A Vision of Fire by Gillian Anderson and Jeff Rovin

Published by Simon & Schuster on October 7, 2014

Like many other geekish guys, I had a thing for Gillian Anderson during her X-Files days -- or more precisely, for Scully, a woman of intellect and understated sexiness who easily made it onto my laminated list of Favorite Fantasies. I feared that her attempt to write fiction might produce another awful clone of Twilight, but as a committed Gillian groupie, I set aside my anxiety and took the literary plunge into A Vision of Fire.

After witnessing an assassination attempt on India’s ambassador to the UN, the ambassador’s daughter, Maanik Pawar, enters a disturbed mental state that includes periodic trancelike states, speaking what seems to be gibberish, and moving her arms in peculiar ways. Dr. Caitlin O’Hara is asked to assist. O’Hara is an adolescent psychiatrist who specializes in solving the problems of children around the world.

Meanwhile, in Tehran, a boy sets fire to himself. In Haiti, a girl is drowning without going near the water. Badly behaving birds and swarming rats also figure into the story. O’Hara’s task is to find the connection between the various events. Her willingness to fly off to Iran and Haiti to do so struck me as unlikely and foolish, but I was willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of Gillian Anderson.

The novel’s backdrop is an escalating military conflict between India and Pakistan. O’Hara’s hypersensitive friend, Benjamin Moss, not only persuades O’Hara to intervene with Maanik but is the first person contacted by a UN peacekeeper when hostilities break out. Those both seem like improbable roles for a UN translator to play -- he’s really in the novel to give O’Hara the opportunity for love or lust -- but again, I suspended by disbelief. (Oh, Gillian, the things you make me do ….)

The novel’s final element concerns the Group, which collects (or steals) artifacts from the southern polar seas. The artifacts come from the distant past, a time of crisis, and as one expects from artifacts in a novel like this, they hold power that endangers the present. That plot thread fizzles out until the end, when it returns to set up the sequel.

The plot of A Vision of Fire is reasonably smart. It has the feel of an average X-Files episode (I attribute that to Gillian). The writing style is smooth (I attribute that to Jeff Rovin). The love interest subplot seems forced but the political background gives the novel some heft. Unfortunately, the story is less suspenseful, less creepy, than I want from this kind of novel. Doing my best to remain uninfluenced by my swoony feelings for Gillian/Scully, I’m giving A Vision of Fire a modest recommendation. I don’t know if I would read the next book in the series without the Scully connection, but as a besotted fan, I’m sure I will.

RECOMMENDED

A Call to Duty by David Weber and Timothy Zahn

Published by Baen on October 7, 2014

The formula for military science fiction follows a predictable arc. The typical story tracks a young man or woman from recruitment to training to war to an ultimate act of heroism. A Call to Duty departs from the formula in some respects by glossing over recruitment and training and focusing instead on the impact of politics on the novel's protagonist. That twist on the formula makes A Call to Duty more interesting than conventional military sf.

Travis "Stickler" Long joins the Royal Manticoran Navy to put discipline into a life that has none. He is called "Stickler" because of his adamant insistence on following military rules. Much of the story's interest comes from the ethical dilemmas he encounters as his desire to obey rules conflicts with friendships and with the pragmatic need to carry out his duty when strict adherence to rules would hinder his ability to succeed.

When the story isn't following Travis, it focuses on the political conflict between Manticore's military and something that is more akin to a spacefaring Coast Guard, tasked with the protection and rescue of merchant ships close to home. Travis' half-brother, Gavin Winterfall, a minor Baron, is recruited by his political betters to support a project to convert old battleships into new, smaller corvettes that will be no longer belong to the Navy. This leads to a political competition that provides much of the story's meat.

The novel's other political element concerns a trade convention on the planet Haven, a leading supplier of military ships. Representatives of various worlds attend the meeting, including poor worlds that can't quite afford warships but still want to protect their merchant ships from piracy. Yet Haven has a hidden agenda, as do the people who want to crash the party so that they can steal a couple of Haven's ships.

A Call to Duty is plot-driven science fiction. It tells a good story while giving only modest attention to character development. That's a common and not particularly troubling problem -- a good story might be enough to ask for in genre fiction -- but the novel would have been better if the characters had been vested with more complex personalities. The last part of the novel is filled with the kind of action that characterizes military sf. It is a little too predictable but reasonably exciting. This is a better political novel than it is an action novel, but the two forms blend nicely.

RECOMMENDED

How the World Was: A California Childhood by Emmanuel Guibert

Published by First Second on July 15, 2014

This is an English translation of a work first published in French. Unlike a typical graphic novel that uses dialog balloons, How the World Was is more of an illustrated short story. Sometimes text appears in the same panel as an image; sometimes blocks of text take up panels or pages that alternate with panels or pages consisting only of images. Some of the images depict the scene described in the text while others add background. They tend to be studies in contrasts: quiet streets of the 1930s versus modern freeways, unspoiled nature versus the urbanization that replaced it. The pictures serve as pauses between the short blocks of text, creating the feel of a documentary.

The first person narration tells the childhood tale of a boy born in 1925 as he grew up in Southern California -- a simpler California than the one that exists today. His quiet memories are occasionally updated to let the reader know what happened to friends and relatives (mostly, they died "in poverty and in sorrow"). Some of the images are drawings of family photographs and in many ways, the story is the narration of a family album.

The story is told in a gentle, honest voice that accentuates its depth of feeling. Reading How the World Was is like listening to a beloved grandfather explain the joys and hardships of his family's life and his own awe of the ever-changing world. The narrator has learned to live with grief but the grief lives on in his memory. He cannot change the hard times -- that's how the world was -- but they have taught him to appreciate life. When he quotes Rodin's belief that artists experience pain as well as "the bitter joy of being able to comprehend and express it," Emmanuel Guibert is clearly talking about the effort he devoted to this volume. How the World Was is a surprisingly moving story and a remarkably effective feat of graphic storytelling.

RECOMMENDED

Personal by Lee Child

Published by Delacorte Press on September 2, 2014

I would put Personal in the bottom half of the stack of Reacher novels. Although it is far from the strongest entry in the series, it has merit. Fans of the series will find that Personal adds nothing significant to Reacher's character, but that would be difficult to do in a series that has run for nineteen novels.

John Kott, a man Reacher arrested as an MP sixteen years earlier, is one of a handful of suspects who may have taken a shot at the president of France. The British and Americans are worried that Kott (and/or other assassins) will try to kill the British Prime Minister and other world leaders during an EU meeting in London. Reacher is tasked with investigating Kott but his real mission is to act as bait. Accompanying him on his mission is a CIA liaison to the State Department named Casey Nice. Occasionally Reacher is helped or hindered by a British agent named Bennett.

The plot of Personal takes Reacher to France and England as he searches for Kott. In furtherance of that mission, he needs to figure out whether Kott has actually been hired as an assassin and, if so, where and how he will attempt to fire his next fatal shot. That quest allows Reacher to mix it up with some thugs in the English underworld, providing ample opportunity for the hand-to-hand fight scenes that Child writes so well. That plot, in itself, would be too easy, and so hidden agendas come into play that give the story some added intrigue, although they don't really materialize until the final chapter.

As always, Child's secondary characters are interesting and convincing. Still, an attempt to portray Nice as weak and potentially unreliable because of her dependence on anti-anxiety medication struck me as unnecessary and condescending. The novel tells a conventional story that is in most (but not all) respects predictable, but it is executed with the skill a reader would expect from Child. The story moves quickly and the questions that puzzle Reacher are answered cleverly. That's barely enough to earn a recommendation, but Personal left me wondering if Child is running out of gas.

RECOMMENDED

Ryder by Nick Pengelley

Published digitally by Alibi/Random House on September 30, 2014

Sir Evelyn Montagu has been murdered. The police turn to Montague's former lover, Ayesha Ryder, for help. A message in Arabic written in Montague's blood and translated by Ryder suggests that the killing had something to do with the Palestinian struggle for a homeland. Montague's mangled corpse stirs memories of Ryder's childhood in Gaza and the torture she endured. Given the bloody message and the fact that Montagu was a prominent Jewish intellectual, the police are inclined to blame Palestinian terrorists for his death. Ryder has her own theories but her investigation is impeded by the British government and nearly everyone else.

Ryder is a "conspiracy hidden by history" story. The conspiracy dates back to T.E. Lawrence and the early days of the Nazi rise to power. It builds upon existing conspiracy theories surrounding Lawrence's death. Lawrence has left behind an improbable coded message and even more improbably (and rather too easily), Ryder decodes it, setting the bulk of the story in motion. While the death of Lawrence conceals two events from the 1930s, Nick Pangelly delves farther into the past by adding the Knights Templar and the biblical Ark to the mix. Those aspects of the plot are puzzling as they add little to the story's development.

To solve the mystery, Ryder needs to follow a number of obscure clues that Lawrence planted -- so obscure, in fact, that I didn't buy Ryder's ability to solve them. Nor did I buy Ryder's repeated escapes from death. Those are common in modern thrillers but Ryder's escapes are too common. On the other hand, the story moves quickly and it always held my interest.

Ryder might not appeal to readers who have strong feelings about the politics of the Middle East. I think the novel takes an evenhanded approach, recognizing that both Palestinians and Israelis have a history of needless violence, but readers who are more passionate about politics than fiction might take a different view. In any event, I enjoy a good story even when I disagree with its political viewpoint, and Ryder tells a reasonably good story. Some of the novel's events are a bit farfetched and the ending is completely implausible, but farfetched plots are standard fare in modern thrillers. The story engaged me sufficiently to trigger my willingness to suspend my disbelief and to earn a modest recommendation.

RECOMMENDED