Book Review: Double Star

© 1956 by Robert Heinlein

The Show Must Go On.

Even in an overpopulated, Machiavellian solar system a couple hundred years in the future.

Larry Smith, a.k.a. Lorenzo Smythe, the “Great Lorenzo”, is the greatest ac-tor of his generation. Despite – or maybe because of – a Boothian ego, our boastful protagonist finds himself in a space cantina, drinking his unemployment woes away. Then, a chance meeting, an offer of quick, easy work … but only if Smythe will meet his new acquaintance at a shady hotel. Near penniless (“Imperial-less” more accurate, love that word “Imperial” to denote the local coinage), he does, and is nearly killed.

But not before accepting the gig: impersonating an up-and-coming mover-and-shaker in solar system politics, John Joseph Bonforte. A mélange of Newt Gingrich and JFK with a dash of Don Corleone tossed in, leader of the “Expansionist” Party advocating free trade, open borders, and universal suffrage (for the Martians, tree-like malodorous entities with tentacles and a unique vocal style who live in massive underground hives), Bonforte has been kidnapped leaving his compatriots in the lurch. All the great man’s life work will go to waste if he is not present in 48 hours to accept “Martian citizenship” from those tree-like malodorous beings. Locking up Mars is essential to the upcoming election.

So, a ruse is necessary. Smythe must give the performance of his life imitating Bonforte in a secretive ceremony before a completely alien high council.

Oh, and give a few speeches, spar with the press, hold a face-to-face with the Emperor (an intimate of Bonforte), deal with a sabotage-minded underling and dodge the various attempts on his life.

At a Spartan 128 pages, this novel moved. Not surprisingly as Heinlein is an undisputed member of the Triad of Golden Age SF Masters. Everything I’ve said about truly good books in past reviews applies here: lifelike characters and situations real-er than your cubicle existence, danger and intrigue that keeps the pages a-turnin’, a vision of the future so compelling that a part of you wishes you were there. Great, great stuff from a great writer. Oh, and it’s a quick, lean and mean read. I finished it in about three hours over three days.

Two things stood out to me as I burned through it. One, the character of the main character. Initially I did not like him. Foppish, vain, egotistical, it’s an understatement to say he had little appeal to me in the opening pages. But something strange and wonderful happened. I grew to like him. Like him a lot. By the wonderful twists at the end of the book, one you’ll guess and one you won’t see coming, he had become one of the most endearing characters to me I’ve read (admittedly, a fairly large group). I wanted him to succeed, to do the right things, and I enjoyed every second of learning vicariously his craft.

Two, the political situation.

Handling politics in a science fiction novel can be tricky. Reason is, everything is more or less made up, and it’s a fine line between beguiling the reader and confusing the heck out of him. Eon, recently reviewed here, is a case where I found myself on the latter part of that line. Heinlein unfolded the political situation – and this really is a political tale, adorned with SF tropes – in a way that reeled me in and kept me fully aware of how high the stakes were.

Both these points further reinforce, to me, the mastery of Heinlein the writer.

Grade: Solid A.

Book Review: The Colour of Magic

© 1983 by Terry Pratchett

Despite flourishing during the prime time of my youth, I only really became aware of the whole “Discworld” phenomenon after Terry Pratchett’s death eight months ago at age 66. Wanting to do for fantasy what Blazing Saddles did for Westerns, Pratchett began a string of 41 irreverent, amusing, and oftentimes off-the-wall novels over a span of 32 years. The first book, The Colour of Magic, had an initial printing of 500 copies. Twenty years later Pratchett was the bestselling UK author of all time, to be surpassed only by J. K. Rowling.

With a pedigree like that, I had to investigate.

Problem is, over the past eight months I couldn’t find any of his works in any of the used book stores I prowl about. This signals to me that the owners of such books wish not to part with them. Which means they’re that good. (Another author who wrote novels so good that you never find them in used books stores is Philip K. Dick. Everything of his I read is bought new off the shelf.)

Then, out of the blue, I stumbled across a copy of The Colour of Magic at my local hometown library, browsing the shelves while the battery in my Honda Pilot was being replaced at the gas station across the street. I seized it possessively, brought it home and bumped it up to the On-Deck Circle of my reading list.

I burned through it in four days around Halloween. It wasn’t that I couldn’t put it down (had to, ’cuz I was in the thick of getting my own book onto Amazon), it’s just that every time I picked it up I’d blow through thirty or forty pages in joyful enrapturement.

The setting of the Discworld series is, well, a disk, hundreds or thousands of miles across, supported on the backs of four massive elephants, supported on the back of an even more massive turtle, free-floating through the universe.

Yes, it’s that kind of tale.

Through four meandering vignettes we follow the misadventures of a cowardly wizard named Rincewind, and in so doing Pratchett pokes playful fun at Tolkien, Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard (he of Conan the Barbarian literary fame of the pulpy 1930s). Besides Rincewind, the hapless, bumbling, somehow endearing Bizarro-world Gandalf, we encounter:

Dragons of varying degrees of reality, water trolls, barbarians, wood nymphs, a Cthulhu-like malevolent deity, a sapient piece of luggage, a brief segue into the alternate reality of the 1980s (aboard an airplane), an eighth color (“the colour of magic”), and a spaceship flung off the edge of Discworld tasked to discover the sex of Great A’Tuin, the turtle on Whom the world rests. Clocks and cameras appear, powered by little imps. Death personified, the dude in the black cape with the scythe, is a major character, always an inch away from claiming Rincewind, and speaking in a unique typeset way quite pleasing to this logophile.

Rincewind the wizard 

contemplating a model of Discworld

It’s funny and witty and downright bizarre. Every page contains a double-take, a gibe, jest, or joke. Occasionally I’d laugh out loud. Disconcertingly, I found I’d often have to re-read paragraphs, having detected a pun flown clear over my head. One-liners as well as page-long jokes unfold with regularity.

Though the purist in me balked at the lack of structure, noble purpose, and having beloved fantasy tropes tweaked, the emerging iconoclast in me relished the trip. It does to fantasy what The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy does to science fiction.

One down, forty to go …

Oncewhere Walked the Whale: Amazon

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