Book Review: The Jupiter Plague

 

 

© 1982 by Harry Harrison

Minor spoilers for this 43-year-old SF thriller …

 

This is the second of my four-book haul this Halloween, a haul designed for some quick, distractionary reading as a counterpoint to The Three Musketeers and other epics I put away this year. It clocked in at 283 pages, a bit long but the typeface was slightly larger than normal. It was probably of a similar wordcount to my prior read, The Other Side of Time.

 

I picked it up more for the author than for the story (though the story did intrigue me) – Harry Harrison, a science fiction master whose pedigree stretches from 1951 to 2010. And like the author of my prior read, Keith Laumer, the centennial of his birth passed too earlier this year.

 

Never read much of Harrison. I do recall as a youngster seeing his name adorn many a hardcover spine whilst perusing the library’s science fiction shelves. The “Stainless Steel Rat” and “Bill the Galactic Hero” were names I did not know then but now know them as the typical Harrisonian protagonist – unlikely, anti-traditional, satirical, a middle-finger to Joseph Campbell and all those heroes on their heroic journeys – but most of all, comedic. Before I leave physical existence on this sphere I’d like to read the origin novels of the Rat and Bill; they go on my bucket list immediately.

 

However, I did read a trio of his works 10-15 years ago: Planet of the Damned, Deathworld, and its numerical sequel, Deathworld 2. Good reads but overall unremarkable; I think I ‘graded’ them all B’s, which – spoiler alert – I also ‘graded’ The Jupiter Plague.

 

But what of this Plague? I hear your exclamatory inquiries. That’s the word that tickled my ear. Since we’re all victims to a greater or lesser extent of a recent – ahem – plague, I wondered if it was too soon to read a science fiction tale about a deadly contagion. Truth be told, it wasn’t, for this one descends upon mankind not from the laboratory of a foreign competitor but from another world: Jupiter.

 

Published in 1982 but based on an earlier 1965 story, the setting appears to be the New York tri-state area around the year 2000. A weird blend of the area I grew up with rockets and spacepads thrown in. A lot of action takes place in my old stomping grounds – just across the Hudson River in New Jersey along Route 9. Most of the story, though, is centered in New York City, between the two poles of Kennedy Airport and Bellevue Hospital.

 

A mission to Jupiter returns after a long absence crashing into a runway at JFK. Our hero, Dr. Sam Bertolli, is the first on scene and helps the sole survivor out the hatch before the man seals the metal door behind him and dies. Sam is an ex-soldier turned medic, still technically an intern despite his age. The man he rescues, however temporarily, was the commander of the mission and his face is covered with bursting read pustules.

 

Sam, along with a beautiful bacteriologist who arrives shortly after, are placed in quarantine, but the disease – named Rand-alpha – soon escapes. It’s a fast-acting bug, killing victims within twelve hours of contact. Sam and the beautiful doctor, Nita, remain uninfected due to medical precaution, but the disease spreads through the population. In fact, it soon mutates into Rand-beta, affecting birds, and Rand-gamma, affecting canines. The army shows up to enforce a containment perimeter, and as society trapped within the 100-mile circle breaks down the race is on for Sam and Nita to find a cure before the tri-state area is nuked.

 

All this was by-the-book for me, but I didn’t see where the novel was heading. Ask yourself: why did the commander seal the ship shut? Hmm. Answer: because the cure is inside the ship, along with something that could make the plague a hundred times worse. And what this is … is, a real, live, breathing Jupiterian. How they found it, where they found it, and why the plague is unleashed is the subject of the final quarter of the novel, and made it worthwhile. In a sentence, the Jupiterians live on a giant ice rock in the planet’s upper atmosphere and harness energy like moray eels – bioelectric – but a failure in the communication of the two species leads to the unleashing of the plague as a sort of defense mechanism.

 

Bottom line, it was a quick, neat read. Like my prior read, no earths were shattered of paradigms shifted. But it beat watching a four-hour TV series on Netflix.

 

Grade: solid B.

 

N.B. Two other fun facts regarding Harry Harrison: 1) his 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! supplied the general plot for the Charlton Heston 1973 SF movie Soylent Green, and 2) the man taught himself Esperanto while bored by his duties as an Army Air Force officer in World War II and often incorporated it in his novels.

Book Review: The Other Side of Time

  

© 1965 by Keith Laumer

Minor spoilers for a sixty-year-old pulpy SF paperback …

 

Bought this at Halloween mostly for its short page length – 171 pages. And true to this objective, I did finish it in four hours, albeit over the course of five days. Anyway, a blessed relief from the long slogs I’ve been doing this reading year. The quick and fun distraction. I likened it to watching a two-part made-for-TV show.

 

Though I never read Laumer before, the experience hearkened back to my golden age SF reading (that is, the devotion I showed the field as a tween). The gnarled yellowed pages, the campy 70s cover, the pleasant finely-aged aroma of the binding. All that was missing was a library check-out card on the inside of the back cover. Best of all, though not earth-shattering or life-changing, it took my mind off my troubles for a few hours. Oh the joy of reading a 60-year-old SF paperback!

 

First, who was Keith Laumer? We just passed the centennial of his birth back in June. Part of the Greatest Generation, he served his country in the Army Air Force in World War II, went to college, and re-enlisted and later worked in the diplomatic corps. In fact, his enduring character Retief, his “James Bond” character, was a galactic diplomat and the protagonist of more than a handful of short story collections and stand-alone novels. Back in the day when I fancied myself an up-and-coming SF author, I did pickup his 1963 Envoy to New Worlds and may have read a short story or two; unfortunately they have slipped the bonds of my memory.

 

Dog not too happy to have his nap interrupted to become 

an unwilling participant in this book review

The Other Side of Time takes place in an alternate reality universe where technology exists to move between differing worldlines forward or back through the threadstream of time. Our hero is also a diplomat (and possibly a secret agent) but is not Retief; this character is a man name of Colonel Brion Bayard of similar aristocratic bent. Our protagonist narrates the tale of being taken in to HQ for a possible mission and – after an explosion of sorts and spotting a fiery man coming toward him – awakens to find his city of Stockholm completely devoid of inhabitants.

 

Thus into the timestream to unravel the mystery. He encounters invading cannibalistic ape creatures, is captured, befriends and escapes with a more intelligent ape name of Dzok who is also, coincidentally, a diplomat and possibly a secret agent. The two form an uneasy alliance to discover and later trick the nefarious genocidal baddies behind Earth’s potential demise and set things right.

 

The best thing about the novel, though, the one that will probably keep it from fading into obscurity for me, is the ending. I love a Big Reveal at an ending. And it is simply this: the final word of the novel reveals the identity of these cannibalistic ape-like creatures, called the Hagroon, who are bent on eliminating mankind. They are tricked in the final chapter and are exiled unwittingly, without their technology, dozens of thousands of years deep back into Earth’s prehistory. Speculating whatever became of these lost-to-history villains, the scientist tells our hero that “they were safely marooned there in the age of mammoths and ice. And there they left their bones, which our modern archaeologists have found and called Neanderthal …”

 

Grade: Solid B.

Book Review: Run Silent, Run Deep

 

© 1955 by Commander Edward L. Beach

 

Contains spoilers for a 70-year-old novel …

 

I bought this on a whim a half-dozen years ago – and it spent a half-dozen long unearned years in the On-Deck Circle, surviving the Great Book Triage of 2021 before the move down to Texas. And good thing, too, because I finally got around to reading it – also on a whim – and must say I enjoyed it thoroughly.

 

During the early phases of the Wu Flu, when uncertainty was running rampant and the grocery store shelves lay in a state of depletion I never experienced in my fifty years, when fear descended upon the land and it felt like the worst might come true, during that period I needed to take my mind off it all. I wanted to dive headfirst into something completely unrelated to Daily Life in March 2020. Something meaty, something that could consume me, something challenging but also something that ultimately had a good ending. I needed a good ending in March of 2020. Since I enjoyed my previous dives into military history, I decided a deep dive into World War II could take my mind off the current End of the World. After all, WW2 was a legitimate end of the world for large swaths of the globe, especially Europe. And most survived, because the human spirit rose to the occasion.

 

So in addition to buying all sort of “bird’s-eye” and “ground level” books on World War II, I also bought fiction written about the time period. Over time I picked up The Winds of War, The Thin Red Line, and The Naked and the Dead. I also purchased Run Silent, Run Deep. But, for some reason I can’t pinpoint, I never did read World War II fiction during this time period.

 

Regardless, that’s how it came into my possession, and just now I read and enjoyed it. The cover boasts a quote line from the Dallas News: “THE BEST SUBMARINE YARN EVER WRITTEN.” I admit this intrigued me. Having just re-read Tom Clancy, and all his “submarine yarns” a year ago, I wanted to see how it added up. So much of Clancy’s books contain scenes in and about submarines I felt like a vicarious brevet submariner. I opened this book and couldn’t put it down; I read its 337 dense pages in eight days … maybe six hours of reading spread out around Halloween.

 

The main characters are Rich, a sub captain, and Jim, his executive officer. In the days just before Pearl Harbor Jim is on a test mission to earn his captain stripes, but overreacts and Rich has to flunk him, causing quite a bit of friction. Then the Japanese sneak attack, then missions right up to the waters off the coast of Tokyo. There’s a Japanese destroyer nicknamed “Bungo Pete” that sunk Rich’s prior boat and nearly sends our heroes to their doom. Some more action and Rich gets his leg broken and must recuperate back at Hawaii, while Jim – facing a shortage of sub commanders, is promoted and actually does a fine job hunting and sinking Japanese ships.

 

Rich is put to work on solving a realistic problem early in the war: the ineffectiveness of American torpedoes. Then, Jim’s sub – Rich’s old command – goes missing and is presumed sunk. Rich gets a new command and sets out to end “Bungo Pete” and get vengeance for his old friend and his old crew.

 

The summary does not do the novel justice. There are many mini-vignettes that show life about a sub in both normal and stress situations. It’s very Clancy-like in conveying how blind subs are and the need to rely on sonar, timing, mathematical equations to get the torpedo to the enemy before he gets one to you, and the imperative to get into your opponent’s mind. How “Bungo Pete” knows the names of the vessels he sinks (bags of garbage the subs release when surfacing are later retrieved by Japanese fishing boats who bring them to the destroyer where the trash is sifted through for intelligence), how he knows what a US sub captain will do with uncanny perception (Pete’s an ex-Japanese sub commander himself, too old to command but old enough to serve Imperial Japan’s defense), how Jim will finally get his vengeance; all factor into this well-told tale.

 

The novel has all the other requisites this old dog likes. Written in the 1950s, there is no post-modern claptrap, no deconstruction, no multiculturalism, no kumbaya. The Japanese are referred to on a handle of occasions with slurs common at the time. This was an existential crises, and the Imperial Japanese forces were just as cruel as the Nazis. Though Commander Beach writes interpersonal dialogue well enough (about just as good as Clancy did), the woman do seem a little shallow and stereotypical, but one does not pick up Run Silent, Run Deep for the romantic shore leave episodes.

 

A random piece of trivia I learned is this:

This geologic formation is known as Lot’s Wife. It stands 325 feet above the surface of the northwest Pacific waters and was discovered in 1788 by an English merchant vessel. In World War II the giant crag was used to indicate the start of Japanese waters and to calibrate instrumentation. For if you follow Lot’s Wife directly north (slightly off by a degree or two) for 5,700 miles you wind up in Tokyo Bay.

 

Anyway, how does Rich resolve the “Bungo Pete” challenge? Knowing he’s up against an old sub vet, he tricks and gets the drop on him, resulting in the destroyer’s sinking. But that’s a temporary solution. He sees three lifeboats, each with two dozen men, and … war being hell, realizes he has no choice but to ride down each lifeboat, for the old sub vet could be in any one of them, and if the old man lives, more American lives will be lost down the road. It was brutal, and it takes it’s toll on Rich. However, our hero gets some redemption in a fourth act rescue of some downed US pilots, and is able to live with himself and his actions.

 

Overall, I give it a solid A. Good book for historical aficionados, good book for Tom Clancy fans. Jack Ryan would’ve read this book in high school.