A general term for speculative fiction about the future or futuristic technology. H.G. Wells and Jules Verne were the fathers of the genre. It has come to encompass very loosely anything with aliens, time travel, fantasy, horror or according to the Sy Fy network wrestling(?)
The Saurons time of birthing is coming up. The humans and the Ra Na slaves will have to strike soon. The Sauron’s puppet president has been secretly working to build a coalition of human resistance and Ra Na to strike when the Saurons go into the birthing temples. The Ra Na is able to seize a quarter of the fleet as the humans manage to free the human slave population. Will they manage in time?
The second and final book in the saga did not disappoint me. It had plenty of believable action throughout. The characters both alien and human were believable and ones that the reader could identify with. The racial politics were not that prominent. It was a fast-paced enjoyable book of people fighting to overthrow their alien oppressors. This is the second of an alien invasion series that Dietz wrote. I enjoyed both and would have no problem checking out his other works.
February 28, 2020, is the day known as Black Friday. For that is the day the alien Saurons attacked Earth. In three days, most of the major cities were destroyed. Three billion were killed and the rest enslaved by the Saurons. The aliens put the surviving humans to work building vast temples by hand. They form a puppet government under the Governor of Washington. Yet resistance forms. The real secret of the Saurons is found out. That in July all the Sauron will die and give birth to nymphs that will replace them. Only most the slaves will die be killed. The humans form an alliance with the other alien slave races to take advantage of this.
I remember seeing this when it came out and thought it sounded good. Yet it was September 2001 and probably got lost in the events of the day. I did find it recently at a bookstore and with his other series gave it a try. It had an interesting premise for the aliens and Dietz is a competent writer. He gives us an epic struggle with mostly believable characters.
The aliens have a caste system based on their color. With the black ones on top followed by the brown and whites at the bottom. They decide to transfer this to humans by making the blacks the overseers with the whites as the slaves. If this wasn’t enough there were a group of humans who were white supremacists and go on about ZOG and mud people to hammer home the idea of racial problems with humanity. This was handled very ham-fisted and wasn’t really needed. This was the first of a two-book series.
An airline check in desk at Heathrow explodes and is considered an act of God. Dirk Gently wonders which god would be around trying to catch a flight to Oslo. Dirk also has other problems for a client he had is found murdered. His head on the record of a hit called “Hot Potato” that he helped write. The client had a fear of some demon coming after him and it appears to have happened. Events link up Dirk with an American journalist who was at Heathrow when the explosion occurred. This all leads to the Norse gods Odin and Thor. A plan by some lawyer/publicist couple to buy Odin’s soul. Yet everything works out in the end.
This was the second in the Dirk Gently series. I thought it was a much better book than the first. It had some trademark Adams humor. Ancient gods trying to adapt to the modern world. Odin has sold his soul to have an endless supply of clean linen in a bed at an expensive hospital. Thor is a rebellious son. This book though did suffer some uneven writing like his first one. It also seemed to tie up everything at the end too easily.
There was going to be a third called The Salmon of Doubt but never got written. Instead, a book with this name was released after his death with Adam’s unpublished notes and essays. A fairly crass attempt to cash in after his death. Adams was not a prolific writer but what he produced will probably stand the test of time. I loved his Hitchhiker series and this one while not as good still has its moments. I think if you love the Hitchhikers series you will enjoy Dirk Gently.
Richard MacDuff is a software developer that starts to have a bad day. His boss is murdered, and the police suspect him. He gets help from the mysterious Dirk Gently. He runs a holistic detective agency. Holistic means he solves stuff believing the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. Richard’s boss is a ghost and apparently there is another ghost going around possessing people. This ghost was part of a ship that landed billions of years ago and blew up while taking off. This ghost wants a time machine that a mysterious Professor Chronotis has. This time machine is his room at Cambridge. If the ghost succeeds and goes back and stops the ship from blowing up, it will cause the human and all live on the planet to never exist.
I am a huge fan of Adam’s Hitchhiker series and enthusiastically bought this when it came out. Unfortunately, it never lived up to his earlier work. It starts out slow and the main character of Dirk doesn’t around until 100 pages in. I now notice that he heavily cannibalized his story from the Doctor Who episode Shada. This was a partially completed one which never aired and back in 1988 I would have never known. Now this episode has been completed with animation and released. A Professor Chronotis a Time Lord living for centuries at Cambridge with his Tardis as his room. Adams never gives us any background on the character, and I suppose he could be viewed as the Doctor Who character only never mentioned for obvious reasons. He also cannibalized from the episode City of Death with the part of an alien craft blowing up and creating life on Earth. This I would have recognized at the time.
The book does pick up and there are some fun moments in it. It has his trademark sense of humor. Still the ending seemed to be just easily solved. He seemed to abandon some plot lines like the Electric Monk who was a robot that believed stuff for people. Or the boss that was a ghost and didn’t really go anywhere. A flawed book but still I don’t mind reading it for it had some interesting moments and characters. His sequel was much better.
There was also recently a TV series that was made in Canada and loosely based on the book. It was an enjoyable series.
A compilation of all the strange and weird facts about the universe. It starts with the universe then goes on to the galaxy. It examples the facts of our solar system and the planets in it including the Earth and Moon. Ends about spaceships. All of this has the Ripley facts some with illustrations. Most of the amazing facts are heavily skewed toward UFO encounters.
Back in the seventies was the height of the UFO and cryptozoology craze. There were many TV specials on Bigfoot, UFOs the Bermuda Triangle etc. As a kid growing up in the seventies, I couldn’t get enough of this stuff. This book is a favorite of mine. It has all these weird and scarry accounts of UFO and alien encounters, at least to a nine-year-old. Yes, nowadays it is common for this stuff to appear in history channel stuff like Ancient Aliens. Yet it was still fresh at the time, and I still find it entertaining. An interesting prediction was by 1996 there would be a colony in space with 100,000 people and the fare to visit them a paltry $3,000. We have not lived up to the past’s expectations or kept our inflation under control.
Matt Sykes and his Newcomer girlfriend Cathy find out that she is pregnant. It seems to be the first instance of a Human/Newcomer birth. This news puts Cathy and her newborn baby in peril. There are Purists who want to put an end to any mixed breeding of the species. There are also a cabal of rich Newcomer businessmen who also see the birth as a threat. The hospital is attacked, and the baby kidnapped. Now Sikes and Fransisco have to track the Purist group down. There is also a subplot that involves Albert Einstein getting hired by a company to predict the failure or success of products.
This is the final book in the series. It goes out with a bang as there is the birth of a hybrid Human/Newcomer baby. Jeter wrote the novelization of the Dark Horizon script and brings back characters and events from that book. He wrote an intriguing story and one that would have made a good movie for the series. This does give the feeling of the end for the book series. I think that all the writers who contributed to the series did an excellent job. Each story was compelling and kept to the mythology that the TV series created. Sad that this series never got the chance to grow.
A final tragic note is that last week Gary Graham passed away at 73. He was the Mick Jagger lookalike that played the human Detective Matt Sikes in the series and subsequent TV movies. His image is on all the covers to this series, and it was a sad coincidence that he died as I was finishing up this series. Besides being well known for this series he was also the Vulcan ambassador on Enterprise. I remember him for the movie Robotjox and the TV movies of The Dirty Dozen. He also guest starred on countless TV shows and movies. Rest in Peace Gary.
George, Matt, Susan and Cathy are on a trip to Pittsburgh. They are part of a symposium for Newcomers. When they get to Pittsburgh, they have protests and threats from Purists who want the aliens quarantined. Then Newcomers are being killed and literally torn apart. The trail leads to a fearsome alien creature called a levpa. It is a genetically bred creature from a Newcomer that was used as a bloodhound. They find out that this creature was created by an Overseer who is working with the Purists to have the Newcomers quarantined in the desert.
This entry in the series is a nice change of pace. It takes us out of L.A. and to Pittsburgh in winter. I liked the change of scenery. You get tired of L.A. for everything. It also introduces a new alien creature in the levpa. The book was written by a female writing team who use this pseudonym which stands for “Let’s all get rich and famous.’ They have written other sci-fi books most notably for Star Trek. They even have a self-insert with a Newcomer husband and wife sci-fi writers who use their pseudonym. A good book that kept my interest.
Sikes goes to a play and recognizes the human actress as a former Newcomer. She collapses after the play, and we find out she had surgery to alter her appearance. She was using a cheap knockoff drug and now has to go through detox. Sikes decides to track down the manufacturer of this illegal drug. The trail leads to an Overseer corporation. Cathy Frankel helps the actress Fran Delancy formerly Fancy Delancey get over her withdrawal of the drug. There are also subplots with Susan and an ad campaign that is insulting to Newcomers.
This book was originally a proposed script idea by the author and his friend Bruce Peyton. It never got made due to the cancellation of the series but gets new life as a novel. It has an interesting story and a bit less intense then the last two novels with was a nice break. An interesting idea of Newcomers wanting to assimilate so badly they alter their appearance to look human. The author is a playwright in New York, and this is his first and to my knowledge only novel.
Micky Cass is a reporter that takes an assignment for the local paper. Using as inspiration the famous Black Like Me where a reporter in the 1950’s South darkened his skin and reported on what it was like to be black. Cass will do the same only as a Newcomer. Writing under Ellison Robb his column becomes widely popular but gets many angry. He disappears and Matt Sykes also undergoes a transformation as a Newcomer to find Cass or his killers. Cass is soon discovered murdered, and a riot breaks out with Sykes caught in the middle.
Alien Nation has always been an allegory for racism and race relations. This book would seem to be going all in on that. Now I was expecting a very preachy and pretentious book. There are some cases of this especially toward the end. Yet I did find it fairly well balanced and interesting. He uses events and the character of the Overseer FBI agent Paul Iniko from his last book. It had an interesting plot and a surprise ending. This was his last book for the series.
Maanka Dak is a brilliant Newcomer scientist. In prison at China Lake, he will soon be paroled because of the valuable discoveries he has make for medical science. Only he has an obsession with revenge against George Fransisco. Fransisco killed his brother during a bank robbery and Maanka has declared vikta ta. It is a blood feud that not only Fransisco is killed but his entire family and friends. George was a member of the alien resistance group like Maanka which is why he feels George betrayed him. Maanka also has an alien technology that can take over people’s minds. It is later revealed that the Federal government is behind Maanka’s research and now George has to protect his family and friends. He is also going through the equivalent of menopause which give him more intelligence.
This was another adaptation of a proposed second season script. Written by Steven Long Mitchell and Craig W. Van Sickle. It had an interesting premise with George going through this menopausal transition. The really good story is the character of Maanka Dak. A very cunning villain and we get some more insight into the Newcomer’s life before they reached Earth. They decided not to use this script when they revived the series through yearly movies. Too bad because it was very good and thankfully, they novelized it.
THE BOOKS THAT TIME FORGOT. 