A Few Words for the Dead by Guy Adams

Published digitally by Ebury (Random House) on April 9, 2015

A Few Words for the Dead is sort of like an old episode of The Avengers with August Shining playing the role of John Steed (although, alas, there is no leather-clad Mrs. Peel to titillate the reader's imagination). Steed was always tracking down evil scientists whose gadgetry produced vaguely supernatural threats to society. Shining does the same except the supernatural basis of the threats is less vague. The novel is part of Guy Adams' "The Clown Service" series.

August Shining is a spy, employed by Section 37 of the British secret service. Shortly after the novel starts, his superiors interrogate him about a mission in Berlin thirty years earlier. An agent that Shining recruited, Lucas Robie, had stopped communicating. Shining's boss sent him to Berlin to investigate. Shining had recruited Robie because he had a "special ability," something beyond charm, that made others want to please him. As the novel moves forward, Shining tells the story of his trip to Berlin and his investigation of a mysterious killer that isn't quite human.

While Shining tells his story, his sister April is dealing with problems of her own while agents who work for August are selectively murdered. An assassin (known by the unimaginative name "the Assassin") is also out to get August. At least August isn't living a dull life. Rounding out the cast are a Section 37 agent named Toby and his voodoo-wielding wife Tamar, who occasionally show up to battle a wind demon.

A few chapters before the end, August concludes his story from the past, allowing the past and present plot threads to coalesce. From the beginning to the end, the story speeds along without wasting words. Like an old episode of The Avengers, it delivers fun without depth. This isn't the kind of story that demands depth so I don't have a problem with its absence.

The evil force that plagues Shining is a standard evil force of unexplained origin. I can't say that the evil force or the wind demon excited me. Shining and April are such strong characters that they could carry a conventional spy novel, but Guy Adams apparently likes to mix genres. If elements of supernatural horror are what Adams wants, villains of a more surprising nature would elevate the story. On the other hand, A Few Words for the Dead grew on me as I continued to read it and the intricate ending is pleasantly unexpected.

RECOMMENDED

Writers of the Future vol. 31, edited by David Farland

Published by Galaxy Press on May 4, 2015

If these are the writers of the future, I'll stick to the writers of the past. The stories are chosen from the "L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future" contest. David Farland, who judges the contest, calls them "gleaming and flawless." I'd call most of them "not quite ready to be published."

One of the few highlights in this volume is Auston Habershaw's "A Revolutionary's Guide to Practical Conjuration." It tells an engaging story about the lessons learned by a young man who endeavors to improve a dark world by mastering a book of magic that is also a magical book.

"Switch" by Steve Pantazis is a direct-link-between-mind-and-internet story about a cop who investigates a homicide. The killer took a drug called Switch that slows the perception of time, enhancing the ability to react quickly. The cop uses it too, which is the only interesting thing about the cop. The story is full of clichéd ideas and it drags on too long before leading to a predictable climax.

"The God Whisperer" by Daniel J. Davis is an amusing but half-formed story about a guy who enlists the help of a "god trainer" to help him cope with an egocentric god of war and strife who lives in his back yard. Set in a future Vietnam, Tim Napper's "Twelve Minutes to Viet Quang" would be an excellent first chapter about a heroine who stands up to an oppressive society, but it is insubstantial as a stand-alone story.

Childbirth, childcare, and the blossoming (or not) of womanhood are the focus of "Stars that Make Dark Heaven Light" by Sharon Joss. The theme of socially mandated copulation has been done before, and better, although the female who must copulate has gills, which unevolved humans might regard as a turn-off. Some of the story, about bonding with brainy alien bugs that other colonists view as a threat, is mildly interesting, but too much of the story consists of starry-eyed romantic musings that fans of romance fiction might find more appealing than I did. The ending is just cheesy.

Krystal Claxton's "Planar Ghosts" is a post-apocalyptic story. A character named Pup has a friend named Ghost who is invisible to others but "faintly purple" to Pup. Maybe Ghost isn't really a ghost but the explanation of Ghost's existence is, like the rest of the story, contrived. As an adventure story, it isn't bad, but it could have been better.

"Between Screens" by Zach Chapman has a young nerdy guy skipping around the universe with the hot girl who gives him his first kiss. If you aren't a young nerdy guy who has fantasies about getting laid by a hot girl, you can skip this story without missing anything. "Half Past" by Samantha Murray tells of a girl who must leave her imaginary friends, except they aren't imaginary since they were created by magic during moments of intense emotion. It isn't my kind of story but it does take a surprisingly clever twist. If you like stories like this, it isn't a bad one.

Martin L. Shoemaker's "Unrefined" is an undistinguished "who sabotaged my nuclear reactor?" story, which might have made for a good plot if the story hadn't gone in a completely different and tragically dull direction. "Purposes Made for Alien Minds" by Scott R. Parkin is written in sentences of exactly five words. Gimmick gets old really fast.

"The Graver" by Amy M. Hughes is about people who absorb memories of the dead. That's a concept I've seen before. The story isn't bad until it buries its drama in a lot of silliness about releasing a dead person's soul. Kary English's "Poseidon's Eyes" is a mundane story about spirits that failed to hold my interest.

Mental health counseling for people who do strange things under stress (like turning into smoke, becoming invisible, or increasing in mass and weight) is the subject of Michael T. Banker's "Wisteria Melancholy". Had it been played for laughs, this could have been a great story, but the author took the subject matter more seriously than I did.

L. Ron Hubbard is too dead to be considered a writer of the future but the volume includes a story and an essay about art that he wrote when he was still alive. I guess that's because his name is on the cover. Larry Niven, Orson Scott Card, and Kevin J. Anderson are not dead, but a Card essay and stories by Niven and Anderson (Anderson's is co-written with his wife) are also featured here for reasons I cannot imagine, unless the intent is to give the volume a sense of professionalism by adding writers of the past. Each story has an illustration and there's an article about illustrators of the future and another on "the direction of art" that both seem to serve as page-fillers.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Chaplain's War by Brad R. Torgerson

Published by Baen on October 7, 2014

"Humans are superior to all alien life forms because, gosh darn it, we're human" was a popular theme of 1950s science fiction. It has gradually given way to a more sophisticated view in modern sf (except for movies that imagine aliens as lizard invaders), but The Chaplain's War is a throwback to the days when a belief in human superiority was steadfast.

In the 22nd century, alien mantes (plural of mantis) rule Purgatory and have imprisoned the humans who tried to invade it. The invasion was retaliatory, following strikes against human worlds by the mantes, but was in retrospect unwise. The mantes feel a need to wipe out competitive life forms as they expand their colonization of habitable planets. Their new expansion will move through all planets colonized by humans until it reaches Earth. Sucks to be human!

But wait, since humans are superior (if technologically inferior), perhaps humanity can yet be saved. A mantis called "the professor" wants to learn about belief in God from a chaplain's assistant before the mantes wipe out the remaining human life on Purgatory, where they have imprisoned human POWs for no clear reason. The chaplain's assistant, Harrison Barlow, is nondenominational and not particularly religious, having been pressed into the role as a military assignment. At the request of the chaplain, who conveniently dies, Barlow builds a chapel on Purgatory but plays no secular role, other than explaining God to the alien professor.

There are some clever moments in The Chaplain's War. Most of them occur early in the novel. For example, some members of Barlow's congregation, believing in an angry, judgmental, Old Testament God, reason that the mantes are God's true children, dispatched on a holy mission to wipe out the sinful human race. That conclusion is not rooted in logic, given that the mantes do not accept the existence of God, but logic rarely informs religious belief.

Much less interesting are the obligatory scenes of recruitment and training that are standard fare in military sf, presented here in unnecessary flashbacks that add needless length to the novel. The flashbacks only become interesting when Barlow is trained to be a chaplain's assistant in a war zone. That, at least, is fresh.

The flashbacks eventually catch up to the present, in which the chaplain's assistant is taking a nonviolent, peacemaking approach to the war by trying to persuade the mantes of human worth. Every now and then he points out how humans are, in fact, superior to mantes. "We're better than you so you should see things our way" is not one of the better negotiating tools in the diplomat's briefcase but perhaps the mantes will agree with Barrow and stop slaughtering humans. You'll need to read the novel to find out.

The novel preaches the need to respect people's right to hold religious beliefs that are not our own, a position with which I firmly agree even if the novel's message is delivered without subtlety. More subtle is a pro-Christian, anti-Muslim bias which, fortunately, makes only a rare appearance. I was less enthralled with the assistant's sense of morality ("no, I will not have sex with the hot naked woman who just crawled into my sleeping bag because we are not in love") which seems like another throwback to the 1950s.

Cheesy sentences like "I flattened to the deck as weapons belched instant death over my head" will win no literary awards but, for the most part, the quality of Brad Torgersen's writing is reasonable. While The Chaplain's War gives a new twist to an old story, too much of the novel is an unimaginative regurgitation of stale scenes from countless military sf novels. This might have worked better as a short story or as a tight short novel.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter

First published in 1962; published digitally by Open Road Media on April 28, 2015

Labor unrest or a nascent revolution has gripped Veracruz. To avoid it, as well as a smallpox epidemic and approaching hurricanes, foreign travelers scramble to board a German ship that is docked in the Veracruz port. The passengers are a mix of Germans and non-Germans. The voyage takes place in the early 1930s.

Ship of Fools is aptly named. Taking a trip with nearly any of the passengers would be a voyage to Hell. They each hold the belief that their language and place of birth make them superior to people born in other countries. Apart from their nationalism, they carry an assortment of religious and racial prejudices. They moralize and condemn. They gossip endlessly. They argue (or bicker) about love and politics and religion. They are easily offended by opinions they do not share. They are hypocrites and betrayers. The men are misogynistic and most of the women are self-indulgent schemers. The ship is a microcosm of humanity with nearly all the good people omitted.

Christian passengers hate the lone Jewish passenger as well as the man who is traveling to Germany to rescue his Jewish wife. The Jewish passenger despises the fact that a Jewish woman would marry outside her faith. Non-Catholics hate Catholics. Germans hate Spaniards. The old despise the young. Women look down upon other women, particularly the Spanish countess who has been exiled from Cuba and given passage as a prisoner (much to the delight of the captain and a doctor who attends to her ether addiction). Revolutionary students and Spanish dancers stuck in steerage seem to be the only passengers who are capable of having a good time, probably because they do not spend their time judging others or worrying about how others are judging them.

Nothing in the novel approaches a plot but the character studies are flawless. Petty characters bicker about the people with whom they must share quarters and dinner tables. They form alliances and enemies. All of this is entertaining and, thanks to Katherine Anne Porter's elegant prose, easy to read. In the end, however, it becomes wearing to take such a long journey with so many fools. No particular character carries the novel. No major character is given more prominence than any other. A young American (Jenny) and her unmarried partner (David) are the least offensive characters and, for a time, it seems that their disintegrating relationship will give the novel some focus, but their story is buried amidst all the others. The development of so many characters is masterful but it leaves the story without a center.

A few of the characters change or grow during the course of the novel although most are just as foolish at the end as they were at the start. That is a reflection of reality -- one ship's voyage is unlikely to undo the prejudices that have built over a lifetime -- but that reality gives the novel a static feel. Perhaps Ship of Fools is just too long and too detailed to achieve the simple beauty and power of Porter's shorter works. It is nevertheless full of small moments that make the journey worth taking.

RECOMMENDED

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie

Published by Random House on September 8, 2015

Two years, eight months and 28 nights is one thousand nights and one night. Blending magic and myth, science fiction and fantasy, superhero comic books and classic literature, Salman Rushdie tells us the story of the Two Worlds' War from the perspective of a narrator who lives in a better time, about a thousand and one years from now. The story begins, however, in the distant past.

Dunia, also known as the Lightning Princess, is a jinni. In the twelfth century, Dunia took a human lover named Ibn Rushd, a philosopher-writer-storyteller. She has a thing for philosophers, having also known Aristotle and Plato, but she fell in love with Rushd.

As a philosopher, Rushd is not entirely successful. He considers himself defeated by the philosopher Ghazili, who died before Rushd was born. Ghazili jeered at philosophy because, to his mind, logic and reason have no role in a Universe that is ruled by God's will. Rushd believes in logic and science and even in God but not in religion because "the godly are God's worst advocates." Challenging accepted interpretations of the Qu'ran has caused some trouble for Rushd (including book-burnings and exile) until a Caliph deems him "rehabilitated." Salman Rushdie is plainly having some fun using Rushd as his alter-ego. Rushdie's concerns with religious intolerance (as well as other forms of intolerance) resurface frequently in the story.

Rushd is not good to Dunia or his family. The bastard children he ignores eventually have progeny who disperse to all corners of the globe, including North America, where the story resumes 800 years later. The story sometimes circles back to Rushd who, experiencing a post-death epiphany, enlists Dunia's help to "reunite their scattered family and help it right the coming world cataclysm." It is that quest that animates the book's plot. Dunia's task includes avenging treachery by dark princes of the jinn while fending off a jinn invasion (easier than it sounds, since many jinn are too lazy or horny to bother making the journey through the wormhole).

Dunia's descendants are mostly notable for the absence of earlobes until Dunia awakens their powers. Key characters include Geronimo Manezes (a gardener who is afflicted with a worsening case of levitation, a condition he equates with "a previously unknown virus: a gravity bug"); a baby who exposes corrupt politicians; Teresa Saca, a young woman who electrocutes men with lighting from her fingertips; and Jinendra "Jimmy" Kapoor, a young artist who seems to bring his Indian superhero to life before learning that a "dark jinni" has been unleashed on the world.

The stories that Scheherazade told taught lessons. I'm not sure that Rushdie's updated version teaches lessons so much as it satirizes the lessons that others teach. Rushdie lampoons philosophy and its "more tedious cousin" theology, particularly the notions that "only fear will move sinful Man towards God" and the countervailing view that "with the passage of time human beings will turn from faith to reason, in spite of all the inadequacies of the rational mind." Perhaps one lesson to take from the novel is Rushdie's observation that modern life moves so quickly that we have forgotten the pleasure of lingering (and no longer have the attention spans that slowly unfolding pleasures command). Another might lie in a character's realization that the illusion of reality is preferable to a known fantasy. And another is that using fear (of government or God) to control behavior is bound to lead to oppression. And another: "rage destroys the enraged." Of course, the virtue of tolerance and of preserving free thought by separating church and state is always a good lesson.

If the lessons are a bit heavy-handed, if some of Rusdie's targets are easy, that seems a natural product of satire. While satire is fun, it also makes the story seem less substantial. My only other quarrel with Two Years is that some moments in the story are a bit too silly, but those moments are few.

Well into the novel, a character from the future explains that "to tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present" and "to recount a fantasy" is to recount "a tale about the actual." Stories from the past, including myths, help us explore how we got there from here. I'm not sure Rushdie's novel accomplishes those goals, but the story is entertaining and, not surprisingly, it is enlivened by Rushdie's rich prose.

RECOMMENDED