BOOK REVIEWS

1998, Part B: February-March

1998, Christian Sauvé

Busy months for school work, lousy months for reading...

The books:

 

 

The Bestseller
Olivia Goldsmith

Harper Collins, 1996, 514 p., 35$Can., 0-06-017822-1

It's inevitable. After reading a few hundred books, the compulsive reader is not only interested in the stories that the book tell, but in the books themselves. Some become authors; other read about authors.

So, it's quite a treat to see such a witty and accomplished novelist as Olivia Goldsmith (The First Wives Club) turn her attention on the wonderfully twisted world of New York publishers. Of course, since this is a best-selling novel about best-selling novels, it naturally follows that adultery, crime, punishment, sex, sex, sex, betrayals, horrid incurable diseases, sex, suicides, multimillion contracts and more sex than usual is portrayed here.

In short, The Bestseller is a blast.

At 514 pages, The Bestseller manages to be long and compulsively readable... after a while. The premise is simple: Five books are eventually bought by one of New York's biggest publishing house. We follow their fates, along with their authors and almost everyone remotely associated with the books' publication: Editors, agents, librarians and the other members of the family...

Author number one dies in the first pages of The Bestseller: Her mother goes on crusade to publish her daughter's masterpiece. Author number two is a best-selling romance writer on the decline: Is she going to be able to keep her sanity in addition to the number one spot? Author number three is a young Englishwoman in Italy: Is love or fame the most important thing? Author number four is not only an author, but the publisher himself: Vanity publishing, or honestly good novel? Author number five is a pseudonym for a husband-and-wife collaboration: What happens when the husband "forgets" about his wife and claims the credit?

Then there are the agents (the good and the bad ones), the editors (the good and the bad ones) and the publishers. (again; the good and the bad ones) We visit sales conference, the ABA, bookstores, a few author tours. We read about ghostwriters, famous scandals, publishing lore and wisdom... Truly, The Bestseller tries to reward its reader, who should preferably be a Reader.

Due to the number of plot-lines kept in the air, it does take a while for The Bestseller to cohere. Once it does, however, we're in for the ride! Goldsmith paints her characters adequately enough to care for them. By the end of the book, it feels like we've made new friends.

The Bestseller, however, is rather heavy-handed. As the novel advances, characters are further divided in two mutually exclusive camps: The Good characters will get most of what they want. The Bad characters will get what they deserve. Melodrama happens, but strangely it does not harm the book. In fact, The Bestseller would have been much less enjoyable with moral ambiguity. Everyone likes a happy ending, and it's refreshing to be in a narrative where everything happens as it should happen.

Escape reading? At its best! Goldsmith's prose is undemanding yet not without a certain elegance. Whatever happens is clearly described (aside from one unfortunately intentional "Let's hide the gender of this character" misstep.) and there are very few barriers between the reader and the story.

A few audacious in-jokes pepper this book, further rewarding the attentive reader. But most will be content just to read page after page, sinking in the story like it should be with any big, good bestseller.

 

 

The Quintaglio Trilogy
Robert J. Sawyer

[Far-Seer (1992), Fossil Hunter (1993) and Foreigner (1994). Ace.]

Funny animals, dinosaurs.

Funny in the sense that they can lend themselves to a multitude of interpretation; their image in the popular psyche includes things from Barney to the T-Rex in Jurassic Park. You can have'em fluffy or bloodthirsty; there's room for everything in-between. Even intelligent dinosaurs.

With the Quintaglio Trilogy, Canadian author Robert J. Sawyer sets out with big ambitions. He set sout to explore no less than the path to our modern Western scientific mindset by telling us a three-volume story about an alien race (said Quintaglios) gradually discovering the truths of the universe. In the few hundred pages composing the trilogy, they (we) will go from Galileo to space-flight. It's a lot of stuff, but Sawyer manages it well.

The first book of the trilogy, Far-Seer, is simultaneously the most interesting and the most ludicrous book of the cycle. The narrative structure is familiar; a young protagonist goes on a voyage of discovery that will change him. (The rest of the world will follow) It's a fine coming-of-age story. Some parts are breathlessly exciting. Unfortunately, this volume doesn't unfold as much as it is unwrapped by the author. Like most Sawyer novels (although this one is worse than most), Far-Seer relies a lot on suspicious plotting and awfully convenient coincidences. Earthquakes, sudden deaths and leaps of logic happen when they are the most needed.

The other books are less classically definable, but also rely less of Amazing Authorial Plot Tricks. If the first volume is about Galileo, Fossil Hunter is about Darwin and Foreigner is about Freud. You'll have to supply the ability to believe that all of this happens in less than a century. With protagonists mostly related to one another.

But reading the Quintaglio trilogy only for the story is a bit unfair. For one thing, the characterization is adequate and the style is the usually limpid prose that Sawyer has used with great success in his other novels. Like the author's other novels, the Quintaglio books are readable in a single sitting, although you might want to make them last a bit further. Scientific details are exceedingly well-researched, which brings us to the biggest virtue of the Quintaglio trilogy: World-building.

The most amazing thing about the Quintaglio trilogy is the way everything holds well together. The world has an impact on the biology, which has an impact on the psychology, which has an impact on individuals... A lot of subtle and unsubtle details show us how the Quintaglio differ from us and how we can emphasize with them. (My favorite is an insult: "Eat Roots!" Pretty offensive statement for a carnivore...!) Despite dealing with beings closely related to our dinosaurs, Sawyer makes them as sympathetic and likable as human characters.

Careful readers of Sawyer's work won't be surprised to find that his usual themes of religion and marital problems find their way into the fabric of the Quintaglio trilogy. A concordance of the Quintaglio world is included at the end of the third volume. Very useful material, but contains spoilers so don't peek ahead. The illustrations by Tom Kidd (Vol.1) and Bob Eggleton (Vol.2-3) are okay. This trilogy cries out for an omnibus edition.

A final comment; the third book's emphasis on Freud might not go down well with a few readers overly unconvinced by Old Sigmund's theories. It would be a mistake, however, to assume a one-to-one analogy with our human theories; the Quintaglio way of life is suitably different from ours, and we get the drift that Freud would have been vastly more successful (or at least, accurate) there than here. (In a bizarre coincidence, I read Foreigner while my elective psychology class was studying Freud. Talk about synchronicity!)

 

 

All Our Yesterdays
Robert. B. Parker

Dell, 1994, 466 pages, 8.99$Can., ISBN 0-440-221-46-3

It's become something of a cliché to represent every best-selling author as someone with deep literary aspirations who resort to simple, exciting, shallow novels to support himself while s/he's writing the Great American Novel. (Even Olivia Goldsmith's The Bestseller does this...)

For instance, everyone knows that Stephen King can write shlocko horror novels at the rate of two or three a year, but his fans also know that meanwhile, King is also writing deeply serious, profound works of literature with his Dark Tower series (among other things, including his short stories.)

In this case, Robert B. Parker is best known as the best-selling author of the detective series "Spencer". In these novels, a witty Boston private investigator fends off the Mob and other assorted thugs while solving crimes and engaging in witty banter with his psychologist girlfriend and a gallery of sharply-drawn characters.

I more or less became hooked to Robert B. Parker in early 1997, when one friend gave me a box of crime novels which contained two "Spencer" thrillers. I don't usually read much crime fiction (perhaps ten-fifteen books a year in good years) but somehow became a "Spencer" fan.

And now this, a non-Spencer Parker novel.

All our Yesterdays traces the affairs between two families over three generations, beginning in 1912 and ending in 1994. The legacy of an affair between an Irish revolutionary and an American nurse will ultimately end up in Boston (considering Parker—where else?) being played-out in a city-wide gang war. Three generations of cops, trying to deal with crime and love.

This book is a much more ambitious novel than any of the "Spencer" novels. It's also nastier, as if Parker realized he was writing for a more jaded audience than his usual crowd. His characters are darker; his prose style is harsher. People swear, have sex and beat up others even more. (They don't seem to kill off each other in greater quantities, though.) Even given the not-always-fluffy tone of the Spencer novels, this is something. Unfortunately, a lot of the humor is also left behind. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, since Parker retains his grip on how to write crackling dialogue.

The characters of the novel are deliciously complex, and often end up acting in ways you're not supposed to expect. The relationships between the characters is more dynamic than in the average novel, and it's one of the pleasures of the novel to see everything being played out. It may be argued that the small scale of the novel is unsatisfying, but Parker makes simple dialogue more exciting than explosions, so everything evens out. The style is unusually readable, this 450+ pages novel being easily readable over a single day.

All our Yesterdays, despite its bigger aspirations, isn't that much of a step over the Spencer series. (A testament of the overall quality of Spencer novels more than anything else) As such, fans of Spencer will certainly enjoy this novel as much as the other ones. Others might see this as a good one-time introduction to Parker's fiction.

 

 

Interface
Stephen Bury

Bantam, 1995

American politics are -rightfully- an endlessly fascinating topic, especially when seen from the outside. With power, greed, money and lately -as if it was the only thing missing-, extramarital sex, you can't really go wrong. The increasingly mediatic aspect of, specifically, high-office campaigning have been the inspiration for many fine works (THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, Primary Colors, ROB ROBERTS...) and Interface is an attractive new high-tech work dealing with the subject.

Half of Stephen Bury is better known as Neal Stephenson, writer of such SF masterpieces like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. With Interface, he switched technological gears and collaborated with his uncle to produce one of the most entertaining political techno-thriller you're likely to read this year. Or any year.

The jacket blurbs will try to sell you Interface as a chilling novel where one presidential candidate has a chip implanted in his brain that lets him get instantaneous audience feedback. The truth is that this particular subplot is fairly insignificant, barely exploited and then quickly forgotten. But the remainder of the novel is even better: Public Opinion moguls, redneck psychos, government-controlling conspiracists, crazy spin doctors, humble housewives, foreign neurosurgeons, nerdy engineers and a few million voters all tangle, fight, debate, act, flee or react to make this a complex, but engrossing story.

Interface is an incredibly dense novel. This is definitely one that you'll want to read attentively; not only is there a lot of plot, but there's also a lot of details. Stephenson is also known by his articles for Wired magazine, and his fascination for the sociologies of America is evident.

The style of Interface is even better than anything we could have hoped for. Bury's combined voice is sardonic, clear, often hilarious and always compelling. With some books, the reader feels smarter than the author but here, not only are we conscious that Bury's smarter, but we accept this without resentment. ("Why didn't I think of that?") The amount of detail is incredible; protagonist Cozzano is not described as a rich guy, but his whole family history is unwrapped before us. It's a measure of Bury's talent that this exposition and erudition does not feel forced or boring. Similarly, these authors don't skimp on characterization: Everyone here, despite some very unlikely stunts, feel like actual human characters, and not puppets moved on a stage for our entertainment.

But beyond all this, beyond the enthralling prose and the grrrreat characters, what makes the novel are the Cool Scenes. Cool Scenes are these almost-perfect snippets of prose that aren't always related to the plot, but stick in the mind for a while. We're talking Dune's sandworms. Neuromancer's public-telephone trick. The snowballs thrown at the Moon in Earth. The cruciform resurrections in the first Hyperion volume. Interface has a lot of these Cool Scenes: A Politician vandalizing an ambulance; a blow-by-blow description of dirty campaign tricks; a psychological test; an unemployed housewife taking on a presidential candidate—and winning. This is what elevates Interface over the rest.

Despite all of this, Interface's conclusion is a bit rushed. Some of the parts don't quite gel together. Threads are left untied. And we never get the "robo-candidate" novel promised on the blurb.

But nevertheless, Interface is more than a keenly successful satire on American politics: it's great, great entertainment. You will probably even learn a few things. Buy it.

 

 

Oh no, more Marcinko!
(Michard Marcinko / John Wiseman, Pocket Books)

In a previous review of Richard Marcinko's autobiography, Rogue Warrior, I mused that while Marcinko's exploits as a SEAL were exciting stuff, the guy himself appeared more like an out-of-control operative than anything else. While this was fine for fiction, it did make me uneasy in real-life.

Fortunately, Marcinko later became the co-author of a series of testosterone-heavy military adventure books. His particular brand of macho writing beomes more satisfying (and, ironically much more believable) in fiction.

For one thing, he gets to kill the bad guys at the end.

The funky thing about Red Cell is that it's a direct sequel to Marcinko's autobiography. Without a hitch, some characters return as fictional constructs, and Marcinko doesn't change one bit. He assumes that the reader is familiar with his life history ("During the time I was the commander of Seal Team Six", etc...) and goes on from there.

So, Red Cell finds Marcinko battling a rich and corrupt American who's stealing nuclear-tipped missiles from a California naval base. In no time, Marcinko gets a few of his ex-warriors back, and goes on full-attack mdoe. It's fast, it's furious, it's fun. Since none of this has really happen, we can enjoy it without guilt. The tone and style of Wiseman/Marcinko is unique, and plays very well among a sympathetic audience.

Furthermore, none of the co-authors forget who are their readership. There's an especially enjoyable subplot where a team of nerdy engineers are trained by Marcinko to become a mean "paintball" fighting machine. If there's only one chapter you've got to read, it's that one.

The book concludes perhaps fifty pages too late, but that's not as big a problem as it should have been. Entertaining, mean, recommended.

Task Force Blue is no departure from the series. You might want to read it some time after Red Cell, though: that same distinctive narrative voice can begin to sound tired after a while. Even worse; the plot is similar. Marcinko, once again, must battle a rich guy doing bad stuff. This time around, though, it's an ultra-right rich guy planning on disturbing America's security to force some rigidity in the government. Marcinko doesn't agree. The rich guy eventually dies. It's hilarious to see Marcinko trying to sound liberal compared to the guy. ("Pot, kettle, you're too black for me, man!")

But if you want something really off-the-wall, grab a copy of Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior. It's a pretty short non-fiction book, so you might want to loan it, but it's worth the quick read.

In Leadership Secrets, Marcinko applies his style, vocabulary, anecdotes and attitude to the fine art of... management. No kidding. Corporate America better start shaking in their boots.

For the most part, his advice makes sense. ("Lead from the front, keep asking subordinate to prove themselves, do the unexpected, etc...") But the style is just light-years away from any management book you're ever likely to read. And the swearwords are the least of it.

It's hilarious, it's more fun than Lee Iacocca's biography, it's the kind of book you keep just to show to friends. A real curio.

Just don't start shooting business rivals, okay?

 

 

Thrilling Science-Fiction!

On the reviewing slate today, two more-or-less recent examples of how SF can be entertaining, thoughtful and action-packed at the same time.

The Trinity Vector's first chapter tells about the attempted murder of a courier. Said courier (Howie Long) is better than his two opponents; he escapes but not without any difficulties. Soon enough, a mysterious object appears, and everyone is trying to kill Long, who gets the job of moving the object from place to place. A thoroughly unpleasant (and clichingly eeevil) politician, a Baptist preacher and a new-ageish mother of two complete the cast of principal characters.

Sounds like a classical thriller, and it is: One lone man (almost) against the world, fighting the politician, befriending the priest and... well... getting friendly with the woman. It works, not the least because author Steve Perry write competently. This average novel is saved by its characters, or at least its protagonists. The action scenes are sufficiently exciting, the romantic scene are both alluring and mature, the wrapping around all of this is adequate.

On the other hand, The Trinity Vector's MacGuffin (InstaDef: A MacGuffin is the Gizmo that's the excuse for everyone to shoot at each other) is nothing less than a box of undeterminate origin that will truthfully answer any question: When's your birthday, what are going to be tomorrow's winning lottery numbers, etc... Omniscience in a box, and it's no surprise that this part of the book falls flat. That no explanation is given only irritates further.

Nevertheless, The Trinity Vector makes some very fine escapist reading. It's better than most, and the characterization is memorable.

After the relatively fudgy-goody feeling left by The Trinity Vector, happy ending included, take a walk on the unpleasant side and emerge in Blue Limbo. Imagine a Philip K. Dick protagonist: A middle-aged man feeling his best years slipping away, escaping him without control. Then conjure an adulterous wife, a young daughter, urban crime and watch him sink even lower in depression. Then make him a police officer and give him enough high-tech weaponry to make Dirty Harry drool. Blue Limbo begins somewhere near there.

Not many novels have the guts to pull off an action thriller combined with a sentimental look at the aftermath of a divorce. Blue Limbo does so brilliantly. Seldom maudlin and even of unexpected poignancy, this novel also includes enough fancy hardware, explosions and white-knuckle action to satisfy the demanding connoisseur. There is a great revenge fantasy scene against an adulterer halfway in the novel, almost immediately followed by a moving sequence involving the protagonist and his daughter. It's heartening to find Blue Limbo taking risks like these.

Technically, this is a lovely novel: The prose feels right (and can be read almost automatically) and the characters are very well-defined. The Canadian-ness of Blue Limbo is explicit, the protagonist being a Toronto Police Officer, and going to very specific "real" places. People who liked the Toronto references in Robert J. Sawyer and Tanya Huff's novels will love this aspect of Green's book.

Best of all, this at times very grim novel manages to pull off a conclusion that's dramatic while simultaneously being uplifting. If Blue Limbo is the story of a man driven to extremes, we get the sense that by the end of the novel, pieces are beginning to fall back in their places.

Blue Limbo is a great book. Don't miss it.

 

 

Airframe
Michael Crichton

1997
(Read in translation as Turbulences, Robert Laffont, 1998)

Another year, another Michael Crichton techno-thriller. At least, this one is better than The Lost World... even if that's not really saying much.

When future literary historians will dust up the shelves of turn-of-the-millenium popular fiction, they'll have to take notice of the name Michael Crichton. After all, when you regularly top the best-selling lists like he does, year after year without any signs of slowing down, these things tend to stay in memory.

But when they'll peer closer at Crichton, I get the feeling that they'll run into a maddening puzzle. Was Crichton an author, or not?

Are there any creative endeavor that Crichton hasn't tried? Besides being a best-selling novelist (Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, Congo, Rising Sun, Disclosure...), Crichton is/has been a fairly good movie director (THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, WESTWORLD... even one of my favorites: RUNAWAY), a computer game programmer (an obscure illustrated text adventure called, I believe, AMAZON), a TV scripter/producer (E.R.), a screenwriter... where does he find the time to write these books? (Notice that we haven't mentioned his medical studies, or his family, or that he once won an Academy Award for improvements in movie accounting. No, really!)

Crichton, these days, is arguably more famous as Crichton himself than as the guy who's slaving away behind the keyboard putting words one after the other. Part of this might be caused by his novels. Okay, so Crichton has made a living out of warning people about technology. But besides that, his books feel like prepackaged products: Formidably competent, usually utterly entertaining, but devoid of flavor, quirkiness or personality.

Airframe certainly fits into the cookie-cutter profile that Crichton fans have come to expect. Once again, it deal with a high-technology subject (in this case, passenger airplanes) from a dramatic angle (people are killed during a in-flight accident) using characters freshly recycled from the nineties' stable of stereotypes. In this case, our heroine is an administrator at Norton Aircraft, the antagonist is a young and irresponsible media "journalist", the evil overlord is a (grr! grr! kss! kss!) rich and greedy corporate guy, and so on and so forth.

Plotting is strictly by-the-numbers, with unexpected events happening here and there without any justification but that something must happen by this point. (The chase through the airplane hangar is particularly ludicrous.) At least Crichton does not do cliches. His characterization may be familiar, unsubtle and hastily pieced-up, but it stays within the borderlines of the reasonably adept.

It's fun (?) to note that despite being sold by truckloads to a mass-market audience, Airframe contains considerably more scientific and engineering jargon than most science-fiction novels. In many ways, this is a prototypical techno-thriller. The hook, the process, the gimmicks, the resolution are all technological, and the ultimate cause of the crashes won't exactly be guessed by the casual reader (as it is too often the tendency while writing this type of fiction.) Airframe at least has a veneer of authenticity, a probable result of considerable time spend researching the subject.

Predictably, Airframe is slick, fun entertainment. Easily readable in a single day (or a single airplane flight, heh-heh-heh) and perfect for beach reading, it again proves why Crichton is at the top of the charts, and deserves to stay there.

 

 

Ignition
Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason

Tor, 1997...

EARLY 1996

--Hi, what's up?
--Thought about our next book a bit. You know that we've got to deliver another thriller to Tor/Forge in the coming year.-
--Yeah, something a bit meatier than our Craig Kreident franchise for Ace.
--Exactly. So, I was watching DIE HARD yesterday, and-
--Ah yeah, pretty good movie. We could do something like this.
--Exactly. So, I began thinking where terrorists could do some damage, and came up with something pretty wild. Ready?  How about Cape Kennedy?
--Terrorists take over a shuttle? That's a great hook!
--Thanks. Now, I guess we'd have some kind of shuttle flight-
---so we could show off our Hard-SF background with the technical details-
--Yeah, and terrorists would threaten to blow up the shuttle on the launch pad while the hero would run around, killing bad guys and saving the shuttle.
--Terrific premise. We can do something with this.
--The best thing is that there's plenty of explosives around.
--Right! A few rockets here and there, some hi-tech weapons...
--Not to mention helicopters and APCs and the shuttle!
--We could even sell the movie rights to Hollywood!
--But no reviewer would miss the connection.
--Hey, this one's for the money, right?
--Uh-huh. So, back to the premise: We could always make the hero -an astronaut- a bit more vulnerable, something to chuck off in the movie-
--Like, oh, having him with a broken leg?
--Oh, come on, he'd be grounded- Hey, that's not bad! He'd be pissed-
--Yeah! And then he's wobble along blowing up terrorists (laughs)
--We could make this work. And what about a love interest?
--Uh... Got it! An ex-lover of his that's gone up to flight control. Traditional fiery relationship. But then they kiss and make up.
--I like it. How about a villain?
--Oh, don't know yet... We'll get around to that later. I just want to make sure we've got a good amazon female henchman assassin character somewhere.
--That about wraps it. I'll draft the outline and send it to New York-
--No special effort for style, I guess.
--Nah. We nailed it with Ill Wind: No need to waste style on thrillers. Descriptive is good enough. Gotta keep them turning the pages!
--That's the goal! Okay, talk to you later.

 

MARCH 1998

Anderson and Beason probably never had the above conversation, but they succeeded in producing a perfectly entertaining thriller with Ignition. Okay, so the villain is simultaneously hilarious and bland, the conclusion is dragged-out and the image of a hero with a broken leg is often more comical than inspiring, but the remainder of the novel isn't half-bad. A couple of big explosions, action scenes and classic wish-fulfillment makes this an engrossing read. Should make an interesting movie.

 

 

Dreaming Aloud: The Life and Films of James Cameron
Christopher Heard

Doubleday Canada, 1997

In the last minutes of March 23rd, 1998, James Cameron brandished his Academy Award for Achievement in Movie Directing above his head and exclaimed before a few hundred million viewers, "I am the king of the world!" Despite the fact that this hyperbole was quoted directly from his script for TITANIC, it was a sentiment that a lot of Cameron fans could share.

James Cameron, born in Kapuskasing, (Ontario, Canada) had come a long way from his humble origins. In fifteen years, he has produced some of the most stunning movies the world could have imagined. His cinematography reads like a box-office hit top-ten: THE TERMINATOR, ALIENS, THE ABYSS, TERMINATOR II: JUDGEMENT DAY, TRUE LIES and finally, especially TITANIC. He has broken the most-expensive-movie-ever record not once or twice, but thrice. His movies consistently push the limits of moviemaking technology, and yet he seldom contributes substandard material. His movie, as shocking as it may seem, are techno-marvels built upon human emotions.

Cameron, like the best folk heroes, consistently goes against impossible odds. Many people thought him defeated after the saga of TITANIC's making. 500+ million dollars of US gross box-office revenue later, Cameron proved them wrong. But if the skeptics had read Dreaming Aloud before doubting Cameron, they might have thought differently.

Dreaming Aloud chronicles Cameron's life from his Kapuskasing Days until the eve of TITANIC. He see Cameron during his stint at Roger Corman's B-flick studio, where he directed his first feature film (PIRANHA II). Then it's his chance meeting with Arnold Schwarzenegger, future wife Linda Hamilton and fate with the first TERMINATOR movie. The remainder is known and expected, but author Heard makes it interesting. Whether it's about his films or his marriages (Linda Hamilton being Cameron's fourth wife. As the author says, "Marriage is something Cameron believes in but isn't very good at himself." [P. 188]) the style is completely readable (very possibly in a single sitting), especially for confirmed Cameron fans.

An index, a cinematography and a few photos complete the account.

But even despite the appeal of Cameron's films and the breezy style in which it is written, Dreaming Aloud is at the same time far from being satisfying enough. A look at the bibliography reveals a scant six books and seven magazine articles used to write "Dreaming Aloud" This reviewer has read (heck, has written) essays with more sources than this. Dreaming Aloud may or may not be a compilation of these thirteen sources, but in retrospect it is also a very distant biography. We never get the sense that Heard has actually talked to Cameron, or done extensive legwork on his subject. The extended plot summaries (4-5 pages for each major movie) are not interesting for Cameron fans (who already know these movies by heart) and may feel out of place for the remainder of the audience. The usefulness of their length is doubtful.

Dreaming Aloud closes while pondering the after-TITANIC for Cameron. Given the success of the movie at the Academy Awards (11 Oscars, tying BEN-HUR's record), this is a surprisingly powerful finale.

Fortunately, we now know that Cameron has taken his deserved place in the Hollywood hiearchy. He is in the enviable position of having dared the gods, and won. He can do whatever he desires next: it will be seen by millions. At the moment he is truly, as grandiose as it may seem, King of the (Hollywood) World.

Millions of fans cheer.

 

 

STINKY THRILLER SELECTIONS!

A pot-pourri of recently read military, techno- and just plain thrillers.

In the past two months, I took a small break for my usual SF diet to read more than a few thrillers. Some of them have been quite enjoyable (they're reviewed above.) but the others... ow... So that you might not suffer through the pain of reading them all, here are my thoughts:

First off on the list is probably the best-known of the bunch: Get Shorty, by Elmore Leonard, has been a mildly successful movie a year or two ago, starring Rene Russo (yeah!), Danny DeVito and leading man John Travolta. I have not seen the movie, and if Get Shorty is any indication, I'm not in a hurry. Briefly put, this is a supposedly funny crime thriller that's about a small-time mafia guy becoming something of a Hollywood producer. Intermittently interesting, Get Shorty is simply humorless and massively uninvolving. I did not care about Leonard's small-time crook, nor did I appreciate the numerous "in-jokes" about Hollywood. Compounding the problem is Leonard's supposedly "authentic" dialogue, which just sounds like unintelligible mismash to my (admittedly French-Canadian) ears. This is the second Leonard book that I've read (after "Rum Punch", picked up because it was the basis of Tarantino's latest film, JACKIE BROWN) and I am frankly far, far from being impressed. [November 1998: The movie is much better.]

Next up: Tom Clancy's Power Plays: Politika, "Created by Tom Clancy and Martin Greenberg". If the "created by" didn't ring a warning bell, maybe the compounded title should be a clue-by-four that this is an inferior product masquerading under Clancy's name. (In the past two years, every interested observer has associated the Clancy name with an increasing amount of trashy make-money derivates, Op-Center being the first one. Sad, but true.) Okay, so there's a pretty good bit of a thriller about terrorism in America somewhere near page 100, but that quickly passes, and the end of the book is something akin to a Republican wet dream about a corporate mogul creating his own peacemaking army to ensure global happiness and a long series of derivative novels. Or whatever. Since I bought this at a very-used bookstore, I didn't get the free CD-ROM that's supposed to come with the book, so I'm feeling doubly ripped-off. Steer clear of any Clancy original paperback! If it's not over a thousand pages, it's not worth it!

From Republican wet dreams, we get to a libertarian wet-dream fantasy with Bill Branon's Let Us Prey, which is about a plot to kill a lot of IRS agents. Normally, books of this type are really about the need to protect ourselves from these evil, dastardly domestic terrorists who are so terribly psychotic that they would kill civil servants! But not here! By the end of the book, we learn that this is a plot by the government to provoke sympathy for the IRS. Not only is the premise completely boffo, but the book simply does not work. Characters are distant and indistinguishable, at the exception of a priest whose subplot is kinda cool but terribly concluded. Not only that, but reading through the lovingly detailed scenes of IRS building destruction, we just know that deep down in his dark heart, Bill Branon is writing a revenge fantasy. There's a lot of violence and sex, not all of it either exciting or arousing. Now a major item on the remaindered hardcover market, I'm just really glad I picked up Let us Prey in paperback for only 25c.

If the three above books are, at worst, uninvolving, Pax Pacifica by Steve Pieczenik is just plain bad. This novel, which tries to be a "geo-psychological" thriller (it succeeds, but still stinks) begins by blowing up its own credibility in the opening pages of a novel, when the Secretary of State and one of his assistant go into a Washington bar to pick up on a few chicks. That's right. It goes from bad to worse when hero Desaix Clark (never "Dez", or something sensible like that; always "Desaix") goes to China, only to meet their prime minister -who is a gorgeous female- and get seduced by her. (He does sleep with her, and the female CIA China station chief—although not at the same time.) The remainder of the book is an incoherent series of crosses, double-crosses and quintuple-crosses which never quite make sense or engage the interest of the reader. It's badly written and it's frequently hilarious by its ineptitude: there are countless "As you know, Bob", as well as completely useless information embedded in the prose. Some of the psychological details are interesting, but most of the time it seems like the protagonist spends agonizing minutes (and paragraphs) trying to decide what's the signification of a single twitch. The effect is beyond ludicrous. (And what about the unresolved matter of the Secretary of State being "attacked" in the Washington bar? Never mind, I guess...) Pax Pacifica is one of those bad, BAD novels that shouldn't be published, let alone read.

Fire Storm (Marc Iverson), for its part, is neither particularly bad nor hilarious: It just figuratively sits there, going through the motions of its plot (which is generally predictable almost from the start) without surprises, interest, or overly remarkable sequences. The agenda of the writer is fairly clear, and his attempt at a strong female character comes up flat—like the remainder of the book. By the end of the novel, I was turning the pages more out of repetitive mechanical movement (twitches, y'know?) than any real interest. Even a few days after reading it, I can only remember scant details from the plot, which is about a nearly-mothballed battleship rescuing American DEA agents in South America. Thoroughly average; there are absolutely no compelling reason to read this.

Finally, our last stinker of this article is one of those trashy bad-but-guilty-fun series of military adventure. I'm talking about the seventh WWIII book (you never thought WWIII could last so long!); Force of Arms. (Ian Slater) The WWIII sequence has been going on since the mid-eighties, now, and this 1994 installment more or less concludes the series out of a lack of potential enemies. After you've whupped the hell out of the Koreans (vol.1), the Russians (vol 2-4), the Siberians (vol 5-6) and the Chinese (vol 7; sorry for the "spoiler"), who else is left? [November 1998:  The Indians in Vol.8] Once again, uber-commander Douglas Freeman kicks enemy butt under impossible odds and proves that he's the ultimate fantasy soldier. None of the series regular dies, everyone is more or less happy at the end, and America still triumphs. If you want serious fiction, look elsewhere. Particularly discerning fans of the over-the-top will howl with pleasure at the scene when one pregnant woman shoots to death one thief-wannabee-rapist and then immediately goes into labor. The tasteless homosexual vignette, however, should have been cut from the book, along with the particularly bizarre scene of a Nepalese old guy exhibiting himself to an American female pilot. I'm more a survivor of the WWIII series than a fan, so at least I knew what to expect from this book. Still, not worth a look unless you're already familiar with the WWIII series.

And I, who was worried a few weeks ago that I was only reading good books...