Star Trek Deep Space Nine: The Siege (1993)

A serial killer is loose aboard DS9 and it's not just any serial killer, it's a shapeshifter. Can Odo put a stop to the murders before the station runs out of red shirts? And will Odo be able to find out about his people from the murderous shapeshifter? (Spoiler: this is a season one story, so no!) And in what would constitute the b-plots in a regular episode of Deep Space Nine, an alien evangelist and his family show up to annoy everyone around them, O'Brien tries to learn a magic trick to impress a toddler, and a spurned former business rival of Quark's shows up with a wild scheme to buy the entire space station from the Bajorans.

Despite being a fan of Star Trek since my youth, I have never read one of the novels related to the series until now. I'm not really sure what kept me away from the books, other than perhaps intimidation at the sheer number of them in existence. Seriously, just take a gander at the list of Trek novels on Wikipedia sometime. These damn things reproduce faster than a Tribble.

However, I recently came across a listing for a whole batch of Trek books on an auction site for a steal of a price, and the majority of them were Deep Space Nine books, which made the deal even more enticing for me. Deep Space Nine, if you didn't know, is proven to be the superior version of Star Trek appreciated by real manly men who are desired by all the womenfolk and frequently bench-press like Jesse Ventura getting prepped for a role in Predator. I don't make the rules, folks! Just letting you know how it is...

So anyway, The Siege by Peter David (not to be confused with the season two episode of DS9 of the same name). What a hell of a book to begin my journey with Star Trek in prose with. I didn't do much research, but from what little I did, I gather The Siege has something of a dubious reputation in some fandom circles. Some people with more delicate sensitivities hate it. Those people would be nerds. Me, an intellectual... well, I loved it.

Let's consider for a moment all the dark and dire things in The Siege:

-Quark has a holosuite sex program featuring Jax and Kira. Finally, a Trek writer acknowledges what the majority of us would end up using the holosuite for: porn.
-Bashir has a program created in said holosuite featuring a dying child. He then tricks the mother of said child into the holosuite so she can watch the child die in order to coerce and traumatize her into accepting Bashir's treatment for her actual child's terminal illness - a treatment that goes against her and her son's religious beliefs AND ultimately causes her to lose her faith in her god AND results in her getting divorced AND sees her and her son now exiled from her own people. Our Man Bashir delivering the highly ethical Hippocratic results as always!
-Oh, and there's the killer on the loose too. We read about a series of exceedingly brutal, gruesome, and graphic murders - one of which a small child and her sexual assault survivor mother are witnesses to. Just peachy.

And... most heinous of all...

-Keiko O'Brien *shudder*

And of course, there's Odo's insane shapeshifting power levels where he's doing Mr. Fantastic-esque feats of stretching and maneuvering, including some hilarious fight scenes with his shapeshifting rival towards the end of the novel. I suspect the author actually knew better, but he tries to make excuses for Odo's over the top feats in the preface by telling us the book was written at a time early in DS9's run when only five episodes had aired. I call bullshit, because armed with only those five episodes and the series bible, the author was able to nail the tone of all the other characters, especially The Sisko™, who is afforded several moments of badassery - both with a phaser trickshot and as the 'don't fuck with me' style diplomat in the face of two hostile ships bearing down on the station. No, I think the author just had a vision in his mind of Odo being able to have his hands turn into weapons like Robert Patrick in Terminator 2 or magically shapeshift wheels from his ankles so he could skate around the villain and he wasn't backing down from that goofy vision, series continuity be damned. And I am strangely okay with it.

It may sound like I'm complaining, but I only do it in good fun. The Siege is a solid, breezy read if you can get past the occasional haymaker towards continuity. If nothing else, it got me in the mood for more literary Trek.

License Renewed (1981)

A new Bond for the 80's! With the looming threat of coordinated nuclear meltdowns across the globe, secret agent 007 heads to Scotland for some caber tossing and castle crusading. Standing in his way is an international terrorist and a nuclear physicist with a penchant for cheating at horse racing. Girls! Guns! Gadgets! A.. Saab 900 Turbo? Da-da-DA-DA!

For reasons completely unknown to me, I had this desire to go through all of the John Gardner 007 novels. I've probably only read a little more than half of his 14 Bond books and the ones I did read were all out of order, so here goes - an attempt to read John Gardner instead of Ian Fleming. Don't ask me to try to understand how my brain works...

Gardner's 007 novels always seem to have such a lowly reputation among literary Bond fandom, but I've always held a soft spot for the ones I've read. Perhaps it's because I'm an 80's guy and I view the Gardner series with the same kind of retro charm I have for a lot of media from the 80's. And because this is Bond in the 80's, despite the author claiming he swore off watching the films once he got the gig as the continuation author (so as not to be too influenced by the big screen adaption of the character), it's really hard to read these and not envision Roger Moore running around as Gardner's Bond. Since Roger Moore is my favorite Bond, it's not too difficult to see why I'm a little bit warmer towards these books than others.

It's also a matter of adjusting your expectations. Gardner writes his Bond novels as less of a pulp adventure like Fleming and as more of a contemporary spy thriller, complete with a penchant for going into borderline obsessive levels of detail over arms and equipment. And yes, there was much consternation over Gardner's decision to have Bond driving a Saab instead of an old Bentley in addition to the introduction of strange supporting characters such as a female quartermaster nicknamed... Q'ute. Okay, so these changes don't exactly scream exciting gentleman spy action, but keep in mind Gardner wasn't allowed too much freedom from the publisher in terms of character development, so I can give him some kudos for at least attempting to push for some minor cosmetic tweaks to the formula. Considering we're catching up with what is supposed to be the same man Fleming wrote about some 13 years after his last adventure, some changes in the life of the character are to be expected.

But a fucking Saab? Dude...

The plot of License Renewed is another "hold the world to hostage over the threat of nuclear annihilation" scenario we've seen in spy fiction a thousand times over, but Gardner tackles it in an uncomplicated and fast-paced fashion that makes for rather pleasant reading. It's certainly not as poetic or quotable as Fleming, but again, I don't believe Gardner was ever attempting to write in the same style as the original creator. Gardner does borrow some Fleming-esque elements, such as giving the villain a strange and unfavorable quirk (in this instance bird-like qualities) and a brutish henchman at his side (ala Oddjob), and there is of course the beautiful but damaged winged dove love interest for Bond to rescue (and be rescued by). Gardner tries to give some love to Fleming's side characters by including M and Tanner in some additional scenes, even giving Tanner a little cameo in the field as Bond's partner for the climax. The primary settings of both a foreboding castle in the wilderness of Scotland and the Mediterranean side of France are believable haunts for Bond to find himself in and adds to the travelogue sense that this series, both literary and film, is known for.

Cover (1987)

A hotshot novelist, his wife, his supermodel girlfriend (you read that right), and a few of his unbearable asshole friends head to the woods for a relaxing weekend getaway and stumble upon a crop of weed tended by a mentally shattered Vietnam vet who is totally Not-Rambo. Thinking this group of jerks is actually Charlie coming to get him, Not-Rambo begins a vicious campaign of snare-setting and murder. A three hour tour this is not...

My first foray into the work of Jack Ketchum was the novel Cover. In retrospect, it's probably not the ideal place to start if you're interested in exploring the late author's works, because it's less the typical horror novel that Ketchum is most known for and more of a First Blood styled thriller with a nihilistic undercurrent. Not necessarily a complaint, just an observation.

I think the main issue I have with Cover is I can't exactly figure out where the author's position is on anything. It's kind of an anti-war novel, but it doesn't quite go all-in on that. It's kind of a statement against how soft modern conveniences make us, but it doesn't fully embrace that take either. I could almost see the piece being an anti-drug story considering all the trouble a crop of reefer seems to cause all parties involved, but again, we never cross that threshold either.

About the only thing Cover actually is in favor of is polyamory, which is slightly amusing because it's possibly the most unrealistic depiction of a threesome relationship outside of a Brazzers movie. The character of Kelsey simply has to be a self-insert for Ketchum himself. He was clearly living out some kind of repressed fantasy with this novel, right? Because in what reality does a freaking novelist of all trades land a sexy wife and a supermodel side chick who live in harmony with one another?

Regardless, if you're a weirdo like me, you're really reading Cover for the murder and mayhem, and once it gets going, it's an enjoyable - if not overly grisly - escapade. Like many a classic slasher movie, you end up rooting for the killer and not the hapless fools lost in the woods. I still can't tell if it was intentional or not, but Kelsey's group of friends are not the most likeable bunch you'll come across, so seeing the embittered Vietnam veteran character go all John Wick on these fools can be fairly satisfying.

Conan the Bold (1989)

Conan has a grudge to settle with a badass outlaw and his drugged out posse and follows them halfway across the world to solve it - blade to blade.

You know that old chestnut about not judging a book by its cover? It's definitely applicable here, because not once does anything close to the epic Manowar album cover style illustration that graces the front of this book happen. A damn shame, because who wouldn't want to see Conan duke it out with a mutated pterodactyl?

Regardless, I found Conan the Bold by John Maddox Roberts to be your standard Conan adventure affair with lots of men fighting and dying, wenches wenching, slavers.. um... enslaving? And a supply of magic steroids because why the hell not? There is a hint of otherworldly Lovecraftian influence throughout the novel, but it never takes center stage away from the basic revenge plot. This is more or less Death Wish with swords and throwing knives, and that sounds like a damn good time to me. However, there are a lot of cat and mouse moments between Conan and the main villain Taharka that may frustrate some readers. One almost expects the villain to bellow "I'll get you next time, Gadget!" after every near miss encounter.

I should state I have absolutely nothing against the Conan pastiche novels. Many Howard purists seem to despise them, but I find them to mostly be a good time if you can adjust your expectations. What I appreciate about a novel like Conan the Bold is that John Maddox Roberts is making zero attempt to emulate Robert E. Howard's prose. Most who try to emulate Howard end up with a mess of word salad and rehashed plots. Roberts is wisely his own man with Conan the Bold and the novel is all the better for it.

Wherein the Author Explains the Premise

I figured out a long time ago that I like to read trash.

I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way. Sure, I've read my share of literary heavyweights. I've been through the assigned readings of a Chaucer or a Shakespeare course at college. I have experienced the more erudite end of the literary spectrum. But at the end of the day, I like my reading sessions to be less heady and more escapism and genre fiction is more often than not my go-to for that. I like pulps. Fantasy and sci-fi. Over the top spy stories. Gritty crime fiction. Trashy quasi-smut set in women's prisons..... wait, what?

I even have this bizarre soft spot for tie-in novels. I can't entirely articulate it, but I often find great humor in their mere existence sometimes. For instance, why did the world need a series of Welcome Back, Kotter novels? Fuck knows. But I'm eternally curious to see how terrible they are now.

So this little project of mine is simply going to be a repository of book reviews from my oversized personal library of what I lovingly refer to as 'trash'. Everything from the golden age of pulps to the might of the current Iron Age is up for grabs here. My only prerequisite is the book should contain an adventure of some variety... hence the Conan the Barbarian pastiche name of this project. Leave a comment on one of my reviews and send me suggestions on what to read next or tell me how awful my taste is. I don't mind either way. Let's have some fun on this journey.