books is like a weaker Pixar film. It’s still better than most of the dross out there and quite enjoyable in it’s own right.

The second most unfortunate thing about H. Beam Piper is that his books have been out of print for nearly twenty years. If you’re willing to sell your soul to the devil you can get his complete works for a couple of dollars on the Amazon Kindle, but otherwise you’re out of luck, unless you know of a good used book store.

(6/10)

Morgawr by Terry Brooks

There are, in my admittedly limited view of things, four kinds of Western fantasy (disregarding the urban fantasy genre that is so popular lately, I see that as just an extension of the faerie stories that every culture throughout history has created). The four kinds that I am talking about are all Tolkien derivative. None of them is like Tolkien’s work but they draw inspiration from it.

There are the fantasy histories like Kate Eliot and Steven Erikson. There are the fantasy journeys like David Eddings, Tad Williams, and Robert Jordan. David Farland and Brandon Sanderson write fantasy that pays homage to Tolkien’s work but don’t fit an obvious mold.

The fourth is what I call Tolkien fan fiction. These are the books by authors who lacked the ability to create their own worlds and stories so they borrowed them. Sometimes this works okay (Weis and Hickman) because of interesting characters. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all (Paolini, Goodkind) because it is lifted whole from other works.

Terry Brooks belongs to the fourth group, mostly.

When I was younger I loved Terry Brooks. I read every one of his novels that I could get my hands on, as many as sixteen of his books. Something changed, either me or him, I don’t know which, probably both.

Perhaps I have read too many books by better authors. Maybe I’ve studied too much about writing.

Whatever the reason I find it hard to get through any of Terry Brooks’ novels in a timely manner.

Morgawr is the third book of a trilogy called The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara. The first too books I found horribly tedious and only finished them because I was assured that this third volume was significantly better.

It was, but that isn’t saying much.

The story focuses on a group of characters who have survived a horrible attack by some kind of ancient computer that happens to use magic as its power source. Despite the improbability of it being able to do … any of the things it does… it manages to kill off most of the side characters so that the third book can be more focused.

The Ilse Witch, Grianne Ohmsford, has touched the Sword of Shannara which revealed to her the truth about her past. Unable to deal with the bad things she’s done she goes semi comatose – she walks around when led but otherwise she is completely unresponsive.

Because of her former nature everybody pretty much wants her dead, except her long lost brother Bek Ohmsford. Her old master, the Morgawr, is among those who wants to kill her, along with everybody else – because he’s evil and his friends are lizards.

People fall in love, friends die, shapeshifters never ever change shape and Grianne stares blankly in front of her, all with almost no emotional impact. None of the characters seem different at all. In fact they don’t really feel like characters so much as puppets placed in situations so that things can happen to them.

Terry Brooks has, apparently, never heard the old adage ‘show, don’t tell‘. If you want us to believe that a character is suffering from the effects of PTSD, don’t tell us, show us. The story is so consumed with navel gazing and introspective passages explaining that this characters has this emotional turmoil – no really, he does – that the story itself probably takes up a third of the pages.

The writing is also difficult to read because Terry Brooks is quite fond of the passive voice. Every sentence is written in passive voice. The effect of this is that everything feels like events happening to characters rather than characters participating in events.

Terry Brooks has been writing in this world for over thirty years. I expected somebody with that much experience to think things out more clearly. His monsters are all huge and have lots of teeth and razor sharp claws. Or they are given ambiguous names that mean nothing. Magic has no description whatsoever. Magic users ‘lash out’ and ‘strike’ and ‘trace down lines of power’ without any indication what any of that means. Elves are just humans with pointed ears. They don’t have any different culture, or different views. They don’t live longer than humans or think differently, they only exist because Tolkien had elves in his books. (Never mind that Tolkiens elves are immortal and kind of creepy and alien and arrogant and different. Immortality changes ones views.) Dwarves are all grumpy and use axes in battle. Shapeshifters are prevalent but they never bother to change shape – maybe there were budget cuts in the special effects department. Anything that looks reptilian is evil, always.

Grianne Ohmsford spends six months in a catatonic state and never in all that time has to be fed, given water, changed or bathed. She actually sits in a chair all that time and when she does finally wake up she gets up and goes out to do battle with no stiff muscles or signs of atrophy from six months sitting in a chair. Maybe it was the lack of food that kept her fit.

Some characters survive simply because they happened to have hidden things previously that the reader was never told about (Redden Alt Mer just happened to have a single wing glider stowed on his old air ship) or just by plain design from the author (Quentin Leah ‘swims’ with the rock fall and comes out with only bumps and bruises, while a big animal falls on him later and nearly kills him – so that Grianne and Bek can be the heroes in the end – Quentin was obviously too capable).

Terry Brooks still sells a lot of books so there must be something that somebody likes in his writing. A lot of somebodies, apparently. I, however, have given him an honest try. The last four of his books that I read I had to force myself to get through. I enjoy my Calculus books more than these.

Whether I have changed as a reader or Terry Brooks has changed as a writer I just can’t punish myself with this any longer. I am through with Terry Brooks.

(3/10)

Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides

The Bataan Death March is one of the most shameful acts in human history. In 1942 General Edward P. King Jr., against orders from General MacArthur, surrendered 75,000 troops to the Japanese army infiltrating the Philippines. This act concluded the Battle of Bataan and forced MacArthur to withdraw his own troops, vowing to return and free, not only his soldiers, but the Philippines from Japanese control.

The result was the Bataan Death March. The Japanese marched the prisoners 60 miles through the Philippine jungle heat. In many cases they did not allow the prisoners food, or water. In one instance recorded, they stopped near a stream for several hours and beheaded any prisoner who tried to drink. Thousands died in the week long march. If a person stumbled, or fell or became ill they were shot or bayonetted and left on the side of the road. Prisoners were beaten to death, starved, exposed to disease, shot, stabbed and worse. The Japanese believed that surrender was the worst form of cowardice and they did not feel like these prisoners deserved to live.

After the march the prisoners were placed into camps where they were forced to work hard labor on farms, building airstrips, clearing jungle and digging ditches. They were fed only a handful of sticky rice every day and were not allowed any medicines or vitamin supplements. The lack of nutrition, combined with the jungle brought multiple diseases that rotted the flesh and brought debilitating effects. Thousands more died, sometimes at the rate of several per day.

Three years later, fulfilling his vow, General MacArthur returned to the Philippines and began the work of liberating the islands. The Japanese Commandant at the Puerto Princesa Prison Camp on Palawan panicked when he heard of the approaching American forces. He rounded up all of the prisoners in his camp, forced them into cramped dugouts, poured jet fuel down the opening and lit them on fire. Guards stood outside and shot anybody who tried to crawl out through the flames.

Nevertheless, one of the prisoners made it over the fence and escaped back to American lines, carrying his story. MacArthur, appalled at the actions of the Japanese army decided that he had to stage a rescue of the prisoners in the other camp near Cabanatuan. He feared that if he waited until the army reached that deeply into enemy territory it would be too late to save the rest of the prisoners from the same kind of massacre.

He picked Colonel Mucci to lead a group of Rangers deep into enemy territory, stage a rescue from a heavily guarded camp, in the middle of an empty field, and bring 600 prisoners – most of them too weak to walk on their own – back to friendly lines.

Thus began one of the greatest rescue missions in U. S. Military history.

Hampton Sides gives snippets of personal accounts from both the Rangers and the prisoners. He details the life that the prisoners lived inside the walls of Cabanatuan prison camp in vivid detail. He describes the diseases, the pain, the psychological games they played with themselves, and the sadistic humor of the Japanese officers that commanded the camp. He explains the feelings of the Rangers, slinking across twenty five miles of enemy territory to rescue prisoners so weak that they couldn’t walk back out.

This book is beautifully told. Hapton Sides is a great writer and makes the history of these soldiers and prisoners and Philippine guerillas and even civilians come to life. The story recorded in this book really happened and it became apparent several times that none of their plans would have succeeded without the aid of divine providence.

Anybody who can think of wars as glamorous or exciting needs to read this book. Anybody who has anything less than profound respect for our soldiers of past or current wars needs to read this book. It should be required reading in high school history classes – although the frankness of the descriptions of some of the violence might be a little too much for some people.

I don’t think that any other history book (I haven’t read that many) has affected me with such power. This was an experience that left me feeling saddened and triumphant at the same time. I only wish that I could meet some of these great men and women who suffered so greatly.

(5/5)

Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor by Matthew Stover

Few authors understand Star Wars. Timothy Zahn got it, Michael Stackpole got it. Greg Keyes understands it. A few others have come close. Matthew Stover not only understands Star Wars but he loves Star Wars. It shines through in everything he writes.

When Del Rey was working through the New Jedi Order series (19 books by 13 different authors) Matthew Stover’s Traitor elevated the series to a new level, vaulting the characters and their beliefs so far above what the other writers were doing that it stood out like a beacon, raising the bar so high that other authors never even tried to reach for it.

When we were waiting for Episode III to be released Matthew Stover wrote Shatterpoint, a story about Mace Windu returning to his barbaric home planet of Haruun Kal. Shatterpoint made Mace Windu, and the readers, begin to question all that he believed in the Force. Windu had to struggle with the indoctrination of decades in the Jedi Temple and was unable to face what he discovered.

Matthew Stover also wrote the novelization of Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith. This time he drug the characters through the hell that the movie only hinted at. We got to see why Anakin changed so suddenly, what Obi-Wan had to face inside his own mind at the betrayal of his closest friend. When Matthew Stover writes Star Wars he lifts it high above the muck and half-imagined mess that most authors leave it in. His books shine amidst the others.

Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor is about the battle of Mindor, which took place after the death of Darth Vader and the Emperor but before Rogue Squadron had infiltrated and overthrown Imperial City. In short the New Republic is still a fledgling government and the Empire is a mess of warlords and governors seizing as much power as they can and squabbling amongst themselves as much as with the ‘Rebels’.

Mindor is a planet in the system where the Empire developed their technology for Interdictor Cruisers, ships that project huge gravity wells used to keep enemy ships from jumping to Hyperspace. The result of all of this gravity research completely destroyed all the planets in the system except for Mindor, leaving a system sized asteroid field around the planet, and Mindor itself completely desolate.

Luke takes a special task force to Mindor to attack a small Imperial base run by a person who calls himself Shadowspawn. When Luke arrives everything falls completely apart, in some cases literally, and Luke’s friends show up to try and rescue him.

Nothing is as it seems and Shadowspawn is a mastermind of deception. Sun Tzu theorizes that the art of war is the art of deception. If that is true then Shadowspawn is a master artist.

The characters are beautifully rendered in the text. This is more difficult than you might think, few authors can make Han sound like Han, and Lando sound like Lando. Matthew Stover not only makes the characters sound like themselves but he even does an incredible job of anglicizing Chewbacca and Artoo’s speech.

The plot is intense. At several points throughout the book I found myself thinking that there was no way the characters could get out of the situation they were in. Then it got worse. It always got worse until my stomach was tied in a knot of anticipation and dread.

All these things, however, are not what makes this book great. What makes this book great is that Matthew Stover understands Star Wars and, even more importantly, he understands the Force.

Towards the end of the book Luke is speaking with a character who is Force sensitive and very much steeped in the Dark Side of the Force, Kar Vastor. Kar Vastor comes from Haruun Kal and knew several of the Jedi of the Old Republic, including Mace Windu, Saesee Tiin, and Ki Adi Mundi. Kar tells Luke “your are more than they were.” Luke responds incredulously saying, “But I barely know anything.” Kar’s response is: “You are greater than the Jedi of former days. Because unlike the Knights of old… you are not afraid of the dark.”

This is the heart of what Star Wars is about.

This is the Force. There is no light side and dark side, there is the Force, and there are people. It is the people who are evil or good, not the Force.

The Jedi of the Old Republic feared the dark more than anything. It made them seethe with anger. They cowered in their Jedi Temple reciting platitudes of “There is no Fear, there is the Force. There is no Hate, there is the Force.” and all the while they drilled fear and hate of the Sith and users of the ‘dark side’ into their students and Padawans until they became indoctrinated into their society of foreboding. They feared the dark so much that they denied themselves the opportunity to love, to develop attachments and they hid it behind a veil of false compassion.

When Obi-Wan and Yoda discover that Anakin has joined the Sith and slain the Younglings in the Jedi Temple Yoda tells Obi-Wan to hunt down Anakin. Obi-Wan’s response is, “I can’t kill him, Master Yoda, he’s like a brother to me. Send me after Palpatine instead.” In this, Obi-Wan admits to an attachment to Anakin that goes deeper than mere compassion. He has sinned against the Jedi order, he has developed a friendship. But, despite that friendship, despite fifteen years of fighting side by side Obi-Wan sees no alternative to killing his young friend. So much for the compassion of the Jedi, there is no attempt to help Anakin redeem himself, there is no attempt to understand his feelings. Once Obi-Wan finds proof that Anakin has turned to the dark side he must be destroyed.

There is no question about what is right. When Obi-Wan destroys Anakin and leaves him to die next to the lake of lava he cries out, “You were the Chosen One. You were supposed to destroy the Sith, not join them.” In his mind, the Sith must be destroyed.

The Jedi do not even stop to question and examine the events that led up to this because they are afraid of what they might find – it is their fault. Anakin is desperate to save Padme, he feels that he cannot live without her (and he becomes a shell of his former self when she dies) and Palpatine offers that to him – whether truthfully or not remains to be seen. If the Jedi had been willing to listen to Anakin, had paid attention to his problems he could have sought help from them instead of turning to the Sith for answers.

Herein lies the key to the Force.

Luke Skywalker, upon hearing that Vader is his father and used to be the great Jedi hero, Anakin Skywalker, does not run off to kill him and destroy the Sith. Instead he goes to Vader, and turns himself in. “There is good in you,” Luke tells Vader.

Luke did not have time for all of the Jedi training that the Knights of old received. He was much to old and Yoda just didn’t have the time. Because of that he missed the decades of indoctrinating mantras about compassion, and fear and anger. He missed the platitudes about the dark side and because of that he outshines those Jedi like the sun outshines the stars.

Because he does not fear the dark.

He approaches Vader and Palpatine both with no fear. Palpatine believes that this is overconfidence born of Luke’s ignorance of the Force.

When Luke tells Vader that there is still good in him he doesn’t believe it because he thinks that he is lost, forever. He was trained as a Jedi, he knows that once he turns to the dark side there is no coming back, there is no redemption. Luke suffers from no such preconceptions.

In ‘Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor’ Luke confronts darkness like he has never seen before and still he tries to bring Shadowspawn away from the dark. He does not fear it, but neither does he embrace it.

There is one other aspect of this book that distinguishes it and makes it great. Luke refuses to kill. He’s had enough. His compassion for life and his innate goodness don’t allow him to kill any more people. This changes the story into a beautiful orchestration of events. Rather than whipping out his lightsaber at the smallest sign of trouble Luke relies on the Force and his own cunning to get him through things that continually escalate until the end. Few authors can pull off this kind of thing, but Matthew Stover does it beautifully.

At the end of the book Luke says to a holodrama writer who wants Luke to read his script about Luke’s adventures: “Who wants to watch me cut up one more villain with my lightsaber?” It’s been seen before, dozens of times. What we haven’t seen is Luke put away his weapons and save himself and his friends through his own connection with the Force… until now.

How different would Anakin’s life have been if the former Jedi had understood compassion and love and fear the way Luke does.

Despite being deep and intense and brutal, this book is also quite funny. The trio of Han, Leia, and Chewbacca is hard to beat for sarcasm and witty quips. There are even a few section from the point of view of R2-D2 which are quite entertaining. He is a very sarcastic little droid.

It is also great to see Lando, back in action and pulling his weight as General Calrissian.

This book was powerfully written. Matthew Stover’s writing is almost poetry. His grasp of who the characters are is exceptional and bested only by the great Timothy Zahn. His understanding of the Force and what it is that makes Luke great is far beyond anything other authors have come close to.

Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor is, once again, far above the usual Star Wars novel in it’s quality. It is books like this that have made Star Wars great.

(5/5)

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

I have decided that Robert Louis Stevenson and H. G. Wells are really the same person. My reason for this surety is that their writing styles are so similar that they are almost indistinguishable from each other. I know that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island and basically defined all pirate fiction until the end of time. I know that H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds and introduced the world to alien attack paranoia. It’s the rest of their books where the line becomes a little fuzzy.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson reads almost like an adaptation of The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells. The way they organize their words, their sentences and the flow of the stories are so similar that I have difficulty keeping them straight.

The Island of Doctor Moreau started so reminiscent of the style of Treasure Island that I actually spent about a week thinking that this book was written by Robert Louis Stevenson.

The book is about a man, Prendick, who is stranded at sea after a shipwreck. He is picked up by a Doctor Montgomery and joins the crew of the ship that Montgomery is traveling on to an island. Montgomery is taking a load of animals to the island. When they arrive the captain of the ship refuses to allow him to stay aboard so he accompanies Montgomery.

On the island he meets Doctor Moreau. Doctor Moreau was banished from England, a fact that he is rather bitter about, for vivisecting animals. Rather than stop performing these brutal surgeries he moved to a tropical island so that he could continue his research in peace.

Prendick quickly learns that Moreau’s research is an attempt to alter the brains and forms of the animals in order to make them more like men. He shapes them to look like bestial apparitions of men and cuts at their brains until they gain of semblance of human thought.

His one problem is that the ‘beast’ remains in all of them. Eventually they revert back to their bestial natures.

Prendick meets some of the beast-men and in an incredibly creepy scene he learns of the law they have devised for themselves. They are not to eat meat, not to lap up water, not to scratch at trees, and, most of all, they are to worship Moreau. Moreau is the bringer of pain and the bringer of death and they fear him.

Things quickly devolve into chaos when Montgomery teaches his friend, the Hyena-man to gut and clean a rabbit. He finds the Hyena-man licking the blood from his fingers. This drags the Hyena-man from his ‘elevated’ human state to his animal state and the men set off to kill him. Each of the three men have a different view of who these beast-men are, or what they are, and it shows in the way they behave towards them.

I found this book enthralling. When Prendick is lost in the forest and the beast-men gather to recite their law to him it sent chills up my spine. The beast-men are hideous, twisted creatures that strive for a similitude of humanity. They rested comfortably across the uncanny valley of animation fame.

The reactions of the characters involved all felt real and true to who they were. Moreau thought of his creations only as failures because they were not exactly like him. Montgomery saw them as a strange mash-up between friends and slaves, but people. Prendick saw them as hideous, deformed monsters and he was repulsed by their appearance and behavior.

Being trapped on the island with these monsters plays into a lot of our primal fears and helped the book feel intense and terrifying. H. G. Wells narrative style flowed smoothly and kept the pace moving along quickly.

There is a reason that both H. G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson are such well loved and well known writers. It is because they are good at what they do. The Island of Doctor Moreau translates surprisingly well into our modern day. There is even a feel of social commentary about it, expressing the fact that animals are the way God created them and despite all of our tampering they will remain that way. Wikipedia says that this book inspired a movement to ban vivisection of animals for scientific research in England.

I do have one question, however. Did authors in the 19th century really think that the whole “this is a letter from my uncle” story device works? I’ve seen it in both H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and even in more modern authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs. When I was little it actually fooled me and I used to wonder if the Conneticut Yankee really had visited King Arthur. As an adult I try to forget about that part because it bugs me.

So I guess for a certain audience it works great, for other audiences we just ignore it, so, no harm done.

I enjoy all of H. G. Wells’ books (and Robert Louis Stevenson’s for that matter) and this one is no exception. He has a concise, clear way of writing and the plot is always clear and plausible within the confines of the world that he establishes. His characters always behave true to their personalities and they are always exciting. It is no wonder that he is considered the grandfather of science fiction. The man was a genius.

(5/5)

Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows by Michael Reaves

The Coruscant Nights series is an attempt by Lucasbooks to cross noir murder mystery with the Galaxy Far Far Away. The cover, the title, the blurb on the back of the book, all connote the feel of a Dick Tracy novel. I think it is marginally successful.

Jax Pavan is a Jedi, though not a very good one, surviving in the underbelly of Coruscant after the Great Purge (the destruction of the Jedi). In order to make ends meet he sets himself up as a Private Investigator. He turns out to be a terrible PI, not because he can’t follow clues but because he can’t bring himself to ask his clients for money. Helping him in his investigations are Laranth, a blue skinned Twi’lek female (who left the Jedi order to join the Grey Paladins – a militant group of force users who eschew the Jedi dependence on lightsabers), the Sullustan reporter Den Dhur, and the sentient protocol droid I-5YQ.

Jax is trying to lie low, when he is hired by a Zeltron woman to investigate the murder of her partner, the famous Caamasi artist Volette.

This story hits all the noir mystery points, the beautiful woman coming to hire the PI, the frumpy but cunning law enforcement who doesn’t like the PI but respects his anyways. There is even the usual array of suspicious acquaintances and friends of Volette. The book plays out much like a mystery – with a twist. Darth Vader knows that Jax is still alive and feels intent on killing him. Vader, however, is busy with the Caamas disaster and several other nefarious works. So he hires Aurra Sing, the famed Jedi hunter to find Jax and bring him in.

All these elements together make for a compelling idea, one that I expected to be quite exciting going in. Michael Reaves is a competent writer – Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter (featuring Jax’s father and I-5YQ) is an excellent book – and I expected a fun twist on the usual uprising of an unknown dark Jedi/Sith Lord.

Mostly my expectations were met. Jax forgets to feel things in the Force. This causes him some trouble in solving the mystery of who killed Volette, it also gets him into trouble when people are intent on killing him – which is the major flaw in this book.

Every chapter ends with some bodyguard attacking Jax, or a droid in a marketplace shooting at him. He gets in fights everywhere he goes. Each of these fights has later consequences which either help him or hinder him in some way so they aren’t completely gratuitous but they get tedious quickly. It feels like the author was not comfortable with the mystery aspect of the story so he added action scenes to spice it up.

This book, like most Star Wars books, feels a little uncut. I think that’s because they release these books so fast that the authors don’t have time to really write carefully and edit the story into a concise form. Michael Stackpole said that from approved outline to final manuscript he is usually given three months. Most authors take much longer than that to write a novel.

The introduction of Aurra Sing brought a significant amount of tension to the story. Aurra Sing has faced off with Obi-wan, Anakin, Mace Windu, Kit Fisto, and several other legendary Jedi. She’s also killed a number of them. Having her on Jax’s tail kept the tension high and accelerated the ending into a bit of a thriller – it’s nearly impossible to escape Aurra Sing once she’s decided to come after you.

The side-plot of Captain Typho, former Captain of Padme Amidala’s guards, is touching and sheds some light on Darth Vader’s personality and some depth to the character Typho.

The mystery is interesting. I thought I knew who had done it then was totally surprised to find out who really did it (the butler). Michael Reaves does a good job of painting a picture of what life in the streets of Coruscant is like, down below the clouds and the skyhooks and the air speeders.

As far as Star Wars books go I enjoyed this book. It isn’t among the best, but it is far better than the worst. It mostly succeeds at what it is trying to do, which is to introduce new characters to a genre that has become stagnant with overuse of characters (how many times can Han, Luke and Leia save the galaxy before they become fed up with it and just let it die). It is a competent mystery, a mild thriller, and a touching story of a man trying to live after everything he ever knew has been completely destroyed.

(4/5)