SCIENCE FICTION
My creative-writing professor at Old Dominion University once claimed that there was no such thing as a perfect novel . . . except for %26quot;The Great Gatsby.%26quot; I agree with the first clause of the statement. But I must add a caveat that is also, perhaps, the greatest commandment in the realm of all things creative: Thou shalt not be boring.
Sorry. %26quot;Gatsby%26quot; is not perfect.
The following excursions into the realm of the fantastic are far from perfect — I wanted to kick one across the room. But they’re submitted to you, our readers in Richmond’s literary twilight zone, for your approval . . . or not.
. . .
R U a bad monkey?
The answer takes insight — and freedom from delusion — not one of which the first-person narrator of Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys (240 pages, HarperCollins, $20) seems to have.
This hypernovel — hyper in that your perceptions are challenged with every new revelation — combines the absurdities and personality of television’s %26quot;The Avengers%26quot; with the hardcore paranoia of today’s %26quot;Bourne%26quot; movies, and good and evil are as interchangeable as love and hate — which is to say, they are really the flip sides of each other’s coins.
Jane Charlotte, our narrator, starts the story in police custody, explaining why she’s the good guy — not a murderer — in a Las Vegas homicide investigation. By the end — well, in tales such as this, with parallels to %26quot;The Prisoner%26quot; and the worst out-of-the-blue revelations from an Agatha Christie mystery — no one is who they are supposed to be, and offhand characters have more impact to the plot than you could ever suspect.
Bad Monkeys is innovating and aggravating — worthwhile for the storytelling, but not the story.
. . .
David Wellington’s 13 Bullets (336 pages, Three Rivers Press, $13.95) starts off as perhaps the best vampire novel since George R.R. Martin’s %26quot;Fevre Dream,%26quot; combining cinematic vampirism with crime noir, but it soon wastes away like a decomposing corpse.
Wellington’s second novel is the story of state trooper Laura Caxton’s investigation into supposed vampire murders — supposed until Special Deputy Jameson Arkeley, a former vampire killer, proves that they’re dealing with a long-thought-dead master vampire, and the killing brood she has birthed in the years since.
The first half of the novel is innovative; the second half becomes a bloody mishmash leading to a convoluted climax that will probably lead to a highly marketable trilogy — but not necessarily a good one.
Pick up 1982’s %26quot;Fevre Dream%26quot; to see how a vampire tale is done right.
. . .
I have only once harmed a book in complete disregard for its well-being.
It was a paperback %26quot;Star Trek%26quot; novel I took on vacation, and it was so awful that I kicked it across my hotel room in absolute disgust.
Admittedly, one of my guilty pleasures is reading the occasional %26quot;Star Trek%26quot; novel — only a few of which have come close in quality to even the worst of any television episode.
Most of the stories in The Sky’s the Limit (edited by Marco Palmieri, 400 pages, Star Trek, $16), an anthology celebrating the 20th anniversary of %26quot;Star Trek: The Next Generation,%26quot; are sequels to %26quot;Star Trek%26quot; episodes from the variety of incarnations during Trek’s 41-year run. In this anthology, there were some stories that filled in blanks, made me smile, made me wonder. But nothing here gave me the sheer pleasure of any single television episode.
If you’re a Next Generation fan, you’ll like it — you might even love it. If you want something special, borrow your friend’s DVD of %26quot;The Wrath of Khan.%26quot;
. . .
I didn’t kick this novel across the room. But I wanted to.
As a lifelong comic-book fan (my mother taught me to read using comic books when I was 3), the two most iconic heroes for me have always been Superman and Batman. I truly wanted to like Kevin J. Anderson’s The Last Days of Krypton (432 pages, HarperEntertainment, $25.95). But I knew something was wrong when I saw the cover — cold and unimaginative — and then I read the dramatis personae. Anderson, an able science-fiction writer, here creates characters never before mentioned in the Superman canon, including a Kryptonian named after former Superman editor Julius Schwartz and another named after a NY literary agent. It’s an author’s ego intruding on an established mythology, and it’s only the first in many ways %26quot;The Last Days of Krypton%26quot; is an inferior work.
Anderson takes almost 70 years of Superman’s history and mashes them down into an amalgam based primarily on the 1978 Superman movie. There is little originality here; the characters are merely shadows of the classic icons that seem, in the comics at least, fleshed out. The writing is amateurish, lacking cohesive development. It’s creative shorthand, and it’s evidence that the author didn’t really care about the source material: a wellspring of creativity and American heroism that will last far longer than anything he will ever write.
I wanted to kick this book across the room. Instead, I’m saving it to toast some marshmallows.
Rus Wornom is a novelist and co-op advertising and vendor support coordinator in The Times-Dispatch’s retail advertising department. Contact him at hwornom@timesdispatch.com.
amp,anthology,comic book,creativity,disgust,flip side,gatsby,hype,mystery,Novel,plo,sequels,star trek
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