"Assassins Have Starry Eyes" by Donald Hamilton

A 1956 cold war murder mystery/suspense/adventure story about an atomic scientist caught up in a plot to kill...atomic scientists. Hamilton was big on Communist groups in America being all subversive and everything. I read another story by him after that "Night Walker" (1954) and it was, surprise! about a navy officer caught up in a Communist plot to do subversive things. The first one was good, the second was rather predictable even with all the farfetched twists and turns. I guess Communism was a great antagonist in the 1950s, once the Nazis went away.

After that I read an Alastair Maclean novel "Night Without End" (1960) about a group of scientists way way up north in Greenland where a plane crashes and they have to rescue the passengers and one of them is a Communist spy. By George, that sounds just like Ice Station Zebra. (also 1960) I'm only half way done and the similarity is just a little too close. Note: one of the characters is called Jackstraw, but he's not the bad guy.

The Guns of Navarone

It's about a commando raid on a Greek island in order to disable a gun fortress that the Nazis have built. the allies are planning a naval assault against the Nazi occupation of Greece and these big guns on Navarone are the Germans' main defense. They tried scrubbing them out, they tried soaking them out but got nowhere. So they got five or six guys to sneak in at night, scale the sheer cliffs and skulk around, avoiding the German patrols and guards for a while until they can plant the explosives and get away before the allied fleet shows up. Also there's a spy in their midst, someone keeps tipping off the Nazis so the commandos have to keep running and hiding all over the island. It gets kind of repetitious after a while. Hole up someplace, sleep for a few hours, find out the Germans are coming, get away. Hole up someplace, sleep for a few hours, find out the Germans are coming, ect, ect. Theres' too much brave English patriotism. One of the guys has a seriously broken leg but he keeps going with stiff upper lip and brave words, even when the gas gangrene is killing him he still gives it all for bloody old England and the cause. At one point they do get captured but because the Nazi sergeant isn't all that bad a guy they can trick him and escape. IF you like WW2 action with cardboard archetypes and no graphic killing this is your book. You already know how it ends.

THE
2 OUT OF 5
CLIMBING SPIKES
AARDVARK

Ice Station Zebra

I'm thinking the movie is actually better than the book. There's a bunch of polar scientists trapped way up in the far north and an American nuclear sub has to go rescue them. There's also a murderer among the polar scientists because the Russians dropped a macguffin nearby. So not only is it a rescue adventure it's also a murder mystery that Agatha Christie would be proud of. There's a lot of jolly back slapping dialog because that's how Maclain thinks Americans sound and act all the time. Maybe they did during the Cold War, I dunno. I do know it takes a lot more than some glue in a torpedo tube to disable a whole nuclear sub, but that's what happened. It's a good fast read but with too many cliffhangers and implausible situations. You can spot the murderer right off even though he's trying to hide in plain sight. I give it....

3 out of 5 arctic blasts

Ready Player One

This is the third time I read it. Actually, I listened to it as an audiobook, partly so I wouldn't skip over long paragraphs of description, which I have a bad habit of doing. Also I can listen while I work on boring production jobs at work.

When you strip away all the 80s nostalgia the book becomes pretty depressing. There's a line about not voting in the real world because it's only rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, which was timely. Everyone is just using the Oasis sim as an escape, giving up as opposed to working to make reality better. Not a great theme

Flack wrote: Tue Oct 03, 2023 11:15 am Because it made the protagonist too powerful. Even more so than in movies, protagonists in books have to have constant conflict. It's all that "no, but" and "yes, and" stuff. It's all about hitting your protagonist with conflict and challenges around every corner.

"I got a story ain't got no moral
With the bad guy winning every once in a while."
- Billy Preston, Will it Go 'Round in Circles?

All I see if an A icon I can’t hit. What is the book?!

When COVID hit, I just couldn't do fiction books for some reason.

One of my favorite authors wrote this book.



22-Murders-Madison-May

I started it the other day. I may just block off a few hours and finish it. He is at the top of his craft with this one, just the way he writes sentences is so far beyond anything else I have read in years, it's shocking to me.

Back when I was a kid one of my friends had the Navarone playset from Marx. It was the cooolest thing I ever saw.


There were so many vehicles and green army guys you could have waged war for days!

At the time I didn't know it was from a movie and before that a book by Alistar MacLean. I think I must have seen the movie at some point but I don't remember anything about it.

Recently I decided that I need to read more and stop browsing YouTube videos every spare minute, like I used to do before teh Internet ruined my attention span. I downloaded a couple three gigs of books as text files, more than I could ever read for the rest of my life. Most of these I put on my Nook (gasp!) and a slew of them went on a flash drive for reading during lunch breaks. Don't worry, I'll get back to Lunkenstein and Miss Marble eventually.
One of the folders contains the works of Alistair Maclean so I was pleasantly surprised to see The Guns Of Navarone and Ice Station Zebra finally available. I always wanted to read Ice Station Zebra because I heard it was Howard Hughes' favorite movie. All I can remember about that movie is Ernie Borgnine looking down a hatch into a bright light.

Anyway, I'm reading both those books now and if they work for me I'll read the rest of the folder.

"The Science of Discworld"

At first I thought it was going to be like the physics of Star Trek or how stuff works in the Predator universe but it turns out to be actual real physics with funny stuff added in. Terry Pratchett teamed up with a couple cosmologists and they wrote a three volume set about our world. Really good stuff


(Edit: four books, not three)

I turned a Doc Smith story in The Polar Treasure. It was a difficult read

Flack wrote: Tue Oct 03, 2023 11:15 am That's not to say they can't succeed at anything (that's where "yes, but" comes in) but coming up with a character that can blast his way through every problem doesn't make for a good story.

He never read Spacehounds of IPC by E. E. "Doc" Smith. The protagonist can do everything, including advanced mathematics, spaceship piloting, and when stranded on a planet, starting from virgin wilderness and a damaged ship along with a lady friend, single-handedly creates a hydro generator for power, mines the iron ore and other elements to make steel, builds the spaceship replacement parts, flies it into space, travels to a comet, mines the comet for certain ores, brings it back to his smelter to turn it into that element...

Flack wrote: Tue Oct 03, 2023 11:15 am but coming up with a character that can blast his way through every problem doesn't make for a good story.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has left the chat.

Because it made the protagonist too powerful. Even more so than in movies, protagonists in books have to have constant conflict. It's all that "no, but" and "yes, and" stuff. It's all about hitting your protagonist with conflict and challenges around every corner. That's not to say they can't succeed at anything (that's where "yes, but" comes in) but coming up with a character that can blast his way through every problem doesn't make for a good story.

Wait, why did the prof want the gun ditched?

When I was in my writing program I was working on a novel. It was a little out there. It was about this guy who was a gun for hire and basically he got killed and due to a glitch he got into heaven and ended up there with this magic rifle. This same glitch was letting demons and monsters into heaven and nobody in heaven had any weapons but this guy so he became really important. I had six or seven chapters done and my professor read it and said, "you gotta ditch the gun." I was like, the gun is the whole point! And yeah, the gun was gonna break toward the end and he was going to have to come up with a different solution, but she said no, the gun has to break in chapter two or three. It was the same problem you're talking about. My prof said a lot of novels started going that way after people who grew up on video games started writing books.

I started to read a lot of fiction where the protagonist is basically too perfect and invincible and it really put me off fiction for a while, choosing instead to read non-fiction at night. I need my FLAWS man, bro's gotta have himself some flaws.

Update: The guy is too stacked. He has no flaws and can out-think and out-fight anyone. It's like playing a video game on God mode. Too much Dues Ex Machina by the author. He solves the Saint's problems with one sentence or less and moves on like intelligent readers won't notice. Plus rhe guy gives away most of the money he steals and never never kilks anyone even in gunfights and stuff

The Saint novels by Leslie Charteris.
I bought a 5 pack of used paperbacks in a bookstore while I was in Canada. I had listened to all the radio shows starring Vincent Price and was keen to read straight from the source.
Well, The Saint, Simon Templar, is a cross between James Bond and The Avengers, the 1960s tv show, only set in the 1920s thru the Fifties.





007 much?

The radio show and the television show Americanized him of course, can't have Vincent Price do a Limey accent after all.
Amd they took away all his sidekicks.

When I was a kid one of my must-see television shows was The Six-Million Dollar Man. It was so cool to go into school the next day and hear the other kids talk about last night's show. I didn't talk much in those days but I listened really well. (These same kids all wanted to get jean jackets and write 'Lords' across the back. An idea stolen from the Lords of Flatbush, naturally.) I remember reading the before and after credits of $6M Man and seeing that the show was based on the book 'Cyborg' by somebody-somebody. I wanted to read that book and see if was as cool as the show. It turned into one of my (unknown) bucket list items. I looked up the word Cyborg in the Book of Knowledge encyclopedia set that we had and saw that it was derived from a Russian word. The dumb fourth grade me just assumed the author was a Russian and that it wouldn't be printed in English because of the Cold War and everything so I'd never get to read it. Oh well.

I forgot all about it for nearly fifty years. Then the Internet happened. I was browsing through my thousands of E-texts yesterday and just happened to stumble across that very book. The fourth grade me was very happy. It turns out to be a whole series of books, probably based on the wild popularity of the show at the time. I remember Walter Cronkite telling a news story about kids swallowing pennies in order to gain iron strength after watching the show and kids hurting themselves trying to lift heavy things.

They used to have $6MDM trading cards for ten cents a pack at the local store. I stole five or six packs of cards before my mom caught me and made me go into the store and give the grocer a dollar (of my money!) and apologize for stealing. They're probably worth a fortune now. I never had the Steve Austin action figure in the red jumpsuit, BUT the sitter I went to did. Or at least her son did, and I got to play with it while I was there. I took it home for the weekend one time and discovered that if I kicked our wooden storm door on the back porch just right it would make that di-di-di-di-di-di sound effect. Or a sound that was pretty close, to my fourth grade ears. Oh the bad guys we defeated that day! Oh the many Bigfoots we beat up!...Oh the storm door windows we broke! (after kicking the door one too many times.) I had to give the action figure back after that.
It was all my mom's fault, she never gave me any G.I. Joes or any other action figures. All I got were educational toys; they didn't take, obviously.

So I'm halfway through the first book (1972 by Martin Caidin) and discovering that Steve Austin was kind of a dick. Fourth grade me doesn't care! I'm reading the books! There's a lot of 1972 hard science that I have to skip over or go brain numb but it's worth it to complete a very small item of my unknown bucket list.


THE
BETTER STRONGER FASTER
AARDVARK

It's a rare treat to find that someone has written about your hometown. I found the following in a sci-fi book that I randomly started reading.

exerpt from

Conrad's Time Machine
by Leo A. Frankowski


Towards sunset, looking up old friends seemed like a good idea, and my bike made a
right turn into Rochester, a strange little town.
The locals claim that the engineer who laid out the street plan was drunk for eight
weeks before he drew the first line, but I knew better. It takes large groups of people
working earnestly together to do something that stupid.
The arithmetic average of the number of streets coming into an intersection is
probably somewhere around four, but the modal number is three, with the next most
likely number being five and after that seven. The whole town is like a quilt made by
crazy old ladies out of random polygons. There's even one frightening crossroads called
'Twelve Points." No shit.
Right downtown, doubtless by accident, there are these two streets that cross at
almost right angles, although one of them changes its name in the process. This oddity so
astounded the locals that they built this big office structure there and called it "The Four
Corners Building."







https://rocwiki.org/Twelve_Corners