March to Other Worlds Day 31 River of Death by Gilbert M. Stack
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March to Other Worlds Day 31 River of Death by Gilbert M. Stack
As we bring this year’s March to Other Worlds to a close, I’d like to spotlight my Legionnaire series and specifically, the fourteenth volume, River of Death, which I published this month.
I’ve been reading fantasy novels since at least the sixth grade when my mother bought me The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. That interest led me to pursue degrees in history where I was introduced to many wonderous periods in the human past. Eventually, I began to wonder why most fantasy literature was grounded in something akin to the European Middle Ages and one morning while listening to Mike Duncan’s podcast, The History of Rome, I found myself wondering what a fantasy series based loosely on the Roman Empire might be like.
And that’s the birth of my Legionnaire series. My Aquila is not Rome, but it shares a lot with that historical entity—especially its culture, its internal political problems, its border troubles, and of course, its amazing legions. Aquila and its world also differs mightily from Rome in a few regards—most particularly the existence and widespread practice of magic and an empire which includes and abuts places very different than those the Romans actually encountered.
The bulk of the series so far takes place in an area north of Aquila called the Jeweled Cities. The Cities are home to great wealth and are the only place outside of the mighty Qing empire where silk is produced—but that silk has heightened an already virulent plague of factionalism and sparked the outbreak of a vicious war and several smaller civil conflicts. Stuck in the middle of all of this is Marcus Venandus, Patrician of Aquila, Tribune of its legions, and now Prefect of the Jeweled City of Amatista. Marcus’ task in the north was to build a capable infantry fighting force—an oxymoron in the eyes of the Gota rulers of the region who cannot believe anything can ever stand up to their beloved cavalry. But then, they’ve never had to contend with a man like Marcus Venandus before, scion of a Republic who for centuries has fielded the best infantry the world has ever seen.
River of Death is the fourteenth volume of the series and shows Marcus taking the war deeper into enemy territory than those enemies—or even his allies—can believe.
River of Death:
https://www.amazon.com/River-Death-Legionnaire-Book-14-ebook/dp/B0BTFLV197?ref_=ast_author_mpb
The Fire Islands (the first book of the Legionnaire series):
https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Islands-Legionnaire-Book-ebook/dp/B0774NY5BM?ref_=ast_author_dp
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March to Other Worlds Day 30 The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein
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March to Other Worlds Day 30 The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein
When I was in the ninth grade, I joined The Science Fiction Book Club and got my first five books for a dollar. One of those books was called A Heinlein Trio and the first of the stories was The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein. It was the second Heinlein book I read (the first was Between Planets which was serialized as a comic book in Boy’s Life magazine) and it’s a great example of Heinlein writing exciting stories built on themes he cared strongly about—the importance of the individual and the dangers of a society in which all members are expected to tow the same political and ideological line regardless of their self-interests and personal philosophies.
Heinlein published The Puppet Masters in 1951 after a rash of UFO sightings in the 1940s. Heinlein used the sightings as a springboard for an imaginative and disturbing tale of slug-like creatures capable of taking over the minds of any human (and many other creatures) that they touch. The enslaved human knows what it is doing, but lacks even the desire (much less the ability) to fight against the alien puppeteer. Heinlein’s novel takes the struggle against the alien invaders from first contact, to insidious infiltration, to widespread invasion, and finally to the epic struggle to free our planet in an exciting adventure story. Yet, as important and entertaining as these events are, they are not what makes the novel great. Instead, it is the exploration—never preachy—into why freedom of conscious is important as well as the fundamental relationships which make human life worth living that give this book its power.
As you would expect of a book written in the fifties, there is a dated feel to some elements of the book. For example, while Mary, Heinlein’s heroine, is definitely an empowered and capable woman, many of her reactions and the condescending way in which she is often treated, will grate irritatingly on the modern reader. Similarly, Heinlein’s vision of the late twenty-first century quite understandably fails to foretell many things we take for granted in modern life even while he foresees the growing importance of industries such as telecommunications. Don’t let these faults distract you from a great story.
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March to Other Worlds Day 29 A Soldier of Poloda by Lee Strong
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March to Other Worlds Day 29 A Soldier of Poloda by Lee Strong
As we near the end of this year’s March, I’ve invited Chris L. Adams back to give a guest review. Last year, Chris reviewed The Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs. This year, he turns his attention to a Burroughs near-spin-off, A Solider of Poloda by Lee Strong. Here’s the review:
Like many fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB), I have often reread his two novelettes, Beyond the Farthest Star and Tangor Returns, lamenting that he hadn’t continued them as with his other famous series such as Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, to name two. But we just didn’t get that next novel.
Thank goodness after my latest reread of those classics, I was able to slide into something that was so much like what I had just finished reading that it was almost as if I was being gifted with that missing novel that Burroughs never wrote. I’m referring to Lee Strong’s, A Soldier of Poloda.
Let me get this out of the way so no one feels misled if they decide to purchase A Soldier of Poloda—this isn’t Tangor Returns Part 2. Tangor makes an appearance, but he isn’t the main character. Lee’s new character, Ran, is the primary character who wades across our pages, and over the war torn planet of Poloda.
My hat is off to Strong who was able, in my opinion, to pull off one top-notch sequel to Beyond the Farthest Star, where an American pilot in WW2 is slain by a German machinegun bullet, and is then cast 450,000 light years from Earth to another world where he is reincarnated and called Tangor, a word that means “from nothing” in the language of the people among whom he finds himself.
Strong nails utterly the look and feel of Poloda where all-out war has raged for over a century. The desultory cry of “It is war,” from the war-weary people of Unis is there. So are the war-hungry, power-mad, whacko Kaparans, the bombings, the airplane battles, the green-shirted Zabo police thugs, the klaxons, interrogation rooms, planes and bombs falling from the sky… Everything that reminds you of ERB’s Poloda is there—but there’s a new twist.
Some of those things are more muted in this novel, lurking in the background, noticed in passing by Ran, the hero, as he wades across the savage, war-torn surface of Poloda offering a different point of view than our beloved flyboy, Tangor. For Ran is a foot soldier and so has different ideas about how to take on the Kapars. And he’s good at it, coming up on-the-spot with clever ways out of the messes in which he finds himself. But one of the things I enjoyed most about the novel is Strong’s wit he brings to bear.
Tangor was witty and fast on his feet—and so is Ran. We’re a naturally cynical race, so maybe it’s an Earthling thing? Actually, I think Poloda has just been fighting for so long that they’ve forgotten how to joke. Strong does a killer job of creating an analogous character to Ed’s Tangor but also succeeds in spades in creating his own, unique character whom I found every bit as much fun to read as I did Tangor.
In summary, A Soldier of Poloda is a great sequel to two of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ most beloved novels.
https://www.amazon.com/Soldier-Poloda-Adventures-Farthest-Burroughs-ebook/dp/B078SGMBHX/
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March to Other Worlds Day 28 Into the Looking Glass by John Ringo
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March to Other Worlds Day 28 Into the Looking Glass by John Ringo
To close out the fourth week of the March to Other Worlds, we’re going to immerse ourselves in Into the Looking Glass, a classic John Ringo “target rich environment” style novel with a lot of science fiction thrown in for good measure. The series begins with an explosion—nuclear in appearance but without the hard radiation. The explosion was triggered by a science experiment which is now generating “gates” that look like circular mirrors. These gates go to other worlds (and possibly to other universes) and they put the entire earth in jeopardy as some of those worlds are inhabited by hostile creatures.
The hero of the story is William Weaver, a physicist who gets caught up in the mess as the National Security Advisor’s point person in attempting to understand—and stop—what is happening. He’s a great character and lots of fun to follow as he arrives at the new gates as they appear and bad things start happening. My favorite part of the whole book is when a small National Guard detachment gets overrun by some aliens in Virginia or West Virginia and they put a call out over the radio for anyone with a gun to help them secure the gate. A whole group of gun collectors arrive and they are so very fun to watch trying out their favorite weapons on alien cannon fodder.
The problem for Weaver is that new gates keep opening and some have highly hostile beings behind them. So, Weaver has to figure out how to stop the gates from opening so that the earth (and every place beyond the earth that the newly appearing gates go) doesn’t get overrun. In doing so, he drops some nice science (I presume it’s real science) on the reader in digestible bites and even gets into a little (but not too much) philosophy. Best of all, he sets up a whole multiverse for future stories.
If you like books where the heroes get to shoot up the alien critters, you’re going to love Into the Looking Glass.
https://www.amazon.com/Into-Looking-Glass-John-Ringo-ebook/dp/B00APAHW24?ref_=ast_author_dp
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March to Other Worlds Day 27 The Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon
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March to Other Worlds Day 27 The Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon
For Day 27, I want to bring you back to the middle of the twentieth century and the first series I ever read. I was six years old and we got the first book, The Tower Treasure, as part of a deal on the back of a cereal box. When I finished it, my father (probably unintentionally) confirmed me as a reader forever by asking me to tell him the entire plot at the breakfast table. I ended up reading all of the blue hardbacks over the next four years and I’m fond of the Hardy Boys series to this day.
Set in the 1960s, Frank and Joe Hardy are brothers, eighteen and seventeen respectively, and are what we might call good American boys—popular with their classmates and wholesome and decent. Their father is a famous detective, and they are desperate to follow in his footsteps, constantly getting themselves and their friends into trouble.
The Tower Treasure may be the first book in the series, but it’s far from the best. So, for the March to Other Worlds, I’ve decided to review The Mystery of Cabin Island. This was my favorite book in the series as a child probably because the Hardy Boys and their friends are never faced with a situation that seemed utterly farfetched for a bunch of high school kids to handle.
The basic plot of the novel is that, as a reward for recovering a wealthy man’s car during the sixth book in the series, the brothers are offered the opportunity to stay at a remote cabin during Christmas break. The cabin is on a small island in the bay that gives their hometown its name, Bayport. Access to the cabin is over the ice, which means walking or using ice boats (which I found very cool both as a child and as an adult). The owner of the cabin also asks the brothers to keep their eyes out for his fifteen-year-old grandson who has run away from boarding school and he hopes might be on the island.
From moment one, things get a little tense. The first time the brothers and their friends travel to the island they find a belligerent man who orders them off the property. Uncertain what to do, the brothers retreat until they learn that this man has no right to be there. In fact, he’s trying to buy the island but the owner refuses to sell.
To add realistic tension to the story, two boys who dropped out from the brothers’ school start harassing them. At first it seems as if they are just being bullies, but it quickly becomes apparent that they have some connection to the belligerent man. Notice—no guns or over the top threats. These are realistic problems that anyone reading could imagine himself facing.
The weather gets worse and the brothers and their friends are forced to deal not only with the elements but with strange sounds and evidence that other unknown people are on the small island. There are also a series of incidents that make them feel unsafe, but don’t deter them from staying on the island and trying to find out what’s going on. The answer to that is the possibility that the secret to the location of some valuable medals which were stolen from the man who owns the cabin, might exist on Cabin Island.
The more realistic tone of the book combined with good pacing and interesting problems made this novel a pleasure to read as both a child and an adult. Perhaps that’s the reason that the Hardys are still popular today. They show up in television series, comic books, and at least four series of books. It may not technically be a fantasy world, but as a child I used to dream about solving mysteries beside Frank and Joe and when someone started bashing in mailboxes on our street, my friends and I got out the Hardy Boys Detective Handbook to help us gather evidence and try and solve the crime.
https://www.amazon.com/Hardy-Boys-08-Mystery-Island-ebook/dp/B002C0XQ5M?ref_=ast_author_dp
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March to Other Worlds Day 26 The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
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March to Other Worlds Day 26 The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
As we get close to the end of our fourth week of the March, I want to introduce the most difficult book in this year’s event. It’s called The Eyre Affair and I’m fairly certain I didn’t understand everything I was supposed to in this novel. And yet, I really loved it! On the surface, this is an alternate history style sf novel which is an English professor’s wet dream and the stuff of nightmares for the poor student forced to take the class as a basic requirement of graduation. Put simply, this is an earth in which everyone on the planet is apparently obsessed with literature. People name their children after great (and minor authors). Everyone seems to belong to societies that obsess about individual books or authors and the academic controversies which surround them. They even get into brawls over whose work or theory is better.
It's also a more traditional alternate history narrative, although I couldn’t figure out the point of departure from our world. England and Russia are still fighting the Crimean War well over a century after it began. A mammoth corporation (called Goliath) has taken over the country and rules from just barely behind the scenes. There are 27 special ops bureaus—the purpose of which is often not public knowledge. They deal with such things as literary violations (like the theft of a rare manuscript) and vampires, werewolves, terrorism, and just about everything else you can imagine. Oh, and there is time travel and potentially catastrophic time events.
The plot of the novel involves a wonderfully evil villain (Acheron Hades) with a range of not-well-understood, seemingly supernatural powers. He knows when someone speaks his name. He seems essentially immune to bullets. He can’t be tracked by conventional technology. He has the ability to mentally dominate weak-minded (read ordinary) people. And he’s really, really, wicked.
Our heroine, Thursday Next, is the only person who has seen him and is still around. She’s a lowly Literary Tec, Special Ops level 27, but she gets pulled into an attempt to catch Hades with tragic consequences. Naturally, she doesn’t give up. And when Hades discovers that Thursday’s uncle has invented a portal that lets people go into books or take the characters out of them, all of literature is endangered as the world’s most wicked man suddenly finds himself able to commit crimes on fiction’s most loved characters.
This is a truly fascinating book. It is not a fast read, even though it’s really not all that long. There is just so very much happening all the time within its pages that you can’t force yourself to read quickly because you know that in doing so you will miss the subtle connections that bring these pages to life.
https://www.amazon.com/Eyre-Affair-Thursday-Next-Novel-ebook/dp/B000OCXHC2?ref_=ast_author_dp
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Science Fiction and Fantasy Panel
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On Tuesday night at 6pm Eastern Time, I will be participating in a panel entitled: Science Fiction and Fantasy: Genre and Community hosted by the English Department of Fordham University. In addition to myself, the panel will host authors like Jane Lindskold and Paul Levinson and many others. If you're interested, you can register here:
https://www.universe.com/events/science-fiction-and-fantasy-genre-and-community-tickets-PW4RC5
March to Other Worlds Day 25 Bite Me by Marion G. Harmon
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March to Other Worlds Day 25 Bite Me by Marion G. Harmon
As we continue with the fourth week of the March to Other Worlds, I offer a unique book in the superhero genre by Marion G. Harmon whose work has appeared in the March to Other Worlds 2020 and 2022. Harmon is best known for his Wearing the Cape series—one of the best superhero worlds on the market today. Bite Me is a spinoff novel from Harmon’s main storyline. It follows the exploits of Jacky Bouchard, aka Artemis, as she travels to New Orleans to help police identify vampires preying on underaged people. Jacky is the victim of a supervillain who transformed into a vampire after the Event. He was one of the very rare vampire transformations that was powerful enough to make his own vampire progeny. Jacky was the result—victim of a really bad stalker. This is important background information because almost all of the other vampires in New Orleans became vampires like other people become superheroes and supervillains—as a result of their strong desires and a crisis situation. Jacky doesn’t like playing Goth girl and Anne Rice afficionado. What she enjoys is being a covert intelligence specialist, and she learns in the course of this novel that she has a lot more to learn about her chosen profession.
One of the things I like best about Harmon novels is his ability to create credible superhuman “cultures” for want of a better word. In most of the U.S. breakthroughs follow the superhero template. In other places, like Japan, other cultural phenomena influence the transformations. In New Orleans, there is a strong tendency for a supernatural flair to influence the breakthroughs—vampires, witches, werewolves, voodoo queens, etc. It gives the city a flavor very different than the Chicago Harmon has introduced in his other books.
The plot of Bite Me very quickly becomes complicated by the introduction of the possibility that someone has the ability to create new vampires. If this is like Jacky’s stalker, it is conceivably the beginning of an apocalyptic event as vampires sire vampires who can sire more vampires, spreading across the country and eventually the world. So, the stakes are high as Jacky investigates. The action is also quite strong, but again, different in tone from what we see in the Wearing the Cape novels. If you are interested in seeing what vampires would be like in a superhero universe, this is the book for you.
https://www.amazon.com/Bite-Me-Easy-Nights-Wearing-ebook/dp/B009ITELVI?ref_=ast_author_dp
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March to Other Worlds Day 24 The Valley of Despair by Chris L. Adams
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March to Other Worlds Day 24 The Valley of Despair by Chris L. Adams
Chris L. Adams has a talent for writing books that feel like they were crafted by some of the masters writing in the first half of the twentieth century, but read like they were written today. The result are novels that feel like lost works by people like Edgar Rice Burroughs. That’s who I think of when I read The Valley of Despair, which was recently reissued as a fabulous audiobook narrated by William L. Hahn.
Adams starts with a bang. His hero, German WWI pilot Erik von Mendelsohn, has crashed in the jungle and is trying to survive a group of apes that have taken the wrong kind of interest in him. Desperate to escape, he reaches the edge of the jungle near a high cliff face and the apes who are in hot pursuit…refuse to follow him past the tree line. It’s a simple idea very subtly conveyed in the story, but it set all the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. These totally aggressive and fearsome animals won’t follow our hero as he attempts to climb the cliff face to get away from them. It’s difficult not to ask yourself—what are the apes afraid of? What the heck is Erik getting himself into? And the tension just keeps ratcheting higher from this point forward.
Erik is a well thought out character—he’s smart, a bit impulsive, and a little too curious for his own good. The supporting cast is equally interesting. I don’t want to give away the plot, but the people Erik finds and gets into trouble with are equally brave and capable—and the problem they have to confront is better thought out than a lot of “lost world” adventure-style stories I’ve encountered. In short, if you want a fast-paced well-developed adventure story with great characters, you should give Valley of Despair a try.
Now that you’ve decided to give The Valley of Despair a try, you should really consider listening to it in audio format. It’s a short book, so it’s very inexpensive, but a good narrator (and Will Hahn is one of the best) and a few sound effects go the extra mile to really bring this book to life.
Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Valley-Despair-Tales-Book-ebook/dp/B01BKX5ABE?ref_=ast_author_dp
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March to Other Worlds Day 23 The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
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March to Other Worlds Day 23 The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
On Day 2 of the March this year, we took a look at Godzilla vs. Kong—the two classic large scale monsters who practically invented the concept of the kaiju. Today we’re going to look at a truly wonderful novel by John Scalzi that plays around with the kaiju idea. I think I should start by stating that while I really liked this book, I almost didn’t get past the first chapter. It just rubbed me wrong. If I had gotten the book out of the library, I probably would have stopped right there, but as I had put out good money on an author that I like a lot, I decided to persevere. By the end of the second chapter, things were getting better. By the end of the third, I was hooked and looking for every spare moment to finish the book.
The plot essentially runs like this. In the heart of the COVID pandemic with the unemployment rate sky high, Jamie gets recruited to work in a super-secret project despite not appearing to have any real qualifications or knowing what the job entails. He is then taken to an alternate earth where kaiju dominate the food chain. And he ultimately saves the day when lots of things go wrong.
Scalzi spends quite a bit of time on the sort of pseudo-science that only a lover of Godzilla movies could come up with. It’s technically “world building” but let’s face it, only someone who really cares about how a kaiju lives, mates, evolves, etc. is going to read this novel anyway, so all the geeky stuff is just wonderful. And it’s brought forth pretty seamlessly through Scalzi’s storytelling.
The plot was fun, but I think it is really experiencing the kaiju that makes this book work—and watching a bunch of geeky scientists study them like they were any other form of exotic wildlife. If I had one complaint, it’s that I never could get an image in my head about what the main kaiju of the story look like. I’m also not certain if there are tons of different kinds (Mothra, Rodan, etc.) in Scalzi’s world. I’m guessing there are, because that means there is a lot of room for a sequel.
https://www.amazon.com/Kaiju-Preservation-Society-John-Scalzi-ebook/dp/B0927B1P8L?ref_=ast_author_dp
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