Sci-Fi That Sucks: I Will Fear No Evil

The more I read by Helein, the more I wonder what the fuck was wrong with the guy. The only time he stays interesting is when he sticks to science and adds some action. For some reason, dude had this thing throughout his career of letting his works turn into shit by any mentionings of love or, more typically, sex. If you read my review of The Puppet Masters, I had the same issue with it, but for I Will Fear No Evil he reached a new level of hatred. The majority of The Puppet Masters was good, but it was seriously hampered by a ridiculous subplot concerning the love of the two main agents in the story. Then, yet again, I found this same issue coming to the surface and annoying the piss out of me in one of his most famous works, Stranger in a Strange Land, which I can unequivocally state is not as awesome as the Iron Maiden song. Heinlein in all of these examples seems to do one thing, come up with an awesome idea and then spends so much time to writing about bullshit to apparently take up pages to increase book cost that it leads to bizarre sidetracks into sexuality that make you wonder if he had some sort of fucking problem. Out of his novels I have so far read, only The Moon is a Harsh Mistress comes with recommendations, this one, fuck, just don't even bother.

I Will Fear No Evil was apparently written while he was suffering through some sort of organ inflammation and his wife edited it, so maybe that has something to do with it, I don't know. The plot is simple. It's the future, the world is overpopulated (trust me, they do barely anything with this ripe concept), and this old rich guy is dying. His dying wish is kind of an attempt to commit legal suicide because he doesn't think it will work; he wants to have his brain transplanted into a healthy, young body and he gets the help of a doctor who did it with two monkeys but who was demonized afterwards. He's a crazy old guy and quite a horny coot, which is fine, and the way he talks and has an honest way of speaking makes for a believable character, at first. His secretary and her husband are one of the couples to sign the contract, and of course, she ends up dying soon after and his brain is put into her body.

Now, first off, the particular edition I have fucking blew that shit by talking about it on the back cover. You don't find out it was his secretary, Eunice, until at least a hundred or so pages in when he finally is able to see himself in the mirror. Before that, they play around with it, but if you weren't told, you wouldn't know, so I was a little pissed at that publishing slip. Anyway, you kind of figure it's going to happen and man, what an awesome idea for a sci-fi plot. Not new, really, but just plain awesome. Heinlein, however, fucks it up after Johann realizes who he is.

See, sure, we're all sure if you were a guy placed into a woman's body, you'd probably want to see what it does, no question. Problem is Heinlein spends the whole rest of the goddamn thing with Johann (now Joan Eunice) having sex with everyone under the sun, buying clothes, and really doing nothing of fucking interest. It basically reads like sci-fi for the first hundred pages, and then descends into a shitty romance novel with a Fabio look-a-like on the cover for the other 3/4 of it, which amounts to around 500 motherfucking pages. After the brain is transplanted and Johann is up and walking, the novel descends into one of the worst farces of sci-fi I've ever read. Cheesiness is fine, this just plain sucks. It's like listening to your wife or girlfriend blab about what they did throughout the day, but stretch that over the week or so it will take to finish it. Absolutely nothing interesting happens through the rest of the entire book, take that at face value because I mean it. It's a total travesty to even call this sci-fi, because other than brief mentionings of technology and the year, as well as a small stint about moon travel at the end that goes nowhere, there's almost nothing in here that has anything to do with the genre. It reads like an issue of Redbook you read on the shitter because there's nothing else around or like a Lifetime movie you for some reason won't shut off. Horrible.

The characters are unbelievable, the dialog ridiculous, and the end total blue balls. You'd expect a weird twist, but here it is. Eunice is somehow still functioning in the body and talks to Johann in his mind. That's kind of cool, but when his lawyer dies at the end, who he married and who was having sex with Eunice before she died, he somehow is also put into the mix and they're all talking together. How in the fuck did that happen? And when Johann decides to impregnate his new body with his own sperm that he had frozen away, Heinlein does next to nothing with the concept! Add to it this quasi-religious Indian thing very similar to the bullshit going on in Stranger in a Strange Land and you get one goddamned awful book. This is probably the worst sci-fi novel I've ever read, and I don't think it can be topped. I'm actually dreading reading anything else by this guy it was so fucking bad. AVOID AT ALL COSTS.

Sci-Fi Adventures: On Wheels

This is a weird one. I have a ton of sci-fi novels I've read since my last review, but this one stood out. John Jakes is mainly known for historical fiction. He did some series that I think eventually led to the video game "North and South", but don't quote me on that even though I just did. In addition to historical fiction, he also wrote a number of sci-fi novels, but most of them apparently weren't memorable, or, judging by this one, just sadly forgotten. You'd have figured a novel touted as the next Slaughterhouse-Five or Dune would at least have a decent blurb somewhere, but even Wikishitia doesn't mention it in his bibliography. Typical for that shithole.

On Wheels is one of the strangest sci-fi novels I've ever read. The premise is incredibly stupid and it's largely boring at first, but by the end, there's just something about it. To start, check out the cover there, what in the shit is going on? I get it, it's symbolic, but I mean, you've got a naked boy with a firebird apparently getting ready to sodomize him as he rolls along the road in his car body amongst a backdrop of weird, 40s-styled artwork of cars on the road. I haven't seen a weird, inordinate sci-fi cover like this since Rena Vale's Taurus Four. So, needless to say, On Wheels sucked me in with it's ridiculous cover, which is what good sci-fi is all about. When people peruse my collection, this is one of the first I pull out to elicit some laughs.

So what's it about? On Wheels, to be brief, fits in the "Mad Max" category to some extent, so if you like that post-apocalyptic craziness with cars and road warriors, this one should get your vroooming. But the 'road warriors' here are different, much different. It's hard to reveal without giving you the "secret" behind the book, so I need to do it. If you want to keep it sacred until you read it yourself, then just stop and check out another one of our splendid articles.

Okay, so America is fighting some unexplained war with the East, presumably China. Funds are sucked dry, but people are living okay, albeit in a really crazy fashion. Really, you're not given too much of an indication how they live until the end, other than chance meetings with them on the road when they're referred to as 'stoppers'. Any time people want to hit the roads, they do it en mass to the point that there are thousands of highway casualties. So, essentially, the population of America has been strained to the point that there are so many of us we end up dying from proximity. Enter the clans. The clans are huge families with names that refer to driving and the 50s. The main character, for example, is named Billy Spoiler. All of the clans live on the roads, literally, like, they never stop driving, EVER. They have to maintain a speed of at least 40 at all times and have big parties in giant road vans, so Jakes immediately creates a very strange world. He also mixes up the action by using road signs and such to break the movement of the prose, which is a really cool touch. On Wheels has three main parts, but the plot is pretty basic.

Billy Spoiler is a boy from one clan, and you meet plenty of others. He eventually falls in love with a girl named Rose Ann, which of course causes tension with a rough-and-tumble young whippersnapper from a rival clan named Lee Ramp. Their clan is known for driving recklessly. Billy races him to win her, kills him (or so you think), and then he eventually reappears all burned and crippled after they get married. There are marriage tensions, Billy almost kills his wife after he catches her cheating on him, and in the middle of trying to get her to an off road hospital (which has never been done), you learn all about the truth of the world. During this, Billy is engaged in a race duel with Lee Ramp, who's legendary cousin Big Daddy Hardcharger races for since he's crippled. Big Daddy is a specter of sorts throughout the novel (who's trying to be the first to ever drive 50 millions miles), and when you see him he's pretty much what you expect, a fat biker dude driving a crazy car. They duel as Billy learns the truth of the world, Rose Ann dies while he's trying to get her help off the road, and then he rejoins Big Daddy in the race and kills them both.

Overall, On Wheels has this bizarre charm. It's really a fun read when you get into it, and once you learn about the clans and get used to their lingo and lives, it has a cool groove. The overall concept that the government is saving societal collapse by keeping 10% of the population permanently on the roads (the clans) is pretty silly, but Jakes keeps the writing and storyline moving along at an awesome pace, so you really can't complain. The way it's divided into three sections that give this distinct feel of a car slowly speeding up and exploding by the end is fitting. I'm excited to see what else Jakes has done, and I can only hope it's as interesting, if not as slightly silly, as On Wheels. It's a short, fast read, a little goofy, but damn was it fun.

Sci-Fi Adventures: The Puppet Masters

Here's a good one, well, almost. If you've read sci-fi you've definitely heard the name Robert Heinlein. Dude was pretty damn prolific, and wrote some of the most memorable novels in the genre. He's usually pretty fresh, fun, and dense. Not for the average sci-fi reader at times, but he knew that, so some of his books were a little more focused on action, this being one of them. It actually has a lot of interesting history behind it too; lawsuits against movies that ripped it off, earlier changes to avoid Communist persecution, and an eventual 90s thriller film that came out pretty good. You won't really get that from reading it, but if you're a fan it's interesting to learn about. Anyway...

The Puppet Masters is one of Heinlein's earlier novels, though not the earliest, and sets the tempo for some of his more accessible works. Interestingly, it's in fact his only novel that features an alien invasion as the primary drive of the plot. He never did another one, which is kind of sad, because The Puppet Masters is a pretty solid work overall that perhaps could have led into other, more clever invasion tales. Still, it's not not without problems.

The interesting stuff is that the alien invasion takes place in the future where people take lots of weird drugs for pleasure and get around in flying cars (this is sadly absent from the 90s film adaptation). The agents have cool little gimmicks, too, like built-in phones in their heads called 'skull phones'. Sam, the main character, is part of an agency that deals with US intelligence matters and is so secret it reports directly the President. You never find out what they are, but it doesn't matter. What does is that the earth is being invaded by a slug-like creature that attaches to the spine of any intelligent creature (or fairly intelligent at least) and controls them like a puppet, hence the name of the book. That pretty much sums it all up, the story revolves around the agency, Sam, and his friends (including father), figuring out the mystery and how to stop the aliens. There are numerous twists in the plot, some revolving around the idea that they can take over memories and learn how to essentially act like people to a certain point, and the action is quite fast and often intense. Heinlein really doesn't waste too much time getting it moving, because in a few pages things start to fly and it doesn't really let up.

That is, however, until he begins to incorporate a ridiculous subplot revolving around Sam falling in love with another agent, who we find out later is actually connected to the aliens in this horribly-explained way. Apparently she was once part of this doomsday cult, grew up in it, and was taken away by the aliens, found in a state of amnesia and made an agent later on. It wouldn't be so bad if the love sections weren't so damn trite and formulaic. They're incredibly boring, the dialog is second-grade laughable, and they only serve to slow down an otherwise interesting story. Later, for example, Sam his alien love woman get married for some goddamn reason, and go off into his 'cabin in the mountains' without telling anyone for some other goddamn reason in the middle of an invasion, where, of course, they eventually are assaulted by an alien that rides in on a cat, totally reverting all of the training and skills you see them utilize throughout the rest of the book. Any point that this stupid love tale enters the story, it's really quite irritating and probably enough to make some people put it down. A real shame, because the rest of it is good. Overall, The Puppet Masters is an enjoyable read, but the love story made me put it down once before and almost did it again. I finished it this time around, but it was pretty grueling through those sections. Really should have eliminated them. Anyway, if you're looking for an early invasion story from the master himself, this is a good one, but it's definitely not his, or the genre's, best.

Sci-Fi Adventures: A for Andromeda

I figured this might be a bit of fun. Editor man has all the cool goings-on of the music world posted day after day, so why not a little geek for the ole' Sparrow blog? This is the first of my proposed articles on sci-fi novels I waste my time reading, mainly old ones from the glory days of sci-fi starting from the late 1800s and ending around the mid to late 1980s. Quite a run for the genre! Everything sucked after that because we ran out of ideas. Anyway, each entry will serve as a short review of a novel I've tackled. I figured I'd start with a rather famous one, though no one remembers it anymore, A for Andromeda.

This one spawned a famous TV series that was eventually redone, and of course no one paid attention to that when it happened. At any rate, back in the early 60s we still thought we had a chance of eventually getting somewhere in space. Numerous novels appeared revolving around ideas of what alien life would actually be like, most quite clever. Even the derivative ones were pretty damn entertaining, if only for their humor factor. A for Andromeda was written as a collaboration between the famous astronomer/philosopher Fred Hoyle and "novelist" John Elliot. That's in quotes because this is actually the only book he ever wrote.

A for Andromeda is classic 'aliens-coming-for-us' science fiction. It takes a different approach, however. Instead of a physical invasion, the alien mind, which we never actually get to see in the book, attempts to get us to create a machine that will eventually lead to our destruction. It opens with a lot of science babble that's honestly quite dry, but it starts to pick up when the team of scientists catches an alien broadcast of sorts using a new, high-powered satellite dish somethingrather. One of the researchers, Fleming, is smart enough to figure out the data is from an alien race, perhaps a now dead race, and is being sent in binary. Using his skills, he discovers the code is actually a sequence describing how to build a never-before-seen, high-powered computer, and the rest of the message is data to be placed into it. Of course, this is the first build of excitement in A for Andromeda. From there, the story moves slowly, but there's enough tension in wondering what's going to happen to keep you reading. The computer is, of course, eventually built, and they start to feed it the data.

From there, the machine begins to essentially ask questions using very basic understandings of life in the universe. It eventually finds out, for example, that carbon-based life is present on earth. Using this method, it comes upon a formula that it feeds to the scientists. Said formula is a plan to create artificial, living tissue. At first a few growing cells, and then this eyeball beast with enough mental power to cause someone to commit suicide to test her body, and then eventually Andromeda, a totally hawt chick that is, of course, an uber being alien, even though she looks human. The computer has simply created something based on what we have here. And also of course, Andromeda slowly learns how to be human in spite of the fact she's here to kill all of us, she reaches a conflict with the machine, rebels, and blah blah there's a sad ending that I'll save for you to find out if you read it.

Really, A for Andromeda is an okay read, at least at first. There's enough cool science and theory for the nerds out there, and the tension of discovering exactly what the computer is going to do keeps the action going. But, really, when it comes down to it, other than some mixing of international intrigue through some spy games that are damn boring, A for Andromeda is bland overall. It takes a good chunk of chapters to really get going, and by then there's just barely enough to keep you interested. It's cool to see what the machine's going to do and it's a neat take on how an alien race could invade another world, but with the slow pace and occasional, anti-capitalist undertones, it might just be annoying to some readers. Cool book for the history of the genre, and okay overall, but there are better alien invasion novels out there.