Author: Brian J. Noggle

It’s been six months since I’ve read a Dilbert book. I don’t know if that’s a record or not; it’s just an excuse to link back to the previous Dilbert book I read.

So if you read that review, you know what I’ll say about it: The humor holds up over the intervening 13 years (since the book was published, not since May). You could still stick these on your cubicle wall. It’s not that hard to read and is a nice respite from longer works or for browsing while you watch a sporting event on television.

Although maybe the deeper meaning in the deeper meaning of Dilbert lies in the fact that these books, of which I own 8 (numbers 6-14 now, so I’ll try to remember if I go looking in book fairs for the rest) is that they’re amusing, they’re relevant, but they’re not really deep and resonant that I remember any of the real ongoing storylines. The characters sketched, yes, but the plots? Not so much. They’re more like the Executioner novels than other sorts of fiction, enjoyed as one consumes them, but only really for the time one is reading. Not that it’s a bad thing, mind you, but nothing more, ultimately.

After I read a science fiction paperback recently, I chose from shelves laden with thick important tomes another of the many thin genre paperback novels: this book. I had already read this book, some 20 years ago when I was in high school and when I’d borrowed the paperback from the Community Library in High Ridge (memory and logic serves that I borrowed it from the Community Library and not the high school library because I read a paperback, not a paperback in library binding).

The plot: A Federal Marshal goes to a mining colony on Io where miners are cinematographically killing themselves. Sean Connery, back when he had color to his hair, uncovers a drug ring run by the colony’s administrator, and has to deal with hired killers. An Amazon reviewer calls this High Noon in space, and I immediately tut-tutted it, but there is a countdown-to-the-killers element, but it’s not a direct transfer and there’s more to it than that, but the film certainly nods to the classic.

So it’s a good lightweight science fiction book. Wait, some aficionados would call this a Western in space (see above). But you know what? That’s what science fiction really was before Niven and the engineers took over the genre. Accessible, breezy, and commonly themed stories set in space that people could relate to without pulling out the slide rule.

I’m not above reading a book based on a videogame (see also The Dig). Heck, I’m not even above reading a novelization of a movie based on a video game (see also Street Fighter). So a science fiction novel set in the universe of a video game franchise? Why not?

The book doesn’t depend upon the knowledge of the video game series. It drops in some terminology that you’ll recognize if you’ve played the games, but it doesn’t rely on them. It’s fast-enough moving and original, unlike a film script, so between the pre-existing mythos upon which it draws and the fact that it doesn’t just run a series of scenes with depth make it a bit deeper of a book than a screenplay adaptation.

It fits into the game series, I discovered on Wikipedia, but I’m not sure I care how. They say that these detailed games are an art form in and of themselves, but I don’t think videogames can eclipse books/movies/stories, since in addition to requiring a media player (like movies and recorded music), it also requires enough patience and skill with a controller to get through the story. I have a theory that I’ve alluded to about the degrees of art, where primary art requires only the art work and the art lover (live theatre, live music, books, art works), the secondary requires the art work, a mechanism to recreate the art work, and the art lover (recorded music, movies, text on a screen). Video games requiring skill to advance the narrative represents a third degree, if possible, which diminishes their experience.

The author is a technical writer at Microsoft who apparently cranked the titles out in a matter of months. You know, I’d like to think I could do that, too, if I had full time paid work of it, but I could disappoint myself.

At any rate, I enjoyed the book so much that I looked for more by the author when I went to Hooked on Books last week, but I didn’t find any of the Halo books. I’ll keep an eye out in the future, though, because I’m running out of things to read.

I think I’ve talked myself into liking the book.

Which wasn’t a slam-dunk, I tell you. Its main character is a Christian formerly into S&M and drugs before his conversion experience. He’s enjoying a nice autumn afternoon with his wife and children in a Midwestern state when his girlfriend from his bad old days calls, and she needs his help. Since he’s got to go to New York City to tend to his mother’s estate, he stops into see the ex-girlfriend some 17 years after their thing and his old life ended. She tells him that his daughter he didn’t know about has run off, and she wants him to find her. When he does, the daughter is whacked out on drugs and bad living and might have seen a murder committed by her terrorist (maybe) boyfriend. And the main character, with much soul-searching, has to get her out and stop a catastrophic attack.

I’ll tell you why I didn’t care for it: For starters, it’s very slow to get rolling. Klavan uses some obvious foreshadowing where the narrator says that this or that particular incident or detail is going to be important. But the beginning of the novel includes an awful lot of navel gazing and exposition before the action takes over. Secondly, the story seems very contrived at the beginning, where the main character feels the need to see his ex-girlfriend after the elapsed time and he wonders why he’s helping her and whether he believes the girl is his daughter and he has to deal with his mother’s death and her descent into schizophrenia at the end and…. Well, it does go on so, and it passes several points where I personally would have abandoned it and the main character continues on only to continue the plot.

Secondly, it gets a little politically polemic at times, and even though it’s politically polemical in ways I agree with, it’s kind of jarring. Almost like an Ayn Rand novel with better dialog. Klavan’s not afraid to pitch this book specifically to the people who by 2008 were reading his blog and watching him on PJTV.

Third, the celebrities depicted within it are too apparently based on actual celebrities. There’s thin representations of Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie, and there’s William Shatner. It’s too obvious that these are the people in the book, thinly veiled, and instead of blending the novel into our world, it breaks up the novel’s internal reality.

However.

The main character is a bit Hamletish in his interior anguish over his decisions (in retrospect, as this double-effect narrator recounts things in the recent past). He’s worried about his descent into schizophrenia like his mother. He bears great, almost debilitating guilt for his former sins and whether his salvation will stick when he’s in his old milieu (and whether he really wants it to). So once I accepted that the narrator might be a little tetched and unreliable (not unlike the narrator of Slaughterhouse Five), I could get over those elements. Eventually, the action rolled and things happened and now the narrator was doing things instead of agonizing over things, and I could understand the interplay of his guilt and the questions of free will, salvation, and redemption presented within the novel.

So it’s okay. I didn’t abandon it like I abandoned the audiobook version of Chasing the Dime by Michael Connelly when I tried that on audiobook (the main character is doing that, why exactly? A phone call to his new number for the person who used to have it? REALLY?), and when I immediately finished it I wasn’t so keen on it, but I thought about it for a bit, and it’s an interesting enough book for me not to pan it.

This is a short book that collects some outrageous lawsuits and notes their results. They’re grouped by topic, and each features a clever picture of an actor portraying a shady lawyer. Each explanation of the lawsuit is a couple paragraphs. It’s like someone made a book of distilled “That’s Outrageous!” columns from Reader’s Digest and distilled them. It’s like Overlawyered.com condensed and with more snark.

In short, a quick browseable book suitable for sports viewing, but not likely to leave much impression on you once you’re done with it. If you’re like me.