Slightly Off the Mark

So, here's why I haven't read many books so far this year: Because I've read fifteen volumes of Schlock Mercenary, a web comic turned graphic novel. Did I like it? Well, I'm on my fifteenth volume, so there you go.

In the very first strip Schlock joins, as you might expect, a group of space mercenaries called Tagon's Toughs. To paraphrase the old A-Team opening, if you've got the money--and if you can find them--you can hire Captain Kaff Tagon's army-for profit. But you won't have any trouble finding them, because they leave disaster in their wake.

Meanwhile, the rest of Tagon's Toughs range from humans, to aliens of every type, to Earth animals who gained sentience. The company's biggest antagonists are also its biggest allies: Artificial Intelligences running ships and worlds, which communicate through avatars that mostly look like humans (although one resembles a super-cute koala).

Writer and artist Howard Taylor covers modern problems ranging from politicians to nanobots, using parody, satire, and just plain laugh-out-loud humor to deal with a violent universe that's always on the edge of blowing up--sometimes literally.

Taylor himself admits to being weak on the artistic side when he first started out. But the art gets better, and the writing is on the money right from the get-go. He happily tackles just about every science fiction concept ever invented, hard and soft, and as the series goes on the challenges and players get bigger and bigger. Taylor's not afraid to kill off characters, and those that eventually come back do so in a convincing way--or at least, a way that may be possible in the future. It's clear the author has a good grasp on technology, even if he happily strays from known science for a story or a laugh.

Meanwhile--and this might be the most surprising part of Schlock Mercenary--Taylor gives us relatable, engaging characters along with the well-plotted stories. As the scale gets bigger and bigger, the characters change and grow and, as mentioned earlier, the art gets better.

Check out the strip or order the books here:

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/

You can click on "Schlock Mercenary Begins", which will take you to a redone version of the first strip, and below that is a link to the original strip. Did I mention the art gets better? It does.

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 Remember: Reading keeps you from turning into a big pile of poo.

 Five teens who otherwise have little in common bond over a shared tragedy: Five years earlier a steel mill exploded in Splendor, Ohio, leaving the surviving townspeople grieving.

Now Franny and her brother Arthur join Sofia, Remy, Levi, and Nick in filming a mockumentary web series they call "Ghost Hunters". It's all for fun and distraction--until they witness the crash of a disk-shaped object that engulfs them in light ... and gives them supernatural powers.

Soon they're being chased by the government, threatened by the recluse accused of causing the steel mill accident, and discovering their unusual abilities are anything but a gift. Their attempts to solve the mystery and escape detection make up the plot, but the heart of the story is with the teens, as they try to deal with their grief and sense of loss from an all too natural tragedy.

 Emily Henry's 2019 novel manages to balance the two, giving us real characters adjusting to an unreal situation that may include Franny being possessed by an alien. There's plenty of action and some twists I didn't see coming, but I was most impressed with Henry's ability to portray her damaged teenage characters. I noticed there was a high school activity book related to the novel, so it appears I wasn't the only one struck by her grasp of story and characters.

It's certainly worth giving Emily Henry's other books a look.

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Remember, authors who don't get enough reviews often get abducted by published aliens.

 When a novel begins with the total destruction of Earth and everyone on it ... where do you go from there?

In God's Bolt, Ron Forsythe goes to the only survivor: scientist Helen Southcote. Alone on a United Nations sponsored space station, she has to witness the asteroid impact that destroys the world, and live with the knowledge that she's the only survivor.

She doesn't handle it well.

Helen's only companion is an Artificial Intelligence running the station that she doesn't really like, and her only comfort the knowledge that the search for intelligence elsewhere, her life's obsession, was successful: There is life out in the rest of the galaxy. Unfortunately, it's so far away that it's no hope of rescue, and unlikely to even know of the Earth's destruction.

 https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Bolt-Ron-Forsythe-ebook/dp/B07QB9CFJL

For the rest of the novel Forsythe flashes back to Helen's life, the creation of the space station's A.I., and the discovery of the massive asteroid that sneaks up on Earth, along with efforts to divert it. At the same time we follow Helen's recovery from despair. She's seen her friends and family all die, and is now stranded on a space station that can never land. The best she can hope for is to survive, alone, and watch the world burn beneath her.

Not the most upbeat life in the world. Still, God's Bolt is fascinating in the same way so many disaster stories are, even if the "Who will live?" question seems settled right from the beginning. The writing can be repetitive at times, especially when it comes to Helen's breakdown and the fight against the asteroid--I couldn't help thinking it wasn't necessary to say it was huge so many times, for instance. But it was an interesting, optimistic, look at what the world could be in a century and a half or so. Interesting enough that I was sad to see it go!

Helen is the main viewpoint character in God's Bolt, and I found her well rounded, especially as we get to follow her through her life and dedication to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. That's a subject I assumed was an unnecessary side story, but just about everything is tied up at the end.

I also found the efforts to stop the disaster, complete with infighting in the world's government and the rise of a doomsday cult, to be fascinating, even knowing their efforts would ultimately fail. All in all a fun read, or at least as fun as planetary Armageddon can be.

By the way, improbably ... there's a sequel.

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This one is a bit odd for me, considering The Flying Girl was published all the way back in 1911. Still, it came highly recommended, and I found it easier to read than a lot of other writing at the time was.

It's also far more feminist than you'd imagine, at least for its time. The Flying Girl tells the story of Orissa Kane, a 17-year-old in California who's holding down a job to support her blind mother and her brother, an inventor who's working on his own flying machine. To say airplanes were still new at the time puts it mildly; in fact, the author gives credit for help on the book from Glenn C Curtis, a founder of the U.S. aircraft industry and winner of the first international air meet, and Wilbur Wright, who with his brother did something even more spectacular just eight years before publication.

Orissa's brother Steve is a genius in mechanical design, but the Kane family finds itself in the middle of a dispute with two former business partners, who want to invest in the Kane airplane for different reasons. Here Van Dyne cleverly describes one partner in heroic terms and the other like one might describe a silent movie villain--then flips the script.

Oh, no, surely not a girl. How indecent!

To say the book's approach to a female protagonist was advanced for the time is putting it mildly. Orissa Kane jumps into the role of airplane pilot fearlessly, and meets all the many challenges that come along with it. Yes, there's a boy, and Orissa never loses her "maidenly virtues", but she's also competent and way braver than I would have been.

But what would you expect, from the same author who invented Dorothy Gale and Ozma of Oz?

Because Edith Van Dyne was really L. Frank Baum, who wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels. That shouldn't come as a surprise for those who read the Oz books, which were full of strong, smart, competent female characters. (And it's how The Flying Girl came into my reading orbit. I've been reading up on Baum as I prepared to tackle writing my own Oz book.)

By today's standards The Flying Girl would be considered a young adult book, and it also works pretty well, a century later, as an historical novel. In context it's surprisingly advanced not only in its treatment of women, but in its technical aspects--it turns out Baum, who wrote science fiction and invented an early robot and miniature submarines, had an interest in the mechanical.

There's a sequel, The Flying Girl and Her Chum, and I liked this one enough to look forward to trying the second one.

 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53386/53386-h/53386-h.htm

 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1929527241

 My science fiction short story, "Everybody Knows Your Name", is available to read on the East Of the Web website:

http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/EverKnow1183.shtml

It's about a scientist whose invention doesn't cause the problems most people think of ... instead, he finds an entirely new worry.

Remarkably, it only took about a week from the time they accepted this story until it came out. My last published short story took four months from acceptance to publication! But in that case there was also a print version of the magazine, while East Of the Web is e-pub only.

Let me know if you like it! Don't let me know if you don't like it. Yeah, I can take it, but I don't want to.

Military pilot True Brighton was forced out of her job when robotic flying machines made human pilots obsolete. Now she's a member of Requisite Operations, a private military company; as The Last Good man opens, her team is plotting an operation to rescue hostages in the lawless Mideast.

But during the operation, True learns one of the terrorists may have a connection to her son--who was tortured and murdered for all the world to see, after a failed military operation several years before.

Linda Nagata is one of the masters of near-future science fiction, and in The Last Good Man she shows us a world so close to ours that in a few more years it might not be fiction at all. Dominated by robotics, paranoia becomes real when flying machines or spies the size of bugs can be watching your every move. It's the future of war, and the warriors are beginning to wonder if their future is to be overwhelmed by mechanized weapons.

The Last Good Man starts slowly, as the characters meticulously plan out their opening operation. In that way it's much like a John Grisham or Michael Crichton novel, rich in details that set your firmly into the story's universe. Some readers might not like that, and the first few chapters did drag a little, a few times. But no detail is unimportant, and once the mission starts the book barrels forward like a runaway train.

True Brighton makes discoveries that bring the horror of her son's death back to her, and soon she finds herself at odds with her own team and family, as she investigates a crime that might be much more than anyone thought. All the time she navigates through a paranoid world of constant surveillance, from machines that were once in the roll of spies, but are being weaponized--sometimes without human supervision.

In the end it's a complex and powerful tale. Why Linda Nagata (who was my instructor in a science fiction writing course, back when that stuff was done by U.S. Mail) isn't a bigger name in the writing world is beyond me.

I had a dream this morning (possibly fueled by pain medication) that led me to an idea for a novel, kind of a science fiction mix of Lord of the Flies and the TV show Lost. Then I realized it could be turned into a book series. 

That would be about the thirtieth idea I’ve had for stories that could be turned into a series. Even if I won the lottery and started writing 80 hours a week right now, I’d die of old age before I could get to book 2 of most of them.