Dome City Blues.  Jeff Edwards, author  (Stealth Books, 2011).  The author says he wrote this in 1992.  That’s hard to believe.  If so, there’s some really good futuristic extrapolation.  It shares themes with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (the movie Blade Runner) and Pohl’s Hee Chee trilogy (more akin to the first book in that series, though).  Hard-boiled private detective David Stalin (too much attention is paid to the last name) lives on a polluted Earth and hops among the domes that now constitute Greater Los Angeles.

When he loses his wife, the PI retires, until a beautiful woman wants him to prove her brother isn’t a serial killer.  Channeling Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade (in spite of the pollution, cancer, including lung cancer, is a thing of the past), he had to unravel the mystery in spite of the LAPD’s closing the case—the brother’s suicide note admitted culpability.  A bit predictable I suppose, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  Do I like it enough to look for the other books in the series?  Probably not, because it’s hard to imagine any sequel can match this.  (Caveat emptor: R-rated for multiple reasons.)

The Inn.  Scott Dyson, author (Deadlock Press, 2015).  Is this the longest story I’ve read by Mr. Dyson?  It’s a novella, and there’s a lot of horror, mystery, suspense, and thrills in these few pages.  I loved it, and It’s not a genre I often read (the horror part).  No zombies, vampires, or werewolves (thank God!), just one seemingly ordinary human being doing horrible things to other human beings.  Some scenes reminded me of Hayton’s novel Breathe and Release reviewed here and that real life atrocity with the three girls in Ohio.

The band director, his student teacher (a woman not much older than the students), and the band are on a road trip.  They plan to perform and then spend a day at a nearby amusement park, crashing two nights in the inn.  I can’t say much more without writing spoilers, but I will send out a warning: if you were a member of a high school band, any nostalgia might fly out the window as your read this.  Or, some readers might say, “This is a lot more exciting than our band trips were.”  Mr. Dyson’s writing is fresh and original.  Fans of the genre will enjoy this one. (Rating?  How would you rate the TV show Dexter?)

Fires of Alexandria.  Thomas Carpenter, author.  (Black Moon Books, 2013) I finished a Churchill bio recently (see Monday’s pseudo-review); lots of history, so it led me to think “historical novel.”  This is what Amazon came up with, it looked interesting, and I bought it.  I guess it’s one time Amazon’s “Peek Inside” failed me, or I just failed to register certain things.  This is NOT a historical novel.  It’s something called “alternate history.”  That’s a genre or subgenre (of what I’m not sure), and I was never attracted to it, unless it was sci-fi involving time travel.  I felt duped (self-duped?), but I read it anyway.

Heron (AKA Hero) of Alexandria was a real dude who flourished in AD 62, according to the Britannica, and was a geometer and inventor.  The book takes place just before the “flourishing” in AD 50.  X’s take here is that Heron was actually a dudette (that’s not a spoiler because it’s introduced early), and s/he (that new pronoun isn’t used in the politically correct sense here) invents a lot more than water clocks in this novel.  The “big mystery” is who torched the library in 48 BC?  Julius Caesar is generally credited with accidentally doing that when he set Mr. Ptolemy XIII’s navy on fire and the wind blew the wrong way (only papyri in dock warehouses were burned on that occasion), but X has another theory.  The “big adventure” is that Heron’s inventions help kick Romans in their butts, and Alexandria falls to a new leader, a barbarian from the north (that is a bit of a spoiler, but not much).

I found this adventure entertaining, a bit like H. Rider Haggard with an alternate world instead of a lost one.  Will you like it too?  Dunno.  Did you like The Day of the Jackal?  It’s hard to say where real history ends and fiction begins there too.  If you do like it, there are many sequels featuring this Heron (the first famous cross-dresser?).  You could do worse.  (This is probably PG-13—think Game of Thrones.)

The Martian.  Andy Weir, author.  (Random House, 2011) When we were preparing for the release of my new novel, More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, one of my beta-readers pointed out that there are some similarities with this now famous book.  At the time, I couldn’t remember whether that was true, so I reread Weir’s book (as often happens, I forgot that I had read it).  Yep, there are a few similarities.  Not many, but part of my novel takes place on Mars.  Martian sand is a wee bit of a problem.  And so forth. Weir’s book is more focused, though—essentially a tale of survival.

My original perception was validated, though.  This book is boring because it violates the Goldilocks principle.  Just as Moby Dick is painfully more memorable to me as a manual for turning whale blubber into lamp oil, The Martian is 80% just a boring sci-tech treatise on how to survive on Mars, with a little stupid NASA politics thrown in to create some bad guys.  I’m an ex-scientist.  I figure if I found this boring, most other people did too.  Apparently not.  For first readers, will you enjoy all those fine sci-tech details?  I liked some of them.  Will you skip over huge sections of the book?  I did.  First, I knew a lot of that stuff.  Second, all that techno-babble hides the story.  The latter is a good one, but you have to dig for it.

Weir, in my version, gives a shout-out to sci-fi greats like Asimov and Heinlein at the end of the book.  They were ex-scientists too.  The first saved his pop-science for his non-fiction books and got on with the story.  The second just got on with the story.  Hoyle was another scientist, much more so than Asimov or Heinlein.  His Black Cloud has a lot of science, but just enough not to cloud the story (pun intentional).  I guess most readers got through the techno-babble in The Martian to the underlying human story.  I struggled a bit, flipped pages a lot, and resisted the impulse to check Weir’s calculations, especially during the second read.  Sour grapes?  Nope.  I’m glad Weir was successful.  Every stupendously successful book shows me that anyone can win the lottery and have a success, no matter how bad the book is.  I celebrate Andy’s success.  With one book and a movie, he can retire like Harper Lee.

This book is also an example where reviewers have jumped on the popularity bandwagon—last time I checked, there were 18,000+ reviews on Amazon, and I suppose that number will grow with the release of the movie.  Hasn’t everything been said that needs to be said about this book?  Well, no, because that number of reviews means that this book won a pop-culture contest just like the one in American Idol.  Because my opinion is probably orthogonal to at least 90% of those reviews, I thought I’d pass it by you: I didn’t like the book because of the above, I think it’s badly written sci-fi where the real story gets lost, and I just hope Matt Damon can save the movie, because we don’t have enough sci-fi movies.  (I foresee a coming movie review because I like Matt Damon, so I’ll probably see it.)

By the way, the publisher didn’t wait too long to cash in on the movie (surprise!).  Greed is a great motivator.  When I looked for the number of reviews, it was for that old edition, the second one I bought 8/30/15 for $1.99 (yep, I still have the receipt).  Now (10/6/15), it’s a new edition with Matt Damon’s every-man-pic on the cover, priced at $8.99.  (FYI: This book was originally self-published at $0.99.  That’s some mark-up!  Thanks to my own pricing structure, you can now have two Martian novels for $12, mine and Weir’s.)  All the reviews were conveniently transferred to the new edition by Amazon (at the request of the publisher?).  I guess the publisher thinks the book will benefit greatly by the movie.  Who knows?  I haven’t seen the movie yet.  If it maintains all those Goldilocks-rule violations, it might be as boring as the fertilizer Mark Watney uses for his potatoes.

Any doubts that Amazon’s major goal is to sell books?  Any doubts that publishing is a business?  Any doubts that publishers will gouge you (most of that $8.99 price is determined by the publisher, not Amazon, by the way)?  I wonder if Mr. Weir will reap the added royalties?  I wonder what royalties Mr. Damon will collect for being on the cover?  BTW, the original was published in 2011, so I probably read it somewhere around there for the first time.  Duly noted and forgotten, as they say.  Second-time around, the $1.99 was worth it just to download another copy.  Readers wanting to read the book now are SOL—that means “so out of luck,” to keep this PG-13–something that the book might not be.  The movie neither–I can’t imagine all that foul language going onto the silver screen.  We’ll see…or hear, that is.  Come on Matt Damon, save another movie!

***

[Ready for mystery, suspense, and thrills?  Family Affairs, #6 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” is now available on Amazon.  You can read it for free in exchange for an honest review (use the contact page on this website to query me) or by downloading from Net Galley if you’re an “official reviewer” (AKA signed up on Net Galley, I guess).  Enjoy.]

In elibris libertas….

This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2015 at 4:00 am and is filed under Mini-Reviews of Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.