Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Sometimes, when you’ve seen the movie, you compare the novelization to the movie. However, I’ve not seen this movie. I did, however, have the activity/coloring book when I was much younger, so I do have a means of comparison, and at times this novel suffers in comparison.

Hey, I like Alan Dean Foster (see also Cyber Way, Midworld, Codgerspace, and even The Dig). I liked his novelization of the movie Outland, for crying out loud, which I read way, way back in the day.

This book runs about 200 pages, and the first 70 lead up to the docking with the mysterious space station. You see, the Palamino is a scientific discovery vehicle which comes across a 20-year lost space station-sized vessel, the Cygnus. Its expensive mission was similar to the Palomino‘s, but it was recalled to earth and never came back. Once the crew of the Palomino is aboard, things start to happen: they find that only one human remains, a meglomaniac scientist who wants to fall into the Black Hole to see what’s on the other side, and the Palomino just wants to go home.

Calamities occur, and the ending differs from the comic book and probably from the movie (from what I read on a fan site). This time, the book goes all Space Child and the movie has a better resolution.

So it ran a bit long in spots and probably didn’t do the film any justice, since the film probably relied on a lot of visual effects not carried over. I forgive Alan Dean Foster for the effort.

And I liked it so much that I’ve added it to my Amazon wish list along with another DVD of the same title that’s apparently set in St. Louis. In case any of you cheapskates has any money left over after donating to the Fred Thompson campaign through the widget in the sidebar to the right.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is the latest Spenser book. In it, Spenser gets tasked with finding out if a woman’s cheating on her husband; she is, and after Spenser reports to the husband, both the husband and wife are murdered. Spenser suspects he’s captured more than the infidelity on audiocassette, he’s determined to find out why.

Amazon reviewers give it a pretty good rating; Heather did not. I think it’s toward the lower half of the middle of the pack Spenser novels. Sometime in the middle 1980s, probably with Taming a Seahorse, Parker got very recursive with his Spenser novels. Suddenly, the plots are repeats or continuations of old cases, April Kyle, Paul Giacomin’s family, Gerry Broz, and whoever start cropping up with new problems, and the series folds on itself. This book, too, fits into that as events within the book are constantly referred back to A Catskill Eagle as motivation for Spenser, as if he needed more than the normal private eye impetus.

Aside from that, which I can sort of overlook, there’s a lot of background that’s not covered or only supplied as a prop. The main bad guy in this book is a violent radical out of the 1960s who uses violent means to fight the power. Which seems to mean Spenser, sort of, here. It’s a fairly stock now for the Spenser universe (see also Early Autumn, Looking for Rachel Wallace, Back Story). I mean, dang, I would love a little scam out of sheer greed.

But Dr. Parker’s getting up to 75 these days, so I guess I’ll take what I get.

Books mentioned in this review:

Unlike some, I haven’t read much Heinlein. As a matter of fact, as I review a list of his books on Wikipedia, I can’t say I’m sure I have read any, although some of the titles sound familiar from my middle school Del Rey paperbacks-in-library-binding days.

I can’t say that now, certainly, and I do have a couple more on the to-read shelves, so I’ll get my old school sci-fi thing going on.

This book, ca 1964, revolves around a nuclear conflict and a nuclear family plus a friend who duck and cover into the father’s bomb shelter when the bomb comes. The family has its problems, from a headstrong son with Oedipal issues to the hard-drinking suburban wife, but the confident and resourceful father holds the family together with the force of his will. A third nuclear strike on a military facility near the home sends the bomb shelter to another place or time.

So the first forty-eight percent of the book details the family’s survival in an unspoiled world, the next forty-eight percent of the book details what happens when the family discovers it’s 2000 years in the future, and four percent of the book at the end details a denouement or dedeusment of sorts.

The prose is lean and the plot is definitely event-driven, so I enjoyed it, but I guess one could knock it for thin characters. However, if you’re a growing lad, this is good science fiction to get you in the mood for the release of Star Wars in fifteen years.

So it’s not as hard science as Niven, but it’s not as dense as some of the stuff of his I’ve read, and it’s not 500 pages either.

Books mentioned in this review:

In January, I read Dr. Kookie, You’re Right!, so I guess you can take it to heart that I’ve read another one of his books this year. I mean, I won’t even mention both names in a sentence, but this guy probably would think he’s like Royko, but he ain’t.

This book collects a number of Royko’s columns from the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune. When the Daily News folded, he went to the Sun-Times; when Murdoch bought the Sun-Times, Royko went, breach of contract and all, to the Chicago Tribune. He didn’t like Murdoch and he didn’t like Reagan, but I still can enjoy Royko’s columns.

Maybe it’s because he came from a different era, although the columns that talk about Reagan trend toward the snotty. Perhaps it’s the selections of his columns that ensure that the more universal or the less context-centric column inches make it into the book, but I think Royko hearkens back to an era where the political wasn’t personal, and where you could get together with people on the other side of the political divide for beers after the day was done. Besides, he excoriated Daley I, Bilandic, and Byrne as mayors, so he’s proven he’s not a Democratic party lapdog. I think he’d have mocked the netroots and maybe even Hillary Clinton (mostly because he’d be an Obama man, but still).

Royko’s collection of 30 year old columns are worth reading just to give you perspective about how little things change. He talks about hipsters on the lakefront, the sort of people who a generation later sport iPods and Starbucks cups. He gets a Bronco to cope with the Chicago winter and deals with the fuel-mileage conscious people who drive the little Japanese imports of the era. Oddly enough, the unchanging nature of these picadillos gives me hope, because I sometimes wonder if our lifetimes will run as smoothly (in retrospect) as theirs did. If the problems and whatnot are simply ongoing and are not cataclysmic as they seem to someone living through them the first time, maybe so, maybe so.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is what one would expect. Culled from a larger work (Encyclopedia of Hoaxes), this book presents a Reader’s Digest kind of sumamry of a selection of hoaxes from history. It is what it is, which is shorter and more whitespaced than an actual Reader’s Digest anthology, but worth a couple bits if you can find it cheaply.

I don’t know that I gleaned any real new knowledge from this, but it certainly reinforced some trivia I knew. Well, maybe the story of Dupont’s painting will make it into a historical essay one day.

Books mentioned in this review:

When I imagined this book report, I was going to make some cracks about how Mr. du Toit once called me a wanker, way back in the old days. I thought perhaps I would make a comment about how polite the book reports are when you know that the author is better armed than you are. But a funny thing happened on the way to that facile line celebrating my own cleverness: I liked the book too much to fall into the normal patter.

The man has an admitted fetish for Thomas Hardy, and it’s easy to see the influence of the English writer and the sweep and scope of old literature in this book, and as it clocks in at 300 pages of modern English, it’s a better read.

It’s set in 1890ish Vienna and deals with a lawyer-turned-artist who has it all: a beautiful fiancee, a promising career, and all the trappings of youth and wealth. But he’s not happy because he’s an artist at heart, an existentialist one who sees beneath the veneer of bourgeous sentiments to the rotting core of humanity. So he loses the job, loses the fiancee, and pursues a detached, unreachable woman. He then ascends to a cartoonist career, gets the girl, and throws it all away.

I have a lot of sympathy for the character, but he’s a complete cad who wastes what he’s given and then wastes what he earns. He’s got a sort of intellectual hubris common of artists and intellectuals: that he and a few others can see the true meaning of the human condition, which is squalor. Whereas some of the insight into the artifice of interhuman contact is correct, ultimately it sees beyond to nothingness which doesn’t offer a much better alternative.

So I liked the book, and I am considering buying du Toit’s other book, Family Fortunes as well.

Books mentioned in this review:

Vienna Days