Thuvia, Maid of Mars

Brave New Worlds

Robinson Crusoe

Integrity

Jim Meddick

Review: Dark Lover

Dark Lover by J R Ward (2005)

My choice of what fiction I read revolves around a number of reasons.  Sometimes I read a book because I'm doing research for my site Tales of Future Past.  Sometimes it's because the work is topical.  And (rarely) I might even read one for pleasure.  Then there are the times when I read something because the wife asks me to.  She does this because she knows that my opinions of books are completely honest and she's willing to put up with my tendency to disembowel a work if I feel it deserves it.

Such is the reason why I read Dark Lover. 

Let the disemboweling begin.

Warning label.

You can't judge a book by its cover, but you can judge it by the author's photo.  If the writer is awkwardly posed, looking distinctly embarrassed or uncomfortable, is slightly blurry because he refused to sit still, or has the air of someone who is dead tired because the photographer needed twelve hours to get a decent head shot, then I conclude that this is a book worth at least skimming.  On the other hand, if the author is enjoying herself,  strikes a self-conscious pose or, worse, affects some sort of costume, then I know that I'm in for dreck.   If said photo is appended to a doorstop novel that is the first in a twelve volume series, then I know that it will be a pile of steaming, freshly regurgitated dreck with a side order of tedium.

Such is Dark Lover.  I haven't any liking for the subgenre known as "paranormal romance".  Frankly, I regard the entire field as twee and more than a little embarrassing even in the abstract.  Sort of like Mills & Boon with fangs.  But then, fangs ain't what they used to be.  I prefer my vampires out of Bram Stoker, not Barbara Cartland.  However, I was willing to set aside my dislike for the genre and judge Dark Lover as I would a bit of general fantasy fiction.  Then I read the pile of... but I don't use that sort of language in a review.  Let's give the paperback edition's blurb writer the honour of providing the synopsis:

In the shadows of the night in Caldwell, New York, there's a deadly turf war going on between vampires and their slayers. There exists a secret band of brothers like no other—six vampire warriors, defenders of their race. Yet none of them relishes killing their enemies, the lessers, more than Wrath, the leader of the Black Dagger Brotherhood....


The only purebred vampire left on the planet, Wrath has a score to settle with the slayers who murdered his parents centuries ago. But, when one of his most trusted fighters is killed—orphaning a half-breed daughter unaware of her heritage or her fate—Wrath must usher the beautiful female into the world of the undead....


Racked by a restlessness in her body that wasn't there before, Beth Randall is helpless against the dangerously sexy man who comes to her at night with shadows in his eyes. His tales of brotherhood and blood frighten her. But his touch ignites a dawning hunger that threatens to consume them both....

Four full stops in the ellipsis. Oh, dear.  As a piece of sales copy, it's not bad.  Not when you consider that it shields the potential reader from the awfulness of the novel like a yard of lead.  This is the sort of book that has lines like:

Her core bloomed for him.

I laughed so hard when I read it that I had to wipe the tears off my glasses.  This is truly bad.  Dark Lover isn't so much a novel as a roll call of clichés.  Beautiful heroine whom everyone falls over like the lead character in Mary Sue fanfiction?  Check.  Lecherous boss so broadly stereotyped that he reads as if written in with crayon? Check.  Tough-as-nails homicide detective who shows the perps how they do things downtown? Check.  Hero with volcanic passions and a turbulent past only because the author says so?  Check.  Frat boy rapist straight out of that Duke University travesty?  Check.  Hero that makes Fabio in his prime look like Don Knotts?  Check.  Ludicrous underground vampire society?  Check.  Vampires who aren't really vampires?  Check.  Secret war between shadow armies?  Check.  Really, really bad sex scenes.  Oh, boy, Check.  Voldemort knock-off villain?  Check. Plot so predictable that you can write the blurb before even turning the book over? Check and double check.  There's even a character called "Mr X" for pity's sake!  Check!

And it gets worse.  Vampire Warriors.  "Vampire" is already a red flag in modern fiction.  Any work that uses the word "warrior" when not referring to real soldiers is as bad.  The two in tandem is critical mass of badness.  Ward compounds this by giving her "warriors" names like Rhage, Dhestroyer, Vishous, Phury, Rehvenge and Tohrment.  Apparently the vampire educational system leaves much to be desired when it comes to spelling.   They are all completely interchangeable versions of Ward's ideal lover–which is apparently a giant, greasy biker in leathers who spouts street slang.  The biker, not the leathers.

Writing this amateurish usually doesn't make it to the book stalls without an armed escort. Ward's style is painfully cinematic to the point where she comes across as a bodice-ripping J K Rowling.  This is not a good thing.  She also seems to be writing for a market with the IQ of a pair of dice, since she feels obligated to provide a glossary for people who can't remember what the word "vampire" means.  We're lucky she doesn't mark each page with an arrow marked "this end up".  Then there's her inability to grasp the concept of showing instead of telling.  Her idea of characterisation is to tell you what this or that person is like. Tell as in flat exposition. Show an event unfold?  Nope.  Just give us a synopsis after the fact.  And never, ever, let a character do something for themselves.  Repeat as necessary. It's like bad opera without the music.

Dark Lover is a book that I can honestly say that I couldn't put down.  I didn't dare to because if I did, I'd start pounding it with a mallet; unable to stop until I was sobbing and retching.

Review: Little Lost Robot

"Little Lost Robot" by Isaac Asimov (1947)

First Law:
A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law:
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law:
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Careless talk costs lives.  It also lead to some knotty problems when there's a literal-minded robot within earshot.  At Hyper Base, a secret government space station dedicated to developing faster than light travel, an aggravated scientist loses his patience with a robot and tells it to get lost–and it promptly does so by hiding among an arriving shipment of identical robots. This would be merely annoying, except that this robot is a special job with a modified version of the First Law:  It can't harm a human being, but it can allow a human being to come to harm.  This makes it an extremely dangerous piece of machinery that must be located or the alternative is destroying over five dozen extremely valuable robots.  So, the Solar System's leading robopsychologist, Dr Susan Calvin is brought in to try to find some way of finding the little lost robot who does not wish to be found.

Isaac Asimov's robot stories had a great impact on the development of science fiction by introducing the idea that robots, like all other machines, would be built with safeguards.  They also went a long way toward making robots sympathetic characters and it was through stories like "Little Lost Robot" that the line runs to Robby the Robot, C3PO, and R2D2.  That being said, this story, like the rest of Asimov's robot series, aren't so much stories as logic problems disguised as fiction.  Indeed, they often read like padded out Minute Mysteries and I'm often expecting to be directed to turn the page upside down to read the answer.  Structurally, they are also like rather pedestrian whodunnits with the crime, the dilemma, the detective, the red herrings, and the solution tied up in a neat bow at the end.  That's all very well if one is approaching such a story like working a crossword puzzle (which many mysteries freely admit to being akin to), but as a work of drama, the robot series are singularly unsatisfying.

One problem, as with all of Asimov's writing, is his utter inability to master description.  Reading an Asimov story, it is impossible to hold any sort of picture in one's mind as to where the story is taking place, or what anything is.  These are stories about robots, for example, yet it is impossible from reading Asimov to come away with any sense of what sort of machines they are except that they are metallic.  Are they roughly humanoid machines? Do they look like suits of armour?  Metal mannequins?    Are they clumsy?  Graceful?  Awe-inspiring?  Crude?  What?  I don't expect a detailed catalogue, but at least throw in the odd simile.  We aren't even told what the robots on Hyper Base are for.  What work do they do?  Why are they indispensable?  There are human labourers there, so why the robots?  Is it just to provide grist for a mystery story?

The same goes for characters.  Asimov was very fond of his creation Susan Calvin, but she is little more than a sustained waspish attitude latched to a Miss Marple knock off.  The other characters in the story are wildly inconsistent, vacillating between belligerence and  deference in a heartbeat.  Motivations are never very strong, conflict comes across as something that Asimov would rather not deal with if he has a choice, and, as usual, the author hangs much of the story on contrived psychological "facts" that have no basis in the real world.  Worse, the dilemma can only be sustained by praying that the reader keeps overlooking one question:  Why aren't the robots isolated from one another so that the one being sought can't cheat against the tests to find it?

"Little Lost Robot" isn't a bad story.  In fact, it could be salvaged very easily if it was placed in the hands of another writer who actually has some affinity with human beings rather than sci fi concepts.  This isn't even conjecture.  In the 1960s, the television series Out of This World adapted the story for the talking fish tank.  Read the original and compare it to the television version and one sees the difference.  In the later, Dr Calvin comes across as a three dimensional character with motivation and courage who actually likes talking to other people and can even be charming.  The base commander grows roses, the lost robot is cunning and even a bit sinister, and the engineer Black, who in the story is a passing moment of beefy bluster, is the real villain of the piece and a source of solid conflict. Finally, the ending in the print version is basically "Well, we've caught the robot. Bye".  But on the screen it ends on a disturbing note as the lost robot murders Black and it's pointed out to us that the other robots, which are being shipped to the four corners of the system, have witnessed it and know that such a thing is possible.  What will they make of that precedent? 

Warlord of Mars

The Gods of Mars

Quote of the day

A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.

Rex Stout

We hope you've enjoyed Quote of the Day.  This feature is being discontinued and will now appear only occasionally. 

Review: Black Mischief

Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh (1932)

Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda, Tyrant of the Seas, and Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University is determined to be the apostle of Progress and the Future for his country.  Unfortunately, his vision of the Future is based upon whatever he happens to be reading at the moment.  This is never good and it is particularly bad in an African autocrat of an state so backward that cannibalism is still pretty high on the local menu. 

Actually, Waugh's Azania is a parody of a fairly accurate description of every failed African state up to the time of publication.  It's a miserable cross section of native tribalism, Arab slave trading, and half-hearted European contact that has resulted in a savage back country ruled by a fly-specked capital city loaded with Imperial flotsam and jetsam.  The vainglorious Seth is determined to haul Azania into the 20th century, but he has no idea what he's doing, how money works, or the fact that he's barely holding on to power by his finger nails after a civil war with his uncle that had half the capital's population running for the boats.  Into this comes Seth's old university classmate Basil Seal, a British reprobate of the first water, who becomes his Minister for Modernisation.  Added is a dipsomaniac Irish ex-pat head of the army, the British legation who are more interested in the latest mail from London than anything happening around them, and the French ambassador who is convinced that his British counterpart is a Machiavellian genius.  In a land where people still sharpen their teeth, this is a bad combination.

Black Mischief is Waugh's third novel and it has a bite that never lets up.  Seth is a wonderfully comic figure who is hopelessly lost in his vision of himself and utterly unable to understand the country he rules and wants to fundamentally change   Small wonder that he sounds rather like a particular 21st century American president.  Azania itself is like an untamed force of nature filled with deep-running native currents that make Seth's modernisation efforts seem like pounding sand–especially when they are in the hands of a man like Basil, who only came out to Azania because he found London too much of a bore.

Waugh's gimlet-eyed satire is relentless from his portrayal of the oblivious British legation to the conspiracy-obsessed French to the opportunistic Armenian merchant.  No one is spared as along the way we are treated to a pair of clueless animal rights activists whom the native nobility think  are actually promoting cruelty to animals, an English girl who thinks that life can be reduced to necking and bad novel writing, and a bewildered 90-year old pretender to the throne who's spent most of his life chained in a cave.  All of this climaxes in a farcical carnival of contraception (don't ask) that descends into chaos and coup in short order as Waugh's dramatic curve alternates between farce and horror.

Mischievous and dark fun all around.

Quote of the day

It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.

Sherlock Holmes

Yes, I know he'd fictional, but I can scarcely credit his editor Conan Doyle, can I?

The Case of Sherlock Holmes

Quote of the day

Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man or better than a man, but not like a man.

John W. Campbell Jr.

Review: Who Goes There?

"Who Goes There?" by Don A Stuart (AKA John W Campbell Jr.) (1938)

 In the 1930s, the Second Magnetic Expedition to Antarctica finds more than it bargains for.  Investigating a magnetic anomaly some 80 miles from base at the South Magnetic Pole,  the scientists discover the wreck of a spacecraft that crashed and was embedded in the ice over 20 million years ago.  Trying to remove the craft from the ice, the thermite charges they use accidentally destroy it, but they manage to recover the frozen body of one of the occupants, who was thrown clear.  Returning to base, they debate whether or not to thaw out their find for study, but there's resistance–partly due to fear of alien germs, but mainly because the three-eyed horror in the ice looks like a refugee from the Pit.  But thaw it they do, only to discover that even after 20 million years the thing is alive and it is a man-eating shape shifter with the power to perfectly mimic the form and behaviour of any living thing it devours.  The 37 men of the expedition are faced with the nightmare of not knowing who is human and who is an invader bent on taking over the world in the most complete manner possible–not by ruling it, but by replacing all life with itself. 

"Who Goes There?" is remembered today mostly for being the basis for the 1951 film The Thing From Another World and the 1982 remake The Thing–which is a pity because Campbell's novella stands perfectly well on its own feet.  It can even be argued that as a horror story it still does a better job than either of its cinematic incarnations. Campbell introduces a truly original mystery:  How do you uncover a monster in your midst who can copy a man right down to his cells and his very thoughts?  What sort of a test can you devise?  And how do you do it before the thing manages to devour and replace everyone else?  On it's own, this would be a wonderful little detective story that keeps the reader second guessing how our heroes will solve their problem, but Campbell ups the stakes a notch.

Taking obvious inspiration from H P Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, he lifts a simple bit of science fiction and turns it into a truly unsettling horror tale.  Early in the story, the scientists seemingly destroy the original thing when they find it trying to absorb one of their sled dogs, but their relief is very short lived when they realise that they've no reason to assume that the man they left to guard the thawing thing is still human.  Worse, they have no reason to assume that any of them are, so a large part of the plot is taken up by the expedition members living under increasing fear and anxiety as they hunt for a solution.  Isolating themselves from the outside world by destroying their aeroplane and tractors, the men live an existence of constantly watching one another while every man worries whether or not he might be the only human left.  Campbell never allows the pressure to let up as tests become blind alleys and it becomes clear that time is running out.

It's not a perfect story.  Though the characters are very well delineated for a pulp story, it's obvious from the first page who Our Hero is  and it's highly improbable that he'll turn into alien chowder.  On the other hand, we do feel for the deaths of other characters.  Campbell also gets points for doing his homework on Antarctic exploration and he provides a real feel for the sights, sounds, and smells of men living in such a confined world.  Finally, he provides a nice little kicker at the end that reminds us that this is, in fact sci fi and not a horror outing.

In all, a satisfying read, but I'd recommend that you do so on a summer afternoon and not on a blizzardy winter's evening.