Happy New Year 2026!

 

May all my visitors here have a safe, happy, healthy, wealthy, and, most importantly, holy 2026. 

I have a good vibe concerning this upcoming year!

The 2025 Best-Ofs!

 

Shhhh … hear that? … listen … it’s getting louder … Yes! … I can hear it now! The noise, the cheering, here it comes … louder … Louder … LOUDER … LOUDER!!! It’s here! It’s here! Tens and tens and tens of people worldwide – all right, ten people worldwide … Cheering! Roaring!! Celebrating!!! It’s here! It’s here!!

 

IT’S HERE!!!

 

THE 2025 HOPPER BEST-OFS!

 

Yes, my annual tradition of the best and worst of all the literature, movies, TV, phases, and experiences Hopper has undergone in the past twelve months. All for your edification. Books and films to experience and enjoy – and those to avoid at all costs.

 

Now, without further ado, here they are –

 

 

Best Book:

   Nonfiction – My Effin’ Life (2023) by Geddy Lee

   Fiction / Re-reads – Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville, Conquerors from the Darkness (1965) by Robert Silverberg, Space Skimmer (1972) by David Gerrold

   Fiction / First-time – The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) by John Le Carré

   Notable Mention – The Seventh Scroll (1995) by Wilbur Smith. [This was an insane read and deserves its own blog post … perhaps in early January … trust me on this.]

 

 

Worst Book:

    Iceberg (1975) by Clive Cussler (all the embarrassments of 1970s culture)

   Stephen King’s It (1986) reread was slightly disappointing

 

 

Bucket Lists:

   As mentioned above, I read through Moby Dick for the third time – I dunno, it just gets better and better every time I read it. Also put away Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and The Confessions of St. Augustine.

 

 

Best Film:

   Horror/Science Fiction/Action – Frankenstein (2025) directed by Guillermo del Toro. What cinematography! What props! Plus an intelligent, human ending to tug at heartstrings.

   Comedy (alleged) – Friendship (2024). Truly and delightfully bizarre … but don’t watch with the wife.

   So many runner-ups – A Man Called Ove (2015 – the Swedish version, not the Tom Hanks remake), Good Boy (2025 horror flick with a dog as the main character), The Dark Divide (2020, midlife crisis meets bigfoot), Nobody (2021, old man John Wick), Being There (1979), Abigail (2024), House (1977 campy Japanese horror flick seen with Patch)

 

 

Most Disappointing Film:

    Dream Scenario (2023, where everyone on the planet dreams of a bald, frumpy Nicolas Cage)

   The Woman in the Yard (2025, where you watch a premise get wasted after a promising 20 minutes)

 

 

Best TV:

   Again, not a big TV year for me. I did enjoy the first season of Ash vs. the Evil Dead.

 

 

Worst TV:  

   The Lazarus Project – everything I hate in modern writing, and I mean everything. Identity politics, wokeism, vulgarity. Wife made me sit through first episode; you couldn’t pay me enough to sit through another one.

 

Personal Accomplishments:

   Losing 18 pounds the first five months of the year (but, unfortunately, gaining 10 pounds back at the time of writing).

   Shaking the dust off my electric guitar and shaving the rust off my fingers with something like 30 hours of serious practice.

   Assembling my daughter’s college bunkbed with her roommate’s dad, plus assembling two bookcases and an ergonomic chair on my own.

   Six trips to the confessional.

   Grew my record collection by 19 to 63 total.

   Met not one but two Little One boyfriends (and behaved myself the whole time).

 

 

Phases:

   Sugar-Free January 1st to May 20th

   UFO literature revisited (read 8 books in November and December)

   The Lindbergh baby kidnapping case – deep dive for one week middle of October

   Return to SF pulp paperbacks (read 9, gave up on the 10th – Asimov’s Foundation)

   Diary of St Faustina six-month reading journey

   Hell House LLC quadrilogy watched with Patch for Movie Nights in September and October

 

Favorite Phase:

   No, don’t make me choose!

 

 

Best Podcast / YouTube channel:

   Andrew Wilson debates. Discovered him in August and probably have watched twenty hours of him debating feminists, communists, transvestites, islamists, you name it, mostly in 1v1 debates but also Andrew versus a whole panel of opposition. He’s a little crude and rough around the edges, doesn’t bar any holds, and may be an acquired taste, but it’s a fun way to get the adrenaline flowing when your job involves generating reports and spreadsheets and more reports and more spreadsheets.

 

Song of the Year:

   Most anything from The Essential Frank Sinatra with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. I find it relaxing on the nerves, especially after all them YouTube debates.

 

Workout Tally:

   37 weightlifting sessions

   68 miles walked

   Not nearly as well, physical-health-wise, as 2024, where I lifted 46 times and walked 20 miles more. I am a few pounds heavier, but what’s more concerning is a worsening lack of flexibility. For 2026 I would love to get in 100 workouts next year – with deep stretching before and after – plus around 150 miles walked. I recognize that this is highly optimistic.

 

Reading Tally:

   43 books / 18 fiction, 25 non-fiction (if you count 5 UFO books as “non-fiction”)

   Re-read the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, Genesis, and Revelation

   Abandoned 8 books anywhere from 30 pages to 431 pages in

   Re-read 8 books, not counting the Bible books above, mostly science fiction from my youth

 

Proudest Moments:

   Seeing Little One posing in her first class teacher picture after six months of student teaching. Also watching her grow independent with her own car, an off-campus apartment (with her two bffs), and a serious relationship.

 

   Patch with her first retail job managing a woman’s clothing boutique, getting her permit and taking her out driving a dozen times on the way to getting that driver’s license, and being accepted into all four colleges she applied to.

 

2025 was a decent year. Had better, had worse. I enjoyed most of it, albeit with a hint of sadness as the little ones are now young adults and are starting to forge their way through life, more and more independent of their parents. Next year Patch will be leaving us for college for extended periods of time (she’ll be way out of state) and that will bring new challenges. And there may be a new pet in the near future. We’ll see.

Book Review: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

 

 

© 1963 by John Le Carre

 

This novel was a bucket list accomplishment for me, and, to be honest, an act of courage.

 

My mother-in-law, well-read in the genres of mystery, espionage, and New York Times best-seller lists, is a huge Le Carré fan and has been recommending him to me right from day one, almost thirty years ago. I knew Le Carré as an intellectual master builder of intricate plots, shadowy characterizations, and don’t-look-behind-the-curtain all-is-not-as-it-seems scenarios. Cat-and-mouse who-can-you-trust and who-can’t-you-trust. Twists and turns, third act revelations that will drop the jaw agape in wonder. A parsimonious writer who only deals out to the reader clues that seem senseless to what is shown unfolding. A storyteller who crafts a tale backwards but tells it in a deceptively straightforward way.

 

In lieu of all this, I was intimidated.

 

Sometime fifteen or twenty years ago I decided that the water’d be fine to jump right in. And being Hopper with an overly large ego and inflated sense of comprehension, I started with Le Carré’s masterpiece: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. And immediately got lost fifty or sixty pages in. Could be life with a newborn in a new house; could be the surgeries I had around that time. Or it could be I was just not ready for it. I put it away, sold it to a used book store, and vowed I would return at some later point in life; hence, the bucket list.

 

My mother-in-law sent me some money for my birthday back in September and this rekindled the interest. I decided to start off where the Internet pretty much unanimously tells Le Carré newbies to start off with – The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. And I fearfully kept it on my shelf until, quite on a whim and after three exhausting literary false-starts, read in in a week in mid-December.

 

My daughter’s kitten Sweet Potato stretching out with my 

copy of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

If I were to encapsulate the plot in a short paragraph, it’d be something like this: world-weary MI-6 intelligence officer Alec Leamas, fresh off losing a double-agent escaping at the checkpoint at the Berlin Wall, is recruited for one last mission – one last strike against the red menace before being allowed to “come in from the cold.” He’s to play a defector, be picked up and brought into East Germany, where he would lay the groundwork to eliminate London’s nemesis, a brutal genius named Mundt. Leamas plans to do this by lies and suggestions in his debriefing. But things escalate and swerve out of control, as things like these tend to do, and however cautious our hero is, mistakes are made – or are they? Not everything is as it seems, and third act revelations abound, culminating in a finale Mundt-like and brutal in its concision.

 

I was able to follow the novel, the allegiances, and the surprises, and enjoyed it immensely. That weekend I went to a local library and found a 1990 Le Carré book, The Secret Pilgrim, on sale for a dollar. But Le Carre is meant to be read in some kind of order, if only to stay as spoiler-free as possible as the author references earlier plots in later books. So I was planning to buy some prequels to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold with any Christmas money. But the Mrs. beat me to it and wrapped Le Carré’s first and second novels, A Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962) and placed them under the tree. I’m currently reading a SF paperback (my last from my pre-holiday haul a few weeks ago), and will crack Call for the Dead come January.

 

And after that, George Smiley, in Le Carré’s masterpiece, the “Karla” trilogy:

   Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)

   The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)

   Smiley’s People (1979)

 

“Grade” for The Spy Who Came in From the Cold – A-plus. Probably the best first-time fiction I read this year.

Christmas 2025

 

Well, our fifth Christmas down in Texas has come and passed. And to celebrate, Texas delivered summer for us. Yes, temps hovered around 80, blessing us with a minor sun’s anvil. I walked my route around the ponds both days, in t-shirt and shorts, and each time I finished I felt like I had mowed the lawn, ran a 10K, lifted weights with a young Arnold on Venice Beach and gyrated to the “Flash Dance” song while welding two metal boards together. It was unseasonably hot.

 

But it did not dampen our Christmas. Fortunately, down here AC systems are no joking matter, and we kept the indoor climate a frosty 68.

 

That was really the only negative, though. We went to Christmas Eve’s midnight mass at our local parish, with Little One’s boyfriend joining us for the first time. He’s a Christian but not a Catholic, so this was a legit trial by fire for him, and he handled it well. By the time all was done, however, we didn’t get to bed by 2 am (or 3 am, in some cases), so Christmas Day didn’t commence until 11 am the next morning.

 

It was a leisurely day of opening gifts, snacking, drinking, and eating leftovers. The Mrs. made a pot roast for dinner, complimented with Little One’s carrots and feta cheese dip. Patch was recovering from sickness, so we kept her away from cooking duties. We watched – and good-heartedly mocked – a Hallmark flick while Little One visited her bf’s family in the evening. Then I read a bit and went to bed just after midnight.

 

So I know you’re all wondering – what did Santa bring the Hopper?

 

Well, as always, Santa did good by me.

 

The Mrs. bought me two John Le Carré books. Le Carré is my newest literary obsession, having read The Spy Who Came in From the Cold last week. Haven’t “reviewed” it yet, but I’ll get there. The books she bought me were the two that precede TSWCIFTC. You should read Le Carré in order, as later books reference early ones, and you want to journey through them as spoiler-free as possible. She also gifted me some socks and skin care, which my old epidermis is in dire need of, plus a gift card to my local used book store.

Patch continued her passion for gifting me records – the 62nd and 63rd in my collection: Two Schubert albums, Symphony No. 5 in Bb, Symphony No. 8 in Bm (“Unfinished”) and the Quintet in A, better known as the “Trout.” And Little One bought me … an ergonomic comfy chair for my desk, having seen the pathetic metal folding chair – with a small blanket cushion – I’d been using for the past couple of years. So no more achy back. A practical gift, one of the best types of presents.

... Not shown - my new ergonomic chair! ...

I, whose love language is definitely NOT gift giving, lucked out. Everyone seemed to like what I gave them. I bought the wife a hockey puck – with tickets to a Dallas Stars game on the other side. She’s turned into a manic hockey fan, and enjoys the games exponentially more than I do. They’re playing the Bruins at the end of January, and she hates Boston. I got Patch Steven King’s Carrie (a favorite she’s been looking for forever but Texas doesn’t seem to stock) and an Ulta gift card; and Little One a flexible jar opener (an inside joke, useful now that she lives in her own apartment) and a PetCo gift card, to take care of her new kitten over there.

My boss got us all squishy blankets, so I regifted that for my dog Charlie; he’s a connoisseur of anything blanket-y, the softer the better. Candles and gift certificates and gift cards from parents both north and east of us rounded out the holiday haul.

I’m off for the next three days – my gift to myself – and then I work Monday and Tuesday of next week, followed by New Year’s Eve and Day off. I plan a post on my resolution as well as a post mortem on 2024’s resolution for 2025. Oh, and the 2025 Best Ofs! Don’t forget that annual festivity!

Hope you all had a very Merry Christmas!

More to follow!

 

Merry Christmas Eve!

 

Going to midnight mass in a few hours with the Mrs, the girls, and Little One’s boyfriend. Then, blessed sleep after a hurried busyness of holiday tasks. Tomorrow we’ll get up when we get up, have some coffee and tea and cake, and leisurely open up the gifts that somehow popped up under the Christmas tree this afternoon.

 

May the peace of Christ be with you all!

 

Foundation Failure

 

Well, I failed in my third attempt to make it through Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Guess it just wasn’t meant to be.

 

The book is regarded as a classic; though, to be honest, I am not entirely sure why. But it isn’t the first “classic” I haven’t been able to read. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad comes immediately to mind. Read it twice – once way back in high school and again around 2011 or 2012. Neither time did I “get it”, neither time was I bowled over in the presence of a masterpiece. It did absolutely nothing to me or for me, much to my displeasure.

 

There are lesser books that I wouldn’t label as “classic” which I tried to read several times but just couldn’t complete. Books that may not mean anything to you, but at one point or another (probably when first taking it off a bookstore shelf and walking to the cashier) I considered it a potentially intriguing or perhaps life-changing read. Books such as The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and My Big TOE by Thomas Campbell. By the way, TOE is an acronym for ‘Theory of Everything,’ and in this book it involves everything from mediation to reality to physics to transcendence.

 

Speaking of physics, I’ve tried Roger Penrose’s Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics a couple of times. Despite an intuition that Penrose might hold the key to what everything is made of (in light of the relative failure of string theory), I have never made it more than 80 or so pages in until brain ache occurs. This silly topic of the building blocks of matter fascinated me to no end since a young lad. I went so far as three semesters in Seton Hall in a quest to find such answers for myself many, many years ago. Ergo, the book still sits on my bookshelf (actually, in my closet for some reason, along with that marked-up Einstein biography). It will be cracked open again at some point.

 

Surprisingly, Dickens has given me a hard time with, well, er, Hard Times. Also, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Both books I’ve tried and both books I’ve failed. Dunno. Like the Penrose physics books, I will conquer them in the near future.

 

So why did my third go-round with Foundation fall through? It wasn’t the old “everyone in the future talks like a 1940s Brooklyn Jew” that nagged me in my other Asimovian re-reads. I think it was simply that I found the story … forgive me … dull and boring. There were no stakes. There were no compelling characters. The futuristic science of “psycho-history” was not adequately explained, even with Star Trek: The Next Generation mumbo jumbo. And while I am by no means a literary feminist, the fact that the only female character in the first 120 pages was a secretary with no lines just didn’t sit well.

 

It’s sad to me that a great hero of my youth did not translate to my later adulthood. I loved Asimov as a kid. That Christmas gift five-paperback pack I write about often – The Bicentennial Man, Nine Tomorrows, The Caves of Steel, Pebble in the Sky, and The Gods Themselves – along with I, Robot to help sooth a young boy with a broken arm, and Fantastic Voyage the same young boy bought in the Bookmobile, these books formed me and gave me hours of reading pleasure, moreso than any author in my youth. Will I read any more Asimov in this lifetime? Probably not. But I will enjoy those fond, nostalgic memories.

 

Used Book Archaeology

 

So I am finally getting to Asimov’s classic 1951 Foundation paperback that I picked up a few weeks ago. Throughout my early childhood I read at least seven of his works.* He was easily my main introduction to science fiction. Didn’t get to Foundation until sometime in the late 80s, and got about a quarter of the way through it before more pressing concerns took my attention (my band, night school, girlfriend, alcohol, etc.). I tried it again during the Wu Flu but only made it a few chapters. Not sure why; but again, more pressing concerns were on my mind at that time.

 

Anyway, I opened the book and this fell out:

 

A receipt from November 15, 1975! Half a century old!

 

It appears to have originated from a place called the Sierra Book Shop in South Lake Tahoe, California. I googled for a few minutes and the place (or a place with the exact same name) could still be in business. I also found that someone who possibly owned it retired in 1980 (maybe sold the business?) so perhaps it since exists under new management. My purpose of the all this was to find a picture of the place to post here, but couldn’t find anything definitive online.

 

The forever mysterious customer bought four books – one for $7.00 and three for $1.25. The Foundation novel has a price on the front cover of $1.25 – which converts to $7.55 in 2025 dollars. Sounds about right. I also see that the tax on the $10.75 purchase was $0.65, or six percent. Now google tells me the sales tax in Lake Tahoe is 8.75 percent, a 46 percent increase over 50 years. Honestly, I thought it’d be more.

 

I truly wonder what the other three books bought were, especially that $7.00 one. That bad boy would sell for $42 today.

 

* Those seven Asimov paperbacks were: The Bicentennial Man, Nine Tomorrows, The Gods Themselves, Pebble in the Sky, The Caves of Steel, I Robot, and the novelization of the movie Fantastic Voyage. I read them all several times between 10 and 12 and loved every minute of it.

Book Review: Pirates of Venus

 

© 1934 by Edgar Rice Burroughs

 

This was a completely random find perusing a new semi-local bookstore two weeks back. More importantly, this book has a little history with me. I vividly remember reading this in paperback form in the late 70s. My father was a high school football defensive coordinator, and young nerd me was devouring this olden-time story one fall in the late 70s on the practice field, on the sidelines, in the school weight room, under the bleachers. Fond memories from long ago.

 

Now, I did not remember the plot at all. Being an Edgar Rice Burroughs story (1875-1950, author of numerous series of novels starring Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, hollow-earth Pellucidar, among others), the story is a basic rags-to-riches jungle adventure that could take place anywhere in the Solar System of Burrough’s mind (and time). This one featured an Earthling hero named Carson Napier and unfolds on Venus, with warring tribes, naval battles, piracy, giant monsters, princesses, and swashbuckling swordplay taking center stage.

 

But this is not why I remembered Pirates of Venus. This must have been the first story – having read it way before Tolkien – where a new language is a prominent feature. Well, not exactly prominent per se as one finds it in The Lord of the Rings, but Napier drops some Venusian vocabulary and grammar rules here and there, and it’s these that stuck with me over 45 years:

 

As we battled futilely to disengage ourselves, the klangan settled to the ground, each pair upon opposite sides of the victim they had snared. Thus they held us so that we were helpless, as two cowboys hold a roped steer, while the fifth angan approached us with drawn sword and disarmed us. (Perhaps I should explain that angan is singular, klangan plural, plurals of Amtorian words being formed by prefixing kloo to words commencing with a consonant and kl to those commencing with a vowel.)

   (page 92 of my Ace science fiction paperback

 

There is so much in a name. I had liked the name of the Sofal from the first. Perhaps it was the psychology of that name that suggested the career upon which I was now launched. It means killer. The verb meaning kill is fal. The prefix so has the same value of the suffix er in English; so sofal means killer. Vong is the Amtorian word for defend; therefore, Sovong, the name of our first prize, means defender; but the Sovong had not lived up to her name.

   (page 135 of my Ace science fiction paperback)

 

And tidbits such as these are what called out to me over half a century; this tree trunk appendage of neurons and neurolinguistic programming remained in place all that time for me to recall it and overwhelm me with a cascade of sublime nostalgia.

 

Overall, I ‘grade’ Pirates of Venus a B-minus. Probably thought it was an A back when I was a young’n, but time is too short to spend on such tales as an adult. A smorgasbord of ERB should definitely be fed to tween boys in perpetuity; and a whole rash of newly-hatched science fiction authors will emerge …

 

Notes:

1) “Amtor” is the name the Venusian give to Venus. Napier fights for the nation of “Vepajan” in the novel.

2) I found a different Amtor novel about 13 or 14 years ago and started to read it, but the damn thing disappeared on me, vanished without a trace, and thus permanently remained unread. To this day, I still think a toddler living in the house with me named Patch had something to do with the theft. 

Book Review: In the Ocean of Night

 

© 1972 / 1987 by Gregory Benford

 

Here’s a little short reaction to the Gregory Benford science fiction novel In the Ocean of Night. Benford is a legitimate PhD’d astrophysicist who’s been putting out science fiction novels and short stories for over a half a century. He’s been nominated for a couple of Hugo Awards and won a Nebula (the Oscars of science fiction literature). He specializes in speculative hard science fiction. Science fiction that one could plausibly consider reality in a couple of decades.

 

Now you might think this author would be a gold mine for a passionate reader with a physics background like me. But, truth is, I only read one other of his novels, If the Stars are Gods, a collaboration with Gordon Eklund, and that was nearly a quarter-century ago. Benford has written or collaborated on something like 30 or 35 novels and has produced something like twice that in terms of short stories and novellas. Why I haven’t explored his works in depth I will get to in a moment.

 

I picked up In the Ocean of Night during my Halloween haul specifically because it was written by Benford. The summary on the back cover is quite vague. It describes the futuristic world of 2018 in shades of triumph and tragedy: technological wonders such as lunar colonies and cybernetic advancements and despair in the forms of pollution and famine. Then – “far beyond the shores of space, there comes a mystery as vast as the limitless sea of stars, as beckoning as the unending depths of space.” You need to buy the book if you want to find out more, which I did on both counts.

 

It was a good read. Didn’t like the main character, a rock-the-boat English astronaut, but enjoyed the reveal: not one, not two, but three alien space probes which enter the solar system and which our protagonist makes contact with. Some involved, some haphazard, some monumental, some hushed up by the government. The science was quite intriguing and well done and made up for any shortcomings in the characterizations and the liberal authorial bias that crept through here and there. Oh, and best of all, an infamous north American cryptid makes a cameo at the end.

 

There’s stuff in the book I really liked. The ingredients were all there, and the dish I wound up eating was satisfactory, but I’m not sure if I’d leave a 5-star Yelp review. I don’t regret reading it; I savored my journey through its 321 pages. I fact, I plan on exploring more of Benford’s work. I kinda remember similar feelings after reading If the Stars are Gods back in 2001. Perhaps I’ll check out his award-winning novel or, better yet, another of his collaborations.

 

Grade: Solid B.

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.

 

Hopper's Day Out

 

At the beginning of the month I still had seven days of PTO left. These are of a “use or lose” variety, so I requested some random Wednesdays and Fridays. Today was the first. And since I was all by myself (well, the dog shadowed me all morning while I did my laundry), I decided to jump in the car and drive the 40 minutes northwest to Denton, Texas. We’d been there last four years ago touring the University of North Texas with Little One, and while there, after a late lunch, we spotted a huge used bookstore where I was able to browse and pick up a few things of interest.

 

It was time to return.

Downtown Denton

 

So I motored on out and spent an hour in the store. A vast quantity and quality of used books, CDs, DVDs, records, games, video games, and other collectible memorabilia. Heaven, in other words. Here’s what I scored:

 

Three records –

 

Florida Suite / Dance Rhapsody No. 2 / Over the Hills and Far Away – composed by Frederick Delius and conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham.

 

Holiday Symphony – composed by Charles Ives and conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

 

Der Freischutz – an opera composed by Carl Maria von Weber and conducted by Rudolf Kempe.

 

Florida Suite is a lovely piece of melody sublime in its beauty, its conciseness, its power to evoke nature untouched by man. Loved it for over two decades and have possibly a different version of it on CD somewhere. Holiday Symphony features the discordant work of Charles Ives (I did a short post on this highly eccentric composer in the early days of this blog). My favorite piece is “Thanksgiving.” Finally, I bought the opera Der Freischutz due to having fond memories listening to it as a newlywed when we first returned to New Jersey after our 18-month stint in Maryland. Good stuff, all.

 

Then I spotted stacked double against a long wall an uncountable amount of science fiction paperbacks – must’ve been about 750 I would guess – and all priced for $1.00 each! How can you go wrong with a bargain like that? Unfortunately, they were not organized alphabetically, so I spent a good twenty minutes with my head tilted reading spine after spine. I picked out three, each one for a specific reason.

 

Space Skimmer is a book I read in Binghamton, NY, visiting my paternal grandparents right after my parents divorced, probably in the winter of 1981. It was a comforting read. Pirates of Venus was a book I may have read even earlier. But I do remember picking it up again in early 2009 and starting a re-read, when my toddler Patch disappeared the book for me. Never found it again. So I have unfinished business with this one. Finally, Asimov’s Foundation. Ah, Asimov’s Foundation! If ever a book was an Achille’s heel to my reading life, it was this one. Universally lauded as one of the all-time SF greats, I never read it as a kid, and the two or three times I tried as an adult it just never gained traction. Maybe this time will be the charm.

 

I got some Italian food on the way back, brought it home and ate while the dog tracked every piece going from my plate to my mouth, drool pooling around his anxious paws. And now he’s staring at me typing this. Will work on my two current reads later this afternoon and tonight will throw one of the new discs on the turntable.

 

All in all, a great PTO day.

 

PS – I have outlined reviews of three books recently read. Just need to compose them into some medium-length posts. Hopefully I can get one out every three days going in to Thanksgiving.