Tutti Frutti - Mike Faricy

   2013; 329 pages.  Book 5 (out of 28) in the “Dev Haskell – Private Investigator” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres: Pulp Thriller; Hard-Boiled Mystery; Private Investigator Mystery.  Overall Rating: 8*/10.

 

    For Private Investigator Dev Haskell, the assignment is a dream job.

 

    First of all, his client is his attorney and drinking buddy, Louie Laufen.  It’s good to know the background of the person who’s hiring you.

 

    Even better is the job itself: just go down to a local nightclub called the Tutti Frutti, sip some suds, and see if you can detect some illegal gambling going on.  Even if you don’t notice anything amiss, you get to come back and collect your fee.  So down to the club goes Dev.

 

    He doesn't see any sign of gambling, but one thing quickly catches his eye.  Everyone at the club – customers and workers alike – seems to be slap-happy, using a spank on the butt in place of a handshake or a hug.  Dev finds that kind of weird, but hey, to each his own, and maybe they’re foreigners of some sort.  Such as Canadians.  Or Texans.

 

    Oh well, enjoy your drink, Dev.  If you think the butt-slapping is strange, wait till you see the floorshow.

 

What’s To Like...

    Tutti Frutti is Book 5 in Mike Faricy’s always-entertaining pulp thriller “Dev Haskell - Private Investigator” series and follows the usual formula: Dev’s “easy” job rapidly spins out of control, the women he hits on often have ulterior motives for tolerating his advances, crimes get committed, and somehow the police conclude Dev’s the most likely perpetrator.

 

    There's a plethora of plotlines.  In addition to the illegal gambling probe, Dev has murders to solve, mobsters to be wary of, flower deliveries of undetermined origin and motive to backtrack, and, most important of all, embarrassing photos of himself in compromising positions to explain, pics that he has no recollection posing for and which are now being spread around to the worst possible associates of Dev: his bedmates and the cops.  

 

    The story is set in St. Paul Minnesota and told from a first-person point-of-view.  The chapters are short, with 60 of them covering 329 pages.  I enjoyed tagging along with Dev as he muddles along, trying in vain to make sense of the mayhem, and although you can read this as a “whodunit”, I found it more fun to try to anticipate the steps Dev was taking to solve the mysteries and clear his name.

 

    Everything builds to a suitably exciting ending that included a couple of neat twists that I didn’t see coming, especially a clever evasive resource if you ever have to wear an ankle monitor as part of your plea deal agreement.  The final chapter was a neat little epilogue that I really enjoyed.

 

    Tutti Frutti is a standalone novel as well as part of a 28-book series.  I’m reading the books in order, but frankly, I don’t think that’s necessary.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  3.7/5 based on 440 ratings and 371 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.61/5 based on 758 ratings and 63 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    My phone rang.  It was Heidi’s number.  Probably calling to apologize now that she’d calmed down a bit.  I could understand her being upset, but I was glad she’d seen the light.

   “Hi, Heidi, are we feeling a little better, dear?”

    “Shut up you slimy piece of toilet scum.  I just want you to listen to this,” she screamed.  (loc. 16128)

 

    “And so your car got to her house how?”

    “I have no idea.  I have no memory of leaving her house.  The last thing I remember is her wearing a smile and a pair of these black knee high boots.  Kinda sexy,” I glanced at humorless Clara, but she remained focused on her notebook.  “Candi gave me a drink.  I don’t know what the drink was.  I just know that it burned when it went down.  I remember that.  Oh, and she got the stuff in Mexico.”

    “Tequila?”

    “I don’t know what it was.”

    “Are you in the habit of drinking drinks that you don’t know what they are?”

    “Sometimes.”  (loc. 17164)

 

Kindle Details…

    Tutti Frutti is priced at $3.99 at Amazon, as are all the other books in this series.  You can also pick up the entire series in various 5- or 7-book bundles, which are all priced at $9.99.  Mike Faricy also offers a couple novellas in the same setting for $0.99 apiece.    He has at least two other series: Jack Dillon Dublin Tales and Hotshot, neither of which I have tried yet; the books in those cost $2.99-$3.99.

 

“Hello, Biker?  Woof, woof, woof, grrrr.”  (loc. 14315)

    The usual quibbles about this series apply to Tutti Frutti as well.  The biggest problem is the abundance of typos.  I noted a couple dozen of them, almost all of them “spellchecker errors”.  Some of the ones that made me chuckle were: sexist/sexiest, phased/fazed, psyche/psych, and my favorite, statute-like/statue-like.  Compound words, such as shot gun/shotgun, after thought/afterthought, and here by/hereby also plagued the text.

 

    It turns out the Tutti Frutti Club is a “bondage-dom” establishment, and this seemed to offend some reviewers.  Others thought there was too much booze-drinking and "rolling-in-the-hay", but I disagree.  These are hard-boiled mysteries, not cozies, although if you’re looking for a Fifty Shades of Grey tale, you’re going to be very disappointed.  Admittedly, there is a fair amount of cussing (15 instances in the first 10%) and lots of spanking, but even the latter was almost (but not quite) always done as a greeting between clothed individuals.

 

    8 Stars.      I’m five books through this series, and have yet to be bored by any of them.  The pacing is brisk, and there’s plenty of action, wit, and in Dev’s case, self-deprecating humor.  The character development is great, and I was happy to see Louie playing a greater role here.  The plot structure may be formulaic, but so what?  I like Mike Faricy’s formula.

Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Bottled Brains - Harry Harrison & Robert Sheckley

   1990; 248 pages.  Book 3 (but Volume 2) (out of 7) in the “Bill the Galactic Hero” series.  New Authors? : No, and Yes.  Genres : Science Fiction; Humor and Satire.   Overall Rating: 3*/10.

 

    Central Headquarters needs a volunteer and Space Trooper Bill is the perfect fit.

 

    Maybe it’s that pair of Deathwish Drang fangs he sports.  They’d scare a Chinger right out of its lizard pelt.  Of course, since Chingers are only seven inches tall, that's not saying much.

 

    Maybe it’s that alligator foot that the military surgeons at Camp Diplatory have just attached to Bill’s leg.  Alligator feet are quite powerful.  But since Bill only has *one* of them transplanted so far on him, all it does is make him walk lopsided.

 

    Maybe it’s because Bill’s a part of the famous “Fighting 69th Deep Space Screaming Killers” unit.  But heck, there’s fifty thousand such troopers stationed here at Camp Diplatory.  So what makes Bill so special?

 

    Actually, it’s because Bill’s been classified as expendable, and that’s exactly the kind of soldier needed for this next mission.  It’s a trip to “Tsuris”, a mystery planet where objects passing nearby – even starships – get plucked from space, disappearing into thin ether, only to reappear again millions of miles away.  Someone needs to go there and reconnoiter, even if they also get zapped to who-knows-where and are never heard from again.

 

    Someone expendable.

 

What’s To Like...

    Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Bottled Brains is the third book in Harry Harrison’s 7-volume humorous sci-fi series, and the first to feature a co-author, which then became the norm for subsequent entries, although the co-authors change from one book to the next.

 

    The book is first and foremost a spoofery of other Sci-Fi series, most notably Star Trek (with Captain Dirk and Mr. Splock) and Star Wars (with Ham Duo and Chewgumma).  Bill gets introduced to time-travel, thanks to a gizmo called a "Temporal/Spatial Displacer", and a bit later experiences getting sucked into a computer as well.

 

    The writing is a vocabularian's delight, featuring some kewl words I’m familiar with (such as “simulacrum” and “tintinnabulation”) plus some that were new to me, a couple of which are listed below.  The multifunctional expression “bowb” (it can be used as a noun, verb, interjection, and/or adjective) is back; I think it should be added to everyone’s vocabulary.  I enjoyed the nod to Robert Heinlein by having Dirk “grok” things, and of course the journey back through time to Carthage and the encounter with Hannibal resonated deeply with me. 

 

    There's some subtle wordplay, such as a capital city named “Graypnutz” and some hilarious mistranslations as Bill’s computerized translating device struggles with the idioms of the Tsurisian language.  I chuckled at some of the religious references, including the “Church of Very Little Charities” and the “Zoroastrian Winter Solstice Defloration Festival”.  Nowadays we call that latter one "Christmas".

 

    There are multiple plotlines to keep the action and excitement flowing: will Bill get a brain transplant?, will he fail the intelligence test?, can he successfully steal a temporal/spatial displacer for his superiors?, can he avoid being court-martialed and executed?  I guess the answer to that last one is self-evident, since there are four more books in this series.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Zaftig (adj.) : having a full, rounded figure; plump,  (a Yankeeism)

Others: Crampon (n.); Concomitant (as a noun, not an adjective).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.2*/5, based on 11 ratings and 5 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.42*/5, based on 811 ratings and 18 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    “Yipe!” Bill yiped.  “What the bowb are you doing with my ear?”

    “I’m fastening a translating device to your ear, so if you find any Tsurisians on Tsuris you can talk to them.”

    “Tsuris!  The place nobody ever comes back from?”

    “You catch on fast.  That’s the whole point of the operation.  Your non-return will give us the excuse to invade.”

    “I don’t think I like this.”  (pg. 16)

 

    “They’re giving me the Usladish look; you know what I mean?”

    “No, I don’t,” Bill said, desperation in his voice, a trapped feeling coursing through every fiber of his being.

    “I keep forgetting you weren’t born here,” Illyria said.  “An Usladish look is what we call a look that means, I know you’re up to something sneaky and rotten but I’m not going to tell anybody about it yet because I’m sort of sneaky and rotten myself.”

    “They don’t have that feeling where I come from,” Bill said.

    “No?  How curious.”  (pg. 22)

 

“When they handed out the brains you were in the corner picking your toes.”  (pg. 181)

    Sadly, there are a bunch of weaknesses in Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Bottled Brains.  Overall, the writing is bad, and the storytelling is even worse.  I felt like I was reading a high school student’s effort.  The various plotlines meander all over the place in the tale, and there is no overarching storyline to tie everything together.

 

    The first part of the book has some funny moments, but things soon devolve into just plain silliness.  I felt like the authors were trying to spoof Starship Troopers and its “so bad it’s good” reputation, but ended up instead with a “so bad it’s terrible” result.  I’m also at a loss to say who the target audience is; the book’s too silly to appeal to most adults, but it’s also got too much cussing and sexual references (tumescence, phallus, copulation, detumescing) to be appropriate for a YA audience.

 

    Summing up, there’s just too much wrong with this book, and the series as a whole, to recommend it.  The low Goodreads rating and the scarcity of reviews/ratings at both Amazon and Goodreads (B,tGHotPoBB has been around for 32 years now, and both Sheckley and Harrison are well-known sci-fi writers) should’ve clued me in that this was something to avoid.  I doubt I'll go any further in this series.

 

    3 Stars.  The book’s cover lists Harry Harrison and Robert Sheckley as co-authors, (with Sheckley’s name getting the smaller font size), while the Wikipedia article (the link is here) says Harrison was merely the editor.  Also, Harry Harrison’s comments in Wikipedia sound like he really didn’t want much to do with this series, likening it to “sharecropping”.

 

    Personally, the 72 chapters of Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of the Bottled Brains seemed like a friendly contest between the two writers.  I got the impression that one would write a chapter, but end it with a ill-fitting and superfluous sentence, and it would then be the other writer’s challenge to somehow make it fit.  For instance, Chapter 60 ends with this sentence: “Surprisingly, the answer was to be provided by a single long-stemmed blue rose.”  Oy.  Good luck making that segue smoothly into the next chapter.

The Twentieth Century: A People's History - Howard Zinn

   2007; 512 pages.  Full Title: The Twentieth Century: A People’s History.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : US History; Non-Fiction; World History.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    The image shown to the left notwithstanding, the complete title of this book, as given by Amazon, is: The Twentieth Century: A People’s History.  But what exactly is meant by “A People’s History”, and how does it differ from the hero-centric, “America-the-Perfect” version we all were taught in public schools when growing up?  Well, Howard Zinn is the author, so we’ll let him explain it.

 

    “I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, the Mexican War as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American War as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by the black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.”  (loc. 94).

 

    Well, now.  I think Howard Zinn’s approach to History might be quite eye-opening..

 

What’s To Like...

    The Twentieth Century: A People’s History is a huge excerpt from Howard Zinn’s 1980 magnum opus A People’s History of the United States.  It encompasses Chapters 11-23, which deal with the time period from the 1890s through the 1970s, and so is essentially the latter half of that book.  Zinn then updated things with two new chapters which close out the 1990s.  Later on, that pair of chapters were also added back into A People’s History of the United States.

 

    The book is divided into 14 chapters, plus a prologue.  The chapters are:

01: The Empire and the People (Land-grabbing from Spain)

02: The Socialist Challenge (The rise of unions and the heyday of the Socialist party)

03: War is the Health of the State (World War 1)

04: Self-Help in Hard Times (The Great Depression)

05: A People’s War (WW2, the Korean War, the Bay of Pigs)

06: Or Does It Explode? (The Black Civil Rights Movement)

07: The Impossible Victory (Vietnam)

08: Surprises (Feminist and Native American Movements, Prison Riots)

09: The Seventies: Under Control?  (Watergate, a great Recession)

10: Carter-Reagan-Bush: The Bipartisan Consensus (Iran-Contra, Desert Storm)

11: The Unreported Resistance (Protests of Nukes, Reagan, Iraq war, Columbus Day)

12: The Coming Revolt of the Guards (Zinn’s vision and hope for the future)

13: The Clinton Presidency (Protests in the 1990s)

14: The 2000 Election and the “War on Terrorism” (how the Gore/Bush election was stolen)

 

    It needs to be recognized that politically, Howard Zinn was a Socialist.  As such, he is unimpressed with both the Democratic and Republican presidents and parties, viewing the two parties as pretty much the same, particularly when it comes to Capitalism and Imperialism.

 

    The book is chock full of interesting history tidbits.  I enjoyed learning about “Bootleg Coal” and the birth of the CIO labor union.  I never knew (or had since forgotten) that Native Americans "liberated" Alcatraz Island in 1969 and claimed it for their own.  The “Rules for Female Teachers” in chapter 2 were eye-opening and I was surprised to learn that Eugene Debs, the perennial Socialist candidate for president way back when, spent 32 months in prison for violating the “Espionage Act”.

 

    It was fun to become reacquainted with  various Americans who have gradually faded from memory: Joseph McCarthy, Rosa Parks, Aldous Huxley, the brothers Philip and Daniel Berrigan, Shirley Chisolm, Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, and many more.  I was amazed to learn that the author Jack London and the activist Helen Keller were both deeply associated with the Socialist Party.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 84 ratings and 47 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.16/5 based on 1,120 ratings and 80 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    For the United States to step forward as a defender of helpless countries matched its image in American high school history textbooks, but not its record in world affairs.  It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country.  It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention.  It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos.  It had “opened” Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats.  (…) It had sent troops to Peking with other nations, to assert Western supremacy in China, and kept them there for over thirty years.  (loc. 2234)

 

    From 1964 to 1972, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country—and failed.  When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won.

    In the course of that war, there developed in the United States the greatest antiwar movement the nation had ever experienced, a movement that played a critical part in bringing the war to an end.  (loc. 3405)

 

Kindle Details…

    The Twentieth Century currently sells for $12.49 at Amazon.  Howard Zinn has several dozen more e-books at Amazon, almost all of which fall into the genres of Politics and/or History, and range in price from $5.99 to $17.99.  There are several other authors who write history books with the “People’s History” slant, including A People’s History of the World by Chris Harman which right now goes for $10.99, which may well be my next venture into this sub-genre.

 

“When the guns of war become a national obsession, social needs inevitably suffer.” (Martin Luther King Jr.)  (loc. 3285)

    There’s not much to quibble about in The Twentieth Century: A People’s History, provided you understand where Howard Zinn stands politically.  But it did seem like, as the book made its way towards present times, historical accuracy started morphing into the author’s wishful thinking.

 

    This was especially evident in chapter 13, where Howard Zinn tediously recounts all sorts of minor protests in the 1990s, making it sound like there was civil unrest of similar magnitude to what was seen in the 1900s decade and again the 1950s.  That simply isn’t true, the unions at the close of the 20th century were pitifully weak and the Socialists had long faded into being a fringe party.  Zinn’s rationale as to why the Reagan/Bush electoral landslides don’t count is also rather weak.

 

    But perhaps this was inevitable, since the closer “history” comes to being “current events”, the more speculative it inherently becomes.  For example, if I were to try to write the history of the Covid pandemic and the 2016/2020 presidential elections today, I am certain that in 20 years it will be found to have lots of inaccuracies.

 

    9 Stars.  Overall, it was really nice to see the ordinary people get the recognition they deserve for the shaping of American history events.  Even growing up, I enjoyed learning how things actually went down instead of the whitewashed history we were all fed in junior and senior high school.  Thank you, Howard Zinn, for making the term “People’s History” familiar to those readers who aren't historians.  I will be on the lookout for more of your books.

All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

   1929; 291 pages.  Book 1 (of 2) in the “All Quiet on the Western Front” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Highbrow Lit; German Literature; War Fiction; World War 1.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    World War One.  The Great War.  The War to end all Wars.  What image comes into your head when you hear those phrases?

 

    Probably you envision American (or British, or French) soldiers, huddled in a long trench replete with pools of stagnant water, all wearing helmets and looking up at the camera with miserable eyes.

 

    Alternatively, you might picture those soldiers climbing out of the trench, rifles in hand, all wearing gas masks (there was no griping about constitutional rights back then), preparing to throw themselves across a mine-laden no-man’s land, knowing that many of them are about to die, and carried out to gain a couple of yards of meaningless muck.  Could life get any worse than this?

 

    Well, yeah.  You could be a German soldier, in a sopping-wet trench, with a gas mask on, in the same miserable conditions, but outmanned and outgunned, and having to face all those charging doughboys.

 

What’s To Like...

    When it was published in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front was an immediate hit in the United States despite the fact that the war had been over for more than a decade.  It was subsequently made into a movie twice, once in 1930, then again in 1979.  Although fictional, the book is based upon the author’s own front-line war experiences in 1917.

 

    The story is told in the first-person POV, that of 19-year-old Paul Baumer, who, along with his fellow German soldiers tries to cope with horrendous battle conditions, heavy casualties, incompetent officers, well-meaning but clueless civilians, and the required blind loyalty to a futile cause.

 

    Despite being a translation (by A.W. Wheen) from the original German, the writing is powerful.  You can feel the terror and despair when the German lines are bombed or shelled: there is no escape from it; you just hope that the explosives don’t happen to fall on you.  Your life is in the hands of a few trusted comrades; when one of them dies it is crushing.  Duties such as guarding Russian prisoners-of-war are gut-wrenching because you can empathize more with those fellow sufferers than with your own military and political leaders. Even getting to go back to your hometown on leave doesn’t relieve the stress (PTSD hadn’t been discovered yet) because your family and friends cannot possibly  understands what you’re going through and you desperately don't want to talk about it.  

 

    The missions Paul goes on further emphasize his wretched situation.  Laying down barbed wire is a life-threatening affair, since it by definition means you’re on the front lines.  Going on patrol means risking getting separated from your comrades, being stuck in a shell hole in no man’s land, and praying that the next person that drops into your tiny shelter is a friend, not an enemy.  Keep your gas mask with you at all times, learn how to quickly yet properly put it on, and for heaven's sake, don't take it off too soon.

 

     There are a few blessed moments of brightness.  At one point Paul and his comrades manage to find some female companionship.  It involves considerable risk and some bartering (civilians trapped on the front lines are starving too), but provides a brief but much-needed relief from the fighting.  At another point, Paul, wounded and confined to a stretcher, is embarrassed as he tries to find a way to tell a cute nurse that he needs to take a leak.  I had to google an obscure reference to a salty quote from Goethe’s “Gotz von Berlichingen”, but it was surprisingly easy to find and made me chuckle.

 

     The ending is easy to anticipate, but it nevertheless left a lump in my throat.  Unfortunately for Paul, there aren’t any plot twists, and the final resolution almost brings a sense of relief.  The title reference doesn’t occur until the final page, and isn’t a direct translation: in German, it is “Im westen nichts neues” which literally means “Nothing new in the west”.  All Quiet on the Western Front is a standalone novel, although I learned there is a sequel.

 

Excerpts...

    Morning is come.  The explosions of mines mingles with the gun-fire.  That is the most dementing convulsion of all.  The whole region where they go up becomes one grave.

    The reliefs go out, the observers stagger in, covered with dirt, and trembling.  One lies down in silence in the corner and eats, the other, a reservist-reinforcement, sobs; twice he had been flung over the parapet by the blast of the explosions without getting any more than shell-shock.

    The recruits are eyeing him.  We must watch them, these things are catching, already some lips begin to quiver.  (pg. 105)

 

    “Almost all of us are simple folk.  And in France, too, the majority of men are labourers, workmen, or poor clerks.  Now just why would a French blacksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us?  No, it is merely the rulers.  I had never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and it will be just the same with the majority of Frenchmen as regards us.  They weren’t asked about it any more than we were.”

    “Then what exactly is the war for?” asks Tjaden.

    Kat shrugs his shoulders.  “There must be some people to whom the war is useful.”

    “Well, I’m not one of them,” grins Tjaden.  (pg. 207)

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Importune (v.) : to harass (someone) persistently for or to do something.

Others: Perambulator (n., British); Dixie (n.); Baldaquin (n.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.7*/5, based on 6,049 ratings and 1,996 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.01*/5, based on 386,474 ratings and 12,221 reviews.

 

“We are losing the war because we can salute too well.”  (pg. 39)

    There’s not much to quibble about in All Quiet on the Western Front.  The tone is dark and grim, yet has very few cusswords: I counted only four “damns” through the first quarter of the book, proving once again that great writers can get their message across with only a paucity of vulgarity.

 

    The translation is from German to "English", not  "American", so I occasionally encountered weird things like bathing-drawers, lorries, nerve-centres, and a carcase.  Yet distances were given in miles, not metres, so maybe the translation was into Canadian.

    Also, please be advised that horses played a major role in World War One, and inevitably suffered major casualties as well. 

 

    All Quiet on the Western Front conveys a sobering message about the horrors of war and the need to resort to it only as a last resort.  The fact that we witness this through the eyes of an enemy soldier just makes it all that more powerful.  It is easy to see why this book became an instant classic.

 

    9 Stars.  Reading All Quiet on the Western Front enables me to reach my yearly goals for reading both “Highbrow Literature” (at least one per annum) and “Banned Books” (also at least one per annum).  The latter one is a bit of a stretch, since the countries that banned it were Nazi Germany (for the rather obvious reason of portraying the Fatherland in a bad light); and Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Italy (all of which objected to its “anti-war” theme).  AFAIK, it was not banned here in the US.

The Guest - Alan Nayes

   2020; 262 pages.  New Author? : Yes, other than some of his short stories from 2012.  Genres: First Contact Sci-Fi; Hard Science Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    Voyager 1 is an interstellar space probe launched by NASA in 1977 to study the Outer Planets in our Solar System and thereafter interstellar space.  It passed beyond the Outer Planets in 2012, headed to nowhere in particular and if left undisturbed, would reach the mysterious Oort Cloud in just 300 years, taking a mere 30,000 more years to pass through it.  NASA is still in touch with Voyager 1, sending signals to, and receiving signals from it.

 

    Now imagine having the tedious job of monitoring the various instruments of Voyager 1 back here on Earth  That’s what Dr. Kayla Storm does.  It is a boring and slow-paced task, requiring lots of patience since it takes more than 20 hours for a radio signal to get to or from the space probe, and which is speeding away from us in a huge pool of empty space.

 

    But something different has just occurred.  Readings from Voyager 1 shows that it has just doubled in mass, cut its speed in half, and inexplicably started to veer off-course.

 

    Oh well, it’s probably bad data from one of its more-than-40-years-old instruments on board giving up the ghost.  We knew this would happen sooner or later.  Run some diagnostics to confirm the malfunction and we can all go back to sleep.

 

    Hmmm.  What if those diagnostics show that everything is still working just fine?

 

What’s To Like...

    The Guest is an ambitious blend of the “first contact” and “hard” subgenres of science fiction.  We will most likely detect an extraterrestrial spaceship headed our way long before it arrives, but if so, what are we going to do about it?  About all we’d know initially is that its technology was superior to ours, since they’re coming to us, not vice versa, and our first task would be to assemble a team to gather more information about the alien visitor.

 

    Here that team consists of the astrophysicist Kayla Storm, who works at the JPL (“Jet Propulsion Laboratory”); the astrobiologist Dr. Eric Bowen from SETI ("Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”); and General Tim Nathan of the US Air Force.  They are tasked with determining the physical make-up of the aliens, how to overcome whatever defenses they might deploy, and taking whatever steps needed to keep us Earthlings from becoming casualties should a conflict arise.

 

    Realistically, achieving those goals would take time and lots of trial-and-error.  Mistakes are made, lives are lost, and learning to communicate with the ETs does not improve things.  Their messages to us are terse: “We come, Earth our planet now” and "LEEVE".

 

    I was impressed by the depth of the research done by Alan Nayes in developing the storyline.  A lot of chemistry and laboratory testing is used, which is really the most effective way to learn about the alien “Guests”.  In the movies, ETs seem to almost always be bipedal humanoids who conveniently use the same respiratory process as we do.  In real life, that’s very unlikely.

 

    It was fun to see N-95 masks being used; I learned about them thanks to Covid.  And although I knew what the word “cacophonic” means, I had to google it to learn how to pronounce it.  I’ve never been to Meteor Crater here in Arizona, but it was neat to see it playing a major part of the story.  The nods to Carl Sagan, Oingo Boingo, and Britney Spears shows that the author has great literary and musical tastes.  Well, two out of those three, anyway.

 

    The ending was both good and logical: earthly science finally wins the day.  The key to foiling the aliens might seem a bit arbitrary, but that’s what trial-and-error is all about: keep trying anything and everything until something works.  There’s a nice little twist at the very end, involving Cyclops and Eric, which sets up the possibility of a sequel, although I'm not aware of one at present.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Schnup (n.) : an extreme idiot or shithead (urban slang).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.2*/5, based on 215 ratings and 33 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.29*/5, based on 161 ratings and 14 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “The Guests manipulate atomic structure in ways we can’t define, sir.  They will fold your plate up like tin foil if they feel threatened.  They play by a different set of rules, our physics don’t seem to apply to theirs.  You’ll see for yourself the Hole.  Nothing on Earth could have created that dig—in fifty years.  The so called ‘asteroid’ that created this crater was in fact a huge spacecraft!  How they buried something that massive so deep, there isn’t an engineer on Earth who can explain.”  (loc. 2683)

 

    “Mr. Speaker, I am not a military general, nor a warmonger.  I am just an astrophysicist who enjoys studying galaxies and comets and the cosmos and data from our space probes.” She took a brief sip when no questions or comments followed.  “However, I am very confident of two things. One—if we attempt to stop them from transforming our environment, they will kill us.  Two—if we do nothing and leave our Guests alone, they will kill us.”  (loc. 3962)

 

Kindle Details…

    The Guest is priced at $6.99 right now at Amazon.  Alan Nayes has more than a dozen other e-books for you, of varying genres, ranging from novellas to novels to bundles in length, and costing anywhere from $1.99 to $6.99.  Back in 2012, he was a member of a writers group called “The Eclective” which is where I first ran across his stories, and whose e-books are also available at Amazon for $0.99 apiece.

 

 

“That’s what I love about math and physics – they always tell the truth.”  (loc. 3541)

    The nits to pick are few in The Guest.  About the worst thing I can come up with is: the piglet dies.  There is some cussing, but I didn’t find it overused, and by far the favorite cussword is the rather mild “hell”.

 

    Most of the typos were the usual “spellchecker errors”: wine/whine, war path/warpath, on my God/oh my god, C₂₅O₄C₆₄/C₂₅O₄H₆₄, PMM/PPM, etc.  I only found one plot hole: the aliens somehow manage to use the phrase “oxidative phosphorylation” in a message, despite not knowing that the letter “X” exists in our alphabet.

 

    It could be argued that the fact that the aliens learn to communicate in English in a relatively short time is not realistic, but I was surprised to find that an audio-visual disc, dubbed the “Golden Disk” was placed on Voyager 1, containing written scientific information, photos, sounds, music, and greetings in 55 different languages; thus giving any sentient life with sufficiently advanced technology lots of data with which to learn our terrestrial tongues.  The Wikipedia link about it is here.

 

    While such culture-sharing is laudably well-intentioned, I still think such information, and the aims of the SETI project as a whole, could be cosmically suicidal if such information falls into the hands (or paws, or flippers) of extraterrestrials with a warrior mentality.

 

    9 Stars.  Writing a hard sci-fi novel is always a challenge because “keeping it real” and “keeping it interesting” is no small feat.  I’m happy to say that The Guest was up to the task; I found it to be both a page-turner and a highly enlightening piece of speculative science